I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing about the glorified 3D chatroom that is Second Life. As such, this Gamasutra post made me very happy:

“While it pains me to report on more Second Life chatter, I was interested to see the responses generated by this post on economist-gamer Randolph Harrison’s blog, Capitalism 2.0. Harrison contends that Second Life’s economic and financial trumpeting has led to it being something like a pyramid or ponzi scheme. He contends that people are throwing away money on it, as they might do on traditional confidence-trickster scams.

“The fact that tax evasion, organized crime and money laundering exist in the virtual world doesn’t distress me all that much; these things exist in the real world, and have for a pretty long time. The distressing part is what this single mom said later; the same thing one will hear over and over from Second Life residents: she was just doing the cybersex and E-Bay stuff to fund her virtual jewelery store. She was a jewelery designer, and had already opened a little shop in a virtual mall. And, to her amazement, she’d already made over L$50,000 after only a month (about $185 USD). I didn’t bother to point out that she hadn’t counted her expenses for renting her virtual shop or accounted for taxes, let alone the fact that she was earning less than 1/100th of what she could get just flipping burgers in the real world.”