Get a First Life


I’ve oft questioned the existence of games and services like The Sims and Second Life. My argument is simple and unoriginal, why spend your time interacting with avatars when you could be interacting with real people. The presence of these things seem to me more a social retardant than the social incubator that they’re made out to be. Nevertheless, people are fanatical about them and, as always, to each his/her own.

Now amusingly, another, cleverer, person than myself took his questions and turned them to parody in a hilarious criticism of Second Life titled: Get A First Life. Complete with pirates.

And in an interesting turn of events, he actually received a pretty cool email from Second Life creators, Linden Labs:

This is an interesting bit of follow-up news that I thought might interest you guys. I don’t know if it’s common for Linden to do this, but I thought it was classy.

Today I awoke from my nap to a letter (via the comments on the announcement) from Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life. ‘Ah, well’, I though, ‘here come the lawyers’. But no. To their enormous credit, they sent me what I can only describe as a ‘proceed and permitted’ (instead of ‘cease and desist’) letter. Here’s an excerpt:

“We do not believe that reasonable people would argue as to whether the website located at http://www.getafirstlife.com/ constitutes parody – it clearly is. Linden Lab is well known among its customers and in the general business community as a company with enlightened and well-informed views regarding intellectual property rights, including the fair use doctrine, open source licensing, and other principles that support creativity and self-expression. We know parody when we see it.”

Hilarious.

I’ve gotta hand it to Linden Labs for having a sense of humor. It’d be pretty ridiculous if they took themselves too seriously.

(In the interest of full-disclosure, I’m automatically a fan of anything with pirates.)

First Life: SL Parody [via Kotaku]