I'm having troubles with my first...

Second life is, I guess, something that's been around for a while, but I'm just hearing about it. Mostly because it's just starting to hit the CNN headlines, my main source for all things "news". For all of you who don't know what I'm talking about check out this article in wikipedia.

Second Life (SL) is a privately owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, and founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life "world" resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as "the grid". The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as Residents) with tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a "real" market. At precisely 8:05:45 AM PDT, October 18, 2006, the population of Second Life hit 1 million Residents


Upon first hearing about it, I wasn't too surprised and I kind of thought the idea was cool. Like a Myspace in three-dimension. But then I was reading about it and saw the insane amount of people who had subscribed I thought, there must be some sort of draw, why would grown adults be doing this? True to this theory there are some really immoral things that occur in this "second life". No real shock there, and it looks to be myspace(cubed) in terms of portal of darkness stuff.

So yesterday I was reading an article in CNN/Fortune and they were talking about adults who are making thousands and yes even millions of dollars in these fantasy worlds. Not monopoly money folks, real hard cash. They mostly develop "special" weapons or they develop land in these "worlds" and resell it to other people in these worlds for the currency of that world (second life has Linden Dollars; L$243/USD). As I'm typing this, I keep thinking this is so ridiculous. At any rate the Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) have a currency exchange so you can turn in your Linden bucks for real money.

At any rate, I'm reading this article about people making ridiculous sums of money off of fantasy creations; land/goods that don't really exist (except for in this fantasy world) and I am stunned that people would buy this stuff and stunned that people can make a living like this; but then I think, really, I am doing the same thing. Look at this quote from the article:

Though we readily accept the puzzling valuations that our society attaches to real-world things like diamonds, Louis Vuitton bags, pet rocks, or bottled water, many can't get their minds around the notion of paying for flickering shadows that can never be extracted from the planar surface of an LCD monitor. Yet so much of our economy revolves around buying prestige, status, and fun--rather than food, shelter, and clothing--that there is scant basis for wonder. This weird new commerce reflects simply the growing importance that virtual worlds are playing in the lives of our children, our colleagues, and--like it or not--ourselves. The more time we spend as avatars in synthetic worlds, the more money we will have to shell out keeping up with the Joneses' avatars.

I'm going to take this one step further, most the cash I am dropping might as well be spent on a fantasy life, it's not real. The things I purchase are all going to be burned up one day, they have no real eternal value. I cannot take them with me. I'm really just developing a "fantasy lifestyle" or a second life. I, too, am buying into a fantasy, granted I do have real living expenses, I'm not all referring to those things, I'm just thinking of the frivolous things, the things the don't have near the value I place on them.

I guess I'm going to be rethinking those Gucci sunglasses I found on eBay.