Steven Messner over at PC Gamer has published an article regarding a brief history of MMO games. The article suggests that it will take a look at the best of the genre and the list includes Second Life.
Second Life isn’t a game of course, it’s a sandbox but with that in mind it is indeed ground breaking in the multiplayer sense and with its creativity, user generated content, economy and more it warrants a place in a history of MMO’s.
Steven Messner writes :
When we play MMOs, we’re asked to participate in a fantasy that’s already defined for us. Second Life is a strange example of what can happen when the world bends to our imagination, not the other way around.
This sounds positive, right? Alas it’s sandwiched between stereotypical cliches about Second Life being pretty much all about sex.
I appreciate that the article is a brief history of MMO’s and therefore it can’t go into much detail about Second Life, but it could have at least made an effort to mention more than the adult nature of Second Life.
This is all the more disappointing when you realise that this article is from the same author who recently covered Strawberry Singh’s unboxing videos and in that article stated :
My conversation with Berry has given me a rare glimpse into a world that is often negatively branded as bizarre. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find a community of artists and creators who have banded together to share and celebrate each other. It’s not something you see in other massively multiplayer games, but it’s something I wish there is more of. It makes me a bit sad, then, that Second Life will always be labelled by its strip joints and sex clubs. As Berry tells me, “That’s just not what Second Life is about, there’s so much more you can do here.”
I’m therefore somewhat bemused as to why Steven Messner has himself suggested that Second Life is all about sex.
I mean don’t get me wrong, there is adult content in Second Life, there’s a large market for adult activities, but there will be a large market for adult activities in not only any virtual world with user generated content, but any physical world that humans inhabit too.
There’s so much more to Second Life than adult content, a cursory glance at the Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide blog posts exemplify on a regular basis that there’s more to Second Life than kinks and fetishes.
I suppose it’s trendier or generates more street cred over at PC Gamer to paint Second Life as a den of iniquity, but Second Life is, whether people like it or not, ground breaking, it will be remembered in years to come for being a forerunner of virtual worlds and experiences to come and it certainly deserves its place in the PC Gamer list.
Therefore it’s just a shame that the article couldn’t be just a tad more constructive regarding Second Life’s importance in the development of the MMO experience.
Is he serious?! That is one of the *worst* and most one-sided reviews of Second Life I’ve seen in recent years. I used to have a lot more respect for PC Gamer… And it is extremely strange, as you said, that Steven would have written (just last month) a much fairer and more balanced article about SL, only to follow it up with this trash. >:(
*sighs* I guess I shouldn’t let this kind of thing bother me so much, especially since it’s not the first time—and won’t be the last—someone judged Second Life so shallowly and dismissively and then parroted that judgment for everyone else to hear.
Still. WTF.
I don’t know why he didn’t just go with what he said in the Strawberry Singh post and mention that Second Life has a reputation for adult content but scratching beneath the surface reveals so much more, that would have at least been consistent but he just goes with all the old stereotypes, it’s all rather baffling.