(Good Lord - I posted over 210 new photos at my Flickr account this weekend, fully illustrating all the stories talked about today, along with lots of comments and notes for serious gamers that you won't find here. They're referenced and linked within the stories below when appropriate; or, you can click here to see them all at once.)

Greetings, true believers! Well, after an overwhelmed G4, a reader fundraiser, two months of frantic freelance work, and waiting forever for my new Mac Intel Mini, I've finally gotten a chance to start playing Second Life. I've been playing for a little under a week now, in fact, and needless to say have a whole bunch to say about it; so let's dive right into it, shall we?

So what exactly is Second Life, I hear many of you saying? Well, Second Life is a videogame, an extremely graphics-heavy, processor-hogging videogame, so be aware of that before trying to run their free software. Like all the other high-end online videogames, it too has a fully-rendered 3D environment, in which players use avatars to interact in real time; unlike most of these other games, though (with the possible exception of "The Sims"), there is no predetermined purpose for players to be there. That is, Second Life is simply a world, a blank one which merely exists; the customers themselves decide what they're going to do there, and even what's going to exist in that world and how it's going to be run.

I'm at Second LIfe (or SL), for example, primarily for business reasons: because I heard that there was actual real money exchanging hands between players, real serious money (as in US$5 million each and every month), some of it because of live events that are being produced within the game. And this is what I will be doing in real life (or RL) for a living as well, starting this fall, is producing live events, plus have a whole past in it too; so I figured it'd at least be worth checking out to see if there's indeed serious money to be made, just so I won't have to go back to being a secretary in RL or a barista or whatever.

This is how I'm known in-game, then, as the avatar you see here, whose name is Miller Copeland. And admittedly, the entire story just starts getting more complicated from here to tell, with the definition of "me" becoming murkier and murkier each day that you play; so for now, let's just establish that there's "SL me," Miller Copeland, who other players only know as a cartoon character unless they read my profile; and then there's "RL me," Jason Pettus, who most of you knew long before meeting Miller.

It gets complicated, of course, because even right off the bat, just the crappy avatar you're given for free for becoming a new member has an insane amount of customization available - something like 150 tweakable body parts, leading you to being able to create a really specific-looking person if you want, like I have in the case of Miller. (It doesn't exactly look like me; more like if I and Wilem Dafoe were to have a love child.) But then, see, in a move that was I think brilliant, Linden Lab (or LL, the owners of SL) decided to make the process of creating things completely open source, so that customers could make just as many objects in this virtual world as the puppetmasters do. And so that means, for example, that there's just a zillion pieces of clothing in SL; even while on Help Island two months ago, I had friendly Mentors end up handing me hundreds of pieces of clothing for free. Above is one example; I have 44 others at my Flickr account as well.

It's not just clothes, either, but skin, eyeballs, genitals, hairstyles; just about every inch of your "factory-equipped" avatar can be replaced by much more complex, lifelike customer (or "resident") creations. There are entire stores, in fact, for this; a lot of stores, in fact, body-part stores, which is at once fascinating and just utterly creepy when you come across them in the main grid. ("Main grid," by the way, is an interchangeable term for the SL virtual "universe.") And it's just about anything else in a universe that can be built by residents as well - homes, businesses, furniture, sex toys, outdoor gardens, pools, hell, entire forests. LL lets these creators and residents then swap these objects with each other, and sometimes even collect payment if they want; and it's this, obvious to anyone who plays the game, which has made SL the big giant runaway cult hit it's become.

The way most stores work, by the way, are pretty fascinating; because it's all virtual goods, of course, so can be an entirely automated process, which means that you don't actually need anyone actually working at the stores. This being a "land with no purpose," however, and with real money exchanging hands, certain things from RL have been brought over to this imaginary world anyway; like malls, for example, designed to attract a mass number of customers at once, to a series of hundreds of small content creators who couldn't attract such a larger number on their own. Here I am at a popular one called Pollyesther's, for example, where you can see that most creators vend here out of a small walk-in kiosk. The catalog items simply hang on the walls, then, and you click on them to buy them; and since it's all virtual goods, they're shipped straight from that billboard immediately into your Inventory, yours to permanently keep. And then in many places, there will also be arrows at the bottom of the billboards, where you can flip through to keep seeing yet more related items. (I have nearly 50 more photos of other cool store examples, as well as other interesting places in Second Life; click here to see them.)

It's a cool idea, to be sure, but boy, the automation can be strange; Pollyesther's has hundreds of kiosks within its borders, for example, but on the first day I visited, I was the only human being there. It made me immediately think to myself, of course, "Well, what if you tried building a Saville Row for Second Life instead?" You know, a series of small, intimate spaces, where the whole point is that someone is always there to help you, and to actually guide you through the decision-making and trying-on process. It's undeniable, for example, that my Mac Mini is not very happy at these types of stores; the finished screenshot may look all cool by the end, but that image above took ten minutes of patient waiting to fully render. Why not have instead have a stripped-down room that renders quickly, where a concierge asks you what you're interested in in the first place? They they send the proper category to a small screen in the middle of the room, like a stylized laptop screen hovering in front of a leather chair; the images themselves would be small, so that they'd load really quickly, with the customer simply zooming in their camera to get a good look. And that way the customer could even try things on at first, before buying them outright; it'd just be a matter of making the clothes disappear if they went beyond the store's borders, after all. That's one of the beauties of a virtual world; no shoplifting.

Let's not forget, of course, that I'm here in the first place for business reasons; even from the very first, I'm paying very careful attention as I wander around, concerning what the real strengths and weaknesses are within the game, what people are already offering, what's missing, and how easy or hard it would be to provide it myself. Take this demo house I got to walk around one evening, for example, which gave me my first idea of how I could build a viable live-events club, not needing much more than about $300 for the entire first year. (There are an entire series of photos of this demo house at my Flickr account; click here to see them.) See, to throw live events, you have to own land to throw them on, of course, and LL has set up a pretty ingenious way to regulate how much extra bandwidth on their servers your events are going to cost you: they only allow a certain amount of people for each parcel of land, and a certain amount of construction to take place on it. So if I'm understanding this correctly, to be allowed to host, whatever, 40 or 50 people at an event at once, you need to own a piece of land at least as big as the above photo - around 2,000 square meters, to be precise, which will run you about $200 a year to LL in "land usage" (server bandwidth) fees. This gets smaller when you own less land, larger when you own more, up to a grand total of owning an entire server in their server room (32 times the size of the parcel you see here), for $2,400 a year, at which point you can host hundreds of people at once.

Now, one of the lessons about SL I've learned the quickest, is that the number of live avatars in the same place at a given time is what will most profoundly affect the rate of refresh on your computer. And this can make profound differences with just small changes, too - a difference between 10 people and 30 people in a space can mean a difference of 10 frames per second in your refresh rate, at least with my Mac Mini. There is value to be had in SL from a less-crowded room, which is of course one of the first answers I've now come up with my ever-vexing pre-play question: When in a virtual world, what exactly is actually worth money to people? Well, for one, it's the chance for your computer to work at top speed within the game, and not get bogged down with trying to render every single random newbie schmo who's decided to show up.

So, inspired by this idea and by this demo house I came across, I thought of an idea for making money from a live-event club: To have an open stage, like what you see me standing on in the foreground here; and then a first floor for the general public, where any resident in the entire universe can attend an event for free; and then a "VIP" lounge on the second floor, which costs one American dollar per event to access (or $200 in-game, known as LInden Dollars or L$). And the key is this: that no matter how many people end up attending the event, you never let more than 20 people into the VIP lounge, so that rendering for all those who pay extra will be nice and smooth and fast for the whole event.

Fellow players, you're following me, right? There's nothing more annoying, I've learned already, than attending a popular event and then ending up having to log out again, because your computer has slowed down so bad that you can't even move. If you're doing legitimately cool stuff, like hosting a well-known band, doing an interview with Cory Doctorow, simulcasting one of our RL events from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography this fall, there will be twenty people in the game willing to pay a buck to access this much speedier-loading room.

Even better, since the laws of physics don't apply here, I was thinking of even hanging a number of tiny little private rooms vertically above the building, off a slender little pole, that you could only enter by teleport from the VIP lounge, which VIP members could check out for free during the concert if they wanted. And each of those little rooms would have a little holograph of the live event (yet another beautiful thing about a virtual world), so that you're not actually missing the action; simply that it's you and one, two, three friends only, so that rendering is at its fastest and interaction at its best. Hell, even put a number of decorating options in each "sky cabana" - with a flick of a button, go from a harem tent to a Modernist penthouse, to a Victorian parlor. In the above photo, for example, I came across this really cool-linking casino that had the same idea, although theirs is like little green branch-ends on an impossibly high tree; now imagine those little green sitting areas above covered by a little bubble, private and lockable, hanging directly above my live-events club.

And of course, and of course, all of this so naturally applies to my other proposed business, a sex club, so well too, it's not even funny; in fact, I'm sure I can just make one club, duplicate it, texture one with wood and brick, the other in onyx and jade, put a big stage in one and a big dungeon in the other, and things would be perfect. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about all this, and the thing that takes quite a bit of time to wrap one's head around; that unlike the real world, the "handbag" you carry with you (known as your "Inventory") can be and is infinitely large. And when I mean "infinite," I mean I'm actually carrying around a dozen full-sized homes in mine right now, about 20 different full-sized vehicles, hundreds of articles of clothing, dozens of addresses and notecards, and much much more. What this means is that, if you have multiple businesses running at different times of the day and night, you don't need a separate piece of land for all of them; simply whip out your home in the morning, to get caught up on email and your things in order; put it away and whip out your artistic club around 7 pm, in time for the big poetry slam; put that away around 9:30 and get out your sex club instead, to run an event from 10 pm to midnight; and if you're still awake and up for it, whip out your private home again, for a more intimate get-together. And meanwhile, set up your retail store anytime you're about to log out, so that people can be buying stuff while you're out of the game.

Much like real life, I'm quickly discovering that there already are a whole ton of business owners in Second Life, running not only stores but artistic clubs and even lots of sexual ones. Just like real life, I'm discovering that many of these owner leave something in their businesses to be desired, that even the most hardcore veterans are running around wishing that certain things would be done at these places, and that I have a chance to make some money if I merely listen to these people and be smart about it all. It's really no different than what I'm already used to, to tell you the truth, despite the cartoon characters and the fantastical housing, the four-hour days and the chance to actually fly. When all is said and done, it's surprisingly like the real world - full of ambitious people, most of whom are missing just two or three things crucial for making their small business a rousing success.

So, lots more tomorrow, including: stories and photos of one of my first friends, a writer and sex enthusiast named Charlotte (including some nude ones, that in just three days at Flickr have been looked at by four times as many people as any other photo at my entire account); more about the complex social structure that's behind avatar interaction here (including some thoughts on the entire subgenres of species existence that you find here, including private islands full of full-time "Furries," entire other islands just for Elves, others just for Steampunk Victorians, etc); and why I'm wearing devil wings in the above photo, indeed, why I'll probably be wearing wings a lot in Second Life from now on. (Hint - it has to do with my plans to transform myself into "the Oscar Wilde of Second Life.") More tomorrow!