GAME OVER

“Turn that game off, you won’t learn anything from that” my parent’s would say to me when I was growing up as a young adolescent boy. Little did they know that from then til now gaming has changed the lives of different people in society today. Video games would change our thoughts on the reality of our lives to the realities of the atmosphere a virtual reality game can create. Through recent years the gaming industry has evolved from the early days of playing for entertain to playing for “real”.

That’s where Second Life comes in. Second Life is a virtual reality world that allows users to create themselves as avatars and do anything any person could do it the real world through this avatar. The whole idea behind the virtual world of Second Life is that users can have a second life on-line with other users from across the world. To some Second Life lets them do what they can’t do in their real lives.

Meadows (2008:51) argues that experiences create a grounding of belief. “People in virtual worlds build things, use them, sell them, trade them and discuss them. When another person confirms what I am seeing, places value on it, spends time working to pay for it, buys it, keeps it, uses it, talks about it, gets emotional about it, and then sells it – this tells me there is something real happening. The suspension of disbelief has become a grounding of belief”

Meadows argument is correct in how he states that “experiences create a grounding of belief” because some individual’s these days don’t belief things at first sight, they want to experience something first themselves before they start to create a belief about a certain thing. This can be applied towards Second Life which many people have started to use on a regular basis. If one person is doing something or has a belief in one thing, it is a matter of whether someone else can see it in order for them to belief it too.

Second Life and other virtual reality games such as The Sims franchise have created the endless possibilities of people to escape their own lives to playing through an avatar within another life. People need to understand that these games are just a “game” and that they should really take the opportunity to experience things in their ‘real life’ before they waste their ‘real life’ on a ‘virtual’ one.