I have seen a great many post here with people saying that all there is to do is sex and clubs. I have played second life for over a year now and there is much more than porn in it. Granted there is a lot of sex and clubs and casinos, but that should be expected. People are trying to make money and sex sells in real life and virtual reality. If you actually search for something other than stuff like that you can find much content available that has nothing to do with sex or clubs. For example some people have created their own Star Wars inside SL, spending their time meditating, training force powers, and having battles between the sith and the jedi with no sex clubs anywhere to be seen. Then there are those lord of the rings fans out there who make up their own fantasy worlds full of elves, dwarves, even some merfolk. Wizards create spells and give lessons and faeires tend to their gardens, and again no sexual content or clubs present there at all. I have even seen people battling eachother in giant robots like out of that gundam anime. So while yes there is a lot of sex and clubs to be found, there is much more to that if you actually look for it...
Comments
The whole world within SL is like Bizzaro land. I don't really even consider this a game in the sense of any of the others here. It should be removed from this site.
It's all about the fantasy baby!
www.solsticeserver.com
Plus the other people that are looking for a traditional MMO with the quests and hack/slash RPG are not going to be happy in SL unless they want to make their own RPG game in there. No, SL is not a "game" in the traditional sense of a prefab game in a box. It's really a virtual world where you have to be the one creating your avatar/toon/character to what you want it to be, not what a game designer dictates. It's only limited to a person's imagination on what you can do there. It's disjointed looking because it's entirely made by the players. So, no you will not have a uniformed look and feel to it that you get with a prefab game. You'll get somewhat that by going to a private sim or island where the player that owns that island makes it into their vision.
So in short, it's the players that make everything in there which will always mean somebody is going to make something sexual. It's human nature to go that route.
Someone is going to make sexual material? should be just about everyone!
There is a huge market for the newbies that come in and just want to try out the virtual sex scene or the clubs, etc. So a lot of people will make things targeting them. It does seem just about everyone gravitates to those areas when they first enter SL. I think it's because they are the more visible and more highly advertised places.
Personally I enjoy the fantasy themed sims, victorian themed sims, or Japanese themed sims the most. There's even an anime themed sim.
SL isn't all about porn, but sex is the motor that drives everything else. It creates motivation for blingtards to get blinged up and pay the content creators bills, motivation for complex societies like Gor to exist, etc. Hey, sorta like RL!
Gor yeah when I first heard of them, I thought it was all about BDSM but then after learning that they originated from books, I read about the author. Gor is now clear to me, they are not a sex society. It is a very complex group, to understand it, you should just look up gor on wikipedia, it explains the history of the culture.
Other gorups in SL include things like furrys, you should go to wikifur for answers.
SL is a very badly made game.
I tried it for 1 day below is a list of what i did and saw followed by why i left.
Ok did tutorial island not exactly clear but i mnaged very nice tho.
Warped to the main server and flew off and saw the first buildings [casinos]
Flew on after looking in them.
Then found a jumble of badly placed and incomplete buildings of variable quality some were very good others were ot [there was even a shopping centre full of sex shops].
Flew on and kept on bumping against restricted access walls [these pop up suddenly and are everywhere especially around the interesting stuff.
After an hour i manged to get out of that area as i kept on bunping on unloaded buidings and restriction walls.
Eventually i just flew very high up and flew north
Got stuck in some sky sculpture made of moving blocks [it loaded as i flew through its space so was stuck inside it].
2 hours later i got out.
Found some more nice looking areas with some very well planned out venuesbut....They were all blocked off with restricted access walls ].
After a few more hours flying around strip clubs and porno stalls and oogling people having randome sex in the streets i logged out and freed up some hard disk space.
This game could ahve been good sadly it has the following problems holding it back.
Bad user interface and controlls
No planning in structure position giving everyone clear routes to move between them [some parts were like invisible wall amzes].
Nothing for newbies to do exept watch avitars ahving sex.
One idea would be to have content specific servers such as a star wars one and have it start as completly blank them have the star wars fans construct the props so they can roleplay id be happy to build a whole city if i could .
The OP is right, in that just running or flying around in SL is most likely to find you nothing but boring crap and endless ugly casinos and sex clubs. Teleportation to specific locations you've discovered outside the "game" (because the in-game search function sucks and is incomplete even when it works right) is about the only way to find good content, which there's actually quite a bit of. I've found the most interesting stuff through a combination of reading boards like this one, reading blogs and setting up news alerts and RSS feeds to get suggestions.
All of which points to a big problem with SL: the "first hour experience" sucks ass for most people. The UI's awful, and if you want to find anything worth doing, you aren't going to find any of it easily.
Oh, and a tip: there's almost nothing worthwhile in any of the PG areas. Nobody--whether they intend to do anything dirty or not--seems to want to pay a bunch of money every month to build and maintain some big, neat spectacle under the same kind of guidelines as the Home Alone movies, go figure.
Yeah frogot to add it in, sim owners have the option to only allow people that they want into their sims. You would have to get permission or join a group of that sim to gain access.
Where does one find good areas? searching. How did all the people on the message boards and other places find the areas? ether they made them and are advertising or they found them by exploring.
The game is only as fun as you make it to be, there is no set path, you have to make one for yourself.
I found severalPG areas to be fun, its also a good place to hang out and just talk. Try waterhead or Luna Oaks for good place. The areas around Waterhead are the offices of the Lindens. Dont just stay on the main land, go to all the islands around the world. Remember this is an open source game and I believe we are talking about adult grid so since its open source and adult, we can expect porn. If you dont like the porn, then go toa PG area or a non porn area. If you want, you could go and hang out at one of the many sand boxes, there is always amazing things that people have built and left for viewing and use.
I found a nice area today way off of the mainland. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Svarga/67/105/74 take the tour at that they provide.