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Personnel Today

Real-life losers in virtual heaven

by Personnel Today 7 Mar 2006
by Personnel Today 7 Mar 2006

If the pressures of the modern workplace are too much for you, then perhaps you’d like to step into a virtual existence.

Unbeknownst to Guru, for the past three years, an entire virtual world has been operating online.

It’s called Second Life, and people can create an alter-ego and live their life as they’d like online. The spin-off from this is that enterprising folk are making enough money to quit their jobs in the real world.

Take Chris Mead from Norfolk, who sells animations that allow game players to create more realistic items. They pay for this in the game’s own Linden dollars, which can be exchanged for US dollars. Mead reckons he earns $2,000 a week. Some people sell virtual clothing, another claims to be a theme park developer, and one even sells virtual tattoos.

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Having a look at the site is a rather interesting experience. Go to secondlife.com and have a browse around. You might find to your amazement that it has a very large population of scantily clad nubile women wandering around. Who’d have thought those who sit in their bedrooms late into the night creating an imaginary world would populate it in this way?

Guru recommends some people (there are about 150,000 second-lifers at the moment) might want to concentrate on getting a first life before embarking on another.

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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