Second Life?

I've played a little with similar programs and situations. One example is the time that I encouraged my boyfriend and a group of his friends to make their own avatar on the PlayStation Network site "Home". The social structure seemed to be ok in that most avatars couldn't do anything dirty but there was enough talk in the chat to make me roll my eyes at the childishness of it all.

However, that was all tempered as the avatar was created to be an old fat man dressed in a mini-tank top and hot pants. They proceeded to find random things to pester people with, including interrupting conversations between people in the main area. As they were playing (it was mostly good natured), they would find that people seemed to react one of two ways. Some people were put off by the avatar and the antics of doing the running-man dance in the middle of a crowd of people. On the other hand, some people joined in and started interacting and gravitating towards him.

Though some people do these things intentionally, I think it can speak to the person's personality on how they react to what happens. The people who joined in seemed to be having fun with the amusing bit of chaos that was going on. As I said, it was good natured, and however annoyed some people were, there were others that saw it as something to have fun with and take the stance of joining in for the sake of enjoyment.

How does this relate to Second Life? Well, the enjoyment was short-lived. Mostly because after a half hour, they'd grown bored of pestering people and aside from going about buying new outfits and new pretty things for their houses, there wasn't much substance behind it. It was a place for people to talk and virtually hang out, but in general it was still like a pretty instant messaging system. The people had limited skills and abilities to interact, and there was no real goal aside from simply talking to people that you could normally talk to through other ways on the PlayStation Network.