My time in Second Life on Tuesday was a bit odd. When I created my account, I selected default everything to start, just so I could spend as much time as possible exploring what the program had to offer. I hadn’t played it since it first came out, and I remembered close to nothing about it, other than it was a kind of weird 3D chatroom. A good chunk of my time was spend trying to customize my avatar and trying to make it do something other than stand/run/fly, the commands for which were prominently displayed on the bottom of the screen. Commands for more complicated gestures seemed to be hidden within some sub-menus that took me half the class to find, and even then, when I found them, I didn’t have much drive to do anything but put on a silly outfit and dance like a fool. It was fun, but the distracting kind.

I can see Second Life potentially being helpful in the way that customizing an avatar can tell us a lot about the rhetorical choices one makes in self-representation in online spaces. I would probably opt for a more simplistic system than Second Life, which has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to changing one’s appearance. Even when I finally figured out how to change my clothing, I couldn’t preview the way anything looked without assigning it to my avatar, which overrode the last thing I wore. This made trying to find my preferred appearance a bit cumbersome.

As far as a place to conduct digital classroom discussions… A chatroom would be a lot easier and about as effective. The learning curve is far too high, and (unlike learning HTML), there really isn’t any long-term benefit to learning how to interact with Second Life. There are just better platforms that don’t require quite so much investment to use.