Digital Worlds: Second Life
I'm fascinated by old online worlds, of course I am. Made a Second Life account recently to explore the world I missed out on entirely but heard stories about, seen in videos like Monster Factory. I have enjoyed my time in it, but I still feel like quite the tourist/visitor. A huge problem for me is that the game runs like ass, and no amount of fiddling with settings can change the fact anyone can load up 4k textures and as many unreasonably high poly models, and my god, do they ever. "it's not a game" I don't care, even if it's a chatroom, sub 15fps is hard to look at for extended exploration sessions. Ah well.
To get the bad out of the way... I think the roughest part of exploration is a tie between how many plots of land are locked to visitors despite people not actively being in it, and the sheer volume of AI gen logos and art. It's maddening. You get teleported out of plots within seconds of stepping foot in them, or the ones you can venture into have generated pictures instead of in game photos of the owner and their friends. Wretched. Beauty really comes from something made by a human, or accidents.
3d scans of people populate these half dead venues and I can't shake how it feels like someone's soul was captured and trapped inside this world. If not that then it's png cutouts, if not that, it's bots that talk to you and each other when you walk near enough. It feels sad.
There's a lot of gems and interesting places, and I'm sure there's so much more to see.
The mature rated zones... I enjoy there being places where mature content is allowed. It feels refreshing, even in an old digital third space, to explore places meant for adults, where it's okay for sex to exist.
I'm a tourist here, and that's fine by me. I like it.