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Virtual World, Real Money
BusinessWeek's cover story for May 1st has to do with a little place called Second Life. BusinessWeek Online has several stories related to their exploration on online living. My Virtual Life is a first-time exploration of Second Life, with some examination of the property and financial aspects of the gameworld. It's Not All Fun and Games explores the serious side of virtual businesses, as they interview Ashne Chung (notable real estate baron) in a piece called Virtual Land, Real Money. Ed Castronova has his say in a more general article on virtual economies. Finally, for an outside perspective, the obligatory Terra Nova discussion is always useful.
stake this first post as virtual property... get with me after this and we can negotiate a pice.
This says something pretty significant and deeply disturbing about society yet the article seems to have glazed over it. Second Life has no point, it's not just a game. It's a reality that simply exists, it's the participants that determine everything--just like real life. People are escaping their own lives, why? Because they feel trapped? Trapped by what? The mindless and meaningless jobs that they hold down working for a multinational corporation. The incessant reminder that they need more material goods to be happy. That they aren't as beautiful as the people on TV. Aldous Huxley seems to have been a visionary. Now corporations are looking to tap into this phenomemon? Holy shit! In my opinion, this trend is more scary than DRM ever could be.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I have found a way better game to play online. It's a lot more challenging and fun then Wow, Second life, or Ever quest combined! This online game also allows you to earn real money!
It's called running an online business. You can pick from a range of class types, (blogger, storekeeper, programmer) or create your own!
The game content is simply amazing! It is virtually infinite, and changes daily!
You can play as much or as little as you want. Spend an hour, a day or an hour a week, it's up to you!
I've been playing for a few months now and its a blast! Check out my avatar cl1p!
Like youtube, they don't make any money yet, but since investors are keen on putting money in, they must know what they're doing.
Where exactly were you between 1997 and 2000?
jf
SL isn't nearly as great as it's made out to be in the media. Even their best example - Anche Chung was banned from SL and their forums the other day. Moderators were then unleashed to remove any thread about her ban.
... but there are some positives to SL. But the hype is about making money - something that is extremely difficult. Most are lucky to even break even.
The only people making income are the land barons who buy up huge sims (servers) then sell off the land. It's a lot of work to cut it up and sell - and the profits are small unless you do this large scale. To get that kind of scale you'll need 10's of thousands of dollars invested. There is already a land glut and the profits are hard to come by even with a lot of money to invest. Because of the land glut, the market is facing inflation. We're seeing over $300 second life dollars per $1 USD.
If you want to try your hand at developing land to run things like casinos, malls, etc. You will have to upgrade your account to a paid version. You then need to find some land to buy. The monthly fee on a fairly modest 16,000m plot of land is $75. The initial cost for that amount of land is around $300 - $400. Much of the main land has no rules besides "PG" and "R" rated areas. So people build horrible objects and structures. The more prims an object takes up, the more lag the area gets. Anyway, people have issues selling clothing, skins, etc. because there is no way to prevent others from stealing them directly from the local client's graphics cache or directly from video memory. People steal then resell other's work.
You also have to watch out for gotchas in the game. They have rules such as a user needing to belong to a group that owns the land, in order to set "Home" to that location. The problem is, if your land is owned by a group, and you sell the land, all members in that group get an EQUAL cut of the selling price of the land. This is not something they mention to you when you click SELL. So if you're selling a $500 USD plot of land and you get $4 back, you'll not be too happy. Calling SL's tech support will yeld such gems as "If you were planning on making a mistake, you should have called us up before you made the mistake and we'd be happy to help you"
I don't want to rant on too much about it - I haven't even gotten started on the negitives
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