Resident Collision

Events in Second Life are realtime events that a person can attend to either learn about aspects of Second Life such as scripting, sculpting, and communication or to participate in a recreational activity online. Second Life classes can also be taught on a real world subject or activity. The voice chat feature of Second Life, along with it text-based communication system, allows for classes to also encompass non-technical learning such as discussions in philosophy or religion.

The event that i choose to participate in was a recreational scavenger hunt across a Second Life mall called Promenade Mall.

In this scavenger hunt, the objective was to wander around the mall and enter vendors stalls in search of pirate treasure chests.

Inside each of these treasure chests is a free item from a vendor in Second Life. Throughout the course of my search I found two treasure chests. Both chests that I found contained a pair of designer shoes. The mall was populated with many vendors, mainly clothing stores, that were attempting to sell their wares. This event was less of a social event and more of a advertising promotional to get people to buy the store’s wares. There was little social interaction in the event due to the constant moving about to find new treasure chests. This event was fun to participate in and was also good for the stores in the mall because it gave the stores advertising.

Second Life communities can be quite extensive, from a few members to groups teaming in the thousands, covering all ranges of topics from education to Star Wars nerds. over the past couple of days, I have became a member of two groups in SL. The first of these is The Galactic Alliance, a group dedicated to the preservation of the Star Wars universe. I had an interesting experience with this group in that I wasn’t able to contact any of them. I read in the group description that they meet on a world called Dagobah. this land did not actually exist anymore so I was not able to get in contact with that group.

The second group I joined on SL was the Welfare Island group. This group occupies its time standing on little multi-colored balls and earn small amounts of Linden dollars (in game money) every ten minutes. This group has hundreds if not thousands of members and was actually one of the friendliest bunch ever. I had multiple issues with getting the welfare system running and the people around me were willing to help and even tell me a method of preventing idling and getting kicked. This was especially when camping to get money.

Me on Welfare Island!

Neither group has bombarded me with any sort of notices or e-mails. i have received a few more spam e-mails advertising with information given to the Welfare Group but nothing that has totally overwhelmed or annoyed me, the people from the Welfare group were very helpful but not very willing to tell me about themselves and were (rightfully) very guarded with their personal information. All in all the communities in SL are very informative, helpful and friendly to interact with.

Gameheadz was a video that showed how games have developed since the very first Pong game in the early 1970’s to what we know today as video games. This film was interesting in that it analyzed both the business methods that attributed to the varying companies success and the characteristics that made these games so popular.

One of the major companies that was discussed in the film was Atari, the company behind the first Pong game. It described how Atari worked to keep its employees as happy as possible so that in turn they would work hard to develop the latest and best games. I found that this strategy at corporate management was, despite how it sounds, quite effective. i also found it very amusing when they mentioned that they had a hot tub installed in the office! I also found how Atari saw the television set as a means to introduce video games in to the home as a visionary concept that helped garner Atari alot more profit than its competitors.

Pong was a national hit almost overnight. It became that way through its interaction with the players. The fact that Pong always has been a multi-player game from the start shows me the importance of the interaction not only between the player and the program but between player to player. It is for this interaction that people experienced with Pong that I think multi-player gaming has caught on as a key component in today’s video games. Gameheadz was a very informative film that helps use see how the games of yesterday have lead to the games of today and how they will in turn lead to the games that we play in the future.