So...now SL is just a video game? Or is it?

I'd rather basement dwell and walk down to the corner store for groceries than waste so much of my time and money for gas dealing with all the human wastes of oxygen that clog the roads.

Living off SL has it's stresses, but staring into highbeams and almost getting into accidents every day aren't any of them.

Some of the more hyperbolic claims about how to define SL stem from a too eager reading of a few specific science fiction books. Maybe in the end those claims will turn out to be correct, but I suspect for most people who "play" or "visit" this platform, SL is simply a form of social recreation. As such, it competes against other forms of social recreation, such as online games, and it is approached as such and will be abandoned as such when another game inevitably becomes more attractive. Yes, you can find examples of people who have abandoned their real life vocations in pursuit of some financial opportunity here, but judging from the amount of "gold-selling" in WoW, I'd say some people "play" WoW for equally lucrative real-life financial reasons. Even P.T. Barnum would be shocked at the gullibility of people if he saw the tier prices in SL for a little piece of virtual space.

The utopian ideal some people describe as the future of SL is frightening in its own right, but coupled with the ID verification about to be thrust down our throats I'd describe it as a nightmare of Orwellian proportions. Poo-poo that all you like, but that's how I see it. I would love to believe that a place of the mind has more freedom, more creativity, more possibility than the physical world, but I see SL moving firmly in the direction of repression, constraint, regulation.