Week 3
This week I decided to earn some lindens, so I did a google search to get some ideas on how that might be accomplished. There are some minigames in SL which reward you with lindens if you complete them. There's a place called "Portal Park", which is a hub linking to various portals. I randomly selected one and walked into it, and I was taken to a minigame called PaleoQuest.
PaleoQuest has five stages, each of which features dinosaurs (as enemies that can kill you), boobytraps, and a variety of settings - e.g. an Egyptian temple, a shipwreck, a downed space satellite. It took me a good 3 hours to complete the entire game, mainly because I had to wrestle with the frustrating game physics as well as the overall unfairness of the environment. If you walked into the wrong places you'd mysteriously die and would have to start the level all over again. I was rewarded with 100 lindens (which is worth approx. $0.50 NZ), although I actually had to complete a transaction to activate my account. I ended up paying $5 US to get 100 lindens.
I also played a couple of minigames with my KOTA friends. One was a horribly designed, clunky and pointless Zombie shooter. One of the things I dislike about visiting some of these sims is how you have to equip items (such as HUD) to be able to do anything. The other game that we played involved taking photographs of ghosts in an abandoned village, but you had to find them first. I found this game to be relatively more fun (but still limited), because the objective of the game was clear.
Week 4
This week I was made a member of the KOTA group. An event was planned for the entire group to play another dreadful Zombie shooting game. Fortunately(or unfortunately) my internet went down, so I had to miss out.
I asked my SL friend about another Korean sim that is based on Busan beach. She took me there and told me that it's more popular than KOTA, even though the few times I've visited there were hardly any people. In the past there were quite a few users, and it was even visited by the Kpop group GOT7 if I recall correctly.
Birds eye view of Busan.
The bicycle takes you on a tour of the town...
Across the bridge, past the residential area...
All the way to the temple.
Within the temple, there is an information panel dedicated to DOKDO, just like in KOTA. To reiterate, DOKDO is a contested territory between South Korea and Japan. Interestingly, if you go on google maps in NZ, Dokdo shows up as being part of Japan. I'm assuming that google maps in Korea would look different. Cartographers often have to change maps to suit the governments of the countries in which those maps are published.
A Korean history wall that starts with the Joseon Dynasty (16th century) and goes into the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. For some reason the wall didn't feature Kim Yuna, a famous figure skater in Korea, a person who I've been fascinated with.
Another view of the temple.
A statue of King Sejong, the inventor of the Korean writing system.
A small island off the mainland containing a hut. The TV monitor pictured cycled through photos while emitting strange Lynchian noises. A dog stands guard over this enigma.
I tried to talk about Kim Yuna with my SL friend, but unfortunately she took it the wrong way and became jealous. It seems that our little affair is over, although it's no great loss to me anyway.
In week 5 I hope to revisit some of the other interesting places I've been to, such as a Venetian art gallery, and a school which offers real classes. I'm interested to try one of these classes to see how a virtual learning environment might work.
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