Second Life

[Eden]

I have never played or rather participated in this, but I read a little bit about it some time ago.

The technic and supports seems to be rather bad, but still more than 15 million accounts are registered, real companies have places were they advertise and sell their real products as virtual item and people use a lot of their money to change it to Linden Dollars. On the other hand I have read about ordinary people who created virtual stuff and earned enough LD to get a nice amount of real money. I am not sure if this is true, though, or just a rumor. Furthermore, it seems to be an addiction like many other virtual worlds.

Has anybody real experiences with this "Second Life" or plays it regularly?

[MyNameDidntFit]

Say what you will about Second Life (and what I tend to say is best suited to be muttered under one's breath and not posted publicly :p), but there is no denying the fact that it is an incredibly viable commercial medium.

I recall a documentary I was watching about this a month or two ago that essentially followed a couple who had met via the game and gotten married and such. That was the uninteresting bit, though, the interesting part of it for me came when they began discussing how the woman in the couple all but lived off of the profits of her own store in the Second Life world--she designed and sold accessories for avatars.

Eh. I still despise the idea of it, but there's no denying its viability as a financial medium.

[Eden]

Yes, I have read an article (a year or so ago) about someone creating clothes for avatars and someone else planing and construction buildings and both made serious money by that.

[Jason]

I instinctively disagree with games like Second Life out of principle - to me, gaming should be about doing things and playing roles that the player would never otherwise be able to do - be it fighting off legions of the undead, tracking down murderers, playing up front for Manchester United or exploring alien wastelands. It shouldn't be about sitting at your desk pretending to have a life. You already have a life. It's the one you're spending sat at a desk playing a game about having a life.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with people who spend most of their lives sat at a desk playing games. Hell, I do it myself to a given value of 'most', but what really rankles with me is that people don't seem to get the irony involved with playing something like Second Life.

[Wally]

When you think about it most of the games you mentioned allow you to do things that simply aren’t possible in real life. Even the ones that are possible like being a sports superstar require you to be in that lucky less than 1 percent that is genetically gifted enough to do that sort of thing – assuming that you dedicate your life to training for it. We play games like that to be the hero or the superstar because in real life we’re just normal guys with normal lives. Nothing wrong with not being Conan full time but it is fun to be Conan part-time.

I think that most Second Lifers like Second Life so much because they don’t like their real life that much. Honestly, Second Life is about playing a game where the goal is to be ‘normal’ for lack of a better word – which implies that the players don’t see themselves in that role now.

[Jason]

Yeah, I suppose that's a very valid point - it's a form of escapism from issues in real life, be they acceptance issues from others (surely not helped by spending your life at your computer desk!) or simply a lack of ability to deal with social situations (again, you don't really learn by not doing).
I suppose when you look at it that way, it's a little more understandable, if perhaps a little unhealthy.

Also, rewinding a little bit to a point Eden made regarding the proliferation of advertising in Second Life and gaming in general, it's something that I'm not entirely comfortable with - currently it's not a huge issue, with the most glaring example I can currently recall off the top of my head is the 'Duracell' placement in Alan Wake (although with the frequency those damned batteries run out, I'd hardly call it a great advert for the quality of their product) - that was the most blatant real-world advertising I can recall seeing in a game, but other than the initial 'ha, talk about product placement' chuckle, it really wasn't enough to bother me.
However, I feel it could be a dangerous trend as the cost of producing AAA-grade games soars and more and more companies and corporations start to realise what a huge unexploited money pot gaming has the potential to be - let's be honest, advertisers are rarely subtle (heck, that's not their job - they're PAID to make their product noticable), and I think that by trying to shoehorn real-world products into a fantasy world risks losing the sense of escapism that captivates many of us - I know for sure that the first time Nate Drake stops mid-climb several thousand feet above a gaping chasm for a "cool refreshing and great-tasting Pepsi" is the day I put my pad down and say "no more".

[Eden]

Another thing I read an article about in the past (same magazine, later edition): How people in the advertising industry started to discover the possibilities of games.
Imagine a company like Rockstar games without their humour. Instead of inventing great, funny ads themselves, they could make millions by adding real companies like BMW, Pepsi, Dell and others.

You know, your point about the real life is true. The game that bothers me the most is The Sims. It seems to strange to me. Playing to have a life.

[Jason]

The Sims is one that I'm undecided on - on one hand, the Second Life argument applies arguably just as strongly to The Sims. On the other, The Sims is more about running multiple lives, forming and destroying relationships as and when the player sees fit - It's a much more voyeuristic and omniscient appeal, which doesn't really appeal to me - to me, The Sims is almost an interactive soap opera where the player can decide the cast and have a role in what happens.

My main reason for hating The Sims is EA's utterly mercenary approach to marketing it - pets? That'll be an expansion pack. A new setting? Expansion pack. Some new furniture? EXPANSION BLOODY PACK! In a way, it's fair play to EA, if enough idiots are willing to pay that much money for that little content, then they're not likely to be holding on to that money very long anyway, so EA may as well take it, but on the other hand, it set the trend for publishers and developers to drip-feed content to gamers at a premium for stuff that really could and should have been included in the release or given away for free.

[Eden]

That is an approach that becomes more and more prominent. The basic game is cheap, but to get all the fun and all the bonus things you have to pay a lot.

I agree that Sims is more like a soap opera, but as I understand it (from playing the first game years ago) one usually plays a social fitting role, learning, chatting, working, being a good citizen. It is not about becoming something extraordinary usually, is it?

The one thing I enjoyed in the game was the aspect of creating different building ^^

[Wally]

Also, rewinding a little bit to a point Eden made regarding the proliferation of advertising in Second Life and gaming in general, it's something that I'm not entirely comfortable with - currently it's not a huge issue, with the most glaring example I can currently recall off the top of my head is the 'Duracell' placement in Alan Wake...

You already deal with this on a daily basis in traditional media like television now. Advertisers know that traditional commercial ads are beginning to fail. That’s why you see things like Big Mike giving his son-in-law a Subway Meatball sandwich (of which he extoll’s the virtues) as a way of saying thank you on an episode of Chuck. They know we aren’t watching traditional commercial fare anymore so they weave it into the stories and games we interact with.

What’s worse is the data mining that we are subjected to. Games now require full time connections so that the company behind them can monitor your playing habits. Stores now send off their security video to market analysts to examine what product labels we looked at longest. Our ISPs now do something they call deep packet inspection to find out what we are viewing while we are online – and then sell that info to marketing firms. Digital video recorders like Tivo save our viewing habits in a database and examine what commercials we watched and which we fast forwarded through. Everything you do now is watched and the information is sold anyone with the money to buy it.

(Sorry for the Off Topic rant.)