Get ready to have your mind blown.

This weekend, I signed up for a free Second Life account. I'll call Second Life an online "game", but it's really more of a big virtual world. So, you control a person in the game, and wander around a virtual landscape.



In the game, every player has access to tools which allow them to create clothes and modify body shape, as well as build new objects. With clothing, you can always say "I want a new shirt", and with a click, you have a new shirt in your inventory. You can then choose from a library of styles and colors and textures, and rename it from "New Shirt" to "My Blue Denim Long Sleeved Shirt" and keep it forever and ever. What's crazy is that you can do the same thing for body shapes. You can create a new pair of eyes, say, and give them a color and shape, and when you drag them on your guy in the game, voila, he has new eyes.

If you make a folder filled with clothes and body shapes, and drag that whole folder to your guy, then all the changes in that folder get applied to your body. So, you can go from being a tall, strapping man to a short, miniskirt'd raver chick in a second. For those of us used to static game environments, it's really a trip that your representation is so dynamic.

All players can also build arbitrary objects in the game. You can say "I want a cube right there", and with a few clicks of the mouse, you can create a cube. Or a sphere, torus, or a dozen other primative shapes. The basic primatives can then be manipulated (moved, stretched, skewed, etc), and you can attatch many primitives (aka "prims") together to create complex objects. Prims can be colored and textured (you can upload your own textures). Most of the content you find in the word has been created by users is this fashion, and as a result, the quality is highly variable.

As a programmer, the coolest thing is there is a scripting language where you can write code that attaches to your objects and controls them. For example, I made a "firework" object by creating a cylinder, a cone for the nose, and some tail-fins. I then wrote code so that when you touched the object, it flew up into the air and exploded. Pretty neat.

Now, there is the concept of money and land ownership in the game. With a free account, you are not able to own land, and you start of with only a small amount of in-game money. However, if you sign up for a premium account with a small monthly payment (on par with other online games), you are given a small plot of land and some more in-game money.

Land ownership is important, as the people who own land can control everything that happens on it. For example, if I create something on someone else's land, it's because they've allowed me to by setting their land options to allow building. And if I create something and leave it on someone else's land, most likely it will get cleaned up and returned to my inventory automatically after some amount of time has passed.

With money in the game, you get the concept of creating items and selling them. You can even buy land and charge rent for users to put stuff up. The sum of those concepts is that people have bought land, created big shopping-mall like areas (with little kiosks and stalls for selling items), and then rented out those areas. For a small amount of rent, people can sell their goods, and the sum of that rent should cover the cost of the land ownership for the landlord.

Now get ready to have your mind be blown.

The currency in the game is called Linden Dollars, or L$. (Linden Labs is the creator of the game). Through the Second Life website, you can exchange L$ for real US Dollars. There is a variable exchange rate for doing this (it's currently around L$ 280 for $1 USD.

I can get on this game, create virtual objects out of nothingness, sell it to people for virtual money, and then exchange that money for real US money. Or buy land that doesn't exist, rent it out, and make money off it. In fact, some people have done this so successfully, they have quit their day jobs to run their full time business in Second Life.

Let that sink in for a second.

I fooled around in the game all weekend, and have been having a blast. As I said, I created my firework object. Someone gave me a "vending machine" type object. I put my fireworks in the vending machine, and found a place that allowed me to set up said vendor for free (or cheap). I also created a mini "desktop" firework thing, that is a decorative item that would launch fireworks up about 3 feet and explode them in a radius of about 1 foot, meant to sit on someone's desk and look cool. My fireworks sell for L$2 each (what, less than a penny?), and I put up the generator for L$150. I logged off the first night, and by the middle of the day the next day, I'd sold L$68 worth of fireworks! It was really neat.

On the website's forums, they have "help wanted" ads, and there are a couple leads on people who are good at creating objects, but aren't programmers. There is the potential for doing fun game programming and getting paid for it as well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to quit my day job quite yet, but I'd enjoy creating and scripting game objects for free, if I can try to sell the objects or the skill, why not?

Crazy.