I have now been using Second Life for about a month and still do not understand it completely, and feel like I never will. Specifically, I do not understand the process of building and constructing anything at all in Second Life. In one example of a video I was shown in class, the creator of a Second Life Island spend something like eighty or one hundred hours building the island. These facts and assumptions lead me to the questions: Is it worth it? What does one get out of putting that much work into something virtual?
These questions lead me to a claim that is very unsupported but is derived from simply a gut feeling: Residents of Second Life, or any comparable virtual world, in general put in much more work than they get out of it.
When someone in real life builds his or her house with their own hands, he or she can easily support the claim that it was well worth all of the work. The builder now has a roof over his or her head that could potentially last a lifetime. Likewise, a farmer puts in a ton of effort in planting and harvesting crops. The same claim, that the work was well worth it, can be easily rationalized by the fact that they now have food to eat. Also, when someone sews a sweater the same claim can be easily justified. They now have something with which they may keep warm. I just have trouble using this logic to make since of spending hours and hours making a virtual island on Second Life. There is already so much space in Second Life that adding another island would not be for the purposes of having extra living area. The only way I could make since of this is for educational purposes. My question is just for those who do it for no apparent reason.
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