I’ve written now and then about the selling of virtual goods in the real world – in fact way back when Everquest first launched I experimented with making money at it myself. The idea is you ‘work’ in the virtual world at acquiring objects that are of high value in the game environment, then sell them off in the real world for real cash. In my own case I calculated that I was making less than the minimum wage and it was just unbelievably boring, a great tragedy, really, given my love of gaming.

Despite my own failed experiments, others have been making a living at this for years now. It fascinates me that one of the most successful models is to outsource the labor to low wage countries, where folks making substantially less than $1 an hour sit in front of machines worth several times their annual earnings, working as virtual peasants in a virtual world by ‘harvesting’ items in gameworlds that citizens of first world countries pay ~$10-15 a month to play in.

Anyway, check out spacethinkdream.com to see these concepts brought to a whole new level. At first glance, their site seems like a typical company website – they’re selling stuff, and they have attractively designed pages for their products with illustrations and clever copy. Except none of this stuff exists anywhere outside of cyberspace – it’s the metaverse of Stephenson’s Snow Crash, for real. These folks code and do design for objects you might care to possess in a virtual world, and will even custom design objects for you for the right price.

In this case they’re designing for one particular game engine (the exceedingly cool Second Life – available for mac and PC) but you will increasingly see this kind of stuff in mainstream gaming environments. I’m really curious to know if the folks at spacethinkdream.com are managing to make a sustainable living at this, and if not, at what point do we reach the tipping point and find folks who spend the majority of their time working and living inside virtual environments like Second Life.

I also desperately wish I could introduce this kind of thing to college campuses. I’ve been working on a couple of instructors at Skidmore, carefully trying to bring them along to the point where I can talk specifically about this stuff without getting mocked out of the room. The potential is vast, and while educators have experimented with VR environments since the 1970’s (with MOO’s and MUCKs and so on) it’s only now that they seem likely to really be able to break into the mainstream.

I’m rambling I guess, but it’s my place, so I’m entitled. Anyway one thing in the real world is happening on the basis of me happening across the spacethinkdream.com site – I’m buying a copy of Second Life and checking it out. They have a very clever licensing scheme – only $9.95 gets you the client and unlimited privileges on the server, with the exception that you cannot own land – where they make their money is in the leasing of land to folks who then build content for others to come see and hopefully spend money on. I’ll post some impressions after I’ve dinked around in it for a while.