When I was looking for a new topic to write about, I was thinking: I need to find something absurd again. Something which is not really useful. Back then I thought that doing sports in Second Life - especially in the meaning of working out - makes totally no sense as our clicker just need to pull some controller to get us in shape. Related to buidling up muscles I probably was right. Even if I once read an article about loosing weight and building up muscles by imagining to work out only. Well, I have my doubts about that. But I can truely say, I changed my mind about sports in Second Life. Going in for sports in Second Life makes sense, even if it seems to be absurd at first glance. Mostly it seems to be a community thing. But there are lonely riders as well, finding their pleasure and meaning for their Second Lifes in sports.
I will start my report on sports in SL with surfing. Surfing is a trend sport. According to Prahl (the real world guy I talked about earlier) trend sports are used as a parallel dimension at first and that way get attractive for company grouping, who think themselves as innovative, searching or redlined. With trend sports life style could be demonstrated and technical preferences can be sampled. Later on even those new trend sports get institutionalizationed with own rules and standards, organizations and competitions. Its a balance between the two poles fun and performance.
To find out about surfing in SL I did some interviews with surf professionals. As I live on surf sims for a while those were easy to find and I had a fun time travelling surf spots as well. The next days you can read the first part: an interview and travel guide with Abel Halderman, director of the SLSA and team member of Tsunami - yes surfing in SL is institutionalized already ;-).
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