The frustation of Second Life...

So I recently got a Second Life account for class, and I was sort of excited about it, because I had heard of it and I was curious as to what it would be like. I heard it was similar to the SIMS and I used to love playing the SIMS when I was younger. So I made my avatar and everything, and I made myself a guy, which was my favorite part. I then started to try and play the game and it seriously slowed my computer down! I was getting soo mad! I would try to walk around and teleport to places and it would take forever for the page to load, and it was slowing down the other things I had open on my computer that I was unable to do anything else!

Once I got over the fact that my computer was destined to work at the pace of a snail while I had Second Life open, I just decided to attempt to work out how the game works. So, I started talking to other avatars and teleporting to "hot spots" and basically just checking things. I eventually ended up at this one jazz place, and so may people were there, but I just couldnt deal with it. Random people were talking to me, and following me around and it just got annoying. To put it simply - I really don't like playing Second Life and I'm happy about that, because if I actually liked it, it would only be one more thing that will prevent me from doing the work I should be doing.

Bookish

I like to read. As the title says, I'm rather bookish. I have been since I was tiny. I have shelves line with the things. I have a pile of things I need to read next to my computer desk. I can spend hours in a book store just looking around. I read the two hours between when my train arrives in the morning and class starts.

My brother, not so much.

He's a gamer. He plays nonstop, hunched over a control with a headset over his ears, yelling at his friends. He can't wait to get home and finished with his homework so he can dive right back into his games. A handful of my coworkers are the same way.

I can understand where this is going. Video games are fun and I have found myself more often than not ignoring the hours flying by while playing. But I still have some concern for the new generation. They seem to have abandoned books completely in favor of visual immersion. That's all well and good, but when it gets to the point where words on a page are far too cumbersome to focus on, have we then lost the original immersion technology: Imagination and thought?