Second Life

Weird review alert...

A chat room with legs. That's what I used to call Second Life (SL) in the beginning. I started playing because the SATA port on the back of my hard drive snapped off, and I was left with a poxy 20GB drive and nowhere to go. I'd seen the virtual world documentaries and heard about the very real possibilities of making real money in Second Life. I had nothing better to do and needed an online fix of some sort. So I thought... "what the hell".

Downloaded. Installed. Newby Island.

It took me just a few minutes to realise that everyone could fly - no skilling up or grinding required. I also learned pretty quick that I could teleport anywhere on the "Grid". So super powers right from the start. Nice.

I was on a mission to make money. That was my sole motivation for picking up this game (if you can call it that). So I set about learning how to use what I already knew to make a bit of money in the game. But first, I decided to explore every freebies place I could find and filled my inventory with mostly junk - but quite a few gems too, along the way. The LAG was totally horrendous in these places though - in fact, LAG is a fact of (second) life in this game. Rather masochistically though, you get used to it. The LAG almost becomes invisible. Burnt toast. ;)

I then decided to rob the hell out of these online survey machines called "HippiePay" that pay you in Linden dollars for providing useless and false information . Now a lot of people said they don't work for them, but damn - they did for me. Around L$800 (about $3 usd) in 1 hour, in fact.

I spent the money on a new skin for my avatar (yes you can buy skin), 2 weeks rental on a little shop in a mall, and the rest went on uploads and classified ads for the in game search. You see, I'm a graphics designer - so designing tattoos was a natural option for me. I knew I had to be competitive with all the big tattoo stores in second life, so I decided to also do custom tattoos as well - made to order. And the orders began to come in!

I wasn't making a lot of money, but I sure was filling up my friends list - and fast. Second Life is probably the ultimate social game - a chat room with legs. If you enjoy meeting and talking to people from all over the world, you might like this aspect of the game. And of course, a few people wanted to help me out too - which was cool.

Land. Now when I learned about land, I really liked the idea. I liked the idea that you could build your own house, shop, castle, nature park - anything, and texture, script and light it all exactly how you wanted it. - Think the sims ... on acid. You'll see what I mean when you fly over the mainland. The shame is that most people in SL can't really build worth a damn, and come up with crazy hotchpotched eyesores that look like they evolved out of some kind of psychadelic spinning hippie brain-fart. Again, you'll see what I mean when you fly over the mainland. But there's a few - a few genius artists within SL that create really awesome stuff - and they're the kind of enterprising people that are making a lot .. and I mean - A LOT, of real life USD.

Oh yeah.. by the way. Land is damn expensive usually. And it has high running costs. Want an entire sim (65,000 m sq.) to play with? - expect to pay $1,500 USD up front and at least $195 USD per month. But don't worry, it scales down from there. Bottom line is that when you buy land in SL, you're starting to get serious about making money there. (or maybe just showing off). Case in pint - one of my good friends owns 16 islands ... yes that's 16 sims at the above price (and more). And yes, he makes a very healthy RL income from renting out smaller parcels of land to people. He's serious about making money in SL.

So I got myself some land and learned how to build luxury homes. And then I needed more land, and more luxury homes. And these homes were renting to people for around $10 usd per week each (about $2,500 linden dollars). I couldn't build them fast enough. People seemed to love them  - My new tattoo (and now avatar skins) store was making more and more money and I was deliving into other projects like opening a night club, hiring staff, DJ's and hosting live events for avatars to dance at. I even had a great R&B and Hip Hop artist playing there out of LA and who owned a recording studio in Vegas in RL. We had exotic dancers (yes... strippers) willing to tease the minds of any guys who were willing to pay them some money (yes, it happened a lot.... virtual sex sells, didn't you know?).

Second Life began bleeding over into real life in a big way when I met an awesome girl who lives in Australia. We started getting pretty serious just as I was perfecting just about every skill I had learned in SL - texturing, skinning, tattoos, 3d modelling, scripting, 3d building, social event planning and hosting (PARRRTAYY!), landscaping and even web design and graphics design - you name it, and I do it. - How serious was this getting?... well, lemme just say that I am moving halfway around the world next year to live in Australia. Yes, it's THAT serious.

My plans changed. We sold the nightclub for around $200 usd - we didn't have the time and the damn thing was more like a RL job than a fun experimental game thing. Try managing 15 members of staff in different time zones around the world, arranging for DJ's to spin their stuff, live events and get the people in who spend their money on the girls and on somehing called a skill sploder (last person to pay into the sploder wins the Jackpot - minus 15% of a house cut, of course). It was truely a nightmare sometimes. On top of that, the luxury home rentals started to die off until we had 6 lovely but vacant luxury properties sitting idle.

So I turned all the land (about one third of a sim) into a lake, waterfalls, forest and magnificent luxury home on the clifftops - complete with mountain top spa, ruins, sunbeams, pixies fairies, fireflies, hummingbirds.... you probably get the idea. The estate owner (the guy who owns the island) was so impressed, he's hiring me to build New York's central park on another city sim he has. He also hired me to design his business website.

We're working on a new incarnation of our tattoo/skins/avatar accessories shop. And we're making more money than ever. On top of that... Australia - pretty damn soon. And Second Life is paying the air fare!!!

Now... what other online game can do this? - WOW?.. nah... EQ2, LOTRO, EvE???... no chance...

This glorified chat room with legs is taking me further than any other online game I have ever experienced - or will experience. While everyone else is "leveling up" and getting their uber pWnZ0r phat lewts in other games, I'm looking forward to spending my time in the sun in South Australia... paid for largely thanks to Second Life - and far removed from rainy, cold and partially flooded Great Britain (we're sinking you know).

I'm kinda glad that my hard drive broke.

Just thought I'd tell you where this game *could* take you. If you're bored and willing to do the whole social creative thing and make friends, put up with bugs and lag and griefers and sex and perverts and the whole crazy commercial melting pot that is humanity.... then try this game out.

Thanks for reading.

WOW,

You must be the luckiest guy ever,

so... how did you get the online surveys were they ingame ?

Originally posted by Jordan23140

WOW,

 

You must be the luckiest guy ever,

so... how did you get the online surveys were they ingame ?

Most pay to camp spots have them scattered all over SL :)

Nice post!  Sad I'm not that good on graphic design. =(

Actually, this is why i play Eve: It still (mostly) feels like a game, not like a virtual extension for my first life. ;)
Gratz to you for applying real life skills into a real virtual bussines. (heh) :)
I think if you can do this in a virtual real space, you should be able to do the same in Real Life too.

    I read the whole post and I am just purely blown away. I will be turning 18 in a couple of months and signing up for Second Life will surely be my top priority.

    Is there any way I could contact you( via email, aim, etc.) and ask you some questions. I am extremely interested in your opinion and advice if you have some to offer.
 

Thank you sir for this great post.

~Tomas

The OP hit the nail on the head.  I remember back in high school when the internet was brand new, and we were sulking around the chat rooms, and meeting strange and mostly annoying people....  that's exactly what this game is.

Sure you can buy an island for 1000 bucks that you don't need in 1st life  but I would pity anyone too successful in this game before envy.

Maybe if they made money greater than a job while having fun or something.... but I bet that is rare.

Just to inject a little 'voice of reason' in here....

Before I even start, let me say I am in no way doubting or refuting what the OP said. If that really happened, congrats, I'm extremely happy for you. However.... please keep in mind that this is the exception, not the norm. This is the guy in the 3AM diet pill informercial jumping up and down saying 'I lost 410 pounds in 3 hours!' with the teeny tiny text at the bottom of the screen saying 'Extreme example. Individual results may vary'. Yes, it is possible to make money in SL, but it requires lots of time, luck, skill, ability, or some combination thereof. Try it, enjoy it... just don't quit your day job yet.