[quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'185147\' date=\'Apr 30 2008, 06:59 PM\']
The whole providing of personal financial information notwithstanding, can someone explain the appeal of Second Life? From what I can glean, it's a metaverse where you can "interact" with other people on the server.[/quote]
As a fifteen-year LambdaMOO user (yeah, I'm old school), I can see the appeal, and in fact I did noodle with Second Life a little bit, way back, before the security breach to which I linked happened and I decided that maybe I didn't trust them so much. Unsurprisingly, on a free account, spending no money on microtransactions, you can do very very little to personalize your character, but you also don't need to to interact with other players. Just don't expect to get noticed.
I would say, if you can in fact make a free account today without divulging any information you wouldn't splatter in 72-point font on the main page of your website, and you have a PC capable of running the client (and it ran fairly well on the box I was running before this one, so most folks here likely do) that it's worth trying out and judging for yourself. Me, I thought all of the 3-D World-of-Warcraft stuff just got in the way of connecting with other people, which is what I am chiefly looking for in an experience like that. But then WoW is a massive hit, so what the hell do I know.