Week 4: Economy

Second Life has one of the most interesting online economies I've ever seen. It has many facets in common with real-world free market economies. Virtual goods are created, sold, and bought by the users with Linden dollars, the unit of currency in the game. Linden dollars can be bought from the game maintainer Linden Labs, and even sold back to Linden for the real money equivalent, at a dynamic exchange rate that is affected by how much of the currency exists in the game. As Wired.com reports, there are few to no tariffs placed on these monetary transactions, resulting in great opportunities to make an actual living off of virtual marketing. "Second Life is an entrepreneur’s dream: no taxes, minimal regulation, no marginal cost of production, subsidies to encourage innovation" (Wired, 2006). This makes the virtual currency and economy as a whole transitive with real-world instances. In fact, many people have been able to make enough money from selling their Linden dollars back for real money to support themselves in reality. One woman in Michigan was able to make more money designing in-game clothes than she was making in the real world as a furniture dispatcher, ultimately allowing her to quit her real job (Craig, 2006).

At the end of Q3 2011, $29.3 mil were in use

So, we have seen that the virtual and actual economies may work together, but are there any statistics to show that they share similar metrics of operation? As a matter of fact, there are multiple studies concerned with real economics that use the Second Life alternative as an accurate laboratory substitute. Linden Labs themselves publish many different statistics about monetary transfers, both virtual and actual. Taking a look at the graph above, which was taken from the SL Q3 2011 economy report, we can see that $29.3 million USD were represented in-game by Linden dollars at the end of last year. This is just one statistic available from the company's evaluations.

The actual distribution of goods in Second Life is similar to realistic distribution as well. Buildings with showroom floors or kiosks lining the walls show off their wares. A user looking to purchase the item on sale simply interacts with the item's showcase. The price is then deducted from their in-game wallet and the item is added to their inventory. Goods can also be purchased from the Marketplace website, allowing users to find what they're looking for without scouring the virtual world in search of the store that sells the item.

The SL Marketplace website is a convenient substitute to in-world shops

Not only is the Second Life economy realistic, the ability to convert the in-game currency to actual dollars has lead to many people relying more on virtual supply-and-demand to make a living than real-world economics. To understand the complexities of this robust digital business model would be to also understand the workings of brick-and-mortar distributors of physical goods or services.

Week 3: The People

There are a few different kinds of people that play Second Life. The diversity isn't as great as that of people in reality, but every once in a while someone does appear that stands out from the in-game crowd. I have not been so fortunate as to find all that many people willing to talk to me or even acknowledge my existence. The ones I did were usually strange.

In week 1, I did not find anyone willing to engage me. Perhaps they were all away from their keyboards, or they were just as snobby as I summized in previous posts. As it turned out, I could never find any zones with an abundance of people in them at once. The most populated zone I encountered during that week had 25 people in it at the time of my starting of the game. When I entered the zone, the people were spread out, only two or three relatively close to eachother. When I approached any of them, the reception was always the same cold silence.

Second Life displays which zones contain the most players

Week 2 was a slightly different story, as detailed in my week 2 report. I found two people that did in fact want to talk to me. Unfortunately, they were a peculiar type that borderlined unsettling to me. The first was the owner of the zone I was in. His motives for speaking to me were immediately evident as sexual advancements. I was curious if the person behind the player was as perverted as the character representing him, though I did not ask him. After all, many players of role-playing games or otherwise personifiable web communities often contain people that treat their avatars as entirely separate from their real selves, as if living out fantasies they could not participate in without these means. The second person was similarly distanced from reality. A Spanish-speaking female with a bunny avatar briefly spoke to me in broken English before I ended the conversation. After I ended the conversation, she began following me around the zone as I continued my research. She didn't stop stalking me until I exited the area.

Week 3: my first friends!

Week 3 showed a great change of pace. In a New York zone I had noted as being one of the more active areas in the past week, I found a woman walking in the park, a man riding on a jet ski in the neighboring waterway, two men walking around the zone, and two more men riding a golf cart around the city. All of them briefly spoke to me, but were not interested in staying still long enough for me to get to know them. Finally, I found two people (a man and woman, later found to be virtual boyfriend and girlfriend) that were very friendly and open to talking to me. In fact, I was able to speak with them for an hour and a half before they decided to go to bed (in reality), but not before adding me to their friend lists. In that time, I discovered that they were veteran players by five years and shop owners with many custom-made items for sale. Hopefully I will be able to interact with them further in the future. I believe they have much to share with me as far as insight into this culture goes.

These two people were quick to ask me if I was new to the game, presumably because of my default avatar. I don't feel that they treated me as a lesser player, though they did offer me a few snippets of advice, such as how typing "afk" in chat will cause your character to fall asleep or holding down the CTRL key while sending a message will broadcast it to all players in the zone. I saw this as being very friendly and good-willed toward new players. This was a great change from the cold reception I had been receiving from others. However, I may never know if those cold receptions were intentional or simply the result of players being away from their desks.

Week 2: Behaviors

In my second week of Second Life, I encountered many different kinds of people. Some of them actually interacted with me, while others snobbily ignored me in favor of their friends. My first memorable run-in with a fellow player was interesting, to say the least. After entering a region, I began trying to walk up and talk to others. Many of them were either away from their keyboards or purposefully shunning me for being somewhat of an outsider to them, as indicated by their unresponsiveness. Finally, I found someone that would talk to me. His title and ownership of most of the objects in the region made it clear that he was the owner of the little chunk of virtual world I was in. He didn't have much to say about anything in particular, but soon enough made his intentions known that he was homosexual (perhaps not so much him as the in-game version of him? This was unclear) and was interested in "getting to know me better." I was not sure how to respond to this advancement besides "no thanks."

There is a person in a bunny costume stalking me...

The next day, I entered a different region. I was quickly approached by a random person in a bunny costume, who began a voice chat with me. It was made clear that this person was a girl that spoke very little English and fluent Spanish. After a minute of trying to talk to her, I politely told her I had to go and ended the call. As I walked into one of the nearby buildings, I happened to turn around and see the same person closely following me. I walked some more, and each time she followed. I caught a picture of my character sitting near a pool, with the bunny girl inside the castle structure behind, looking out towards me. I continued my study with her following me for the duration.

Couples dancing

In this same region, I found a ballroom setting which had a few couples dancing together. I stopped and watched for a few minutes, waiting to see what type of discussions they would have with eachother. To my dissatisfaction, none of them spoke publicly or possibly at all. When I approached a couple and tried to engage them, neither spoke to me. This seemed to be a trend. The next day, I entered a new region and instantly found something I had been looking for. There was a group of at least six people conversing with both text and public voice chat. I sat on the sidelines for a few minutes, just listening in on the conversations. There wasn't much substance to what they were saying, though the value of the connection was immense to me. I attempted to engage them. Since most of them were women, by their voices at least twenty years old, they began chattering about how attractive I was. I couldn't understand this since my avatar was simply one of the generic default ones available to everyone. Later, two other men walked by, to which the women called their looks out as well.

Later, I visited a new zone modeled after New York City. The streets were lined with shops, each one selling a different type of good. They all had something in common, though. They were all gender-specific goods, such as revealing clothes for women and overzealous jewelry for men. This was not something unique to this zone. Most of the shops I had passed in other zones appeared to cater to people that wanted to be flashy and stand out. Beyond Victoria Secret-esque clothing for women and gaudy bling, there were also shops for hairstyles, food (there isn't a point to it since in-game characters don't get hungry), and even vehicles. I found a motorcycle on sale for 399 Linden dollars. According to The LindeX, 399 Linden dollars is equivalent to $1.61 USD at the current exchange rate.

Hairstyles and facial art on sale

These experiences conclude that people in Second Life play the game in two different modes. The first and seemingly most common mode is social detachment, where the person only ever interacts with the friends they have already established. The second mode is social exploration, where the person acts flirty or otherwise enticing to others. This is similar to real-world social behaviors in the case of introversion versus extroversion. However, usually these behaviors are established and held to. I ponder if the same is true for Second Life, or if the two may be swapped as found appropriate by the person.

Week 1: The Nature of SL

Second Life is meant to be a virtual means for people to come together and, at the broadest level, interact. What exactly is the nature of that interaction? What is meant to be accomplished through digitally communicating with other people, with very few of them actually knowing who the others really are? From the sign-up page of Second Life, it becomes immediately evident that there is more than just "people talking to people about ideas." The first page of the sign-up process shows a carousel of characters (avatars) that the player may use to represent themselves in the world. The strange part comes in when it's realized that there are more than just humanoid avatars available.

Pick your poison: Choosing an avatar

From the screenshot, we can see a few random avatars selected from the categorical tabs along the top of the page. We see there are humanoids available, though many of them are still fantasy-related. Vampires, robots, and even evil bunny costumes make up the swatch. It's important to note that there are even vehicle avatars available! While these aren't the avatars you are stuck with (a player can customize their avatar later on), I feel it does speak a lot about the purpose of the game to have these sorts of avatars as the defaults. In fact, clicking the People tab still doesn't bring up any "Everyday Joe"-type avatars. There are rock stars, divas, bums, and suavely dressed people, but nothing that could easily blend into a crowd.

Inside the game, people are able to buy pieces of land and build multi-purpose structures. Much like the default avatars, they range from realistic yet exaggerated, to flat-out ridiculous. Related, large lots of land usually with specific purposes set out for them also exist, called regions. These buildings and purposed patches of land become the main pubs for people to meet and interact. Generally, the buildings don't seem to convey obvious purpose unless they are distribution centers for virtual goods (shops and service outlets). People in clubs, like people in regions, take on their own interested roles with no concern for the overarching action and conversation around them, each person having their own fanatic agenda to pursue. One of the first regions I visited was a train station, where people were busier dancing around the tracks than actually going anywhere or accomplishing anything.

From the nature of the default avatars and the ways in which people mingle, I can make an educated assumption that the overall nature of social interaction in this game, from the point of view of both the game's maintainers and the small sample of players I've observed, is more about role-playing than the spread of ideas and contemporary banter. This project is already beginning to show the vast difference between real and virtual social interaction, in Second Life at least.

Wired Articles

Wired.com is a recognized name in gadget news reporting for the technologically advancing society we live in today. Here, I've collected three articles involving emerging technologies that Wired has recently published and some thoughts on them.

Toshiba Makes A Tablet
On July 19, 2011, Wired reported on a handheld tablet device manufactured by the Japan-based electronics giant, Toshiba. The device runs the mobile operating system developed by Google called Android, which is also used by many other handheld devices including smartphones. Unfortunately, Toshiba's handheld was experiencing issues early in its life after release, involving the power saving features. In my opinion, these issues should've been easy to catch in testing before release. I blame the laxed testing on the fact that Toshiba doesn't make handheld devices! They specialize in TV, disk data storage systems, and more recently laptops. Each company should stick to what they're provenly good at instead of jumping into industry races.

In An MMO Far, Far Away...
BioWare recently released a new entry in the massively multiplayer online role-playing genre focusing on the Star Wars universe. The Old Republic allows players to travel the galaxy as a customizable character, fighting alongside friends of equally customized stature. This specific article was interesting to me because it works to discredit the marketed genre of the game. BioWare themselves admit that the game can be fun with other people, but doesn't focus as much on the massive gathering of people to complete objectives like other similar games do. If the player so chooses, there is a lot to be done solo. So, does that make this game a singleplayer RPG with massively multiplayer options, or a massively multiplayer RPG with singleplayer playability? The side the developer chooses may have major repercussions since it basically sets up who the target market is.

Why Wi-Fi?
A new trend amongst television manufacturers is to encorporate Wi-Fi connectivity into their giant, crisp, ridiculously slender devices. Sony is no exception. Back in 2008, Wired reported that Sony was developing the world's skinniest (at the time) TV, measuring 9.9 millimeters thick. It's very likely that this TV was what broke the mold for plasma screens and began a new industry struggle for "who can make the first TV thats thinner than paper?" The issue I have with this move by Sony isn't that they started a new fad of skinny-screened devices for years to come, but that they just had to put Wi-Fi functionality into it. It's a nice convenience to be able to communicate wirelessly between PCs and TVs, but seriously, why would you want to? Why not just make the TV a computer and save the money on having to get both? Or better yet, do what everyone else does and get a big flatscreen monitor for your PC and forget about the TV! We have to consider, at what point are we ceasing to provide functional convenience and starting to jack up the price tag just for some extra bells and whistles no one really needs?

Introduction

Hello! Welcome to my 8-week-long project submission for a class I'm currently taking in pursuit of a degree in Game and Simulation Programming.

This marks the beginning of an educational undertaking -- An investigation of social interactions within digital media, specifically Second Life. This project spans 8 weeks of at least 1 hour per day of play in the world. It's the intention of this project to relate virtual (commonly artificial) social life to real-world equivalents.

This specific project is being performed by Blake Ballard under the instruction of Professor David Cox of DeVry University (GSP475), upon the dates of January 1 to February 26, 2012.