Getting Started

My first steps:

First I signed up for SL I wanted one of the premium accounts which would allow me to buy land and buy other things available but as I don’t have a credit card I had to get myself a pay-pal account. But even with having created a pay-pal account I was still not able to pay for the premium packet which I would liked to have had, there were some technical problems which prevented me from getting it, so I only got myself the account which is free. I found that a bit annoying but I read that by the time you get to Second life that there was help available and that I could solve the problem then. (By the time I got to the main island ‘Help Island’, the Avatars who are there to help and guide you didn’t know how to help really and there were more people with the same problems, so it was good to know that I wasn’t the only one.)
I downloaded the software to run SL on my Computer, which was easy to do, so I signed in and thought I was ready to go, but for some reason my Avatar wouldn’t do anything. It might have been my Internet connection but it just kept freezing on me, which even now happens a lot, although I have a pretty new PC.
I was excited and ready to go. By the time I got my Avatar to do stuff I kept wondering around and fiddling around with tools given. As I have mentioned before I am not much of a game player so all of this was pretty new to me.
After wondering around, trying to learn how to fly I was getting a bit annoyed as there were boundaries everywhere, I was somehow stuck somewhere and I hardly met anyone. The people I did meet weren’t able to help me either as they just been there the first time themselves. But the overall feeling I got was that no one really knew what was going on, only that we had to complete tasks.
This might sound really stupid but if you never have played online games before and expect great things from this Second Life my first hour was pretty discouraging.
Also with my internet connection not being able to cope I guess, it became pretty frustrating, on my first day.
Disappointed and frustrated I signed out and left it for a day.
As the saying says ‘The curiosity killed the cat’ although was a bit frustrated I was still curious about it, so by the time I got some time the next day I logged on again and started to explore more. This time my internet connection did me proud and only froze once in 2 hours.
After hooking up with another Avatar who was from Spain we finally figured out that we didn’t land on the main SL world but on the Orientation Island which is designed to help people to help people to learn how to do things, such as flying, talking, changing body shapes and basically to learn how to use the programme itself.
Well the basics anyway.