What Is “Second Life”?

Second Life is not a computer game. It is a website enabling visitors to enter a huge 3-D virtual world with millions of participants. At every given moment, you can enter this virtual world as any character you wish to be, and there you can meet many other characters. The experience resembles a 3-D movie where you are both the spectator and the actor.

Everything in this world is run by the players, whose average age is thirty-one. They make business transactions and trade a total of three million real American dollars a day! Of course, they do it using the local currency, called “the Linden Dollar.” (270 Linden Dollars amount to one American dollar), which is traded in the local (virtual) stock market based on a fluctuating rate.

They chat, shop, hang out, purchase homes and land, build malls, get married (then divorced), watch movies, attend lectures, party at clubs, loiter at coffee shops—you name it.

And all of this, ladies and gentlemen, is pure virtual.