Third Life

Second Life? Oh God. I cannot believe this raft of crap. I cannot believe the huge amount of time people waste having anything to do with it. I cannot believe that anyone does it.

Okay, so real, actual, or as we like to call it, First Life isn't all that great. It needs money time, interpersonal relationships, work, pain, loss, and all the other unpleasantness that life entails. I can see why you might want to retreat into a tiny room and hide from it all. Really, you have no idea how appealing that idea begins to sound to me daily.

And I once was a junky of various online communities (not Second Life because I'm oldschool, yo) so please don't think that I speak from lack of knowledge. It seems like it might be fun at first. You start slowly, and then it sucks your life from your body and you become a hideous walking zombie, only alive to continue to participate in this drek.

I call it drek for good reason (drek means shit if you're at all surprised) because it's not fun. It starts out being escapist, but then it gradually becomes just as much work and pain and suffering as real life. Possibly more so, because you have to pay for the privilege, whereas in First Life all you have to do is be alive to play. It's supposed to be liberating, a throwing off of the shackles of our common life to live in a virtual world. That, like Web 2.0, is faded crap. It's just another world, significantly less realistic, more difficult to navigate, slower, and more expensive.

Then the jokers start. Whenever people begin to take things seriously, other people react to this by attempting to joke about it, which is healthy. But then the jokers begin to take their jokes seriously, until they are spending just as much time playing what they decry as a stupid game as the people who are simply playing it.

I'm singling Second Life out because it's not just a MMORPG; it is billed as Second Life, as if it were an alternative. But chat rooms, forums, MMORPGs; anything which will suck you into a world which winds up being as tedious as the real one is bad. Don't do it. They sound great, but they aren't.

How can people take this crap seriously? Who gives a damn? Why do the media report on it like it was anything more than a stupid game? Um, I'll answer my own question: money. Jesus H. Christ.