In which our hero visits Atlus Island

You'll recall that I went phone shopping not too long ago. It was a little eye-opening in two respects: It demonstrated Second Life's ease of use with linking to the Web, and it showed just how little traffic these marketing projects seem to sustain at any moment.

However, maybe that's a question of audience. Is the average cell phone consumer going to jump on Second Life before purchasing a phone? Nah. That person would rather go to the nearest phone store where display phones can be picked up and demonstrated by a sales representative -- who happens to be a real human. But then, what kind of things would a Second Life user be interested in buying?

I paused for a second.

"Oh yeah," I realized. "I'm a Second Life user."

While Second Life is not a videogame, its users are perhaps more likely to be interested in videogames. I did some research and found that most of the major developers - Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony Computer Entertainment - do not have a presence in Second Life (although there are rumors that Nintendo may be up to something). However, one Japanese developer of role-playing videogames - Atlus - does have its own property in Second Life. I dove in to take a look.

Unlike Sony Ericsson's island, Atlus scrapped the idea of mimicking a retail outlet and instead went for the utterly bizarre.


That's the first-person view I saw as I flew around the massive island: castles, malls, buildings and one creepy looming mascot.



And what do you know - there's an actual avatar here! I opened up her profile window (as seen above) and didn't find much information on the user, other than his/her favorite locations in Second Life were all explicitly pornographic in nature. Without going into detail, it seems that Second Life's reputation for sexual deviancy isn't entirely unwarranted. At the very least, it didn't bode well for the people I would run into while exploring the land.


This billboard linked me to Atlus' Japanese language website for Trauma Center: New Blood, a surgery videogame (no, really) for Nintendo's Wii.

As I walked around the various billboards and mall-like corridors, I heard various low-fidelity MIDI songs -- probably from Atlus' games.

Inadvertently, I walked across the border to another area of the island that sold Japanese manga, or comic books, for Linden dollars. An internet radio station began playing as soon as I set foot. The DJ announced the station as Japan-A-Radio, an American-run internet radio channel run by fans of Japanese music out of Denver, Colorado. It's kind of an interesting situation when a Japanese vendor of Japanese comics broadcasts an American radio station of Japanese music in Second Life, an American-made application.

Conundrum? Maybe. But it's more indicative of the universal nature of Second Life. Linden has created a world of countless nations with no borders, and even though it doesn't exist in physical space doesn't mean it can't have a similar impact on its travelers.