“Last week I was wondering about machinima in Second Life, and this week I decided to look at it. I have to be honest; I think that machinima is almost always terrible. Much like using video games to create architecture prototypes, it works fantastically to create quick and dirty mock-ups of shots, locations or even scenes, but to create whole movies? Gosh, no thanks.”

Rather pleased with the title of this column.

I suspect this is my last “Letters from the Metaverse”; “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” is actually a fairly apt statement about the general coverage of Second Life, if not Second Life itself. There really isn’t that much to it. It’s largely and embarrassingly dated piece of software that works as little more than a dress up doll and a chat client, and the majority of people creating many of the (often wonderful) structures in the game would be better off spending their time petitioning Linden Labs to actually, you know, make the system worthwhile. Second Life will hopefully go down in history as one of those seeds that created something far better, but I sincerely hope that someone other than Linden Labs create that something.