GTA Online Roleplay Tips from Top Second Life YouTuber Meela Vanderbuilt!

Meela Vanderbuilt is one of Second Life’s top YouTubers and she recently expanded her fun, chatty, seriously glamorous brand of videos into the world of GTA Online roleplay. (Watch above.) Here’s her expert take on the similarities and differences between roleplay in GTA versus SL:

“The general concept is the same. GTA is more focused on voice role play and the majority of Second Life role play is text based. Over the years, SL role play has evolved from strict guidelines and paragraph-emoting roleplay to various types existing, including just playing out different lifestyles and not focusing much on the delivery, just the overall story.

“The later is closest to Grand Theft Auto roleplay. In GTA, people create a character, have a general background story and then navigate through cities as that character. Story progression will depend on their interactions with other characters and the features of the role play server.

“Servers are comparable to Second Life sims. They’re independently owned and will have different features or stories even though they share the same general framework of GTA’s Los Santos. A lot are centered around crime because of the nature of GTA, so gangs, police, general civilians may be a large part. Some cities may focus on the university, some on commerce and business ownership, etc.”

As with Second Life, you can customize your avatar quite a bit in GTA Online, but options vary from server to server — and unfortunately, are still somewhat limited for women and non-white avatars:

“Servers are heavily scripted and modified so they have different menus, some utilize sliders like Second Life. Clothing, hair, skin is going to vary server to server.

“Making a good looking character is pretty hard generally, especially for women and people of color because the options on GTA were incredibly limiting for both. There are creators who make additional customization possible but they usually have to have both artistic and technological skill, so the pool of creators is significantly smaller than SL even though the GTA roleplay community is vastly larger. This is my first video [watch above] reviewing a server where I detail character customization in this server. I’m working on my second and it’s completely different.”

Some of Meela’s roleplay fun below!

She’s not kidding about “vastly larger”: On Steam alone, daily peak concurrency for Grand Theft Online (which runs on top of GTA V) is well over 100,000, about 2-3x peak CCU for Second Life. But from what Meela says, looks like there’s quite a lot of room for more content and options for women and people of color — get a goddamn hint, Rockstar!

Recommended laptop for SL/metaverse activity: