Wait, what else would you use it for?

Daniel is all sorts of awesome.

I think SL could get a second life of its own if it adopted a more GTA approach, but with real life consequences. Like, you can choose to raise a family or start a business (or even University) if you want, or you can be a thief or whatever and actually kill people if you want to. But the difference is in GTA you just respawn outside of jail, but here you'd get locked up for a long time. They could even have prisons in Second Life for those who decided to make the bad decisions, so you'd really need to think about what you wanted to do with your (second) life.

As I understand you can do a home invasion and then you're eventually teleported somewhere else, but you can't engage in any sort of combat, which is kind of lame. I guess on the other side of the coin it'd suck to lose your avatar because some gamer asshole killed you and start all over (just to make things equally fair for the murderer who gets to play SL from prison for literally 20 to life (or whatever kind of time is used there)), but I dunno. I'd be interested then.

OH god I should've watched to the end the first time :)

You might need an actual game capable of actual gameplay for that to work, but neat idea. Start with the GTA engine and add second life features, not the other way around.

Hey, GTA V is moddable.

Back in the day, persistent trolls could get sent out to a corn field for a while until they "learned their lesson." Back then accounts also cost US to verify. But you also got free in-game currency just for existing.

I played with it a bit and racked up something like L,000 which is apparently worth a decent amount now (FOR SOME REASON), that I'm just sitting on.

Anyway back when I was trying it out, all of the communication was text-based instead of voice. When voice chat started to show up I completely lost interest, and now I guess it's voice-only. Which makes these videos way more amusing, at least.

Yeah, I guess you could potentially do something like that in GTA, but with the cars and stuff it'd be pretty easy for someone to be an asshole and just drive into peoples' houses, which probably wouldn't be picked by the police, AI or human, until somebody was killed. But yeah, if there's a way to disable the respawn function, you could basically create a very realistic life simulator. Heck, you could even have a whole court system with lawyers and judges if you wanted to!

"Your honor, although my client did go on a rampage in a fighter jet, killing several hundred people, I would like to point out that.."

"OBJECTION! This guy's a pussy lol!"

L,000 is about eighty bucks. And most SL communication is text.

There's a cool article I caught on Bo news about abandoned university campuses in SL. And they're all real universities like UW UCB etc. and you could attend lectures and discussions. That's kinda cool. I always liked those kids who just sat back and played gameboy through biology or physics classes, because it was required for them, as it was for me, but they already knew all that stuff whereas I was a total Luddite. It would've been fun to take a lecture from one of those people, even if it didn't count for course credit. But alas they're more of a ghost town than Reed College in the summertime..

That article's been circulating around. It was a bit depressing, but also entertaining to think that all these universities were still paying like 0/month on something that hasn't been touched in probably close to 10 years.

You know, I'm not sure how legal this would be, but for example I checked UW Milwaukee (sadly Madison's not on there) and I'm pretty sure I could just log right in, no need for proof of enrollment. So if somebody was taking classes, ostensibly you could pay to hear what their professor said more-or-less verbatim at fraction of the cost of a real university, even if that "real" university is U Phoenix. It may not count for course credit, but if it's some really cool subject, sure! And the money would help the "professor" monetarily with the inevitable student loans!

I mean, it's illegal to steal a syllabus of course, or record a lecture and read it back verbatim, but it's not that different from talking to a fellow student at a bar. I never had a chance to take a class from someone like Harold Blume (nor did I go to Yale) but it'd be cool to get that vicarious insight without having to go all the way to Griffin's Pub to hear about it.

The part where he starts walking away onto the pier while he's still talking reminds me of when I put the phone down on my particularly talkative developer friend sometimes and get a drink and come back to him still going on about whatever.

Rude? Yes. But I've learned my lesson from actually listening.

Yeah all his stuff is gold. But I can understand.. One of my clients is wheelchair bound and autistic so she plays a lot of The Sims and SL. Personally I'd rather escape reality with a game like New Vegas, but for some what I take for granted as a "normal" reality is indeed an escape for some.

Interesting notion.

I see lots of "why the fuck does this game exist" titles on steam, and I guess that's probably a portion of the answer I sought. Escapism is different for everyone.