I’ve never quite understood the appeal of games like The Sims or online worlds such as Second Life. I tried The Sims for a while but couldn’t see the point of it. It isn’t a proper game since there are hardly any rules or goals, and no real challenge. It’s like real life but on the screen, at a distance. I’ve not even tried Second Life because it just seems like more of the same. Anything I could do in Second Life, I could do in the first one, and better. (Well, the one advantage of SL might be that I wouldn’t have to leave my desk to do it.)

Today I found an essay expressing and explaining this all much better than I have ever been able to.

I used to weep envious buckets watching whatshisname in Close Encounters of the Third Kind being taken off-world to the absolutely not here anymore by those delightful doe-eyed creatures, and Second Life seemed to offer a way of doing this without the hassle of the striving, making mountains out of mashed potato, quest thing. So I signed up.

The problem turned out to be (as it must) that Second Life is organised and inhabited by beings from the real world who have by definition very little experience of being anywhere or any way else. Being virtual is not very different from being real because the virtual place and its beings are controlled by the same old us as always.

Sad but true. For a “second life” that’s really different, we need aliens or a fifth dimension. Or books.