Discussion at The Village
I finally met Jennatar in-world last night. Our different time zones mean that we’re rarely online at the same time, so it was actually nice to just stumble across her by chance. Jenn is officially the first “semi-real life” friend that I’ve now also met in Second Life… and by “semi-real life” I don’t mean that she’s a figment of my own imagination, I mean that I know her from elsewhere on the Internet and have spoken to her on Skype, but haven’t met her face-to-face.
But to the point. I invited Jenn to join me at another discussion group at The Village, run by Lizzie Gudkov. Tonight’s topic was money in Second Life: whether it was necessary, whether you needed to spend RL money to have fun, ways of making money in SL.
The discussion was interesting as there was a range of varying viewpoints. There were many in attendance who were firmly of the belief that all the money you needed to “get by”, buy clothes and the like was freely available in-world, and there was no need to spend real-life cash. Then there were those who believe that you can get by just on freebies. Then there were those who enjoy setting themselves a “budget” and then seeing what cool stuff they can get from it.
The discussion moved on to ways of making money. An example was cited of one attendee’s estate manager, who started by just buying one sim, now runs over fifty and still somehow has time to enjoy the fun that SL has to offer due to delegation and hiring staff to help.
Digital rights management, in the form of the mod/copy/transfer rules also came up. Some found it frustrating that they weren’t able to “sell stuff on” when they were finished with it, others pointed out that if you were able to do that, “premium” content (whatever that might be) would quickly find itself on the cheapie or freebie market.
There were varying views on the whole subject, as everyone in attendance dealt with money in-world in a different way - but the conclusion was drawn that, even if you personally weren’t someone who spent a lot of (or any) money in SL, money and the acquisition thereof was very much a part of life on the grid.
An interesting discussion.
(NB: To clarify something earlier that I actually wasn’t aware of: Port Merion and The Village are two completely different sims, their only link being their homage to The Prisoner. Port Merion is the picture in the post below. The Village is where I have been attending these discussion groups. Thanks to Lizzie for clearing that up!)
