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.
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";
How is that different than taking a job with any new company? The company could just close down and then you'd be out of work.
:)
Heck, it happens to workers in old companies too (Enron, Worldcom, GM, Ford).
Besides, if she's making 4 times her previous salary it won't take long to be able to afford to have a few years with no income at the same standard of living if she wanted.
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
Until she has to go back out into the real world with this at the top of her resume:
2006 - 2008, Played Video Games
Well, let me detail my own situation then: I'm an IT engineer in a country where unemployment is in the double digits. In my specific age and education class it's over 25%. I only ever get few-month-long missions for ever-varying employers. I can be laid off in a single day with no compensation, and I know a pay rise won't be happening in years. Social care ensures I get a revenue in between, but only for a few months.
And aside from that, I make about half as much as my salary in Second Life using my programmation and innovation skills. I really consider this additional revenue to be my insurance against misery, should I not manage to get a new job after the current one, mainly because I can work at it from most places in the world, anytime, for almost as long as I want or can afford. That's some significant security in my opinion.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
That's not how you write a resume! Its...
2006-2008, Entrepreneurship in virtual atypical marketing, exchanges, and acquisitions.
Demented But Determined.
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.
I almost think that 'wealth' is like economic energy: just as energy is "the ability to do work", 'wealth' provides the means to do (economic) work - that is, provide services. Here's an odd example: farming is a service that produces food - wealth - that can be used to perform more farming (by keeping people alive).
Markets are a service in that they distribute wealth, but they do not create it. Markets have value, though, in that people are willing to trade wealth for the presence of the market.
Ah, that seems a little like it could use some further development, but I think it's sufficient for now.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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").
You can make stuff in SL anywhere that the land owner hasn't set 'no building'. You can play with scripts anywhere that hasn't been set 'no scripts'.
This accounts for something like, oh, 80% of the world, I'd guess.
There are specific sandbox areas; some are small chunks of heavily-loaded sims*, some are entire sims given over to the task. Sandboxes are build-enabled, usually script-enabled, and have very lenient auto-sweep times, so you can just plop yourself down and start Making Stuff.
Popular sandboxes are an attraction in and of themselves; you'll see lots of builders who don't bother shelling out to own land working on their projects. People whose projects involve scripting will often hand out beta versions of their toys, just for testing, or just to watch someone have fun with their work.
You need to have land to put a vending machine for your stuff. But you can rent space in a mall, or perhaps a friend who has land would like to offer a little space for a vendor, or perhaps you might join a group to share some land. There's a lot of options. I make my own avatars, and I've gotten several offers of vendor space, including one in some very prime space in one of the oldest sims in the game, near the newbie area!
If you want to run a club or be a land baron, yeah, that requires money for paying for land. But you can do a lot of stuff with potential financial return in SL without ever paying for more than the initial account, and that's free nowadays.
*a 'sim' in SL is the fundamental division; each one is handled by a different server. So a very populated sim is on a pretty overloaded computer.
egypt urnash minimal art.