the nut house :: more than you ever wanted to know about me

at work we have been talking a lot lately about "social media" and how it relates to what we do. blogs, wikis, chatting, message boards, and most recently second life. apparently people are beginning to use second life to host off-site staff meetings, international business conferences, training sessions, and other sorts of things. you can build a nearly identical replica of your "brick and mortar" office building in the digital world, give each of your employees the opportunity to build themselves an avatar, and use second life as a way to network with team members who may be in far away locations.

sounds great, but i'd never tried it. since i'm expected to be able to speak intelligently on the subject, i took the time this weekend to download and install the client on my home computer.

my first reaction: i hated it.

maybe it's just because i'm so spoiled from playing guild wars, but i couldn't even get through the tutorial before becoming so frustrated and disgusted that i turned it off. the movement was slow and clunky, the animations were choppy, the graphics about 15 years behind technology, the interface was unintuitive, it was difficult figuring out which objects i could interact with and which ones i couldn't, the inventory system was cumbersome, the text was oversized, inflexible, and looked like a giant jpeg instead of actual dynamic text, i got motion sick within minutes of "playing"...

i'm sure it does lots of neat stuff and if it had the developmental dedication of an actual game, i could maybe give it a shot. in the mean time, i can't recommend it to anybody who has any actual expectations. for someone who has no idea what they are missing, it might be acceptable. but to anybody who has ever played any sort of video game in the last 5 years? forget second life.

as soon as you can start designing buildings in guild wars or WoW, i'm all over it. heck, make morrowind or oblivion an online game and i'm there. it already has the built in tools to design your own buildings, outfits, character skins, items, and terrain. team building exercises running raids on a dragon's lair? THAT would rock!