trees are people too

ok. I am creaking my learning cogs into action. While I may not ‘get’ second life itself, I feel as if I may have begun to grasp what Jenny is trying to get at with it’s application in IM2. We are just continuing with media production, but will be implimenting it using this new medium, machinima. (Unfortunately not as close to Mech-anime as I had hoped, ha!)

Just when I was wondering what all this had to do with second life (which, as astounding as it is, does not seem quite as ‘cutting edge’ as it sounded 4 years ago) Jenny pointed out that this was just an easy and free way to access a games engine, which we can then use to ‘build’ our productions. It could be any engine. My rudimentary understanding of creating machinima is that you need a powerful piece of software – such as those used in games (think Halo, World of Warcraft) – that allows you to create real-time graphics. It’s come pretty cool stuff actually, now that I am getting the gist of it, and I was surprised at how impressed I was with the short machinima film that Jenny showed us in the lecture, Silver Bells and Golden Spurs.

Right now, however, we are still all stumbling our way awkwardly through this seemingly never-ending landscape of terraformed grass and stuttering graphics. I am trying to work out how on earth anyone would have the patience to stay in second life long enough for it too start to mean something, to formulate meaningful relationships and legitimate businesses, but in the meantime I am feeling somewhat more reassured by the fact that we are using sl as a media tool, rather than a social tool. socially (thus far, at least) I have found it somewhat…banal. Rudimentary? oh god, that is probably a reflection of my social nuances, however.

meanwhile, where to go for a good time in sl? A bit of research here and here seems to indicate that places in sl are categorised as such: Games, buildings, stores, gathering places and other. i just want to go somewhere to dance. Clubbing in second life, i’m sure, will be an exhilarating experience.