A Four Year Retrospective of My Second Life

June 16^th 2010 marked my fourth Rez day in Second Life.  This week I have pondered on what it means to be an avatar and how far have I gone since my inception into this virtual multi-faceted world.  I’ve lived some amazing experiences in these 4 years and have met lots of wonderful people from the world over.  In fact, some friendships have transcended into my real life. 

I have been role playing in Second Life© since August of 2006.  Ever since I started role playing in the City of Lost Angels, I had not really wandered outside of areas that were not role play based.  As such, all my relationships in Second Life had to do with role play.  It all changed soon after I found the social network Plurk.  Through this unique networking experience, I found a world of Second Life avatars that I did not normally associate with during my time online.  Among them were designers, creators, writers, and bloggers.  Plurk helped me expand my horizons as I met many different people.

I am very proud of my accomplishments in-world.  I am grateful to Stacia Villota, owner of the blog Virtual Neko, who inspired me to start my own blog about role play, aptly titled, SecondLifeRoleplay.  My blog opened in March of 2009 and began to come to life in April of 2009.  To date I have over 23,000 views and readers from all over the globe.  Stacia was right when she told me that I would be making a contribution to the genre with my experience. 

My blog and my friendship with Stacia got me a writing job with the now closed Role Magazine.  Stacia recommended me to the editors, Ofelia Laval and Leeza Catteneo, whom were looking for a writer that would expand on role play, the most popular pastime in Second Life.  Role Magazine published its last issue on December of 2009 and it was then that it occurred to me to attempt to create my own magazine in a much smaller scale. 

    In July of 2009, I met Feles Seitan of Feles' Adventures in Not Dating. As an officer in the Brood demon faction of the City of Lost Angels, I had invited many different people to experience role play.  I wanted them to see a different side of SL; to see what we did, why we did it, and how we did it.  Around the end of September, I invited Feles to come see role play live and in person.  We hit it off right away and she returned in October joining the faction.  We created a great bond by working together to incorporate her character’s background with mine so that it would be a base for us and a reason for always being around each other in character.  All that time spent together in creative collaboration led to me getting to know her better OOC and a month later we mated, creating more role play for both our characters.  Together we also ventured out to the rest of Second Life that I had left behind, long ago.

Inspired by Feles and her creativity, I created SLRP.  SLRP is a magazine to highlight the different role play areas around Second Life that I felt were worth mentioning.  So many great places exist here, yet there is no one, to my knowledge, that is focusing the spotlight on these creative gems and allowing others to see what is available in terms of different types of role play.  The creation of my magazine was two-fold.  I wanted to spotlight the beauty of these places in words and pictures and I wanted to give the role play community a place where their work, imagination, and creativity would be exposed to readers interested in the genre.

There are still others to thank for their support, generosity, and friendship.  I really could not have achieved all that I have, had it not been for those that not only believed in me, but pushed me to do more and be more.  Though I won’t mention their names here, you know who you are.  I appreciate everything that every one of you has done that has touched my life as well as what we’ve learned and shared from and with each other.