Second Life: The Quest For Cash

November 21st, 2006

Since I’m on vacation, I figured I should log into Second Life again. I still only have 4 dollars, and need more in order to rectify my current state of a virtual, broke homeless person.

It seems whenever I fire up Second Life, I appear in a random location, and today it was some rock club called Club Rock! I’ve read that performers like Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega do virtual performances in Second Life. Anyhow, at the rock club I had my first constructive conversation with a virtual citizen, the club proprietor. Thankfully friendly, he gave me a guitar and a bookmark to a place where a “newbie” can get some stuff for cheap. I thanked him and took a Club Rock! newsletter so I could remember his place in the future.

I then jumped over to the “newbie” store. It looked like the inside of a castle, with hanging cubes lining the walls, sporting pictures of items for sale, mostly clothing and hair styles (people really invest a lot of time in their appearances here, it seems). But I did find one thing that sparked my interest: a house for $1. Since that’s about $599,999 less than one in the Bay Area, I immediately bought one.

Of course, I was now a homeowner with no land. I asked a nearby person for advice. He mentioned public land, but also something about everything being wiped off of said land at regular intervals. Of course, he did mention you can always buy land with Linden dollars - it all comes back to the dollars.

The easiest way to get Linden dollars is to whip out a first life credit card and pay the piper. But I’m still resisting (because I’m frugal - both in my first life, and now it seems my second). So the assessment of my newbie situation is: I now have a cool guitar, a house, and two newsletters, but nowhere to put all this virtual crap because I still need more virtual money. I’m a little virtually bummed out.

Slowly I realize the challenge creeping over me, and suddenly it becomes clear that this is how Second Life sucks you in. I suddenly have this vision of owning a virtual house, where I can put all my virtual stuff, and decorate in my own virtual way. I guess I could invite all my virtual friends over, because after spending all the time in Second Life to make this happen, who knows what decay will infect my neglected first one.

In college, some people I knew were obsessed with “MUDS” which were essentially the same thing as Second Life but text-based, and as far as I knew, didn’t involve dollars. But even at that low-level of immersion, I know one person in particular that was so caught up in the MUD she was playing that she slept at the library (where the best internet access was) and nearly dropped out of school. So now I’m thinking, MUD + money + materialism + cooler graphics and you have the potential for a seriously addicting game.

Anyhow, as I type this, my avatar is sitting on a stump before a virtual campfire (documented in my previous post), accumulating a handful of Linden dollars, which I will then take to a casino, in order to make the dream of home ownership come true. Yes, it’s kind of sad, and I have absolutely no idea why I’m doing this. But I may have to think about my reasons soon, before I get hooked on this thing.

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