Dec 26thAn avatar looks back on the year that passed and beyond

Second Life:

My name is Lila Mill. I’ve been around since 2006 when I entered the magical world of Second Life for the first time. A lot of things has changed since that first time I set foot there and met all those amazing people now long gone. Second Life has a way of wearing people out. Either you stick it out and let Second Life change you, mold you into something else or you just move on. I tried the molding part, but that didn’t work, so I moved on. SL still has a special place in my heart because of all the memories, but 2013 was the year when I finally realized that my SL doesn’t exist anymore. Sometimes I wonder if it ever did. That I was just moving through it in a dreamlike state, imagining it to be something it isn’t.

Second Life was built by it’s residents. Everyone helped building that first and biggest world. We learned that we owned what we built and that we could use the money within SL and outside it. SL wouldn’t be what it is today without its residents. Now the Lindens say we don’t own what we create. We just contribute with money and the things we’ve built are theirs to use as they please. These days all the contributors can do is work for the Lindens and pay them for working for them. In other words: The Lindens retain the ownership of the content providers’ creative work. I’ll say no more. Time to move on.

Inworldz:

Sometimes a lot changes and sometimes it’s just the opposite. I moved to InWorldz a couple of years ago. A friend of mine, that I have known since that first time in 2006 in SL wanted out from SL. He had owned land there almost from the beginning and I’d been with him from that first time when he started to build there. When he moved to IW, I moved with him. He’d had parties on his land almost from the beginning, first pool parties and then Salsa parties. He continued with these parties, the Salsa ones, in IW. We are a group of people who have been meeting for years, every Sunday, at the same time, the garden looking the same, same avatars, everything is the same. It’s fun, but nothing really changes. Sometimes change is a good thing, but at other times stability feels safe. I know what I’ll be doing every Sunday, between 8 and 10 pm. I know who I will be talking to.

Metropolis:

“Lila” has never been to Metropolis, but “Olive Tor” has. She’s been around since 2008, I think. She created her own world with the technology of the time. She looked just as basic as “Lila”did that time when I first entered SL. Ever since that day, there’s been an Olive Tor and she also joined Metropolis where she’s found a lot of new friends. They were just as amazing as those I met in SL all those years ago and because of that, it felt natural to join Metropolis where the cool kids live.

Avatarland:

Olive is the builder in the family, she builds worlds and she creates outfits. This year she also created our home – Avatarland. She filled the world with fantastic things, built houses and buildings and decorated it with flowers and trees. This is a place for us to relax and to create. The first part of the year we were allowed to spend a lot of time there, but after the summer that RL alt started to make trouble. She demanded more and more time which was good of course, but our world suffered. Something is wrong with our home world and she didn’t have time to work with Olive to fix it.

Real Life:

Our RL alt Gabriella had been unemployed for years. Suddenly and out of the blue she got a job that consumed most of her time. She didn’t have time to play with us anymore. So much changed for her this year. She started this new job, she got her license and she even got her first car. Apart from that she started on a couple of projects that she has no idea if they will work out. One the projects is purely for her own sake in her RL, but the other will affect us all. If that part works out, we’ll have a new playground which we all look forward to.

My hopes and wishes for 2014

I wish that Gabriella’s both projects will work out and that she’ll have more time for us. She and Olive must fix the problems with Avatarland and hopefully we will all have more time to blog, to explore and to share our experiences on the Avatarland website.

We all wish you a Happy New 2014, and that this year will be the best ever. That’s what we hope for us and for all of you.