Apple Second Life Feature

Are you familiar with Second Life? It's a virtual online community where you create your own custom avatar and interact with other losers whose first life isn't fulfilling enough other interesting people in a magical fantasy world beyond your greatest imagination! (Okay, okay, so I'm being a little hyperbolic and also mean with the strikethrough; in the words of the Great McNulty, "I kid, I kid.")

So, anyway, Apple has a feature up on Second Life at the game section of their site. This is cool, but: is it really a game? Recently, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame did a virtual book signing where he was interviewed in talk show style in Second Life, and I've read numerous articles on odd uses of this online space: professors using Second Life for virtual classroom discussions and anthropology students studying Second Life, for example. In any case, Second Life will cost you $9.95 for a basic, non-landowner account and will run very slowly on a 12-inch Powerbook. If you have a G5, you'll do much better in your explorations. Look up in the sky for a largish avatar named CK Semple while you're there. That's me, trying to fly and suffering from lag...