com125 assignment 11: virtual worlds

World of Warcraft and Second Life are both very different and very similar. World of Warcraft is a game with a community that has formed around it, partly because certain goals in the game are unachievable without teamwork and a community spirit. While Second Life is a community that has built a game around it, where there are no goals and the community is part of the experience.

Second Life does not function as a game but as an extension of reality; it creates a social platform for users to interact an create their own content. Although it is free to join, the virtual world operates on real currency called Linden. This form of cyber-capitalism is the most apparent within Second Life where more than 10,000 people interact on a daily basis. The games designers give people all of the tools and virtual land they need to create their own unique online experience. People can create their own businesses where they can charge money for virtual accommodations such as a haircut or clothes. One user has even claimed that her Second Life property business has made her a real-world millionaire (Giles, 2007). Although World of Warcraft has a larger number of users, it is different in that it does not allow that free flow of US currency. The only money exchanged is the monthly subscription that is required by all users. In the Warcraft economy, gold and exotic armor and weaponry that players accumulate are given value and are traded amongst one another (Levy, 2008). Although the games content and graphics are meticulously detailed, there are only a small number of people that are actually creating the games content.

It seems as though the most popular economies that are created on the Internet tend to mirror real life. These virtual worlds show similarities to real life at the level of one-on-one social interactions, however, the risks taken online are much greater then the one’s people are willing to take in the real world. Last year one of my Visual Studies professors, Stephanie Rothenberg, got us involved in a project where she studied the economy of Second Life and virtual labor within its middle class. She was even asked to exhibit it at the Sundance Film Festival last year. What she did is she created a sweatshop in Second Life called Double Happiness Manufacturing where they made "designer" jeans. After making a Second Life recruitment video, she collected workers to work long hours at the factory for little pay and in return they received a small area to live on her land. At Sundance, she connected herself to the online factory and had people order jeans from the festival. Their orders were taken by the Second Life workers and then printed out onsite on fabric with an industrial printer and Stephanie and her friends assembled the jeans for the customer.


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References:
Giles, J. (2007). Life’s a game. Nature. Retrieved on November 1, 2008 from https://ublearns.buffalo.edu/courses/1/200809_471918/content/_1019953_1/giles_2007_lifes_a_game.pdf?bsession=29081714&bsession_str=session_id=29081714,user_id_pk1=132593,user_id_sos_id_pk2=1,one_time_token=

Levy, S. (2008). World of warcraft: is it a game? MSNBC. Retrieved on November 1, 2008 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757769/site/newsweek/page/3/