Progress Report 1

We finally decided that our topic for our final news project would be about vampires in Second Life. There were several reasons why we chose this topic for our final research. First of all, stories about vampires have been all the rage recently, from books, movies, TV shows, even to the fashion industry. Hence, we thought it would be interesting to do a research about the vampires in Second Life while comparing them to the ones that have dominated the billboards of real life recently. Second, we thought it would also be interesting to try to understand the motives behind the role-playing of vampires in a virtual environment. Why do they choose to be vampires in Second Life? What do they gain from all of this? What kind of sacrifices do they have to make? This is actually a question that we can dive into with the perspectives of culture, psychology and human behavior in mind.

To gain all of this information, there is no better way to do the research than to ask a real vampire himself/herself in Second Life. Thus, we did a little search on the Internet and found that there was a place called “Bloody Village” in Second Life that was quite popular for the role-playing of vampires and other creatures that seem fit to our research. At first, we could not find anybody else, and then we got lost. The whole atmosphere there was quite dark, but weirdly fun at the same time, kind of like what we would have seen from the movies or TV series.