What made you join Second Life?

[ChinRey]

I first joined SL in the early days because I was curious about this new thing. I didn't stay long.

I rejoined in 2013 because some amateur author friends of mine complained about how hard it was to find good illustrations for their stories. I suggested they should try SL and they all rejected it so I went in myself to prove them wrong. By the time I realized they were right, I had become hooked on building instead so I stayed for a while doing that.

[Silent Mistwalker]

I joined to attend a memorial for a friend who had recently passed. I stayed for the inworld building tools. At the time there was nothing else like it and the creative me just could not resist. 

[Thorn Evergarden]

To be honest, the RL world is really rough and challenging for so many people right now and I needed a place where I could re-connect to something inside of me that hasn't been able to show itself lately - something fun, and adventurous, and goofy, and weird. I'm sure I'm not the only one who dances on SL and feels it in my own bones.

[Rolig Loon]

45 minutes ago, rengeky0 said:

I needed a place where I could re-connect to something inside of me that hasn't been able to show itself lately - something fun, and adventurous, and goofy, and weird. I'm sure I'm not the only one who dances on SL and feels it in my own bones.

That's an interesting way to express it. I didn't recognize how true that was for me when I joined back in 2007.  I have told people here many times that I came to SL on a dare, which is mostly true. A friend told me that SL was on the cutting edge for using the Internet in higher education.  I doubted it, but came to have a look when she insisted. I was right; SL was not offering much that was useful for higher ed.  Still, it was fascinating for other reasons, so I stayed.

Now, the rest of the story is that I had recently retired from a long career in higher ed and was going through withdrawal pangs. Letting go of a 30+ year career isn't easy. I hadn't been in SL very long, though, before I discovered that it was fun to create things out of thin air.  Better than that, it was easy to write basic scripts to make them do things.  As a scientist, I had been using computers since the 1960s but rarely for anything recreational. SL gave me an excuse to have fun with scripting and it eased my transition into retirement. I fell in with friendly librarians who needed a scripter, and I met Void Singer and other scripters who were willing to help me get comfortable with LSL. Those librarians -- most of whom have now retired too -- are still my closest  friends in world.  We get together and dance two or three nights a week, just chatting and being goofy. And I keep in regular touch through the forums and in-world projects with scripters I have known for much of my time in SL.  It's been a wonderful way to retire.

[IvyTechEngineer]

I am relatively new to Second Life but my reason was to expand opportunities for student learning. However, to develop course content and link material to what we are learning in the real world there has been a significant learning curve to overcome. For example, I wanted to clear-up some space on our island to add a pre-built building but I wanted to maintain the terrain for a section of the region and just make it a mesh and offset it vertically. To do that (and I am still working on texturing) took a knowledge of Blender, L3DT and Photoshop and I needed to either use Opensim or request a sandbox in SL to rez terrains. 

The result is you need some time to develop the inworld material because you will need to learn many more software programs that would typically be beyond most coursework requirements. It is not a quick process because there are so many things to consider...

[InnerCity Elf]

Plain curiosity. I'm still alive even, amazingly.🐈‍⬛

[Rolig Loon]

21 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I am relatively new to Second Life but my reason was to expand opportunities for student learning. However, to develop course content and link material to what we are learning in the real world there has been a significant learning curve to overcome. For example, I wanted to clear-up some space on our island to add a pre-built building but I wanted to maintain the terrain for a section of the region and just make it a mesh and offset it vertically. To do that (and I am still working on texturing) took a knowledge of Blender, L3DT and Photoshop and I needed to either use Opensim or request a sandbox in SL to rez terrains. 

The result is you need some time to develop the inworld material because you will need to learn many more software programs that would typically be beyond most coursework requirements. It is not a quick process because there are so many things to consider...

You are discovering what I found out myself 15 years ago. As I've said here in the forums whenever the topic has come up, I came to SL because a friend told me that she thought it was the next big platform for higher education. I spent my first six months visiting all the sites that were sponsored by college or universities, and talking with dozens of instructors and administrators, eventually compiling a report that I shared with my own system's office and with LL. The bottom line was that almost all of the instruction was being done by adjunct or non-tenured faculty, with little or no institutional support. In fact, I found no senior administrators who were aware that they had a presence in SL.  "Involvement" was generally restricted to a a single instructor who was using SL for a few classes, usually without giving the students much support. There was almost no organized research or outreach being done at the time. 

The few exceptions were nursing programs in places like Evergreen, a handful of large universities like Stanford and Harvard, and quite an impressive number of library programs. Most of those have disappeared now, although some library programs hang in there. Part of the reason for the dropoff was LL's decision to cut the educational discount and to reduce their staff supporting education.  Another part was the recession of 2008. I think the major cause, however, was that the initial adoption of SL by higher ed was weak from the start. Once that first wave of enthusiastic junior faculty found how hard it was to teach in SL and how little support they were going to get from either LL or their home institutions, most of them left. (I was retired at that point myself. Aside from working with the library community in SL for several years, I too eventually left educational thoughts behind.)

LL is now showing signs of increasing support for education. @Madori Linden has been given an opportunity to build what she can. I don't know how deep the Lab's commitment may be or how many others Madori has to work with, but it's a good sign. I do not share the enthusiasm of the friend who coaxed me here in 2007, but I think there is a role for higher ed in SL -- largely in tutorial or personally guided instruction. It will take long-term commitment from both sides.

[Lewis Luminos]

On 3/28/2022 at 9:43 AM, So Whimsy said:

I recently had a conversation about it with a friend and it had me go down memory lane.

I knew Second Life was a thing from shortly after it launched but I was heavily invested in IMVU at the time. I remember lots of folks in the forums asking why it's not possible to walk since in IMVU you hopped from poseball to poseball. I was one of the ones who told these people to just go to Second Life if they want to walk, IMVU was fine as it was.

One day though I actually stopped and thought about it. I wanted to walk, too! So I made this account almost fifteen years ago and haven't looked back since. It's probably a silly reason to join but I can be a very silly person at times with loads of wtf moments on my part!

What reason had you join SL?

I read an article on the BBC website about it, in 2006, in which it mentioned that U2 were playing a gig in SL.  Being a fan of the band, and given that tickets to see them in RL are way out of my budget, I signed up so I could see them here for free.

I missed the gig, apparently, and after a few months I forgot about SL and when I came back I couldnt remember my username or password so I started a new account and this time I stayed.  I did recover my original account a few years ago too, which was nice, but I never went back to using that one as my main. Now I just keep him for his L$500 a week Premium stipend.