Ken Estrellas made an excellent observation that very few Brown students use Second Life:

name 10 people you know that play Second Life, outside of this class (and OUTSIDE OF THE CS DEPARTMENT. Nice try.).

However, as a CS major, not only have I never heard of any other CS major using SecondLife, I was not introduced to the virtual world until last year when I took another MCM class with MCM majors who used SecondLife regularly. Interestingly, despite massive amounts of work in the computer lab, CS majors (at Brown at least) are normal students. In fact, I have found that most CS majors surprisingly not interested in (online) gaming or virtual worlds. (Personally, I haven't even played a video game in many years.)

I actually spent a lot of time searching the internet for reasons that people might want to use Second Life. I found many articles about people getting married in SL, how SL marriages can affect one's first life (FL), people having cybersex in SL, and just about anything else you can imagine. So I was about to give up on understanding the draw of SL and go to dinner with my friends when I realized that perhaps for people without the resources that we privileged students have here at Brown, (such as friends/people to talk to and constant intellectual stimulation), perhaps escaping the real world wouldn't be so bad. Case jacks into the metaverse where, unlike in reality, he is someone important and isn't living in a storage facility. So for people who are lonely and want to be someone else, perhaps SL is a wonderful platform. What is interesting however, is how SL has direct effects in FL -- a case of the simulation affecting the real.