Newcastle University

Entrepreneurial E-business student Theodoulou Theodoulos (known in the virtual world as Colton Lytton) talks about his experience of making a living in the new virtual world called Second Life.

I was first introduced to Second Life in a fascinating lecture regarding “The implications of metaverses”, presented by Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis as part of the Consultancy Project Module. I was very excited with the whole idea, as Second life combines the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), with real life e-commerce opportunities. Making real money in my leisure time…that sounded great! I downloaded and installed the game straight after the lecture and started exploring and experiencing the endless opportunities Second life offers.

I spent a couple of days learning about the new virtual environment and set up my character’s virtual identity ‘Colton Lytton’ (The Second Life term for this is an “avatar”). I became more amazed every day with the places I was visiting and the things I was seeing, as everything in Second Life are developed by the users. Many users even have full-time jobs in Second Life running their own virtual businesses. Moreover, mastering my skills and reading successful stories on different blogs about people and their businesses, I felt the urge to start experiencing my building skills, in the hope to open up my own Second Life virtual store.

At first I was thinking about starting a business designing virtual clothes, as people in Second Life spent too much money while trying to dress their avatar in the best possible way. In order to design virtual clothes though, everything needs to be done outside Second life using image-editing and graphics creation software. As my graphics design skills are still developing and I am certainly no Giorgio Armani, I had a hard time designing clothes and finally gave up.

One day while cruising in Second life and thinking what my virtual business should be, I met someone who owns a virtual furniture store. Talking for a while and visiting his shop, I was convinced I should try building furniture. Building inside the game was much easier, as Second life offers easy to learn and useful building tools. I started experimenting with the game’s building tools and my very first design was a simple and ugly chair. I had never used any 3D building software tool before, but with the help of Second Life’s knowledgebase, building learning video clips uploaded on YouTube and attending life building classes in the game, I was able to get better and better every day.

The technique to build simple objects are very easy as basic objects’ shapes like the square, sphere, cylinder, triangle and various others are already available. By using your imagination and creativity and playing around with the different options provided for each already available object, you can transform it into almost any shape you want. Some users have also developed software which you can download for free and use to design objects outside the Second Life world and then import them back in. The most difficult part for me was putting textures on the objects as the ones already available by Second Life are not enough if you want to create something really nice.  It can take some time to go look around for the best textures to buy or even create your own in Photoshop and upload them.

Patience, practice, effort and creativity were needed, but eventually I was able to build some living room and bedroom sets. Now I am looking for a store space to rent and I am ready to go! I can’t yet say I am a perfect designer, but I am learning and getting better every day. The following is a screenshot of some of the furniture I created.

(To visit the Business School’s ebusiness island go to: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ebusiness/125/125  after downloading and installing the Second Life software, available at: http://www.secondlife.com.)