Coming up for three years

I read the reports from my fellow bloggers about their anniversaries, and realised that I am coming up for my third rez day in SL. Unlike many other people, I didn’t join SL in order to make money, but in order to find the community that I had found in another online world, which had closed down.

Nowadays, I feel like an ancient one, meeting people who have only been in world a couple of weeks, who express astonishment at my avatar age and number of positive ratings. As I never tire of telling people, when I joined SL, there were only 10,000 accounts, and a maximum of around 1000 in world at any one time. I used to doubt those figures, however, even then, as I would see the same 50 people at events and in world, and rarely in those days after my first few weeks, came across anyone I didn’t know.

It took another six months for another 10,000 people to be added, then three months, then one month. The rate of new people being introduced to the world increased greatly, but I never imagined it would pick up to the point where people were joining at a rate of 25,000 per day.

Many things were different when I started. Events were announced before they happened, by a Linden. There were many classes on building, scripting, SL basics every day. The world was only 100 sims big when I started in SL. This meant that it was perfectly possible to visit every sim and to know more or less every build in them.

There were no custom animations, and people used their ingenuity to adapt the default animations to the things they wanted to do. That meant that the motorcycle posture got used for a lot of sex aids. Avatar sex involved box attachments, a lot of manouevring and some surprising back chat from genital attachments, a tradition which continues to this day and still surprises new people.
I learned a lot in my first year, and slept a lot less. I had entered the first Game Developer contest within days of joining SL, and began a crash course in building, texturing, and team management.  I entered the whole life of SL in every aspect, and have maintained an avatar which is both my business avatar and my private one, and who has a well-rounded Second Life, including friends and relationships.

I discovered fairly rapidly that although I had experience in another online environment, SL was a whole different kettle of worms.  In URU, people played themselves, but didn’t have so much freedom with appearance to appear as they wished.  Many of the avatars looked very similar as a result.  The main activity in URU was the solving of puzzles in a game which took you to different environments, either alone or in company with other people.  Thus one always had something in common with other people, and something which formed the main part of any conversation.

When I joined SL I was under the illusion that that my experience in URU would mean that I began in SL where I had left off there, but it was such a different experience it didn’t really help.  URU was structured, and learning the layout of the game meant that you knew your way around.  SL was completely unstructured, and what is more changed frequently.

I brought with me a lot of friends from URU and met many more people in SL who had been there too.  Initially my intention was to rebuild precisely what we had lost, from the environments to the groups, but I very quickly realised that the potential in SL was so much greater than in URU, because it was an experience which I could control.  Rather than being shepherded through games and puzzles, and being unable to create things myself, SL gave me the opportunity to make things I wanted to find.  That ability is what keeps me there, and keeps challenging me.

I’ve seen many changes over the past three years, but I think people — whatever their original reasons for trying out SL — stay or leave in the same general proportions that they ever have.  For every person who finds SL’s open-ended freedom too challenging, there is another who is excited and inspired by the possibilities and the creativity.

I have had my share of failed SL relationships.  I think that it is all too easy to persuade yourself that the person you have met and explored with is the love of your life, because it is too easy to fill in the gaps in what you know of the person, with your ideal and projected desires.  People vary immensely in the level of sincerity and commitment that they offer to their friends and partners in SL… which is no different from real life.  People vary immensely in the honesty and depth of their emotions…which is no different from real life.

As many people I have mentored have discovered, in order to have an open, honest and authentic relationship in SL, you have to be open and honest.  You soon discover that if you have closed off some part of your life, whether it is your gender in real life, or the fact that you are 60 and wrinkly instead of 20 and lively, it is impossible to maintain an honest relationship of any depth.

I have made some very deep friendships, and have discovered that the relationships in SL do translate to the real world.  I have met a number of people in real life that I got to know in SL, and find that after half an hour, it is possible to recreate in real life the friendship which you have had in SL. I have found far fewer differences between SL and real life than I expected.

It’s hard to see the future in SL because the world has become so big, even though the limit on avatars in an individual sim is still relatively low.  In some ways I see that as a positive thing, because I think it makes every experience a personal one, and keeps everything at a human scale.  Maybe the limits on the number of avatars in a sim helps to make the experience understandable in a way that would be impossible in real life.  Where most people bemoan the limits, I welcome them, because that seems to me to keep the playing field even between individuals and corporations.

Currently I am finding that I am settled in SL, but still being challenged by the possibilities of the world.  I have not made a lot of money, but then I have found it very difficult to commit to one area of business, as I have mentored, built collaboratively, made shops and businesses in SL, built commercially, made clothes, and furniture and structures, held events, talked to people, blogged, made a partnership and, I hope, helped other people enjoy their SL.  I love exploring all aspects of SL, and helping other people to do that too. One day all that experience will come into its own, I am sure.