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Starting a Group in Second Life

Will Ross

Will Ross here, welcome to The Traveling Avatar's Quick and Dirty Tips for a Better Second Life. On this show we discuss tips and tricks for the game Second Life, created by Linden Labs.

This week's episode: "Groupthink: Making Your Own Groups in Second Life."

One of the benefits of a computer-based virtual world is organization. Everything you own can be accessed and searched with a few keystrokes, all of your friends are on one convenient list to visit or spurn at your whim, and virtue or vice are just a landmark or teleport away. So it makes sense that organizations, cliques, clans, families and businesses would be organized the same way, and in Second Life this is done through "Groups."

Groups are used for everything from families, relationships, land trusts, businesses and any number of other things, and they're a great way to find and keep tabs on people of similar interests. If you're looking for a group to join, you just open up your search menu, click the "groups" tab and search for keywords. You can even create your own if no one yet caters to your own particular interests.

Creating your very own group is fairly easy, and it will only cost you 100 Lindens. Right click on your avatar to open up the radial menu and choose "Groups." From this menu you can change your current group tag and organize the groups you belong to. From here click "Create" and you'll bring up the new groups menu. It's important that you choose your name wisely, because apart from a forced change for a "terms of service" violation, you won't be able to change it once you create the group.

From this menu you can also change your group insignia (which can be either texture you upload or an in-game snapshot) and the group's charter (which tells the world why your group exists). It's also important that you label the group "mature" if you plan to use it for anything naughty, since not all of us want to stumble upon "Furries Gone Wild" without being prepared for it. You can also choose from here if the group will show up people's profiles if you want to be all secrety about it. Yes, I made up a word: secrety. Update your dictionaries.

One important thing to remember is that you can't let your group fall below two people in membership, or you'll lose it. I've actually got an "Alt" (alternate character) for just such a situation, and you might consider making one when you create a group. You know, just in case people aren't as excited about 17th century feudal Japanese shogun successions as you are. Actually, I'd probably join that group, but I'm that sort of a nerd.

Now for all you business owners out there, I'd like to close with a warning about groups. Be very selective about who you let have an owners tag in your group, and reserve rights to things like selling land and objects only for yourself. I personally know of three separate clubs that were stolen by partners from the original owners, and none of them were ever returned since the person had the authority to do so by virtue of having their powers granted by the group owner. It's always better to be safe than sorry.

That's about it for our primer on groups. So until next time, remember, the first rule of Ninja Fight Club is you don't talk about Ninja Fight Club. Strangely enough, the second rule involves pandas, but per the first rule, I can't talk about it.