My poor aging eyes could not read the pdf (you, however, can print it out or perhaps you are young and vigorous), but I believe this article is interesting with a very high "p."
The research value of virtual worlds
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Not sure if you were being sarcastic but you can bump your pdf reader to 130% for easier reading
I think he means all of the skipping around you have to do because the columns are about five words long. At least that’s why I didn’t bother.
Studying Second Life to understand what virtual worlds are like is a bit like studying CompuServe in the late 1980s to understand what today’s Internet is like.
As the article itself points out, virtual banks no longer exist in Second Life. Most if not all of them offered savings accounts with Ponzi-like interest rates; this rate was invariably quoted as a daily rate (eg, 0.1% daily).
Of course, one of the basic functions of banks in real life — deposit taking — is entirely superflous in Second Life. There is no “money under the mattress” problem, no loose change or cash to be mugged or lost. Linden dollars do not exist as in-world objects, there are no virtual pieces of gold or dollar bills; your Linden dollar balance is just a database entry, displayed in the corner of your screen. That is, the company that runs Second Life is the default banker (but pays no interest).
Because no interest is paid, very few players maintain a large Linden dollar balance. Anyone who earns substantial money in-world simply exchanges it periodically for US dollars on the Linden exchange. The buyers however are other players, since the company itself never redeems Linden dollars for US dollars.
There are also no treasury bills or other risk-free investments in Second Life.
In general, economists looking for something to study won’t find all that much to sink their teeth into. With Second Life’s fifth anniversary approaching soon, many aspects of modern real-world economies still don’t really exist within the game at this point, nor is it clear that they ever will.
If you couldn’t read that, you need reading glasses. You’re 46. It’s time.
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