dale lane

I’ve dipped my toe into Second Life from time to time, although I’ve mainly been an observer of the whole thing – the increasing media coverage it has been receiving, and some of the interesting things that companies like IBM have been doing in this space.

After spending most of today “in-world”, I’m starting to get into the whole thing a little more. I’ve always liked the idea of Second Life and been excited by the potential, but my experiences with it before today could be pretty much summed up as “wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do”. When you actually have something to do, it all starts getting much more interesting.

I got to spend today in Second Life for work (a nice change from WMQ!), as a few of us spent the day developing a recruitment centre for IBM in Second Life.

We’ve been knocking the idea around for a while now, and a couple of buildings went up over Christmas to start us off as a kind of placeholder. It’s even been getting a little interest, with potential applicants dropping by from time to time to see what we are up to.

Today was a chance to get together to focus on developing some of our ideas, and construct the buildings that will house some of the things that we’d like to try.

For me, it was definitely the best way to get into Second Life: an objective that meant I had something useful to do; a block of time set aside to concentrate on learning the ropes without worrying about what else I should be doing; and being sat in a (real) room with a few more experienced colleagues who could point me in the right direction. I created objects, helped construct buildings, and even wrote my first few scripts.

I guess if you go into it with the mindset of “this looks like a game”, it can be easy to get bored or disillusioned by the absence of any missions to complete or baddies to fight. But when you have an actual problem that you want to solve (in our case, how can we reach out to potential applicants more effectively) and approach it with the mindset of “how can I use this tool to help solve my problem”, it becomes much more engaging.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 10:42 pm and is filed under ibm, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.