Recently I've heard a human having one of those moments of initial second life enthusiasm and saying: "This is great, everything is possible!" Yes, it is possible to fly, you can have wings and tail, sun is always shining…. But, as you soon will discover, not everything is possible in the world of our imaginations.
Some things are not possible now, some never will be. Here comes my (probably not definitive) list, and I'd like to know yours.
- Scents are something we'll going to wait a long for. Smells are powerful thing in our human's lives. They escapes the reason, they make them fall in love. There are no scents in the virtual world, though I do rarely feel the perfume of some people around, or the scent of the place. Precious moments! Does that mean that avie or place is created so well that it fills the gap made by technical restrictions? Or that we made *that* kind of connection/communication which hacks deep into my human's mind and triggers the illusion? I don't know, scents are beyond the reason.
- Spontaneous reactions All the gestures, mimics, all the barely visible moves, that are the base of any body language. And those that are voluntar too. Too many times you need a quick spontaneous smile but even calling a prepared gesture or clicking a HUD means passing the right moment.
- Bad weather No, not lag storms. I mean sudden summer rains that screws your hair and outfit just ten minutes before the date you've been preparing for. I mean snow that blocks you in the house for days. I mean heats that makes you all sticky, oversensitive and crazy. Weather that is the starting point of typical English conversation, just before switching topic to the government (still, we all have so much to say about Lindens, maybe that is the compensation).
- Limited endurance Whether it is pain of arousal, one can go endlessly with it. You know those young guys that can have sex for hours, making you silently scream in desperation "Oh, will you ever cumm?". But they are young (both avatars and their humans) and think that if they do it long enough she will reach her moments of bliss. Actually, she were there long ago and now is waiting to switch to cuddling while they are enjoying their avatar's porn star performance. Same goes with the pain. I guess that is one of the reasons of BDSM popularity in second life. I've heard that Xcite! has made one step in that direction but I was so disgusted by genital clicking as a noob that I never checked that toy.
- Dreams Gods know how many nights I spent thinking about second life dream engine. And, despite the fact that I haven't made much progress, I know I'll be back at the subject in the months to come.
Except scents and the dream, things I miss in second life are those that we usually hate in our first lives (that list is not definitive, I can tell you about acne and two-day armpit hairs, but those I miss just because I am lazy to make them). We hate them but they would make our world more real and more immersive. And, in most cases, more fun.
I am sure I forgot about lot of things here. What do you miss in second life?
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