I’m sure you’ve all heard of this, but it scares me. It’s a video game where you live out your life. It’s called Second-life. It combines all the virtual reality of the Internet; myspace, AIM, WoW, etc. You create a profile of yourself (i.e. Myspace), then you use an avatar to make a virtual being that can interact with all the other ones on a virtual continent, (WoW) and then you go around talking and interacting with other virtual people (AIM).
This is ludacris. There are also maketplaces where real people use their virtual selves to sell virtual items, food stuffs and virtual tools for example, to other virtual people for REAL MONEY! Are you serious??? People are paying REAL MONEY to live a VIRTUAL life. I can’t believe it.
Since you have to maintain your character, it makes sense that you would have to buy food stuffs or whatever, but how can the over 5 million people using the site actually spend REAL MONEY on a virtual character. What can they possibly get out of it???? I am baffled. I think this is the worst thing to happen to civilization. Having access to a full interactive virtual world makes worldly skills unnecessary and breeds a culture of socially inept people. It allows us to keep our blinders on to the goings-on of the world. What better way to change the world than go onto your computer and make yourself some virtual pizza? I mean, I have seen people completely taken over by WoW. Their social life completely ends, but not just that. Their sense of responsibility is completely shattered. I can only imagine that this will bring the same results.
That being said, I think this will take off. There are enough rich, suburban kids with nothign to do all day to make this a hit. I also think there is an untepped market in selling virtual pizza to people. I’m sure you can make millions.
Best-Buy has actually opened up a secondlife.com help station. You can go into a virtual Best-Buy, with your virtual character and ask questions about computers, or Secondlife, or anything really. It’s scary.
I also forgot to mention that CNet lacks reporting on this issue. I was upset.
This came up at Mass High Tech, the tech paper here in Boston that I work at two weeks ago. It’s really scary and makes me sad to think that people are literally starting to live through their computer. I’m always trying to escape mine – I just don’t understand why you’d want to do the opposite.