Just about everyone, when they hear about Second Life, asks what the heck it is. I thought I might share my thoughts on the matter.
As many will tell you, it's not a "game" but rather, I think, a social experiment. What if everyone could be whatever they wanted and do whatever they wanted? What if we had a utopian society with the technology of the Matrix, only everyone knew that they could fly and summon up a rack of guns out of thin air? Second Life is the answer.
At first, one enters Second Life with the realization that they can do and be what they want, so they run around collecting all the free clothes, cars, weapons and other assorted doohickies that they can. Second, you realize that the way cool stuff costs money, so you have to think of a way to get money.
There are several ways to get money. First, there are chairs that you can sit in, and for a given amount of time that you sit in them, (usually 15 or 20 minutes) you get a penny. YAY! There are also games you can play with others, like quiz games where the winner will receive some sort of jackpot. Another way is to get a "job" in which you DJ clubs, bartend, dance in clubs, etc. Usually this is a pay increase to maybe 3-5 cents per 15 minutes. If you're really lucky, you can make a quarter an hour! Next is to provide services or goods. And you can do anything from selling some little trinket you made to selling your body in the SL red light districts.
Now the first two methods of money collecting is the bane of Second Life, in my opinion. When they say "MILLIONS of people play!!!" it's a flat out lie. The majority of Second Life is filled with people sitting in chairs for hours so they can collect a couple pennies. People will often put these money chairs near their shops so that they get a boost in popularity, and as it is with Google, the more people that come to your land, the higher up you'll be on the search engine. So, when you search for things, be it anything, 8/10 times you're going to end up somewhere with about 10 people sitting around blankly (their players somewhere else in RL) with casinos or stores surrounding them, enticing you to buy. 1/10 times you'll get a dance club that has quiz games or jackpot lotto things to get people into their club (usually surrounded in stores), but the majority of people "dancing" are only there to win money or are just using the music like a radio, so they're mostly not interested in chatting or hanging out. The other 1/10 times, you'll end up again somewhere where there are things to buy, and absolutely no one around for miles.
Now, once you get past the money issue, it's time to reinvent yourself, either by buying it or creating it. What I think is a somewhat sad fact about this is that it appears that easily over half of the people on Second Life want to be extremely tall, busty, anorexic hookers. If you go into Second Life, it won't be long before some Barbie doll walks up to you with barely any clothes on and way too much makeup. I'd say that one of the most successful merchants of goods in Second Life is this woman who specializes in women's hair (if you're wondering about what makes the most money in SL, I would say the selling of land (everyone wants a chance to make their own stores, of course)). While lusty women make up about 90% of the SL population, you do get a pretty neat assortment of other things. Furries are very popular, as are machina. I've also seen dragons, various monsters, robots ala the 1930s, lots of Goth and Lolies, even inanimate objects like chairs and phone booths that hop around.
When it comes to what people create, there's an interesting array as well. While there are TONS of stores, there's also everything else under the sun you could think of. Clock towers, ships, space domes, castles, any sort of architecture you can imagine from skyscrapers to villages made out of giant mushrooms. If you spend enough time looking around in SL, you will see some things people have made that are absolutely astonishing and breathtaking.
Finally, there's the question of how one spends their time once they've got themselves dressed up and ready to go. There are plenty of dance clubs, where I've gone to just listen to the music when I'm bored of my own. There are also games that people have coded, all the way from SL Majong and Tic-Tac-Toe to shoote-em-up games. There's an entire city where you can either be a scientist or an undead based off the movie "I Am Legend" and you run around shooting each other. There's also groups that meet up like IRL. There are book clubs, fan clubs of various things, educational groups, etc. One of my favorite places is a movie theater where they play nonstop MST3K.
So what is Second Life? I see it as kind of a simplified look into the human psyche. And if by looking at it, we are looking at what sort of defines the human race in the sense of "this is what they do when its completely left up to them" I see that we can be amazingly creative, predictably susceptive to society's idea of "beauty," obnoxiously greedy, and sadly unsocial.
