First Steps

A long time ago, I did a little acting. Very little. Only got a couple of parts. Did a lot of theater workshop though. Lot of improv. I developed a few characters in a regular improv workshop and on a public radio show which featured scripted material I wrote. One of my best and most well-received characters was a five-year old kid. I really had fun playing that kid and developing and writing the character.

In recent years I’ve combined some of my writing projects with roleplay in virtual worlds such as Second Life and OpenSim. RP is much slower than improv theater of course but the creative principle is the same. A recent notice about an RP event caused me to recall my kid character from long ago and got me thinking about creating a kid avatar for virtual worlds.

I’d see someone portraying a kid from time to time in Second Life and I’d hear of RP groups centered around children’s books or movies but I didn’t really know much about it or where to start. I started looking on the SL Marketplace to see what was available for child avatars, thought about a name for the character, researched names, asked around to see if any friends had any friends who RP’d children.

Every little thing I did led to an idea for the character. I couldn’t wait to get started. I also had this thought about not investing too much time researching kids and kid avatars and kid RP groups and kid rules on various virtual worlds, and figuring out which world or worlds to have land on and which ones to have accounts on and then go all over the hypergrid and SL on a virtual shopping spree… but instead - just jump right into the character, get the story going. All that other stuff is detail, I can figure it out later. Let’s just figure out the kid’s name and open one account in SL and one in OpenSim and get it going and start playing and building and creating story.

I didn’t find much info anyway but I really didn’t know where to look. And I wanted to tread lightly too. I didn’t want a reaction like: “Hey, who’s this guy asking all the questions about children? Is he some weirdo or something?” I didn’t want to have to deal with any “issues” of any kind. I just wanted to play and write.

Then two things happened. I found a complete kid avatar for free on the Second Life Marketplace and I heard about a company called Zetamex that offered a region on the Metropolis Metaversum virtual world for only three bucks a month.

I decided on my character’s name, “bought” the free avatar and started a Second Life account for him and one on Metropolis as well. Then I submitted an order form to Zetamex for the region.

I logged in my new SL avatar, donned his free body parts and clothing, edited his appearance a bit and took him on his first adventure after which he wrote his first blog post. Then I logged in my new Metropolis avatar and started shopping in OpenSim.

A few hours later, my region was delivered. It has the unfortunate name, Lone Wolf Gardens but it’s three bucks a month. It came with four choices - empty land or one of three scenes. I opted for the lakeside theme as I think it’s a good setting for a story about kids.

These first couple of days, I’ve been getting things in order in the region. The next order of business is to create Artie’s avatar for OpenSim.