Second+Life+Commerce

=Commerce=

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//It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.// - Everett Sloane, Citizen Kane

One of the major formal and informal uses of Second Life is as an instrument of commerce. As people enter their Second Life and begin to navigate around the grid they often begin to feel the need to equip their avatar. This can happen on several levels, from the purchasing of skins and clothing items to procuring property, building textures, cars, airplanes, spaceships, furniture, even friends. If it can be rendered in three dimensions and put upon the grid, chances are there is someone out there in the vast expanses of Second Life seeking to buy it. Traditionally, in real life, our commercial spaces were also social spaces. Between larger and more recognizable unifying institutions like churches and schools lay a whole community filled with private enterprise which encouraged and supported public interaction. Walking down Main Street in a small American town was once a social event. Familiar faces abounded at the market, the hardware store, the barber shop, and the theater. Local pedestrians moving within and between these locations were often interrupted by conversation from friends and acquaintances. As the focus of commercial activity began to divert away from downtowns and into malls, strip malls, box stores, and shopping centers along major highways which often times bypassed the town proper, the downtown and the social/cultural interaction it brought withered away. The faces behind the counters of stores were no longer stable, no longer the familiar faces people had seen on a daily or weekly basis. The stores were larger and farther apart, making walking from one to another impossible and removing the chance of a meeting or conversation within them or along the way. The movement of commerce away from the city alienated people from each other just as the removal of agriculture from the small community farms to an industrial orientation alienated them from the land.

In Second Life, this process of alienation is taken a step further,

Absenteeism
In the many stores on the grid few actual users are present. Avatars may abound in these areas when viewed from the Second Life map, but for the most part they are campers. Automated greeting bots are used make sure users who teleport or walk into the store get a notecard and a landmark  to spread publicity, but the effectiveness of this method is unclear. After a few sessions on Second Life most users learn to refuse most of the notecards and landmarks  offered them lest they become bogged down with too many objects and an unnavigable list of places to visit. This nullifies business owners' attempts to make their shopping areas into communities. Commercial spaces fail to become centers for community activity because there are no familiar faces working them day-in and day-out. Shopkeepers in Second Life are given the luxury of a 'set it and forget it' format where they post images of the item for sale and the buyer need not do any more than click on it to make a purchase. A deeper level of abstraction is set upon it as the items being sold are typically not real life objects, but items, skins, and textures rendered in Second Life. These artifices are not purchased with concrete money, but with L$, which, thanks to camping, can be acquired just for parking one's avatar in a commercial area.



Similar to the American downtown, Second Life commercial areas are filled with empty, open space waiting for vendors to come in. Perhaps the Second Life economy is facing a similar downturn to that of the real world. With more money going to users' gas, electricity, and grocery bill there is less real life currency to convert to Linden Dollars.

Camping
//see also camping// In Second Life, 'camping' is an activity whereby users set their avatars to 'sit' or perform an activity within a commercial space in exchange for LindenDollars (L$). The camping avatars are paid by time period, usually between 10 and 30 minutes. Owners of commercial spaces in Second Life use campers as a way to attract customers. In an old fashioned main street, activity similar to camping would be performed by townspeople participating in public interaction, however, in Second Life avatars are present with the absence of participation. Though commercial areas may appear to be filled with many avatars on the map, they are often static places devoid of people and activity. Another method commercial groups use to try to attract more avatars to their shopping areas are dance parties.

Disconnect


The disconnection of shoppers and merchants is but one stratus of the commercial alienation on Second Life. Many merchants and shopkeepers are not involved in the creation of the items they are selling. This disconnect is common in real life - Walmart does not make the socks and DVDs its customers purchase there. Many of these merchants, like Walmart, don't purchase the items they are selling from the people who made them - or even from distributors who purchased the goods from the manufacturer or creator. Many items for sale in Second Life were taken without any semblance of permission and placed into a shop for sale.



This leads to a skewed system of commercial value in Second Life. Often times shopkeepers do not know what kind of effort went into designing certain graphical objects and fail to price them accordingly. Objects that may have taken dozens of hours to properly construct and render can sell less for objects that were created with a simple paint-can tool. Because the items being sold are digital in nature it is clear that shopkeepers have difficulty attaching monetary value to them. Large shops may sell clothing and shoes for 1L$ because the people who own the property and run the shop were completely disconnected from the creation of these objects. Furthermore they do not have to pay for their store stock per item - once they have bought one copy of an item to sell, a new copy will be made for each customer who choses to purchase it. Though custom goods exist in Second Life, unique items are almost an impossibility. This brings about a certain level of homogenization - everyone chooses from the same group of swords, cars, and clothes. Since more customized textures and items are generally more expensive, people usually end up picking from a limited selection of items so virtually cheap that they are actually worthless.



Therefore, commerce in Second Life more closely follows the homogenized, generic, impersonal and cheap Walmart model than the traditional, community-oriented Main St model. To attract customers, then, commercial areas sell image as much as they sell objects. Second Life businesses use advertising and naming techniques to try to ensure users that their avatars need certain items - hence the store above, Damage, advertises that it sells 'Devastating Outfits for Ladies and Men'. Another trick used in Second Life to attract customers and boost sales is the 'Great Deal' - this should be familiar to readers who have seen used car-dealership advertisements, 'prices so low you can't possibly turn them down, and the huckster running the lot will even throw in his/her 10 gallon hat with every purchase of over $X!' Big-box shopping meccas like WalMart use these deals as well, offering up ludicrous deals like 10 pairs of hedgeclippers for $20 - who could actually need 10 hedge clippers? The sign above was from a shop selling prefabricated Second Life buildings for $500 apiece. To boost sales they offer all of their buildings for the (low, low) price of 'ONLY L$ 1000'. What an average Second Life user would need 20 different building designs for, unless trying to build a mini-city on a private island, is beyond me.

Artifice


Second Life commercial products also have the problem of being digital representations of real objects - they can't help be cheap artifices. Hence stores like the Nepal Trader which advertises that it sells genuine Tibetan Goods couldn't be farther from the truth - as you can see, there is a healthy mixture between Buddhist, Celtic, and contemporary Western designs. Yin-Yang necklaces aren't just non-Tibetan, they're not Buddhist either!

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