Help Island

So, I get to Help Island. I got to decide whether I wanted to be able to hear music and watch videos. Little question marks rotate here and there and when you click on them it tells you how to do things. I learned how to sit down and why I should have a posing stand.

I learned about prims (relating to "primary") which are objects that you create in Second Life. Anything you can create in real life you can create in Second Life but, like in real life, you need talent to do so. I made a box.

They make a big deal out of prims because whatever you create you own...legally...for real. It is intellectual property. You can sell it for real money if you can find a buyer, which many folks can. Over a million real US dollars changes hands in Second Life each day. Not that my box is going to allow me to retire, but still, it is mine. I know it, and if I put it on the ground, anyone who clicks on it can see who made it and whether the creator allows others to copy it, alter it, take it, or whatever. I put it down on the ground.

Then I explored other places. There was a game area on Help Island where you could sit down and play chess, play hangman, Sudoku, pinball, and a variety of other games.

I learned to fly.

And then along came this short, fat woman who plowed right into me and pushed me around. I moved. She followed me. Wherever I went she followed, pushing me around and shouting "RARARAR." I was about to quit just to get away, but then I didn't see her any more. So perhaps the "help" removed her.

I found a dance floor. A floating question mark told me how to stop dancing. But I wasn't dancing yet and I didn't know how to start dancing. That remains to be discovered. There was a goth guy on the dance floor, too, but he wasn't dancing either.

I saw a couple other folks on Help Island, but no one named Linden was immediately apparent. Which was too bad. I had figured out how to put the torch away, but am still living with the big hair. Maybe it was the hair that set off the short, fat lady.

It was getting late, so I signed off. This morning I had e-mail from Second Life saying that they had found my box and put it in my lost and found folder!

Big hair

One of the things I want to change about City Chic is the hairstyle. She begins with this big hair sticking out to both sides. Of course in good old "editing appearance" there are umpteen options for hair, including color, where you want the part, length, body, spikes, ponytails, etc. But as I tweaked those, it seemed to affect the hair closest to my head, but not the big poofs on either side. In the mini-pictures in the hair section it looked fine, but Voces still had the poofs. I haven't yet figured out how to change that.

I changed a little bit with the clothes...went from a bright red to a royal blue, but more remains to be done there. And apparently you can buy clothes and such within SL.

When I started up again at home, I noticed that the place where I had first landed actually had tutorials. In each of four areas you were assigned a task--learning to move around, learning to communicate, learning how to interact with objects, etc. I successfully picked up a torch out of my inventory (which brought back fond memories of Zork and lessons in grue avoidance), but that little tutorial never told me how to get rid of the thing.

Once I had completed all four tasks, however, it told me that I could go to Help Island where I could find out more. The on-screen prompts assured me that lots of SL guides would be on Help Island to...ummm...help. I would know them it said because all of the official SL helpers have the last name of Linden...for Linden labs that invented Second Life.

So, torch in hand...trying to keep it from igniting my big hair...I clicked to go to Help Island.

Editing Appearance

So, I end up in this area outside the gates of the SL world. There are some other folks around. I can see their SL names above the heads of their avatars, and most of them are posed with arms and legs outstretched...sort of like the Vitruvian Man...and under their names it says "editing appearance."

I had no idea how to do that. From the toolbar across the top I guessed (successfully) at the editing tab and soon I, too, was a Virtruvian woman editing my appearance. Up came a little box where I could determine the slope of my forehead (back a bit), the puffiness of my eyes (not puffy, thank you), the fullness of my lips (a little less sultry than the City Chic basic and a bit more fitting for a Bible Society, but not pursed either!), and all sorts of options for skin color (I went darker), hair and clothes.

My laptop was having display issues, and as I worked on facial features, I kept seeing a face that looked more like a paper mache head than the skin and features I was editing.

And then some other guy entered the area who was not editing his appearance. I had not moved Voces from the place where she initially landed, and apparently that's where everybody new lands. He landed in my space and as he moved forward, he pushed Voces all the way to the stone wall. "Hey!" I thought, "What are you doing? I'm editing my appearance!" With the strange posture, I thought that made me safe from being shoved around. NOT!

It also didn't keep others from coming over to chat--espeically guys who didn't know that Voces was on her way from City Chic to the Massachusetts Bible Society. They wanted to chat. "I'm from Brazil." "I'm from Italy." "Do you know how to get a job?"

"I'm editing my appearance!!" I did figure out the chat button. You can chat to those close by, shout and be heard by those further away, or IM just to one individual.

But then the display problems on my laptop combined with people pushing me around and not being able to figure out how to move back and the ticking of the clock which indicated the advent of my train home, I quit and decided to do more at home.

Birthday

Voces Amat was born on May 30, 2007. I went to Second Life (www.secondlife.com), clicked on "join" and put in the information. I got a premium membership so that I can do anything, including purchase land, and have access to lots of help! If you don't want to own land, membership is free, so you can have a second life and come join the online Bible society for free if you want. And I hope you will.

But back to the birthday. When someone is born, the parents have to come up with a name, which is what we did in the office yesterday. The Massachusetts Bible Society slogan is "One book, many voices" so I wanted something that related to that. "Voces" is "voices" in Latin, which seemed both cool and appropriate, so we picked that for a first name. Kudos to Office Manager, Sandy, who knew the plural for vox without thinking twice!

We couldn't be quite as creative with the last name, since SL makes you pick from a list of last names. It is a long list, however, and since "Amat" is Latin for "he/she/it loves" the combination seemed the best. Voces Amat it was.

Gender? Are you kidding? I'm the first woman to head the Society in its 198-year history. Voces Amat is female.

Then it was time to pick what Voces would look like. Initially there are five or six basic templates for each gender to pick from, then you tweak those later. The first one is sort of a plain-Jane sort. I think they call it "The Girl Next Door." Seemed a little boring. There was a goth option that seemed a little beyond what I was looking for, and I finally settled on "City chic" seeing as how we're in downtown Boston and all.

Then Voces Amat entered the world.

Say What?

For those of you who haven't yet read about SL, it is a virtual world. It's not a game--there is no objective or goal, although there are certainly games you can play in Second Life. It's an online world where you create a persona, or avatar, and go about doing what you might do in your regular life, except in cooler clothes and with a bunch of other people who are as strange as you are to be doing such a thing.

Anyway, in my new job as Executive Director of the Massachusetts Bible Society, I'm supposed to help raise awareness about us and also to further the goal of biblical literacy for more folks in a way that doesn't insist on a literalist and fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. So, I thought it would be cool for MBS to have a virtual presence in Second Life as well as our physical presence in the very obvious first life.

But, I had never even visited Second Life before and had no clue how to proceed. Even though I'm a gamer, I have never even been part of an MMORPG for fear that I would become addicted, the dog would hate me, and I would lose even my first life! They don't call it EverCrack for nothing.

Second Life, however, counts as work (I have the coolest job in the world), and I thought it would be fun to blog about how someone new to the whole thing (a newbie or noob) fares as I try to not only get a character up and running but buy property and accomplish the MBS goals.

Which brings me to yesterday, when the adventure began.