Membership in Second Life, the giant online game/community/virtual world that you’ve heard about but never used, is free. I didn’t know that until recently. When I learned that fact, an idea hit me:

Second Life is a free source of material for at least one post, and probably a series.

It is, after all, the place where all the scariest, most unpleasant motherfuckers on the internet come together to be totally uninhibited. A place where a man can say, “In my real life, I’m an accountant, but here I can by my true self: a panda with huge tits and both sets of genitals,” and be accepted and embraced by a whole huge-titted hermaphro-panda community. A place, in short, where I could find something to write about, whether or not those stereotypes turned out to be true.

My vision for this project was simple: I’d go undercover, knowing absolutely nothing about the game or its world. Once there, I’d investigate all the things you’ve heard about Second Life in the media. Would the other players be at least half-normal? Would they would look down on me for being a noob who didn’t own any in-game property? And (of course) is the game really a depraved 24/7 furry scat party like all the news reports say it is, or is it mostly just people walking around and chatting? This, I told myself, would be some funny shit.

I downloaded the necessary files from the Second Life website, I installed them, I set up my account, and I started playing.

And then I stopped playing, because it is fucking unplayable. My computer is old, and my internet connection isn’t as fast as it could be, but goddammit, it ran World of Warcraft just fine! This game, though, suffered from a fucking ridiculous level of slowness. Remember that first generation of 3D games, on the original Playstation and the Nintendo 64? How objects just appeared when you got close enough? How mountain ranges would just pop up out of nowhere?

Yeah. It’s like that, but with better graphics and about 1/10th of the speed. Oh, and sometimes you’ll see objects that aren’t supposed to be there at all! You’ll be standing around, and a cluster of weird-looking polygons will appear in the middle of the screen, and stay there until you adjust your camera.

I assumed this had to be a problem with my hardware — either the old computer, or the mediocre connection. To an extent, I was right. But then I watched a couple video tutorials put out by Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life, who I probably should’ve mentioned earlier), and the videos’ narrator wasn’t having much more luck. He clearly had a better system than I did, but the framerate was still choppy, and his avatar spent much of its time standing around, waiting for the scenery to load. The game even crashed on him while he was recording one of the tutorials, and he didn’t even bother cutting it out of the video. He knows how to edit — he’s making video tutorials, after all — and he decided to leave this in.

And that was the end of my undercover investigation of Second Life. Everything I learned, I got from articles and tutorials that are already freely available to anyone who wants to read them, whether or not they’ve played the game. I am able to bring absolutely nothing new to the table regarding this topic. I had some interesting points about the in-game economy, but it’s nothing you can’t find on your own. No, all I could come up with is some angry criticism of the game’s slowness.

Seriously, how fucking patient do you have to be to addicted to this game? At least with drugs, you have the instant gratification of getting high.