Second Life...

This gives a whole new meaning to the words Virtual Reality. 

Second Life

This might be the craziest thing I have witnessed in my life thus far.  Second Life is a virtual world, similar to the Sims video game, but then again…nothing at all like it!  (By the way, I’m not a video gamer in any way, shape or form, but I know the premise of the Sims games).  Be a character, build a city, theme park, whatever…entertain yourself, work, basically engage yourself in virtual world for however long you feel it necessary to keep yourself away from those 3 dimensional people called...humans. 

Second life, is literally what its name states.  You are creating your own second life in a virtual setting, however just like in the real world, the smarter you are and the more you prosper, the more money you stand to make.  Wait.  You actually make money?  Yes.  The virtual world of Second Life has its own economy – it is based on the Linden dollar.  As Linden dollars are spent, let’s say in your virtual guitar shop, they are exchanged into real American dollars.  You earn money for some virtual character walking his virtual ass into your store and dropping 100,000 Linden’s on a custom guitar.  Let me remind you that this guitar doesn’t even have to actually exist.  Out of curiosity, I checked the website for the exchange rate for today:  L$267/US$1.00

Does anyone else find this absolutely genius and altogether terrifying?

You create a pretend, non-existent, 3-D avatar, buy a pretend, non-existent parcel of virtual land, start a pretend, non-existent business or build a make believe cottage, make an imaginary product or sell a fictional service.  Buy…sell…trade!  In all actuality, these products or services you made up CAN exist for sale in the real world as well, as you retain your Intellectual Property rights over anything you create, but that’s just too much to get into at this late hour and my head already feels like it’s going to explode.  Current enterprising SL residents (of which there are 3,414,980 - in case you were wondering if this was HUGE or not) have founded and currently run such businesses as tattoo artist, wedding planner, private detective, bodyguard, aerospace engineer, hug maker – I had to include that one because it’s just too awesome - and the list goes on and on.  You can literally do or make or sell absolutely anything.  

I don’t know who has time to start and run a business in computer land, as it makes me wonder what they are doing at their real life job, however…there is evidence that some successful business owners “in-world”, as they refer to it, are making thousands of dollars – a day. 

I have no idea where I’ve been, obviously living under a rock somewhere...as I’m just learning about this from a friend of mine at 2:00 in the morning, but it’s been around since 2003 and quite obviously thriving.  And here I thought I was ahead of the game because I had already watched The Secret before it was featured on Oprah today.  :)  So now, not only do I have the demands of thriving in the land of people who breathe, I now have to concern myself with my virtual success in a world where the selling point of the home I’m about to buy is that it was once owned by Lara Croft. 

Oh the pressure, it’s just too much.