Investigating Second Life
During our recent trip to visit my mother in law in California, we spent a few days in San Diego, where the local magazine was running a story about Second Life.
Like many others, I’ve been wondering about the virtual world known as ‘Second Life’ for quite a while, wondering, for example, if I’d ever get round to checking it out.
Unlike many others, what I also wondered is why is Second Life ok when Everquest was not considered cool? I decided to check it out and see if Second Life is really the way forward and so much cooler than fighting snow leopards in Everfrost Peaks and Halas. This post will be the first in a series investigating Second Life and the opportunities it offers.
Personally I liked Everquest a lot, so I had mixed feelings about Second Life from the start: on the one hand that it couldn’t be as good, but on the other hand it held the potential of many of my favourite aspects of Everquest – exploring the virtual world and so on, without having to do any fighting. It’s also free to get a basic membership.
From the San Diego Reader, I discovered that much of it’s popularity comes from the potential for members to create their own content, and also to give away, sell, rent or advertise their creations.
The attractions for designers and programmers are obvious, but some have also been able to make a living out of this.
This capability has drawn in entrepreneurs, and led many bigger companies and organisations to establish a Second Life presence (3).
Apparently Second Life now has some 8.5 million players worldwide, of which the majority are in the US. However, the game has seen a jump in popularity in the UK over the past two years, with several thousand Britons believed to now be regularly trading through the site.
“Some make over $10,000 a month, selling virtual goods. It’s an excellent tool for nurturing entrepreneurial skills as you learn the ‘art of doing business’ without taking major risks.” (1)
In the last year Second Life incomes have become widespread enough that HM Revenue and Customs has begun investigating people who are making real-life profits in Second Life (4). The same tax rules apply to internet trading as to any other form of trading and HMRC has a bot, known as Xenon, which trawls the internet in search of people who use the web to trade but don’t pay taxes. It would be possible for Xenon to track down someone who was making substantial profits through a game such as Second Life.
So is it possible to make money in Second Life? Yes. Is it fun and easy money? Well I just don’t know. So I continued my investigation to find out more about how money works in Second Life (more about this in the next post).
So is Second Life cooler than EverQuest? No. It isn’t a game, but it’s more like the Web: in part a great place for technical development and creativity, in part featuring greater encroachments by big businesses, and in part being infiltrated by get-rich-quick schemes dependent on spammy invasions of privacy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those things happened in that order, as they did on the web. I would guess there may have been a golden age of Second Life, as there was in the early days of the web, but from now on we will mostly be hearing about whether it is influential, brand-building or profitable.
But these are early days for me, and somewhat coloured by the first ‘popular places’ I visited there (more about these in my next Second Life post). I can also see that Second Life does hold enormous potential, both for expressing creativity, earning money, influencing others, testing various skills in a safe environment and even experiencing things which are not possible in the real world (like flying). So despite some slight initial disillusionment, I’m looking forward to spending more time there.
(1) Virtual reality is serious business
(2) The Second Lives of San Diegans
(3) Virtual Visions
(4) Tax office tackles growing trade in virtual items for real money