Nigel Paravane

I did the weirdest thing this morning: I sold all of my Second Life land and converted most of the Lindens into US dollars.

Am I giving up? Am I pulling up stakes? Why would I do this? This blog entry, the twenty-fifth in this series about Second Life, is about the answers to those questions.

So, firstly, no, I’m not giving up. If all goes well, we’re about to get a new Second Life island that will be devoted to our IBM standards and open source programs. I plan to blog about the design and building of that non-trivial effort. It will be experimental, it will be dynamic, it will be edgy, and it will have a beach. What more could you ask for?

I’ve done most of my building and scripting on my own land and I felt that I hit a plateau. That is, for my own personal projects, I wasn’t doing anything that was new or exciting. With the forthcoming island project, all my ideas, time, and other cycles would be elsewhere. In brief, I wouldn’t be spending much time, if any, on my land, but I would still be paying the land tier price.

I had almost a quarter of a sim, which meant that I was paying about $75 a month. I was willing to pay this for a few months as part of my learning experiment, but I did not plan to continue it indefinitely unless it somehow paid for itself. I did dabble a bit in building furniture and having a store, but I never committed enough time to it to make it successful. So the land became a non-reimbursed personal expense, and I decided to pull the plug.

Note that this was a personal expense. If I was doing something in SL for business reasons, then I would have had all kinds of different considerations. Nevertheless, I would certainly have measured the value I was getting from my investment.

Another reason I sold the land was that I discovered that I was isolating myself from others. Building on one’s own land is a pretty solitary experience, and I just didn’t spend enough time in SL with people, including my professional colleagues. After a while, this really seemed to be defeating a lot of the purpose of SL as another way of communicating and interacting. If I really wanted to spend time alone building, it would be cheaper to buy some Legos.

Next up, I need to spend more time in other virtual worlds. I’m particularly intrigued by some of the open source ones and plan to delve into them. If I get a chance, I’ll highlight some of my experiences. While I had that monthly land tier cost hanging over my head, I felt that if I was going to spend time in a VW, then it should be SL. By eliminating that charge, I’m freer to look around.

In fact, my son and I have spent time in World of Warcraft in the last two months and we have a monthly subscription to that. (I am currently a level 18 19 undead warlock, where the level, I am told, is directly proportional to the amount of your life you have wasted in the game.) So if I choose to get subscriptions to other online games or virtual worlds, I can take it out of the $75 I’m not spending on SL. Or, of course, I might just save the money entirely. Again, remember that I’m talking about personal expenditures, and that IBM will be paying for the costs of the island where I will be working in SL.

My new home location in Second Life is my IBM office. If you stop by, that explains why there is a sleeping bag on the floor. (grin)

The reason why I converted the Lindens to US dollars was so that I wouldn’t just turn around and buy more SL land. I’m still waiting for it to move over to PayPal, though, more than 36 hours later. Several people have asked whether I made money on my various land sales. If you don’t count the land tier fees, I probably lost a little bit, but not too much. Second Life land prices have dropped quite a bit in the last few months.

This is the last entry in this series, but I anticipate that Second Life and other virtual worlds will figure prominently in various future lines of discussion in this blog.