AJ Tan's blog

AJ Tan is a Cornell student who has been working for Metanomics over the summer. Turns out, Second Life wasn't entirely up to his expectations. I think his expectations are probably pretty standard for college students, so while SL works *for me* on a personal and professional basis, it clearly isn't everyone's cup of tea.

--Rob B.

Kyle Broflovski: Dude! Boars are only worth two experience points a piece. Do you know how many we would have to kill to get up 30 levels?


Eric Cartman: Yes, 65,340,285…which should take us seven weeks, five days, thirteen hours and twenty minutes, giving ourselves 3 hours a night to sleep. What do you say, guys? You can just... you can just hang outside in the sun all day tossing a ball around. Or, you can sit at your computer and do something that matters.

Having spent an entire summer working in Second Life, I feel well qualified to voice my opinion on this virtual world. Open the flood gate doors, because I think Second Life is boring.

Be it through movies or personal experience, we can all picture this scene in our mind’s eye – a middle-aged man, his face accentuated by a handlebar mustache, near-chanting his sales pitch in a staccato voice. The man is wearing a red-and-white stripped shirt and a stout, almost comical, straw hat.

“Hurry, hurry! Step right up! The Amazing Zoltair will guess your age for only one dollar!”

Now, imagine I could perform the same feat without any sort of number game or trick, perhaps not with the accuracy of an oracle, but at least as precise as to pinpoint a decade.

Click Below to Read More on this Phenomenon's Effect for Educators

Blizzard Exec #1: Whoever this player is, he has played World of Warcraft so much that he has reached a level we had thought unreachable.


Blizzard Exec #2: What kind of person would do this?


Blizzard Exec #1: Only one kind...Whoever this person is, he has played World of Warcraft nearly every hour of every day for the past year and a half. Gentlemen, we are dealing with someone here who has absolutely no life.


Blizzard Exec #2: How do you kill that which has no life?

My first experiences in Second Life make me wonder what Linden Lab execs must think of the kind of person that spends hour after hour in Second Life.

At the ripe young age of 21, it seems as though I should not be entitled to use the phrase “back in my day.” It seems as though this expression is reserved for only the grey of hair – for those who have had the tribulations of life written on their faces and have lived to tell the tale. I, however, will use the phrase having had a mere two decades under my belt. Times are changing, indeed.

Back in my day, I blocked all use of the telephone every time I wanted to go online. I ran ten feet of wire from where my shiny new Gateway Pentium II PC was to the nearest telephone jack and proceeded to ardently defend my right to use the telephone against my parents.

Back in my day, I was impressed when I could only sort of tell how many polygons a graphic consisted of. As the son of a computer consultant, I was a gamer – and one of proper breeding, I believe. My pedigree included such classics as Descent, Doom, Hexen, and Quake. During the time I owned a P2, Blizzard Entertainment could have told me that what I really wanted out of life was to own a pink elephant (or marry Zerg Kerrigan), and I would have attempted to find one.