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But they had the right idea.

We need it made clear in law that private currencies are property and thus tradeable. You should be able to trade cell phone minutes, airline tickets, and anything else of value.

The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).

You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.

If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You can own as little as 512 square meters for $7-10/month, or one or more whole regions for $195/month.

Keep in mind too, the company that runs SL isn't creating artificial scarcity with land like so many people assume. Each region of land (65,536 square meters) requires one server-unit of resources to be maintained for running things such as:
- the simulator itself
- the Havok physics engine
- local asset storage and transfer
- synchronizing updates to active agents within and near the region
- running hundreds or even thousands of user scripts

The result is each region requires a decent piece of hardware to run without noticably lagging the region's simulator (incurring "time dilation", slower script execution, etc).

So the title is wrong. You can enjoy SL for free. And even if you pay, there are many pricing tiers between free and a full region. According to their Land FAQ, it is $25/month only if you absolutely need to have complete ownership control over 4,608 square meters of land.

PS: BTW, An odd quirk in the current economy makes it actually profitable to buy a minimal (512 sq m landowning) annual subscription, assuming the virtual currency (L$) value holds above a L$1000:US$3 ratio. The landowning accounts receive a weekly grant of L$500. At the end of a year, that comes to L$26k, which is currently valued at more than the price of the US$72 annual subscription fee.

There is/was an exchange market designed just for this very purpose:

http://gamingopenmarket.com

They used to support a dozen or so game currencies, until someone scammed them through PayPal.

Now they only support the Second Life currency, since they are they are probably nearly the only MMO which encourages currency exchange (and they have also agreed to work with them if someone pulls another scam).

Callum Linden and I are the two developers at Linden Lab working on Mozilla embedding. Some details:

Why bother? We want to allow people running Second Life full-screen to access our web site. Right now, if you want to bid on a piece of virtual land, or read the scripting language wiki, you have to either run in a window or switch out to your browser. That sucks, so we're fixing it.

The second goal is to get to third-party web sites. I want to trade SL currency on Gaming Open Market while staying in-world. Our internal scripting language supports e-mail into and out of the world, as well as XML-RPC. Lots of people have used this to build cool web sites that tie into the virtual world. See the postcards on Snapzilla postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag for examples. Getting these connected into the world would be a big win.

Why Mozilla? Could there be any other choice? :-) Our competitor There.com uses Internet Explorer to do their internal web browsing, but they only support PCs. We love open source tools and use LGPL stuff extensively in both server and client. Plus, we need support for Win32, Mac and Linux.

Working with the Mozilla codebase has been interesting. It's huge, and very complex. But I'm proud to say we've found and fixed a couple bugs in Mozilla, and contributed the changes back to the Mozilla folks. I'm looking forward to Firefox 1.1 and the potential for the new Cairo/OpenGL rendering subsystem -- that may really help with embedding for 3D worlds.

So despite the linked description, Callum and I are working on getting an interactive 2D browser working first. Web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects may not ship in the next version (1.7). It'll ship as soon as it's done.

As an aside, if any of the Mozilla developers are reading this, we could use some help with embedding, specifically how to post mouse-click events into an embedded instance, please send me mail.

Cheers,

James

There is no official cash value for the Second Life currency (L$). You can't buy more L$ from the company that runs SL, and they will not buy back your L$ for US$.

Exchanges between L$ and US$ is done between residents (usually via third party websites), and the value fluctuates with supply and demand. See Gaming Open Market for an example of how the currency is exchanged as a commodity.

The amount of L$ in the SL economy is fixed via a specific formula and is not affected by these third-party currency exchanges.

The Game Is Virtual. The Profit Is Real.

By MARK WALLACE Published: May 29, 2005

JASON AINSWORTH plays the online game Second Life at least four hours a day. In the game, he runs a virtual real estate development business. But his after-tax profit - about $1,800 a month - is real, and it's enough to pay the mortgage on his home in Las Vegas.

For many people, what are known as massively multiplayer online games have become significant sources of income.

Web sites have sprung up that allow players to use real currency to buy items - like weapons or real estate - that they may want or need for the games

Games like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online and dozens of others offer the opportunity to interact with thousands of players worldwide in virtual environments that continue to exist whether or not any particular person is playing at the moment. The virtual broadsword you found in the dragon's cave (or that dream house you built) before logging off on Tuesday will be right there on Wednesday.

Acquiring those items, however, requires work. In Ultima Online, it can take weeks to amass enough virtual gold to buy a superior weapon. It can take just as long to earn enough "simoleans," the virtual currency of The Sims Online - the online version of Electronic Arts' best-selling role-playing games - to buy and furnish a house.

But not everyone cares to spend time toiling in pursuit of game money. This provides an opportunity for people like Mr. Ainsworth. A thriving market has sprung up in which players spend real-world cash to buy game currency or desirable items from other players. Transactions take place on eBay or on sites like gamingopenmarket.com or www.ige.com. Payments are made through PayPal and other online services. Players then log into the game and transfer the virtual goods or currency.

Mr. Ainsworth, 36, was not a fan of online games until his 10-year-old daughter became interested in The Sims Online. He then noticed that a large number of simoleans were for sale on eBay. "I started hearing about players leaving the game who were selling their assets," he said, "so I figured, buy low, sell high."

But Mr. Ainsworth found his moneymaking options in The Sims "very limited"; he switched to Second Life, a virtual world that is less a game than a three-dimensional environment in which players can do whatever they choose. There, he has leveraged his real-life experience - he is a developer and contractor - into an online business. In 14 locations in Second Life's virtual world, he owns enough "land" to rent space to nearly 50 retailers, who in turn earn virtual money selling everything from jewelry to clothing to art (all nonexistent, of course). Mr. Ainsworth converts his game profits into real money on sites like eBay, Ige and gamingopenmarket, which charge a small fee, and he includes that income on his tax returns.

"A lot of your success or failure depends on your ability to keep the fire lit," he said. "I have good months and bad months, but the work is fun."

Earnings can be considerable. Ailin Graef, who goes by the screen name Anshe Chung in Second Life, said she was on track to earn about $100,000 in real money in her first year in the game's real estate business.

Hundreds of people who play Second Life make a profit on it, said Philip Rosedale, chief executive and founder of Linden Lab, the game's developer. The value of the average player's transactions, if converted to real money, is more than $1,000 a year and has been growing nearly 25 percent a month, Mr. Rosedale said.

Who buys this stuff? One Second Life resident, who asked to be identified only by her screen name, Diamond Hope, said she spent $10 to $15 a month on clothing and other accessories in Secon

There's a secondary market in Second Life currency. Gaming Open Market used to do this for other games, including Everquest, but they encounted publisher opposition.

I don't think that article is correct; here's the Second Life exchange on GOM, and it lists blocks of 250 Linden for about a buck. Unless I'm reading it wrong, which may well be the case.

as people madly tried to sell off their accumulated wealth.

The results are here. Keep in mind that the nominal prices of tbux are $1.12/2000 (from There.com) and $1/2000 (from tbux.com, another large reseller).

• "Are we seeing a reversal in TBUX prices? The past few months have pushed the price of the Therebuck down substantially from around $1.04 (per 2000 Therebucks) at the start of March to an all-time low of $0.85 seen on April 19. Just this past week has indicated that there might still be some hope."

Gaming Open Market offers game currency portability; you can exchange your Ultima Online gold for Therebucks. This may increase game churn, just as number portability does for phones. You can take it with you when you leave the game.

You can't turn them directly into cash, but the Gaming Open Market will let you sell them to another player. Current exchange rate is 2151 TB to the dollar.

Any time there is profit to be made by ruining an online economy, there will always be people lining up to make it.

There are some "games" which are even designed to work with this concept instead of punishing it.

Second Life is one of them. If you create something interesting, you can sell it for virtual currency, which you are then allowed to trade for US$ on places like GOM. It is a free-market economy, so anyone can sell anything they can build/script to anyone else, just by leaving the object rezzed in the world and setting a price on it for passers-by to buy a copy.

If they were a real currency, not necessarily the US dollar, then they would be convertible and these measurements and comparisions would make sense.

This site is still new, but it's basically a virtual currency "commodities" market which makes the comparision measurable...

http://www.gamingopenmarket.com

The article fails to take into account that those EQ platinums aren't conversible.

I've been following Gaming Open Market (mentioned in the Walrus article) since the slashdot story from last year. This seems to have the potential to be a strong counterexample to your point. This site is the first step toward making game currencies convertible.

If you look at the Second Life market or Therebucks market, you can see the price change with supply and demand. The changes can be quite striking, in fact.

I don't really see the difference between this and exchanging currencies through your local FOREX.

I've been following Gaming Open Market (mentioned in the Walrus article) since the slashdot story from last year. This seems to have the potential to be a strong counterexample to your point. This site is the first step toward making game currencies convertible.

If you look at the Second Life market or Therebucks market, you can see the price change with supply and demand. The changes can be quite striking, in fact.

I don't really see the difference between this and exchanging currencies through your local FOREX.

I've been following Gaming Open Market (mentioned in the Walrus article) since the slashdot story from last year. This seems to have the potential to be a strong counterexample to your point. This site is the first step toward making game currencies convertible.

If you look at the Second Life market or Therebucks market, you can see the price change with supply and demand. The changes can be quite striking, in fact.

I don't really see the difference between this and exchanging currencies through your local FOREX.

They are not "convertible" through the normal currency exchange markets but eBay and Gaming Open Market provide this service.

Also, if more people began to exchange their Platinum pieces for USD$ of course the exchange rate would change which is true for any other commodity.

Bullshit. You're soaking in it!

Here is a site that takes the concept a bit further. It's a "currency exchange" where you can buy and sell credits in various games. It's interesting to read through and see how the various game economies are faring.

Online trading/selling of items has been occuring since the first account was sold on Ebay (Ultima Online) up to the formation of the Open Gaming Market (a currency exchange place for online game currency).

There have been people who have quit their normal jobs and took the "job" of play Diablo to make money. There's even been a court case for return of stolen in-game items.

It is a crazy world where currency in online games actually have more worth than the currency of some countries. I've personally sold virtual items for real life cash and I think people are crazy for paying what they do for these things, but then again I also can't understand why people pay large amounts of money for junk on E-Bay. I guess what they say is true, "one man's trash is another man's treasure", whether the trash is virtual or real. The online market just makes it easier to get those two people together.

Second Life already has a vibrant economy driven by user-created content and some users are choosing to convert their in-world earnings back in US$ via Gaming Open Market. Terra Nova has extensive discussions of the strength of the SL economy, as well as some of the problems that can arise from using real-world currency in virtual worlds -- including resident alienation, loss of suspension of disbelief, and interesting legal implications. It is also somewhat specious to suggest that pulling real-world currency into a virtual world somehow enables user-created content. The billing system, whether in US$ or SL's L$, was certainly a complicated component of the overall product, but it was dwarfed by the complexities of 3D streaming, collaborative creation, and distributed physical simulation.

So far, Second Life seems to be their most popular market. I've played with it a little bit; it's kind of fun, and taught me a little about how the bigger commodities markets work.

I think Second Life is doing especially well on OGM because the company that runs the game (Linden Labs) has not only allowed it to be used, but has encouraged SL residents to use it.

One of the things that really turned me on to SL was how open-minded the company is that runs it. It's too bad the other bigger MMO companies are afraid to let their users own the fruits of their "labors", including their currency.

Zhang Qingsong explains that these "weapons", or points, represent a right that the player can get to a certain level and play with a certain degree of ease or excitement. Even though they may have economic value among players, current law does not specify its legality.

I think people are starting to recognize that the time and effort (not to mention subscription dollars) that go into the levelling treadmill for MMORPGs means that your resulting character and items do have economic value, just like if you'd spent the time building model sailboats or writing software code. Whether it should be enough of a basis for suing people I don't know, but companies should put more of an effort into security for MMORPGs than just to say, "Ho hum, guess we got hacked again. Let's just reboot and pretend it didn't happen. Good thing our EULA denies all liability!"