How a cyber world is making real money

Second Life is still tiny compared to social networking sites such as MySpace, but it's rapidly becoming the outlet of choice for forward-thinking marketeers.

Is Second Life a role-playing game?

Not quite it's a virtual community whose members assume the guise of characters in a fictional world. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORPGs), such as World of Warcraft, let players compete online against thousands of other people around the world. Some of them, Entropia Universe for instance, are similar to Second Life in that they let players buy and sell virtual land and goods using an in-game currency that's convertible into real money. However, Second Life is different from other games in that there is no quest or ultimate goal involved, such as rescuing a heroine or becoming the most powerful knight in the kingdom. Second Life's goal is simply to let users immerse themselves in an imaginary alternative world and lifestyle with the added bonus of glorious 3-D graphics and special effects. As the Chicago Tribune put it recently: think MySpace.com meets The Matrix.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.