Virutal Gaming Earns $1 Million
LIKE many canny property investors, Ailin Graef makes a fortune out of buying land and building swish housing. But unlike real life moguls, Graef’s homes don’t exist. They are made of computer pixels, not bricks.
She has just become the first person to make a million dollars by buying and selling land and property on Second Life, a bizarre online simulation game where players live in a virtual world.
On secondlife.com you create a computer-generated version of yourself, called an avatar. In this brave new world, you can live a fantasy life in a posh apartment, make friends, shop and dance the night away at a club.
In fact, you can do pretty well everything you can in real life — along with a few niftier tricks, such as Fly.But unlike other virtual worlds, you can, like Ailin, make real profits.
Players use real money to buy virtual cash, called Linden Dollars (LD), which you can then use to set up and run a fantasy business.
If you are successful, like Graef, you can convert LD back to real cash via currency exchanges on Second Life.
The current rate is about 275LD to one US dollar (or 430 to the Pound).
Graef, a 33-year-old teacher from Frankfurt, joined the site in 2004, creating herself a sexy Chinese character called Anshe Chung. Since then she has made 300,000,000LD, with a real value of just over a million dollars.
By using 3D computer modelling skills, Graef transforms bare pixels of land into lavish properties, public buildings and even roads.
She said: “My initial investment in Second Life was less than ten dollars. I realised people who were looking for land didn’t have the programming skills to develop it.” Other Second Lifers use computer packages to design clothes, jewellery, furniture — anything in fact, which can then be sold to other avatars.
More than 3,000 residents make an average of £10,000 a year from Second Life.
There are around 1.5million residents, 100,000 in the UK. Around 50,000 visit every day for about four hours.
Founder Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab says he wanted to create a world “better than reality but without political or religious issues.”
But now big businesses are getting into the act too.
Vodafone plan to launch virtual telephones, record company Sony BMG supply music and there is even a TV network avatars can watch.
Adidas even created a special 3D version of their new Predator trainers.
It sounds like the plot of a dodgy science fiction movie.
But for the thousands of players, their Second Life is becoming more important than their first one.
