Second life- What is the fascination?

Before starting this course i had only briefly heard of Second Life, it was not something i had any interest in being part of and therefore did not know all that much about it. I had heard in the news or possibly just in the rumour mill that it had caused marriages to fail, people to lie and deceive, but it was just a game, could a virtual game cause this much trouble? Well in workshop 23, we were asked to set ourselves up a second life account, have a look at it, explore it and see how we found it. Well i can safely say that was the one and only time i have or will be visiting Second Life.
 The most enjoyable thing about it was creating yourself a character, being able to look as you wish, bigger boobs, a smaller bum even reducing the size of your nose or mouth. So i set my character up to be this beautiful slim 'perfect' girl. After my character was complete i decided to do as Simon had asked and explore Second Life, see if i could find out what all the hype was about. I did some exploring, i learnt to fly and transport myself to different areas and then i braved the scary concept of actually talking to people. The majority of people that i came across were older men, although there was also a lot of women, on this particular occasion it was men that i cam across most. So i would start a discussion, about anything really and then lead it to possibly their age and what they enjoy about Second Life. Now for example one man that i was talking to, his character looked around mid twenties, tall, dark and handsome. When i found out how old he was, he was 56. Is this not the deceit that i previously mentioned? OK, so i had modified myself to get rid of a bit of excess weight but i hadn't knocked 30 odd years off my age. The concept of talking to this man then seemed wrong, why would a 22 year old girl want to talk to a 56 year old man that she didn't know?
 When searching Second Life on the search engine 'Bing' i found it strange to find that the first link that came up was a Marital Affair Dating Link, for 'people looking for additional uncomplicated excitement' - was this what Second Life was all about? I  thought the idea of Second Life was an improvement on Internet chat rooms because you get an idea of what the person actually looks like, It seems i was wrong as people ,understandably, change their appearance for the better.

 I think the concept of Second Life is good and if people feel that this is a good way to interact with people then that is perfectly acceptable but it isn't something i will be joining as a leisure activity now or in the near future.

                                                                                 Real Life.

      

                                                                              Second Life.