Aiming at Nothing

The blogs and forums related to Second Life’s most recent announcement about pricing increases on Openspace Sims has a lot of people threatening to leave SL for good. Call me cynical (please!) but I rather doubt people are going to leave that Metaverse anytime soon. Their protestations remind me of people who threaten to leave the US every four year if this or that candidate wins the Presidency. Canada must be full by now.

All of this talk of exodus got me wondering about alternative virtual worlds, so I gave one a try today. I created an account under my SL avatar’s name at Openlife. After answering a few simple questions and downloading their preferred viewer (you can also use the SL viewer if you want to), I managed for the first time to access a new virtual world unsullied by those nasty Lindens.

My default avatar shape was that of Ruth, the SL default avatar. I went to edit her appearance and the viewer crashed. Boom. Beta software doesn’t scare me. I waited a few minutes to let the system know my login had expired and tried again.

FAIL

…waiting for region connect. I had wondered if a third party could possibly realize all the joy, splendor and beauty of Second Life. So far they have (ca 2005). The Lindens do blank screens like this too but less frequently.

To be fair, Openlife is new and they’re going through some growing pains. If they are successful, someday they’ll be huge and have to deal with all of the same technical issues as does SL. We’ll see how well they fare.

If I ever manage to get logged in again, I’ll post some pics. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with the broken system I know at SL.