Collaborative and distance communication

Before today, my only experience with Second Life was this clip from The Office:

So you can imagine my shock when I came across this website. That's right, there is an online newspaper devoted to the goings on of the virtual world of Second Life. I found this site after performing a Google search for "Second Life," and it took me about 10 minutes to realize what I was looking at.

After browsing the site for a few minutes, I found a link to an article in the New York Times written by Amy Harmon in January of 2004. Apparently, The Alphaville Herald started out as an online newspaper about an internet game called The Sims Online. Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor, founded the newspaper as the unofficial paper for the fictional town of Alphaville. When he started to publish stories about seedy happenings in Alphaville (scams, cyber-prostitution, cyber-violence, etc.), EA Sports, the makers of The Sims Online, "killed" his character. This incident made international headlines. Shortly thereafter, Ludlow rebranded the website as the Second Life Herald and began focusing on the virtual world of Second Life.

In the aforementioned New York Times article, Ms. Harmon highlights several concerns for these types of online alternate reality games. "The currency of several online games can now be regularly purchased for real dollars on Internet auction sites, allowing people to buy their way into a higher level much as they might pay to get a child into a better nursery school." She quotes Mr. Ludlow about the dangers of the virtual money of The Sims Online gaining real market value. He said that this makes the notion of selling sex online more worrisome.

The alternate-reality gaming world amazes me. The fact that there are people who can devote so much of there time to something so trivial is actually a sign of collective economic prosperity. If you were to spend as much time playing Second Life in the 1700s as you do now (ignoring the obvious technological issues), you would starve to death. I just hope that the world economy continues to prosper so that I can enjoy a better standard of living in the future - but I don't see that happening if everyone eschews the real world in favor of the virtual one.