I just tried out Second Life, which is a streamed, 3D, massively multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t live up to the hype. Maybe the experience is better with a internet connection faster than my 1.5M ADSL, as I had some lag with movement and objects and textures were slow to stream through, and possibly my slightly older hardware didn’t help (but the graphics seemed fairly smooth once everything loaded). That doesn’t explain the buggy physics and skeletal system, when you walk onto an incline often one leg points 90° backwards, and part of my hair kept being separated from my head (which happens in First Life, so I guess that’s OK). However my biggest problem was the content. Every single thing in the world can be broken into one of four things: advertising things outside of Second Life, simulated virtual sex, and selling either virtual land or game objects (scripted 3D models).
There is of course nothing wrong with advertising, sex and rampant capitalism. In fact add alcohol and you would satisfy most of the population. But when there’s miles and miles of virtual terrain to explore, a richly scripted, user-created environment (it’s either furniture or clothing, and the scripting either starts you dancing or having wild polygon-based sex), and 5 million inhabitants to interact with (only ~20000 were online, and the ones I saw all stood or danced around while chatting in a fashion similar to your standard DC++ hub user’s conversational abilities), yet absolutely nothing is actually interesting or engaging.
Download it just to play through the tutorial, and the introductory help island. Some of the sights along that first hour of play are well worth it, and give an indication of what this genre of game is going to shape a virtual 3D internet into in 8-10 years, once we all have 100 mbit connections with bandwidth to burn. Then once you get to the Second Life mainland, uninstall, take the red pill, and move on.
