Slashdot Mirror
Making A Living In Second Life
Wired has an article looking at folks who have dropped out of the whole 'meatspace moneymaking' thing, and are now making their living in Second Life. From the article: "Within a month, Grinnell was making more in Second Life than in her real-world job as a dispatcher. And after three months she realized she could quit her day job altogether. Now Second Life is her primary source of income, and Grinnell, whose avatar answers to the name Janie Marlowe, claims she earns more than four times her previous salary. Grinnell isn't alone. Artists and designers, landowners and currency speculators, are turning the virtual environment of Second Life into a real-world profit center." Interesting, and with a respectability lacking in gold farming.
I wonder how long it will be before real-life politicians start setting up their own virtual offices in Second Life so they can tax the in-game profits of Janie Marlowe or try to regulate her online business.
I'm worried that people like this could well be in for a nasty surprise in the next few years. While they may well be making several times their previous salaries in MMORPGs, what happens if the game is simply closed by its manufacturers, or something better comes along that players flock to? If they can't then map their skills from one game to another, they're suddenly out of luck and out of a job - how sustainable is this sort of job? I certainly wouldn't quit my day job simply out of the security it would afford me - if the game ends tomorrow, at least I still have a paycheque.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Second Life released an Linux native alpha client. Some hard rough edges but very usable.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Especially in the world's oldest profession.
DN
You can make a lot of money from furries. Take an established section of the web market, add the word "fur" to it, and sell it at an inflated price and you're into money.
Ask http://www.furcadia.com/ or http://www.furbid.ws/
Comment of the year
It really takes a while after starting Second Life before you realize the true, and staggering, implications.
The metaverse is finally here!
And it has a really, really, really low framerate!
And there really isn't anything to do there except stand around in gaudy discos and watch your avatar run through a dance animation!
Still, isn't it neat?
This is just an example of how free markets create wealth.
What value did Second Life have before people moved in and started exercising their rights to engage in unrestricted trade? Absolutely nothing, except a bunch of promise.
But when people began exchanging goods and services without restriction, they begin to build something beautiful.
Imagine for a moment that the owners of Second Life tried something other than free market economics. What if they decided they would dictate the direction of growth? Or what if they controlled the money supply and gave it only to people they liked? Or what if they banned certain transactions? What if Second Life had a board of very smart and highly educated economists trying to create the ideal economy? What if they had onerous taxes and regulations?
If you think that anything but free markets work, you haven't had much experience in the real world.
I would hope that we can take some of the principles that makes Second Life so wonderful (IE, free trade) and bring it into our real world so that we can create even more wealth.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Those making money are nothing but sheep farmers, harvesting from n00bs that wanna play with their paper dolls simulating getting laid.
Despite the claims, it's a closed system with a very limited future, a collapsing eternal economy, and more bugs than a bait shop.
The claim of "A user created community" is Linden/Rosedale just playing everyone for suckers, missing it's potential and merely focusing on profit,
while wrapping themselves in a blanket of lazy, scamming altruism. There's a few interesting builds, but for the most part, it's more BigLots than Metaverse.
The quality of the graphics looks like a game from 5 years ago, and they haven't improved on the look in well over a year, other than adding a water shader.
Can't wait for someone to do it right.
And working the drivethru at McDonalds is "sales and marketing for a Fortune 500 company." Sounds a lot better, and isn't even a lie!
Just another example of Dick being ahead of his time. What a crazy world we live in.
This is just an example of how free markets create wealth.
No. This is an example of a free market redistributing wealth earned in another external economy under completely different rules. All it is doing is rewarding someone for the fruits of their labors with the money others have earned elsewhere under different rules. All this is is someone earning a living under our existing non-free market system just like a flea market or yard sale.
It's a fine example of how well a free market economy works when no one has essential needs and every purchase is a luxury purchase. SL characters don't die of starvation if they can't earn money. They don't die of exposure without the ability to afford housing. They don't need medical care. They don't grow old and infirm and require retirement. Not only would you never have to kill to survive, you couldn't kill for money even if you wanted to. Violent crime is impossible. You can't cause serious harm to people deliberately or even indifferently by way of pollution, foreclosure, or anything else.
In other words, SL is nothing like reality. It is a world without disease, aging, or any other infirmity, non-consensual violence, and starvation or deprivation of any other sort. Well sure it works as a free market economy! All the hazards of the free market and human nature don't exist there.
If you think that anything but free markets work, you haven't had much experience in the real world.
If you think that free markets work, you haven't had much experience with reality. People who think free markets solve everything honestly don't understand the ramifications of the non-exclusive nature of public and common goods nor do they understand the net negative effects of the extreme poverty of others on oneself.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Be careful about using that plan to get a dedicated Second Life box running. SL is CPU-limited rather than GPU-limited in terms of graphics candy. More memory on the graphics card is a great thing, but if what I've read is correct (which it may not be, of course) the CPU is a big determining factor in the SL experience.
There are groups of residents petitioning to get the game's transform and lighting functions onto the GPU rather than the CPU.
Ideally, this is done in a democratic fashion, and the people making these decisions have just as much of a mandate to mitigate the pitfalls of a lawless/free economy as much as they do a lawless/free society with laws against harming others. In my opinion, the government should encourage free markets wherever private goods or club goods are involved unless there a life-need (e.g. healthcare), predatory practices (e.g. credit & investment), or both (e.g. utilities) are frequently present. However, whenever common goods or public goods are involved, government must step in to regulate because the free market can only make things worse.
For those who wonder what I'm talking about, there are four classical types of goods that economists define based on whether or not you can exclude others from use and whether or not use diminishes the good. They are:
The definition of degrading a good can vary, but the general idea is that adding or subtracting a single user does not signficantly affect the enjoyment of other users. A concert hall might fill up, but me listening to the music doesn't take away your ability to listen to it. Excludability is more about making sure that people who don't pay for a good can't use it without requiring government coercion. DRM can only exclude goods with government measures to prevent making tools to crack it.
The problem with common and public goods is in the fact that you can't effectively charge people for them. You can't make people stop polluting without coercive force. If you stop paying your taxes and hole up in a compound in Montana, the US military still protects you. The free market cannot effectively solve problems related to these types of goods. Only government can because the effective management and creation of these goods requires that people be forced to play along even if they don't want to.
Government can do this in ways that encourages more or less free market-like behavior. For example, emission trading schemes are more free market like than mandated technologies. However, without government force, there would be no market for emission trading because companies would continue to treat things that they get for free as externalities that free market cost pressures prevent them from worrying about. In fact, the free market makes things worse because competition forces actors in the market to cut costs wherever possible. People wouldn't pollute if it wasn't profitable, and a free market only makes things worse by giving incentives to bad behavior.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").