Progress Report 3

Once Again, I went into “Bloody Village” for my interview. Luckily, I found one Vampire quickly this time. The following is my interview with her:

Why do you want to be a vampire?
I love vampires. They are mysterious, beautiful, and handsome, so I want to try the role play thing.
What pleasures do you attain from being a vampire?
It satisfies my desire to play a role that otherwise I would never be able to play in real life.
Do you believe in the existence of vampires in reality?
No. I am not nuts.
Is being a vampire the same as your imagination?
Actually, more or less the same, I would say. It just feels so awesome to be a vampire.
What are the pros and cons of being a vampire?
I make a lot of friends for being a vampire, for joining a very close family.
Have you confronted any stereotype on vampires in SL?
Sure, people are generally scared of us. So we need to break the mould a little bit to get to people, I would say.

Afterwards, she even took me to some places to show me the place. She is really a nice vampire!

Progress Report 2

Wandering in “Bloody Village” on Second Life in search of a vampire to do the interview, we finally came across somebody in the end. However, although she is not a vampire, we did ask her some questions about the vampires as well as some rules in the village. She showed the signs that explained the rules clearly to us. After that, we went on another search for our targeted interviewees of vampires, but there was not any avatar in sight that we could talk to. With the dangerous vibe in the village, we decided to leave as a result.

We heard that it was actually pretty common to run into a vampire once in a while in Second Life, so we decided to wander around on the streets with the hope of chancing upon one of them. Nevertheless, most people are not vampires, not to mention their zero knowledge of the subject. Hence, we put our focus on the Internet and did some research first. In fact, we found so much useful information about our subject that it prepared us for our future interviews even more. We also found several interesting videos on Youtube that can be helpful references to our final project. One particular video showed that the vampires had their own ceremonies to turn average avatars into vampires, which were pretty much like the ones shown in our movies, TV series, etc. In general, we got a much clearer picture of what we were dealing with after the research.

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.