Blog Post 12

The biggest impression I got playing the Second Life is that I can normally communicate with people. I was surprised that all people I talked with were genuinely nice. In today’s blog, I want to talk about a person whom I felt close to the most.

I met a person who told me that she’s interested in Japan, and I felt delighted to hear that. After we both shared our general demographic information and personal preferences, it turned out that she is also familiar with Anime and Japanese comic books. During the conversation, I tried to follow what the textbook mentioned: responding as quickly as possible, using natural language, and so on. I’m honestly not sure if any of these facilitate our communication, but meeting her was a nice experience. It was my first time talking about my interests and hobbies with people in virtual reality. When I last time played other virtual games, I couldn’t even find someone who has the same preferences. Much more, our communication didn’t go in-depth and last so long because some people were rude and just tried to curse at me. I felt uncomfortable and didn’t fit in the environment, such as IMVU. However, playing Second Life gave me a much better experience and I had some decent conversations with other people. The biggest difference between Second Life and IMVU is that people are more respectful, and many more people try to keep communicating. The environment helped me talk about my personal information and ask about it to others in turn. I thought that I won’t be playing virtual games because of reasons I experienced before, but I might keep playing Second Life outside this course.