(no subject)

I did manage to play Second Life a little last night; yanked all the detail controls way down, so I could have a general idea what was going on around me, and move around, after a fashion. Molded my avatar to look more or less like me (there are many, many axes of malleability; this isn't The Sims), which is as much egocentric fun as you might imagine. (Kind of flattered that the hairdo my guy started life with was already basically correct.) Chatted with a friend (your avatar makes "air-typing" motions when you're typing iRL; cute), received "shouts" from other realms, explored someone's house and played with some of their programmatic toys. I noticed that it cost "money" to build things, and that the world was littered with all sorts of objects which, when examined, each revealed a single owner's name. Hmm, how familiar.

Experienced enough to conclude that, if NWN is a MUD, then SL is a MOO (or a MUCK or a MUSH). It focuses on attracting programmers to build strange and wonderful things not imagined by the people who designed the core world, or the scripting language it uses. And actually, it lies much closer to the MOO model that NWN does to the MUD one; it really is just a single, very large creative play-space, based around 3D graphics instead of text. This is attractive to me, and therefore all the more disappointing that my mighty Mac is too puny to play.

Well, it's yet another datapoint in my continuing quest to convince myself to buy a G5.

FWIW: My SL name is Prog Perkins. Feel free to refer me if you end up trying it out. (Not that I have any idea what referral gives you.)