Dana in Geeksville

Buying Fake Money for a Virtual Life

You'd think telling people that you've purchased fake money for real hard cash might raise an eyebrow or two. It certainly would have in my mother's day. But not any longer. My mentioning that I just bought 3,000 Linden dollars doesn't get a response of surprise from anyone, only the question of, how much do 3,000 L cost? The answer: a little over ten US bucks. Not bad.

So why buy fake money? Well, for fake worlds, of course, virtual worlds. Over the last year, I've been spending quite a bit of time in Second Life (SL). I headed inworld to do some chats with developers at Sun's SIM, but as I got to poking around, I discovered that Second Life is a really fabulous place.

My initial response to entering SL had been one of confusion. I entered into an area with a lot of weird avatars milling about aimlessly, or so it seemed, and it took me some time to learn to walk, sit, fly, and operate my camera controls, etc. As I learned, I became more and more impressed with what I saw.

My kids, on the other hand, had trouble understanding my fascination with this place, or my learning curve. Having grown up on video games, to them the graphics and world scenes were just run of the mill. The controls were average, and the ability to chat was totally old school. Overall, though, they deemed it a decent piece of software. For those used to fighting and ducking for cover inworld, SL is riduculously slow paced. For those like myself who have no desire to dodge bullets or crazed aliens, and would much rather take advantage of the social aspects, SL is a very cool place to be.

I was impressed by Sun's SIM in SL. The engineers did a great job building and creating, so much so that I had to see what other worlds were like in SL. I searched my interests and lo and behold found many places worthy of exploring. I was fascinated by the creativity of these places where oceans are filled with dolphins and whales, land covered with forest and water fountains, castles or huts, and many, many cities with shopping malls. It doesn't take long before you realize your avatar is plain and boring, your clothing generic, and your moves robotic. To change any of that, though, you need to spend cold hard cash. A bit too much like the real world! You can get just as lost and addicted to material goods in SL as the real world, so be careful.

Of couse, SL is not just about shopping. There are worlds and groups to suit most interests. I've joined photography, Buddhist, and developer groups, found regular online meetings for all, and wonderful places to explore that are themed to those topics. Every Sunday I go to group meditation with the Skeptical Buddhists. On other days other Buddhist groups also have meditations and talks, complete with a gong to sound the end of the meditation. The pix in this blog is me at one of the Zen retreats.

The social aspects are interesting. I attended several talks on Relationships in SL. The talks were intriguing, addressing the usual issues in relationships with the special problems that avatars face in the virtual world. All kinds of relationship types were addressed from casual to business to love affairs, each of which had challenges inworld.

Virtual worlds are incredibly wonderful places for developers, and I'm starting to itch to learn how to build stuff in SL. SL allows for a lot of drag and drop, and of course you can import graphics and textures from your favorite graphics programs. Naturally, you can take building and programming classes in SL to learn how to create worlds.

I've looked at a few other virtual environments, and so far I'm most impressed with Second Life, which is free . . . until you want your own land to build on. Then you buy and rent, and I'm guessing that is how Linden Labs makes their money. I'm researching this now. I don't know if I'll become a land owner, but I'll blog about it for sure if I do.

In the meantime, my avatar has a little shopping to do . . .

See a video about what Sun is doing in Second Life.

Posted at 03:27PM Aug 12, 2008 by dananourie in Virtual Worlds  |  Comments[0]