There's No Excuse

I was looking through some back issues of Computerworld magazine yesterday and noticed one had an article on Second Life boldly presented on the front cover (Dec 3, 2007 issue).

The article starts with the author stating that he didn't want to do it and considers himself "too old and too serious" to look into Second Life. I guess I have to give him an A for honesty for admitting it, but I feel like the attitude going in doomed the article to be a negative one from the beginning. And indeed, I found that it had a negative tone throughout which is unfortunate because it'll stop people from even looking to see what Second Life is all about. It is one thing to point out the flaws in the experience, but in my opinion this article went beyond that.

He had a negative experience, as I suppose many do, but is there really an excuse for that? An excuse for going in blind and uninformed?

In my opinion, no, there is no excuse for anyone to go into Second Life and not have background information on what it is all about and a vast list of things that interest them to check out.

Do a Google search on the 3 words, Second Life Blog, and you'll get pages and pages of results that even a cursory examination of some of them will give you loads of information on what you can do in Second Life, more than enough information to figure out how to have a good experience. Just reading Natalia Zelmanov's blog, which came up for me on the first page of that search, would be enough to give a person a vast head start just from the tutorials alone, especially her Getting Started in Second Life Guide.

For myself, from the first day I logged into Second Life, I made it a habit to do a Google search every day or so using simply the words Second Life and see what new stuff came up, from articles to blog entries. In the 7 months or so that I've been in Second Life, I've never once wanted for an interesting place to go and see, never wanted for a nice place to go and "dance" and chat with nice folks. In fact, there are places I want to visit and haven't had the time to, things to do that I would like to and haven't.

Ok, so there are going to be some people who just don't get it, who don't see the point in Second Life and that's ok. I don't see the point in some stuff that other people do and enjoy, but I at least hope that if I'm going to try something, I have informed myself about it enough to know that it's something I'm not interested in rather than pass by an opportunity to do something interesting because I wasn't informed.

Second Life boring? In my opinion, definitely not, but it's not going to be handed to you on a silver platter (since when is anything like that?), you have to go out and find the interesting stuff. Might I suggest you begin with a simple Google search on one of your favorite things and add the words Second Life to that search, you might be surprised at what you find.