Just Like Me Only Better

I found the article, Just Like Me Only Better, pretty interesting in that while I had heard vaguely of Second Life, I wasn't completely sure what it was. The first thing that came to mind for me was an episode of The Office where Dwight has a Second Life account and if I remember correctly flies around a lot. So, based on what I remembered from The Office, I thought Second Life was a game where you could make an avatar and fly around.

I was immediately pulled into the article because I'd always wondered where the term 'avatar' came from, and here, in the very first sentences, I was being told, "The term avatar comes from Sanskrit and originally referred to the form that the gods assumed when the visited thew world". The entire introduction was new information to me and I was curious to find out more.

Reading this article cracked me up at points because Second Life (in my opinion) seemed to have one of the cheesiest mottos I've heard of, "your world, your imagination". Based just on the motto I was quick to figure out Second Life and problems with this kind of 'game' became easy to come up with. I mean, solely based on the fact that you can basically create an entire second life for yourself I can count numerous problems. From an interpersonal level (beyond the cyber world) this just can't be good.

For example, I have a friend who is very into online chat rooms and has basically created an entire life on these. Recently he's been going through some relationship problems (with his online girlfriend) and when I asked him if he had some friends he could talk to he replied, "My online friends...". When I asked if he has friends he could lean on besides his cyber friends he could only come up with two or three. Clearly something like this in problematic.