Personal Blogs

Probably as a displacement activity when I should be studying MST124, I’m going to have another foray into Second Life this evening. Studied ‘Virtual worlds’ in Block 4 Part 4 of TU100 last year (ah, I miss TU100).

I first heard of Second Life in around 2007-2008, when rumours were going around that my then-boss, who was on long-term sick leave, had become so addicted to the virtual world that she was spending all night on it, which wasn’t helping her already dodgy work attendance and performance.  So it’s been around for a good while – and has quite probably had its heyday by now.

Here’s what I wrote last year when starting to study this part. The instruction was: “take some time (up to 20 minutes should be about right) to jot down some of your own thoughts about virtual worlds.” As often with TU100, about 1 minute sufficed, but this is what I wrote in response to the prompt questions:

Part of me thinks I’m the type of personality who could really have enjoyed and got into this stuff if I’d been exposed to it. Part of me thinks my personality type doesn’t need any encouragement and I should just get out more.

Section 2 of this part asks the question “What do you think the average game world user looks like?” Well, I’d probably give a stereotypical answer like: Hairy; has their own tankard at the pub with runes carved on it; slightly over-intense in everyday conversation.

Section 2 notes that a survey (Yee, 2006) “concluded that players in virtual game worlds enjoy meaningful relationships and significant emotional experiences, as well as developing skills such as leadership that translate into the physical world.” Well, who wouldn’t want some of that.

Second Life began in 2003, apparently. At the time the TU100 module materials were written, the OU evidently owned several virtual islands within Second Life. An embedded video in this part says that “The Open University is a trailblazer in Second Life”. The video features (former) OU Director of Learning Innovation Niall Sclater talking about the OU’s Second Life activities.

When I first had a go at Second Life while I was actually studying TU100, I only had mobile WiFi, and though I managed to set up an account and get access, it was pretty much a no go – endless buffering and moving in an extremely jerky fashion down a virtual street. I gave up pretty quickly. Now that I’ve actually got a proper broadband connection, let’s see if it works any better.

First off: I had to download the Second Life Viewer, as I’ve bought a new (Windows 10) laptop since I last attempted this. Downloaded it from https://secondlife.com/support/downloads/. Tried to install it and got the following message:

My virtual world attempts seem destined to failure at the moment. Back to calculus.