Damaged, But Not Broken

Yesterday was more or less a wasted day. I slept in long, woke up, drank some water, then crawled back to bed again. All day the only memorable thing I did was brush my teeth, nothing else really. I didn't eat, didn't talk to anyone, didn't leave my home and didn't get dressed. I walked around in the flat and slept in my boxers, a t-shirt under a hoodie and thick hiking socks. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.

Luckily I am off from work until January 2nd, but still I want to do more in my free time than sleep, blog and be in SecondLife.

However I didn't do a worthwhile thing until I finally crawled out of bed at 9 PM to make some coffee. After my first cup of coffee I started reading predictions for 2012 in the SecondLife and virtual worlds blogosphere. That was to a large extent a dreary ordeal.

Every SecondLife blogger with any ambition or pretension to be a serious part of the metaverse had come up with some prophesy or other on what we could expect of 2012. Many seemed to have taken their starting point in Philip Rosedale´s views on SecondLife as he expressed it earlier this year. The "high threshold" and the residents being “Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, they love it. But you have to be highly motivated to get on and learn to use it.” statements.

Some of them even went so far as to say that a vast majority of residents are "broken" (physically. emotionally, mentally and/or spiritually).

I have never ever considered myself broken in any way, shape of form, and certainly not when I first arrived to SecondLife and decided to come back again, again, again and over again for almost five years now. Maybe I have gotten somewhat damaged during my time here, but I sure as hell have not been broken by this life.

Although most of them predict SecondLife will still be around for all of 2012, they still rant on about its high threshold compared to online games like "World of Warcraft", which is one of the fastest growing games and is therefore seen as a model to which SecondLife should adapt to recruit new users. So I went ahead and tried that game to see how easy it would be to join, learn and how interesting it would be in there.

I spent four (4) hours in the trial version of the game. First I must say it was not that easy to sign into. One has to register twice, which I cannot understand the need for and which was totally bewildering because the sign in´s come at different points of the registering process.

Once you are in, you choose if you want to belong to "the good" or "the bad" side and what kind of apparition you want to be in those alliances and how you want to look. Creating your looks isn't as advanced as in SecondLife if you want to vary from the given avatars and the resulting avatar is a disappointment.

After downloading, registering twice on different services (the game itself and something called "Blizzard" - if I remember correctly) and creating my looks for about 30 minutes I spent 3,5 hours honestly trying to give the game a chance to intrigue or fascinate me.

There was never any interaction with real people, just with machine dummies who gave you missions or could bring you to life if you died, all the set was about clicking fast and hard on things you had to kill. I admit, I am easily bored sometimes, but after doing this for 3,5 hours my brain was numb and bored to death by the simplistic shit.

If that's what they think we should strive for I for one don't want any part of it - ever.

Do you finally see to what extremes I am prepared to go so you should not have to, my dear readers?