I have two lives.

A first one and a Second one.

After Uru Live was cancelled I had grown fond of the online social aspect of games. I knew you could go online and blast people senseless or gangbang the baddies in Diablo with help, but in Uru I'd met people and gotten to know them.

There is a "game" called Second Life, and I hesitate to call it a game, because there isn't a set goal or levels or anything like that. Rather it's more of a playground where you get a body and essentially fabulous cosmic powers. You can create things out of easily manipulated "prims" (short for primitive, which means a single shaped piece of an object) which are spheres and cubes and cones and cylinders and pyramids which can be stretched and twisted and textured and joined together. You can also attach them to about forty-five different points on your body. So you could easily "rez" a prim (rezzing is the lingo for creating something, or waiting for the world and textures to load around you) shaped like a cone, texture it blue and attach it to your head as a dunce cap.

When you create something in Second Life, it has your name attached to it. You can set permissions whether it can be manipulated by other people, is copyable or unique, or what price someone has to pay to pick it up. You can sell anything you create to anyone in the world for Lindens — the game currency $L. The economy in the game is huge as some amazingly talented people create objects and clothing. You pay $L to upload textures and sound clips and take pictures in the game – pictures can literally be dragged and dropped onto prims to texture them.

So in this game you can create or buy wings, attach antennae to your head that flop around and light up, and dress in black and yellow to become a bumblebee. The "furries" have evolved into almost their own race in-world as many people choose to play anthromorphic animals. There are three layers of clothing on your torso, two on your legs, also socks, shoes, gloves and divided skin textures which each have a tattoo layer. The shoes I wear consist of the "shoe" layer which alters my foot to fit inside two prim shoes, (each made of about 12 detailed prims). Anyone in this game can make themself dazzingly attractive or bizarre and otherworldly.

Part of the game I've not gotten into is scripting. Second Life has it's own language that once saved can be dropped inside a prim to give it behaviors. The simplest makes text hover above, or particles erupt (particles are prims that appear briefly and disappear, so they can be smoke, sparks, water spray, or flying skulls; particle scripters are like Wizards in SL.) Scripts can also make a door slide aside when you click on it, or display a picture, or sell an object to someone.

So just because there is no real "game" doesn't mean there isn't anything to do. The residents of the game create the landscape that isn't already put there by the Lindens (they are the gods of SL who are employed to fix when things go wrong, and all have the last name of Linden). I currently own a beach house on the corner of a tropical island (paying rent to the person who owns the place) that has a radio that will stream internet broadcasts onto the property. There are dance clubs and sex clubs and game competitions and contests ("Best Beach Wear"), huge malls and vampire castles to explore. Someone created an attachment that makes your avatar (the body you control) swim in the water realistically. I have been playing in a Silent Hill-esque horror sim (sim is one of the square regions of the world) with an asylum. There is a recreation of Amsterdam, and there was a Peter-Pan event where you had to search all over London and then put on pirate costumes, jump out a window and fly to a boat where you could swordfight. I remember chatting with a group in an outdoor sex club that was suddenly invaded by giant alien killer bees who pushed everyone off the platform.

Oh, you can fly too. And teleport. Landmarks are objects that are freely traded to give someone a teleport destination. You can't die unless the sim you're in is marked as a combat sim, and if you die you teleport to your home location. Lately the combat in the game has been about "push" weapons. Since you usually can't kill someone, you can knock them back and send them flying for miles. There was a hairy incident where someone casually handed me a crudely made weapon which I just stuck in my inventory and forgot about. Later in a combat sim where someone was showing me all about different weapons, I pulled it out and everyone got really nervous and told me not to equip or use it — apparently this was a weapon that rezzed so many prims it would crash the entire sim region…knocking people offline and bringing the wrath of the Lindens and probably suspension. I deleted it and emptied the trash can.

So Second Life is pretty cool. It's the game if you get tired of you can always go back to later because everything will be different. I've met some of the smartest and ridiculously creative and funny people there. If you play late at night or very early in the morning you can meet people from Australia and England who are wicked cool. I've even sat in a nightclub and listened to someone play a live set of original music to an audience in a cafe that was themed like a lily pond with frog-shaped chairs. How often do people get that sort of opportunity?