Companies Continue to Get a Second Life

PreacherTom writes "Reuters and CNET aren't the only players staking online claims in the virtual world of Second Life. Yesterday, Wired magazine opened their 1-acre digitized headquarters, complete with neon-pink sliding doors and a nouveau 50 person conference room. Businessweek takes a look at the new virtual offerings from Adidas, Toyota, Lego, and even Major League Baseball in their pictoral spread. 'We are this canvas that allows companies to do what they want to do in Second Life,' says David Fleck, Linden's vice-president of marketing. 'It mimics real life much more accurately.'"

Re:Um..

[jandrese]

Interestingly enough, that's pretty much with all new players have to do, since you don't start out with a home and the newbie plots are generally all grabbed up by unscrupulus land speculators with tons of alt accounts.

Been done (but not in SL)

[smellsofbikes]

Your idea is great.
I started my serious online addiction playing LambdaMOO [wikipedia.org] in about 1993. To sum up, it's a textual VR set in the then-house of Pavel Curtis, who created Lambda (and ncurses and other big unixy things) and you wandered around and played with things. One of the things was a computer, and if you could get it to boot (find the power switch, plug in the monitor, find the boot disc -- this was '93, after all) you could play games on the computer. As I recall, Adventure was on there, and I think there was a mini-version of Lambda, establishing recursion.

Re:Um..

[merlin_jim]

I feel this overwhelming urge to start a homeless character who will sleep in their bushes and pee on their steps.

They exist... in overwhelming numbers since it became free with no verification or IP logging to create such a beast... they're called griefers... and they brought the whole world down for the last three weekends in a row...

Re:Um..

[jandrese]

Here's the 30 second primer on Secondlife.

When you first sign up, you have a beginners account. This account cannot buy land, I don't think free accounts get a stipend anymore because people abused it like crazy, but you do get a signing bonus. The build system is integrated into the game, and it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are some areas ingame that have good tutorials on how to use it. Anyway, you can build anything you want most anywhere, however it is considered bad manners to build stuff on other people's land, and some people have building turned off on their land (although this is uncommon). You can also go to one of many sandboxes around the world and build stuff, however every few hours everything in the sandbox is returned automatically so you can't leave a permanent structure up. You can however save your work in your inventory and then bring it back out to work on it later.

If you want to leave your work up permanently, you need to either buy or rent some land. To buy land you need to upgrade your account. The upgraded account costs $10/month, but comes with a weekly stipend that you can convert into real $ to help offset the cost of the account. You can also buy a small plot of land that will let you leave a small structure (the complexity of your builds is limited by the size of your plot) up permanently. Renting is similar except that you can do it with a basic account and it can sometimes be cheaper monthly than buying. You lose out on any land appreciation, although that tends to be very low in Secondlife because new land is added all of the time. Landords can offer you land cheaper than buying because there are large bulk discounts for owning huge amounts of land. Landlords make a profit off of the difference.

Building is fairly simple. You start out with basic shapes called Primitives or Prims (Cube, Torus, Sphere, etc...) that you can deform, stack together, and texture to make whatever you like. While it is easy to make something in the system, it is somewhat difficult to make something that looks good. Like all artistic creations, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A reasonably powerful scripting language is also available that can add a lot of life to your creations.

You also have a lot of flexibility in your avatar's appearance. This is one reason the furry community has taken to Secondlife, it is not overly difficult to turn your avatar into an animal shape. The skeletal model the game uses more or less requires that you make your avatar bipedal if you want realistic movement, but other than that it's quite flexible. There is a big market in-game for new clothes and accessories for your avatar.