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Activities of residents
Residents engage in many activities, just as people do in real life. Unlike real life, there is no biological need to seek nourishment or shelter. Thus, some activities that would be necessary in the real world are purely voluntary leisure pursuits, e.g. living in virtual houses and enjoying virtual food and drink.
Contents
Residents explore, interact with one another, and create new "content". Exploration is like travel in the real world. One searches for places which might be interesting, and then goes there, sometimes even at random. There is a plethora of different destinations that one can travel to at the click of a button. Some of these destinations are real places like London or Paris, and some are imaginary places or places from the past. Individuals explore alone, but often small groups explore together. Some exploration is spontaneous, but there are also more-or-less organized tours, and there are even travel agents and reviews that are written about different destinations.
Interaction occurs via text chat, text instant messaging, or voice, not unlike popular Internet applications, except that full 3D visuals are usually included. Interaction is also behavioral, such as when friends and strangers assemble at a club to dance or flirt while listening to recorded or live music.
Creation is changing the appearance and behavior of the Second Life virtual world including the avatar itself. Building a house, gardening, creating new clothes, and creating a new dance are all examples of creation. Some advanced examples are publishing a magazine or making a movie or TV show in the virtual world.
The "Community" section of Second Life allows residents to use blogs and forums to share pictures and ideas with other residents. It also allows residents who belong to the same group to chat about current events within the community. The "Events" subset of the Community section gives the resident a calendar to plan upcoming activities or to create their own activity.
Subcultures
Second Life comprises various diverse, user-driven subcultures. There are few pre-determined structures, so what organization that exists has evolved to meet the wants and needs of the residents. Some residents will have an avatar that is clearly human male or female, and some will have an avatar where the gender is less obvious, or entirely androgynous; it is easy for a user to change the appearance of the avatar to either gender. Also, there are many non-human avatars, like "furries", or hybrids, like neko (feline), inu (canine), nezumi (mouse/rat), and kitsune (fox) that have more of human shape and features, but distinct skin markings, ears and tail. Robots and fantasy creatures, such as dragons can also be found.
Some residents choose to re-enact some specific world, such as medieval Japan or ancient Rome. They choose to act out this world like real life historical re-creators do. As usual, residents are free to move in and out of these worlds as they see fit. Virtual property rights come into play here, since the property owner can choose to expel residents who don't abide by the property regulations, which in these case might include dress, language, and behavior. There are also areas that re-create worlds from literature, such as Frank Herbert's Dune or John Norman's Gor or from video games such as the Final Fantasy or the Star Wars series.
Some of the subcultures in Second Life revolve around events. Events include many activities related to arts, culture, charity, support groups, commerce, discussion, education, games, contests, nightlife, entertainment, pageants, and sports.
There is a built-in mechanism for organizations called the group. A group can be created by a resident for a fee of L$100, who then has three days to recruit an additional member. A group must then maintain a membership of at least 2 members at all times in order to remain active. The groups that each Resident belongs to are displayed in that user's profile. Group membership provides a means of self-identification and self-expression, and facilitates member to member communication in a number of ways. A group comprises officers and members, with titles determined by group leadership. The Owner, Member (referred to by the client as Everyone) or the title for any custom roles may appear superimposed above the name of the Resident's avatar. Residents may participate in up to 42 groups, and may choose which group's title to display at any given time. Group activity is usually centered on a particular interest, so creating groups can give people a common ground for discussion and provide an easy way to break the ice. Some groups maintain websites to bridge the gap between real-life (referred to as "first life", or abbreviated to "RL" for "real-life") and Second Life (commonly abbreviated as SL, but 2L is also used) interests.
Groups are allowed ownership of land and resources, so they comprise the closest thing to a corporation within the Second Life environment.
Second Life is also being influenced by many Internet phenomena which include the Moskau Dance, Ulae, Miko Miko Nurse, Yoshio Kojima and Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Many of these memes are in the form of gestures, which are animations that the avatar uses. These gestures are a cause of Internet culture spread in Second Life.
Second Life blogs and Facebook profiles are also appearing where Residents detail their second lives, sometimes more extensively than their first:
Resident-created content
The majority of the content in the Second Life world is Resident-created. Linden Lab actively promotes the concept that Residents retain the intellectual property rights to objects they create (although they are required to offer Linden Lab a limited license for the purposes of promotion and marketing. Many sales are through the online site Second Life Marketplace.
Only LSL scripts, wearables, images made from in world snapshots, and the basic 3D objects (called "Primitives" or "Prims") or composites of scripts, images and prims, can be created solely with the client (although a future release promises to be able to create animations, as BVH files, within the client).
Animations can be made with various software, such as Qavimator, and Poser, or they can be acquired via motion capture.
Textures can be uploaded as TGA, Bitmap, JPEG and PNG, and are made in applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Textures can be applied to the surface of any 3D object, land, clothing, an avatar's skin (including tattoos) and can be used as scripted particles.
Sounds can be made using any piece of software capable of creating WAV files, ranging from an Operating System's basic sound recorder, media players such as foobar2000, as well as dedicated audio editing packages such as Audacity and Pro Tools.
Every resident has access to a library of textures, animations, sounds and objects provided by Linden Lab, found in the Library folder. Textures, animations and sounds cost L$10 each to upload. JPEGs, although smaller in file size, are not recommended since they will be converted to JPEG2000 file format on upload regardless of original file format. TGA files have the added advantage of alpha channel transparency. Images are sized to the next smallest of a series of defaults, with the largest being 1024x1024.
Avatars
Residents of Second Life are represented in the environment by an avatar. The basic avatar is humanoid in shape which may be customized in a variety of ways:
The result can either be faithful to the original humanoid avatar, or can result in a completely non-humanoid representation of the character. These customizations can be packaged up into a single outfit, with common applications of outfits including animals, robots, mechs, furries, Clone Troopers and "tinies", which are just "folded up" (via a static animation—a "pose") regular avatars.
Objects
Second Life includes a built-in 3D Modeler that allows Residents to create complex objects out of a set of basic building blocks known as prims (short for "primitives")—parametric models supporting dynamic scalar level of detail. Second Life uses Havok for simulated physics, though not all objects in the world respond to physics. A future update will include Havok 4 support, an improvement that Second Life Residents have awaited since it was first announced by Linden Lab before June, 2002. All objects and 3D information are streamed in real-time to all clients. This allows for real-time editing of 3D objects so any Resident can view what is being created as it is being created.
The 3D objects can be used to make avatar attachments, vehicles, buildings, furniture, sculpture or anything else the user can think of. Attachments can be something as simple as a pair of glasses, or a complex series of objects in order to make the avatar look like something else entirely. Vehicles can range from a small pair of roller skates to a car, to large and full-scale replica of fictional vehicles from Sci-Fi and Anime
In the first half of 2007 Linden Lab added a new feature to Second Life: the possibility to create sculpted prims. Whereas prims are based on simple geometrical shapes, as cylinders, cubes, or spheres, sculpted prims are based on a special type of displacement maps, where the red, green and blue components indicate how to position the vertexes of one of the 4 base shape topologies (sphere, cylinder, torus and plane).
Scripting
Residents can apply scripts to created objects, thereby controlling the behavior of the objects within the environment. Second Life uses its own scripting language, called Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL has a syntax similar to C or JavaScript, and allows objects to interact with the Second Life world, as well as the Internet via email, XML-RPC and HTTP.
LSL is used to drive all interactivity in Second Life that isn't provided by the interface. For instance, while it is possible to sell an object by leaving the object out with the correct attributes set via the interface, it becomes increasingly difficult the larger a single object is, the more numerous a collection of objects are, or for objects that are updated on a regular basis. Textures, scripts, animations, gestures and notecards cannot be sold by themselves (although they can be transferred between Residents in such a manner), requiring them to be held within a containing object. Games, doors, flashing lights, and basically anything that is seen in Second Life that is interactive is scripted.