The Second Life Member Challenge

Join the Green Life Innovators Second Life Task Force

Visit the forum for this challenge

Second Life is a virtual world, where the residents interact with one another through their avatars. Contrary to what many people believe, when they first hear about it, it is not a game. At least, not a game, in the traditional sense, where you compete against others or against the computer according to a given set of rules. In the sense that life itself is a game, you could, however, say that Second Life mimics the game of life. Because it does mimic the elements of competition that is part of life, including business competition. Second Life has its own economy, the users attain copyright to whatever they create inside. And it has its own currency, the Linden dollar, which can be bought and sold for US$. You read that right. It is possible to make real money through your activities in Second Life.

As far as I can tell Second Life does not have some of the inconveniences of real life. Your avatar does not need to struggle for food, it can not hurt or kill itself or other avatars neither accidentally nor intentionally. Nor can it pollute its environment. So, as far as I can tell, Second Life has not built into it features to facilitate doing bad things (correct me if i'm wrong). Having said that I, however, assume that Second Life will see real criminal behaviour, if it has not seen it already. Con artists using scams and manipulation to part avatars with their Linden dollars, is something I would suspect will emerge in Second Life.

The purpose of the Second Life members challenge, is to get members of Green Life Innovators to go into Second Life, try to tell people about our community and research in which way we can further utilize Second Life as one of the tools for making “Green Tech the open source way.” The task force should pay special attention to all the virtual university campuses and other places dedicated to education and science within Second Life.  

See a video about Second Life for educational use

External links

Second Life web site, join Second Life here.

Wikipedia article about Second Life

You Tube: Philip Rosdale (SL creator) on TED talks

More YouTube videos about Second Life