Second Life News & Events & Guides
First, let's talk about the Game-play. This is a very hard topic to explain as what you do in Second Life depends entirely on you. If you want to shoot zombies, you can. If you want to go to a club and dance your heart out, you can. Explore haunted houses, watch a movie, ride a rollercoaster, you can! The game is basically one giant sand-box. Meaning, everything in the game is made, coded, and ran by players (except the game itself of course).
Keep in mind that this game is aimless. There is no set goal for you to achieve here but much fun to be had. To go along with this the world isn't connected. Instead of being on one giant land mass you're divided into regions called "Sims". Each Sim is different and its contents are based on who owns it.
Confused? Well, let me try to explain it. There's a button called "Build" that lets you start creating (you can't build in most places as to avoid a spam of objects, press ctrl+F, click the places tab, and type in sand-box. Find one you like and teleport there. These are the designated building sites).
So, when this build menu comes up you can choose shapes and if you click the ground it creates itself there. Now, if you right-click whatever shape you made you can edit it in many different ways. But if you click the content tab you will notice you can put or make scripts in there to make it to a wide array of things. You're probably thinking, "Hey, if all I have are these shapes then everything in this game must be all blocky!" Don't fret, I'll discuss that when we get to the graphics section. Also, since you can build anything you can also look like anything. The customization on here is endless, you can even be Sonic the Hedgehog!
To continue, you can build anything your little heart desires and then script it to make that creation do what you program it to. But you don't have to choose that path. You are more than welcome to enjoy other people's creations and worlds. As I mentioned earlier, you can press Ctrl+F to search places you want to go. Some examples would be Amusement parks, Clubs, Combat, Racing, etc. There are many things to play and explore, you just have to find them.
The economy is based upon real-life cash. As it is right now, 1000 Second life linden (L) is around $4 USD. It's cheaper on http://www.xstreetsl.com though. The value of that 1000 depends on the person though, if you want to save up and buy something that costs 20,000, you can. If you want to buy nice things that cost 1000 each that's fine as well. Now, this goes in reverse as well. You can turn your Lindens into real cash if you wish.
There are some ways to make money without giving them a credit card. That is by Camping (People pay you to sit on a chair. You get money per time spent there. For example, 2 Second life lindenper ten minutes), Building and selling your creations, scripting and selling those, getting a job (Security, Djing, Host, Greeter, just take a look for people hiring), and many other things but these are the basics.
Now, not everything in the game costs money. Most activities are free (who would charge you to dance at their club?) and some things for your avatar (hair, clothes, etc.) are free. Those types of apparel are called freebies and can be searched in the places tab. Also, if you go to http://www.mmobread.com/ you can search for what you want and then click the prices column. This will order it from cheapest to most expensive and there are often many items costing $0L on there. You won't find everything in-world but it sure beats drudging through a large place filled with them, especially if your computer can't handle that many things on-screen at one time, plus you can look decent with just freebies so don't worry!
