I would urge anyone who is in a RL relationship and is cheating on their SIG in SL, step back and look at what you are doing. Are you prepared for the devastation that your actions will cause when you get caught? And you will get caught. Your spouse has that gut feeling. Think seriously about the avatar you “love”…words..anyone can say those, how does one know they are true, who is it really behind the avatar? Actions, that prove love…those are done in RL. It is a fantasy world. He lied to her, she lied to him..it was make believe. If you prefer a relationship based on lying, cheating and dishonesty, then I would say have fun in SL. Both of the people in my case, were lying, betraying and cheating. Is that really the character of a good person? The character of a person you want to “love”? When you lose your RL over it, suddenly the fantasy goes out the window. Its a pretend world folks..may seem real to you if you have issues, but it is a pretend world. 3 months in SL and he is “in love”, vs, 12 years of friendship and 9 of living together. Gee I know who I would pick *shrug*. If you are hiding your behavior from your SIG, that is your brain telling you it is wrong…if it is so right, why do you hide it. If it is so much what you really want, the SL relationship…why do you lie both in real life AND to the avatar? Why not just say I found the love of my life am leaving etc etc. Reason? You know it isn’t real, you lie to keep what you have that is real. Wake up, second life cheaters are ruining lives with your behavior. As to which is worse, a one night stand or 6 months of sharing every waking moment with a stranger and abandoning you spouse and children to use a cartoon penis to screw a cartoon vagina and type oh yeah baby you make me feel so good..and lie about love rather than deal with your problems which are of your own making? I do know the answer to that one.

I created an account to catch him as I said. What have I found there, well lots of the above, but in fact there are good things there. Dieting groups, religious meetings, AA meetings, support groups, charities, educational things. So it is the person driving the game. Not the game. Funny how all my time there I have never been approached by anyone for flirting or anything…so hmmm…people go there looking. If you don’t look, you don’t find.

ALL of them focused on sex.

Every. Single. One.

Perhaps if you could shift your focus away from your penis, you might find a thing or two to appreciate about SL.

There are a lot of talented musicians who are performing “live” in SL that I would never have heard of otherwise. I’m able to do things with SL machinima that simply wouldn’t be possible with my real life videocamera unless I happened to be a Hollywood director with a special effects outlet like ILM at my disposal. There are lots of real life artists who have set up virtual galleries, yet another set of people that I would never have learnt about were it not for SL. And then you have the artists who are exploiting SL and using it to express themselves in ways that unique to the virtual environment and they could not possibly accomplish otherwise.

There’s so much more to SL than just digital wanking, folks. Sheesh.

The TECHNOLOGY of second life might be a base for something larger in the future but right now it is just the SIMS on steroids.

My father says that about the internet; “for people who got nothing better to do than waste time”. He wouldn’t even understand what “social media” is, but he might say it was stupid and for people who didn’t know how to do real work for a living.

@Steve – “Are you fucking kidding me? Please tell me you’re joking.

No. I’m not. And neither are the corporations investing in this technology.

“That video was dumb as hell. Second Life is LAME and so are the people who use it. PERIOD.”

In the early 90’s people said the same thing – made the same kinds of overreaching declarations – about the World Wide Web. Funny how history repeats.

“And if you start trying to make your avatar appear in the real world then you have serious mental problems.”

I’d suggest you talk with the people at Cisco ( http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=csco ); get them some mental health treatment. They’ve been pushing virtual conferences hard this past year. Talking about how it makes more sense to hold virtual conference meetings with people from various globally-dispersed locations than fly them all over the place. In fact, there’s a story about it today: Christian Renaud on Traveling Virtually to Live Eco-Friendly.

Personally, as a product developer, I could definitely use a better means of communicating with my overseas clients. And augmented reality technology – coupled with the CAD data I sometimes generate – would speed the process and lower the costs (including the retail prices people pay for goods).

I guess being more efficient and paying less isn’t something you want. Well, to each their own.

btw, you all realize that Amazon’s engineers are especially interested in this technology (they’re often experimenting in Second Life), and that eBay’s founder is one of the investors that kept it afloat, yes? Oh wait. No one here uses Amazon or eBay, do they? That’s because buying stuff on the internet is something only fools would do, right?

You could say the exact argument about the Internet Period, and I suppose yes I would be making this same argument aswell.

Second Life is the Internet, just animated.

So, I assume you believe all the same about the internet then, eh?

If I learn how this 2nd Life is done, I am seriously going to build a hood in there. We’ll have avatars playing craps on the corner.

It’s not just about sex, I agree. But then again, that’s how people pick out the weak spots of things.