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Week 6 Update:
Second Life is not a game I would reference when looking for inspiration when developing any sort of content, first and foremost however, optimization is key.

Second Life released in 2003 and runs terribly on computers that run current generation games at over 144fps. 

Speaking from experience, lag doesn't always come from poor hardware and this lag (the poorly optimized game lag) is one of the main contributors for the lack of immersion in video games. You cannot get immersed in a game if you are constantly stuttering. Second Life fails in this area. My CPU and GPU usage stay near 10-15% yet the game lags and becomes a chore to play. 

If there's a lesson I have learned from playing Second Life it is to focus on not only adding more content but also making sure it is optimized and runs well on as many hardware setups as possible, a good example being the very popular Fortnite. It runs well from Mobile devices to High End PCs.

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Week 5 Update:
Information travels through Second Life in a few different ways but mainly word of mouth, people mainly communicate through text or voice chat. The other method is through the Second Life forums, on multiple occasions I overheard people referencing something they read on the forums.

In a sense, you could say the forums are a centralized form of communication. Information in most cases is shared from player to player, and the intended audience is really anyone who will listen. I haven't noticed any cases where people had a specific audience they wanted to reach in their conversations.

The power of media in Second Life has diminished quite a bit but is still there, I met people who made videos about Second Life and gained some popularity in the past and they seemed to be more interested in me after I showed them the video I made, this media creator "status" being a sort of social currency.

Word of mouth typically tends to be the main source of casual conversation and communication between players but players still seem to have some connection to media that places it on a pedestal, above word of mouth, why that is could be simply a player's connection to the real world where media is such an important element.



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Week 4 Update:
Second Life is diverse in its options of "bodies" if by bodies you mean the player model, it can be customized to be anything you want it to be if you can develop your own model, or spend money on buying a model someone else has made. 

My own character is a floating dress, I fiddled with the customization and accidentally ended up with just a dress. People questioned why I was just a dress and I told them I found it comedic, they incidentally also found it to be humorous. 

In a world where you can be absolutely anything people found a floating dress to be funny. So I believe that the world, world being Second Life itself, is very open about what your "body" is. Even a dress can fit in and make friends.




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Sculpture Center:
The Sculpture Center was interesting. The artwork became more interesting through the usage of a lens, you can create connections between things that aren't blatantly connected and the lens helped me interpret possible meanings the artist intended.

Here are some pictures I took

https://imgur.com/a/AnP551W



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Week 3 Update:
Second Life's rules definitely don't mirror the rules we have in our world, on a physical level, things don't always interact as they do in real life, people can jump twice their height and fly, there's mechanical dolphins floating around and many of the creative worlds offer experiences that don't exist. 

On the social aspect, people are more open to speaking their mind as they don't face nearly as much consequence as in real life, in Second Life you can get banned from a world, at most, and many people are more able to make friends in an online world due to this lack of consequence and pressure, people can just be themselves, whoever that may be.



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Week 2 Update:
Week 2 of Second Life was very much like the first, full of strange sights and strange people. Nothing new is happening as the game is close to deserted, but I did visit a "horror" location with a lot of interactivity which gave me an idea for a VR game, for Week 3 I will be posting another video that includes some of Week 2's interactions.


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Week 1 Update:
Due to of the amount of ridiculous things I found on Second Life, I decided to make a video.
Beware of peaks in volume, Second Life's audio engine is weird.
https://youtu.be/-F2sW68HG7s

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