Second Life

  • A financial consultant on Valleywag, a tech gossip rag, believes that Second Life's economy is really just a pyramid scheme.
    We concluded that we weren't playing in a market at all. We were suckered in by a classic pyramid scheme, albeit one with a pretty new user interface. New entrants plow real money into the game. Only the guys at the top can extract that money with any volume (and in excess of the risk-free rate of return). Attempts to move anything more than token amounts out of the game generally result in real-returns of almost exactly the prevailing USD deposit interest rate.
    (thx, franz) (1) #
    1/25/2007
  • Hey, I'm in the New York Times! Or, rather, my Second Life avatar is. I'm the guy with the beard in the second row from the back, sitting next to crazymonk.org commenter Geoff, attending a lecture on ethnomusicology. (thx, w&w) (10) #
    1/7/2007
  • Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash, has finally publicly commented on Second Life, the real-life manifestation of the virtual world he presciently wrote about in his aforementioned novel:
    Stephenson said he's never used Second Life and has requested that "Snow Crash" site builders make clear that he has no affiliation with the world. "I have nothing negative to say about it," Stephenson said. "There are lots of unread books on my shelves and many interesting parts of the real world I haven't visited yet. Every hour I spend in a virtual reality is an hour I'm not spending reading Dickens or visiting Tuscany."
    (23) #
    11/13/2006
  • The Guardian on the growing literary subculture of Second Life, the online virtual world. Penguin has created a Snow Crash area, introducing avatars to the famous Neal Stephenson novel that popularized the idea of virtual worlds, and another user has created a painstaking recreation of The Shakespare and Co, a legendary Parisian bookshop. (Where the books currently link to Amazon, but will eventually be in-world e-books.) (7) #
    10/24/2006
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