this game has been simultaneously incredibly weird and funny and also an instrumental piece of self discovery for me in a very important sense since i started playing back in high school. ive also seen so much i wont ever unsee on here.

aint that just how it is though.

i cant help but love it even with everything about it, man. its so much.

Oh, Second Life… what a mess you were… are?

I don’t even know where to start with Second Life. Should it even be considered a game, when there’s really no motive? Even Minecraft has the goal of not being killed by the creatures at night. But then, what makes a game a game, then? Ugh, I’m not going to allow Second Life of all games to get me started on thinking about this.

Second Life was influential. It’s probably the reason why we had games such TF2 and Fortnite get so wildly successful. It’s arguably a reason for why Bitcoin is even a thing. It let developers know that players are willing to spend real money to customize their fictional characters. Linden dollars showed that online currency could hold real monetary value and that people’s outside worlds could completely change from learning how to market in Second Life.

Second Life is remembered by most, myself included, as extremely predatory, creepy, and in general, not a good time. But the influence it had on the video game world that we see today is monumental. Whether you see it as positive or negative (and by looking at my score, I’m sure you can see where I stand), we can all agree that it’s an enormous part of video game history.

I took a college course titled "Creative Writing: Virtual Worlds" expecting to have a hyper-focused class dedicated to writing about augmented reality and shit like The Matrix. Turns out, it was a class where the students carried out assignments in Second Life.

The first rule of the class was that Second Life was not a video game—it was just as real as your "first life." Upon my birth in this virtual world, I was lost and confused. I entered the nearest building to my initial spawn. My eyes were assaulted by a collage of genitalia. Mirroring the myriad *** before me, the walls were closing in. I felt myself gasping for air. Luckily, I carried over an attribute from my first life into my Second Life—the power of flight. Clipping through the ceiling, I narrowly escaped my **** riddled demise. I was late to meet with my class at my professor's estate.

As I sat in my chair sideways, legs out through the hole in the arm, my professor called upon me. "BongoMan27, are you paying attention?" My friend from outside the class I had snuck into her domain, presently standing six meters tall with his face in the window behind her, staring ominously into the farthest reaches of my soul or lack thereof. From this point forward, she told the class about her hobbies. The most noteworthy hobby came in the form of rescuing animals. The professor then asked my friend and fellow classmate if he owned any pets. He went on to discuss his two dogs and cat that his family had. As he concluded sharing, the professor told us that she, too, had dogs. "Here comes one now."

A virtual dog model spawned into the room.