This was my first time in Second Life. After setting up my account and logging in, my avatar was loaded into the game. I had to do a tutorial exploring the basic controls, this took some time as I didn’t realise you could run and was restricted to walked slowly through the tutorial.

I was able to teleport to the DIT Campus location where I was met by many class mates, most of which I recognised by their avatar name. The class started upstairs where John talked briefly about the game and what kind of tasks we would be doing over the next few weeks. We were able to communicate through the chat or using our mics which was a new experience for me as I’ve never been in an online game communicating and listening to conversations of avatars around me.

Over the week I needed to visit 3 places. The places I visited were Japan Tempura Island, Octoberville and Flotsam Beach.

 

Japan Tempura Island                                                                                                                I found this location by looking through the destinations. There was 12 other players on this map when I arrived.  I started to explore the area, it was a small map with a building surrounded by water. When I crossed the bridge and entered the building there was a ball room with two people dancing. As I entered the room the music changed and I was able to take a snapshot of the couple. I explored this area a little more trying to figure out how to interact this objects and people. When I went back to the other side of the bridge I was able to interact with a sign, by clicking on it I was teleported to another room where I was able to buy objects if I had money.

 

Octoberville                                                                                                                                 I also found this location by looking through the destination options under the category of Editor’s Pick. When I teleported here it was really dark and hard to see anything. My mini-map disappeared and thought there was no map in the location but realised later that I could click on the map option and the map would pop up on screen again. There wasn’t any music playing, but there was the sound of people screaming and scary voices which was a bit scary. I’m glad I was playing this during the day! I went into on of the building where there was a vending machine and after interacting with it the ‘owner’ Meryet Amat gave me an item- ‘a sandwich’. This was my first experience with receiving an item so I had my first look inside of my inventory to locate my new item. A train then appeared at the side of the building and I was able to ride the rain. It was still very dark and wasn’t really able to see anything. Then train then stops and there is a message from ‘The Conductor’ of the train saying that there is something on the tracks and I need to get off the train. So I get off the train and there’s a object shaped like Death on the side of the tracks and I go past him and into a cave where I brought onto a new area. It’s still dark and hard to see anything but there is two more players here. I fell off the cliff and landed in water. I wasn’t able to fly or jump out of the water onto land so I was stuck and then teleported to a new location.

 

Flotsam Beach                                                                                                                           I found this location under the category of Beaches. When I teleported here, I couldn’t see any other players. There was a machine next to where my avatar spawned that allowed me to buy a map, it was free so I suppose I technically didn’t buy it. It was saved to my inventory so I opened the folder and it contained the rules of Flotsam Beach, Beach activities and locales, Historical history amongst others. I opened some of the files but didn’t end up reading much of it. Before I teleported here, on the Flotsam Beach icon it said there was 20 players there, so I was surprised not to see anyone else. The first building I went into was an arcade which I thought was pretty cool. Some of the games were free but most of them you had to pay for, I assumed then that most of the players here were playing the games in the arcade. I was able to interact with nearly all the objects in the room and received several objects. I left the arcade and explored the map a bit more. There wasn’t much else here other than the beach. I would definitely like to come back here when I have money and try out some of the games in the arcade!