While players are expected to buy things with real money, there's no real "progress" to be made, making the victory part of the trope moot. Accidentally stumble across two avatars virtually making out (or more), or stumble across an area where an activity or a meeting you weren't invited to is taking place, and players might react similarly to how they might in the real world.
Open Simulator is intended to be an open-source alternative. (There was also a cordoned-off area for teens that was merged with the adult grid in early 2011.) Streaming audio and video are another feature, with the latter acting as a special texture for a prim's surface, which some people have used to make blended meetings with video from the simulation projected into the same room that's being streamed. An in-world scripting system that allows a large amount of control over prims, which nearly everything in-world is made of (except for the ground and basic player models). On the technical side, a user can create nearly any item within the simulation, using the built-in editor to manipulate "prims" simple 3D shapes that can be combined however you want, "sculpted prims" were introduced later and allow the importing of 3D models from an external program, via the same method textures could be uploaded before. Also a bit uncanny-valleyish, especially when it comes to the default "human" models, and the user-created ones can be disturbing in a very sexy way. It may be the dawn of The Metaverse in Real Life. You may ask yourself, "Why am I running through the junkyard in a swimsuit?". You may ask yourself, "Why am I wearing this beautiful house?". You may find yourself pole-dancing while what can only be described as a sentient light-show stuffs cash into your G-string. You may find yourself standing beneath a tree on which money grows. And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
It's the sort of environment where a hacker attack involves self-replicating spheres spreading across the biosphere, and banned users find themselves in an endless corn-field with only a TV showing a promo for Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. There is no story-line and no goals, instead putting an emphasis on chatroom-like conversations with friends and buying virtual property. No matter which of the three definitions you prefer, it's generally agreed upon that Second Life is not a game or even a work of fiction so much as it is a simulation of real life made much more interesting.
It's like a sandbox MMORPG heavy on user customization, or a world-sim meets 3D-chat-program, or the Internet's largest alternative-digi-porn-emporium. Second Life is a virtual world, originally launched in 2003 for Windows PCs, with Mac and Linux versions also available.