Week 2

During the second virtual environment class, John was giving us a little bit of feedback on our blogs. Among other things he advised us to add a brief biography on our blog, but he also stated that it doesn't have to be true, it doesn't have to relate to our real life, we are allowed to stay anonymous and tell a story we made up. I did not put a biography on my blog because I did not think that it had any importance, and I never really know what to say about myself. But for the next week I'll add a  small biography.
Since the classroom in SL is open for everyone, which means that people that are not part of the module are able to enter the building as well, there is always a possibility of having some visitors sitting in the class. This week there were 2 strangers sitting in our classroom. John tried to make them speak through the microphone instead of using the chat, but only one of them did so. The sound was pretty low so I did not understand everything he was saying, but he was a web designer I think and when asked how long he's been playing SL, he said over 10 years. I think that's incredible, because I can't imagine playing a game for 10 years, and I wondered what made him stay all these years? The game is interesting because you can meet new people and explore places, but if someone wants to meet new people and have conversations they can use chat rooms, there is no need to see each other in a game, because it's not the way they look in real life and there is no body language or face expressions, so I feel like there is no need to see each other since it doesn't really add anything to the conversation.
John also asked how many people in our class read newspapers, and if we don't read them he wanted to know where else we get information. And then he asked us if we can always trust the news we read online, and that we might have to be careful to look at good websites.
The next part of the class consisted of us all individually doing a 30 second elevator pitch. Which basically means that we had to come up with reasons why we would be a good asset to the team. We had to do this over the microphone, which I still don't like to do because it feels strange to talk to people without looking them in the face and not seeing any reactions. Unfortunately my microphone did not work, so for the next class I'll have to solve the problem. The reasons I named for being a good asset to the team was that I'm a good listener, I have a lot of patience, and I study visual communication so I'm used to do digital work. After this class John set up the groups and posted them on our SL Facebook page.
For this week we had to explore SL a little more and try to have a conversation with at least 2 people.
The first destination I visited was a party island, I forgot to write down the name, but I thought that there would be probably a lot of people to talk to.
Me at a Party


In the end I did not talk to anyone on this island because I felt intimidated and awkward, so I couldn't bring myself to start a conversation. The reason why I felt like this was because the groups of people there seemed to all know each other and they were dancing intensely while having sexual conversations and flirting with each other. Although I know it is just a game, and my identity is anonymous, I still felt uncomfortable talking to strangers. Therefore I left the island after a short while to try a different location.
Another location I visited was called Octoberville. It was a Halloween themed place. The reason why I chose to visit this place was because I felt a little frustrated after visiting another place where nobody would talk to me. So I thought maybe it is because of the way my avatar looks? Maybe I look too scary? So by choosing a scary location I thought that people might be more open to talk to me. Unfortunately I used the camera tool in SL to take pictures and sent them to my email address, since I did this before in other locations and it worked fine, but this time it did not work, for some reason the pictures I took were not send to me, so I have none for this location. I'm not sure if this was a temporary problem within the game or if there are places in SL in which players are not allowed to take pictures? Nevertheless I took 2 pictures with my phone of the small conversation I had with one person, next time I'll just do screenshots. 

The only person that was open for a small conversation was a user called Ben50000. He told me he was from England and that he studies web design. When I told him I was studying in Ireland he made fun of me saying that people from Ireland sound funny. So I asked him why he decided to join SL, and he simply replied sex.
Then I asked him why sex?, since it is just a game and I don't understand why that would be a reason to join SL. He kind of ignored my questions and only talked about virtual sex, so I ended the conversation after a while because it did not seem to go anywhere and he did not really seem to want to talk to me. After talking to Ben50000 I tried talking to other people but they just wouldn't talk to me, so after a while I got frustrated and logged out. So I didn't really manage to fulfill the task for that week.

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