Linden Scripting

I've been dabbling in Second Life a little recently. I always wanted to see what was out there on the Second Life grid, since I'm fascinated with video games of all kinds (though my friend insists "second life is not a videogame!" ). When people talk informally about second life, they usually tell you about seedy virtual strip bars and walls covered in phallic imagery. While Second Life is probably the only game where you can buy a fully functional avatar "Penis with HUD" in actual fact the main "grid" has much more interesting content, like the Chernobyl exhibit and Lost Gardens of Appolo and one of my personal favourites, Da Vinci Isle. Second life does look dated compared to the beautiful graphics in more modern video games, but that's kinda missing the point. The whole game is organic, user created content. If you enjoyed exploration games like Metroid or Tomb Raider, you can certainly waste plenty of time exploring around Second Life.

What really caught my interest was the Linden Scripting Language. Objects in Second Life can be manipulated by attaching scripts to them. The language is C like in its syntax, but obviously without things like pointers and suchlike. Bizarrely there's no arrays either, instead it's possible to create type agnostic lists, which can store any kind of variables (except other lists). Though the syntax for working with them is a little fiddly. What it does give is the sort of instant gratification that you used to get when you programmed in BASIC on the old 8-bit machines. Being able to instantly see an object react to your code is much more rewarding than a boring old console window that most beginners start with. It makes me wonder if anyone has studied how effective LSL or something similar is at getting people interested in programming. Certainly I've heard lots of people put off just by loading something like Visual Studio. Any barriers we can dissolve that prevent people getting into programming are good. Yes I know, LSL is far from perfect, especially when we get onto bigger projects. Then again you could hardly describe C, C++ and Java as perfect either.

What Second Life also encourages is the kind of cooperation and teamwork amongst people with different talents. Those who can forge the shapes and scenery often need people who are skilled in scripting to bring their visions to life. This kind of cooperation is of course vital on larger software projects, particularly games.

Second Life is certainly an interesting community and though the games interface can seem a little clumsy at times it's easily mastered. I'm not sure at the moment if I'll be bored with looking around on there in another couple of weeks or if I'll be going back more often than that, but it's certainly worth a look.