After 5 months of playing this "chat room with legs"...

killerwig · December 2007

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.

Jordan23140 · December 2007

WOW,

You must be the luckiest guy ever,

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

Woopin · December 2007

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

Bafucin · December 2007

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

batolemaeus · December 2007

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.

Ragana · January 2008

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

smitty0356 · January 2008

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.

ZsasZ · January 2008

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.

smitty0356 · January 2008

For every dollar made though legit means, a dumb person sank money into a game post-purchase for something that another player can offer. while that is good for the person making the money, it makes him one smart person in a virtual room full of dumb people spending money on a 2nd life... something tells me that he won't enjoy his company (fellow players) too much if that is the case.

killerwig · January 2008

Hey, thanks for the replies,

I haven't been on much because I'm preparing to move to Australia in a few weeks. I'm selling up the land I have in SL - about 20,000 sq m of it - so the stuff I built had to go really (a blank canvas sells a bit better). I took a few piccies though if you're interested.. here they are:

Yeps, it was a shame to lose all that. I spent 2 weeks building, texturing and scripting it all.. but needs must when the devil drives I guess. Besides, with the move to Australia, I won't be in Second Life much anymore - except to keep my shop running and working on our estate owner's website I just built - incidentally: http://www.nflcompany.com

If you're interested in what I make in SL, here is a small sample of what I sell on SLX:

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=77588

For anyone who has started playing, or thinking of playing SL to make money - good luck. It's damn hard work, just like in real life - and it's definitely not a quick or easy way to make money... but it can be enjoyable. You'll find my SL name on the slexchange site if you want to message me in world, but please be aware that I'm really, really busy moving.. lol

Take care, happy new year.

(edit - tidying up broken links )

patrikd23 · January 2008

Originally posted by killerwig

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.

Thanks alot for the read, it was intressting. Hope they payed you to write this, if not they should

Enjoy Austraila

killerwig · January 2008

lol .. thanks patrik, but nope, they didn't pay me for this... well, actually.. in a way they have, but only through the normal economic mechanics of the game I guess.

I'll be enjoying oz in just 3 weeks! yey!

Peace

kikinchaz · January 2008

That was a great read. I wish I had the time on my hands to learn all of the aspects of SL to then put time into and get creating things.

Those pictures look fantastic. Enjoy Australia!

Riotgirl · January 2008

Originally posted by Shahate

Not to say you shouldn't try, but DON'T join to make money. Join to be creative, to have an outlet. For example, i run a series of non-profit museums (i am part of the museum sector and wrote my MA thesis on the use of virtual environments for museum exhibitions). The plot these museums are on costs me US$40 a month, and we get maybe US$10-20 back in donations. There is so much potential here BEYOND making some cash on the side....

This is what (potentially) interests me about SL: social interaction changing in the face of technology - especially the 'creative' aspect.

I've been learning Chinese for the last two years, and it is difficult picking up fluency when you by and large think and speak in English 24/7. Social network sites, Skype, podcasts and virtual communities like SL, are all fantastic examples of how technology can be utilized in a creative sense. I'm interested to see whether SL can be used alongside these other tools for language exchange.

Regards,
Riotgirl

baloktime · March 2008

you are lucky guy who get so much good things. I'm envying you.

MChavez · April 2008

Wow, to the OP, your post was incredible. You're right on the money with your review of Second Life as I have had very similar circumstances although didn't take my time in Second Life as far as you did. However, after yet another round of playing the standard MMOs, I am now asking myself again, what do I want? A game or virtual world? The more and more I keep spinning my wheels pointlessly playing one MMO after another or retrying the same MMOs I've tried a million times hoping for something different, the more I realize I sorely need something more out of my online existence. I want so much more than just a game.

Today I went back to Second Life after trying out Entropia Universe. I thought EU might be the pick for me since it combined a game with a virtual world, but from all the research I've done, the costs to get into EU is too much up front. I think it is a tad arrogant of Mind Ark to give nothing to the new user, not even one freebie area, and expect them to pay for every thing up front.

So I said to myself let me take a look at Second Life again. As soon as I got into the world, I saw one of my old friends online. She told me she had become a DJ and was spinning a live set. I went to the club, started listening to the music again and all the memories I had from my first experience with SL came flooding back. I realized then that this is the virtual world for me.

So here's hoping this time around I take my time and appreciate the virtual world around me as opposed to wanting to "conquer rome in one day." I think I've finally got it out of my system that need to experience Gygaxian/MUDD games that now dominate the MMO industry. Rather than sit around all day killing fake crap, I can use Second Life and refocus on my own creative passions and interests....something I had ran away from quite recently but maybe now SL will help bring it back into my life.

Anyway, I babble. Good post.

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After 5 months of playing this "chat room with legs"...

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After 5 months of playing this "chat room with legs"...

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