Second Life can be your second life

Once upon a time, actually last winter or so, I had a Second Life account. Aside from the tutorial, I probably had well over 100 hours invested in this virtual world. In this amount of time I was able to experience most of what the game had to offer, and I was able to see that Second Life really can be a second life.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Second Life, an in depth description would take pages. Basically it is an online game where you make a character to represent yourself (or whoever you’d like to be) and you essentially make a second life for yourself. You can build a house, buy a car, or get a job. You can meet people, make friends, and interact with them in similar ways that you interact with your own friends. Other ‘’players’’ in the game can create shops where they sell clothes, they can make casinos with slot machines and blackjack tables, they can build shopping malls, and they can host parties and raves. You can interact with all these things in the game. You can shop at the mall and purchase clothing items, you can use your money to gamble in the casinos, and you can actually make your character dance at a rave (the music is generally provided by DJ’s which are real people DJ’ing music through their computer live.)

Just like in the real world, you need money in Second Life if you want to better the life of your character. There are only 2 ways to earn money in the game. You can either pay a fee (in real money of course) which will get you a plot of land in the game to build things on, and it will also give you in game money to use on whatever you’d like. At any time you can also purchase additional game currency using real money. The second way is to get a job, just like in real life. You can work at someone’s shop, you could DJ a party, and you can do any number of real life jobs. Most jobs will pay you by the half hour or full hour that you work, and just like in real life, you typically have set hours to work on certain days of the week.

Houses, buildings, shops, cars, etc. are built mostly using code. Like creating a video game or computer software, players in the game write the code for a slot machine or they write the code for an airplane. The creator of the item can then set the code to be open source so people can edit it, or lock it to sort of copyright it and protect it. The creator can sell his or her items to other players in stores, or just through player to player interaction. Someone I had met in the game was good at creating clothing items, so she (or it could have been a he, I’ll never know) would make shirts and pants for my character to wear and would give them to me free of charge.

While it may not sound fun to play a video game and have to get a job in it, it’s actually really fun. It isn’t really working if you think about it, and you are constantly interacting and talking to new people. There is no way to beat the game, there aren’t any objectives. All you really need to do is live a second life, any way you wish.