SL in 5/29 NYTimes

It would help if the mainstream press stopped reffering to SL as a game and lumping it along with WoW, TSO, EQ and the others. It is NOT one of those.

this "money for nothing" puzzlement cracks me up, even if it is entirely unsurprising.

You know, you can't eat, touch, kick, taste, smell software either. It's just a bunch of binary. But hey -- people use it, and they pay for it! How amazing!

then there's this thing called gourmet food! I mean, you don't need it, and once you eat it, it's gone. Forever! And people pay a lot of money for this! Now that's amazing!

not to mention that my waiter gave me great service last night and i tipped him. I can't see, touch, taste or stick that service up on the shelf, but it enhanced my life, and I happily paid for it. amazing concept...

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then again, some people have trouble understanding the social relationships that form within Secondlife. I mean, it's not REAL right? I never advocate substituting virtual life for "real" life, but I see the exchange of ideas and interaction between two or more people online indeed as real and worthy social communication.

maybe it just comes down to comfort level with computers, technology, and change

I have to laugh when people think there is something more highfalutin about making a pixelated doll outfit for a doll in a dollhouse as being "more real" and "more important" and "more creative" than selling real estate. Why is it more legitimate? Because somebody spent hours hovering over a hot PSP and making textures and drawing little tiny noses? That's not like gold-farming? Making something out of nothing? It's like Rapunzel spinning gold, or the Left-Handed Craftsman shoeing the fly.

But somebody spends hours parceling and terraforming land and dealing with huge numbers of customer service and administrative issues -- and that doesn't count? That's just "gold-farming"?

These are just different kinds of activities, and there is no need to slam one at the expense of the other.

There are enough articles in both the blogosphere and the mainstream press about the content-king side of SL to make the point that people have designs and get rich off designs. OK, God bless them.

But surely you want this game to be something more than just a 3-D adjunct to your PSP machine for you to run your website fo TSO-like creations (there is a vast fansite sub-culture of clothes and furniture for off-line TSO games -- for money -- have you tapped into it?)

And you want that because you want customers and you want the game to grow. So you need to understand that land ownership rights, respect for land dealing, an end to hatred of the land baron class, a recognition that land ownership and responsibility is a civilizing force -- is all something you should support rather than shun or ridicule.

Honestly, the thing that perplexes me most often about SL is the division between land barons and content-creators. And I can only chalk it up to the influence of utopian ideologies that scorn land ownership.

Of course it counts, Prok. If you're providing an actual service that IS an application of your creative energies. It's the articles themselves that make the comparison to gold farming. This article at least made some mention of the fact that services are being provided, but then they go right on to talking about UO, or WoW, or whatever, which to me suggests the authors themselves see no difference, and hence, miss the point.

How bout software even? The vehicle I bought in SL is every bit as real as Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Actually, it's all money for nothing.

What we're all doing here is getting into issues of capitalism versus marxism versus others without even realising it.

However, I think it's best not to try to put a value to the service, objective or subjective (only the market can really do that!)

What you can do though, if you wanted to, is say this requires this many years of university, and that requires that many years of university.

While there are still cases I'd rather a brilliant but uneducated individual over a moronic guy with a PHd, it's still a pretty compelling way of of discussing the relative merits of different occupational activities. Ie: gold farming versus LSL scripting, for example.

To heck with the content creators and the land barons. What about the poor entertainers? Which you might call an entertainment or even a service category.

What about them? Why don't they get talked about? Because they are a dying breed, that's why. You can't make money at it. (Well, maybe the hookers do, I don't know.) Because what little means they had for making entertainment profitable was yanked away. So now we have less of them, and more of those who are left having to do it purely for their love of providing entertainment, rather than any hope of making much - if any - money at it.

And what about the educators? Like irl, they are paid a pittance. Moreover, I have yet to understand how they get approved. It apparently has little to do with their teaching skills, judging by a few of those classes which I have attended.

contentcreatorcoco

i don't think it's that dire, but robin is working on it. im/email/hotline her if you want more details.

I don't think that's why, Coco. Most of these articles seem to be written by people who aren't familiar enough with SL to know anything about the entertainment market in world. If they were really covering the creativity angle instead of the "virtual goods" angle I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't talk about entertainers. There have been a couple of really good articles about SL, but most of them follow the same pattern of this particular one.

Well, I agree, Chip, but the article - and many others - is about turning a game into rl personal profit. My point is, if the creativity and content produced by entertainers and the like has no way of being profitable, naturally they aren't going to be talked about in these articles.

And of course, an article focusing on the creativity in the game would naturally (if it is well done, as the NYT piece was with its topic) include entertainers and other forms of producing creative non-physical content.

coco