Culture: Adventures of Snake Part 1-Ccoursey Resident Reporting…

                I stepped into Second Life ignorant of everything going on.  A man jumped into my box offering to help me.  He led me around the freebie place taking me where they had avatar’s shapes and skins.  He proceeded to tell me how to take my clothes off.  To someone that had never been on a computer game let alone one as complicated as SL it was slow going.  Then he started trying to talk me out of my password…  Okay, I am not a genius, but it is basic common sense to not give out your password.  He started Caps Locking in my pm and in open calling me an idiot and demanding my password.  ‘Would you like some help?’ appeared.  This big, scary looking guy was standing there to the side of the side of the Texan.  ‘Yes, yes I would.’  And so I met Snake.

                Snake took me to another SIM introduced me to other female avatars, and then asked me the most basic question I’ve heard on SL asked to a noob. “Do you want to be a vampire?”  Here this big man is offering me instant friends, help to making a decent looking avatar, and a tour guide through SL.  Of course, I agreed.  I’m computer stupid.  He spent the next several hours showing me the basic step of ‘accept’ and ‘drag out of your inventory to the ground’.  Yeah, it took several hours.  Once I finally got the concept it was more exciting.  They fixed up the avatar to be one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen. Snake stood to the side with his back turned the whole time… Yeah foolish me didn’t get the concept at first just because an avatar isn’t looking at you doesn’t mean they can’t see you.  I thought he was very gentlemanly, even a bit sweet.  I wasn’t worried so much about finding a man then, so forget the concept of crushing, because that definitely was not the case.

                Snake and his partner, (we’ll call her Amy), then proceeded to take me to my first club.  It was a completely different environment or atmosphere for me.  Overwhelming more than anything, being around all these people that knew exactly what they were doing and me, I was just proud to have figured out how to cover my pixel boobs. They were taking me on my first ‘hunt’.  They explained the basics of using a vampire HUD, taught me to dance, then began to move around the floor scanning people.  I had no clue what to do and here this big avatar was telling me ‘hunt’.  Amy, whom I felt was more approachable, told me to jump in some man’s box and just start talking.

                This was my next great discovery.  In real life you don’t just walk up and start conversing, people think you are nuts.  In Second Life, they talk back and most people are just glad they aren’t the ones to have to start the conversation.  I talked to many people that night, Snake and Amy left, but I was still enjoying the fact of the basic things I had learned.  I didn’t worry so much about scans or hunts, just basic profile perving and learning what different people did and how they did it.  So it was Snake who introduced me to basic SL and that’s where our adventures together began.