Second Life calls in the police: If you gamble with fake money, does it count?
If you have any exposure to the increasing media frenzy of Web Bubble 2.0, you have probably heard of Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world where you can present yourself in ways untethered by your actual looks and interact with other people doing the same thing in a virtual landscape. There is no overriding goal such as Freeing The Princess or Finding The Magic Sword. Instead, the idea is to participate in a mirror world which presumably is cooler than our own. In a world like this, a few areas have economic value:
- “land” which is sold by the creator, Linden Labs, along with use fees
- design elements such as clothes, pets, and special effects created by users with the patience and talent to work through the code
- and of course, pornography
Similar to their real-life equivalents, all of these cost money. To facilitate such transactions, Linden Labs has created Linden Dollars, which can be traded for U.S. dollars.
In general Second Life does not show up on the radar for background check companies, except for some of their less savory enterprises. But as it turns out, Second Life hosts another familiar online business […]