The recent Designing Worlds 250th edition grabbed headlines for Designing Worlds reaching such an impressive milestone and for an interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg. However the carefully selected location of Matanzas has been somewhat overlooked, so I decided to visit the sim to see just why this impressive location was considered the ideal venue for the landmark edition of Designing Worlds.
The sim was chosen not just because of its undoubted beauty but also because in a very early edition of Designing Worlds they visited Skate Foss’ parcel on the sim and gave it a makeover. Skate Foss was so impressed with the location that over the years she became not just a parcel owner, but the owner of the whole island and it’s a very impressive sim indeed that exemplifies not only what can be achieved within Second Life but also how much you can pack into a sim without leaving visitors with the impression that they are treading in treacle.
Part of the challenge of most Second Life sims is to engage visitors and strengthen community. Matanzas manages to do both with a mixture of public and private areas. The private areas are for tenants of the sim and visitors are respectfully requested to avoid these areas but that’s not a problem because of the impressive amount of public areas on the sim and the impressive design that makes navigating the public areas such a pleasure. Amongst the early public areas are a public beach, Island dance floor and Cafe.
