Art Often Imitates Life

In Second Life the open economy encourages you to spend your offline money online. This is a concept that is completely foreign to me. I could never see myself taking my hard earned dollars and giving them away to someone online, so I could buy and item, that would exist only online. However, what doesn’t necessarily make sense to me makes sense to the millions of users of Second Life.
When I look at this specific economy with a critical lens the first problem that jumps out at me is, what are people doing to get the money they spend in the Second Life economy? I believe these games are for people who are really looking for an escape for the every day realities of their unfulfilled lives. As I saw in the readings that’s not always the case, some users are relatively affluent and relatively educated, especially in the case of the man who worked for Proctor and Gamble and held two patents.
However, for the user I envision in my head, the twenty-something high school graduate who lives at home or in a dingy apartment with little disposable income left over from his slightly over minimum wage job, how is he affording to pay the membership fees? Also, where is he getting the money to buy items in this virtual world? I would imagine that at times he may choose to buy something on Second Life rather than pay his bills in real life, because men have funny priorities.
As far as WoW, there aren’t many initial problems I see with the economy except for the exploitation of the people who are paid to advance players to certain levels. The sweatshops where we used to get textile products have turned into sweatshops where we finally get to be the level 59 Grandmaster Ogre we always wanted to be for the low price of $250 US.
WoW discourages the sale of services and property for real life money, but to stop such a profitable enterprise would be extremely tough to do. As we saw in the article about the sweatshops in China where these employees aren’t making very much money, it is still more than they would make elsewhere in exchange for not having to do hard labor. If that were an option available to me I might take the opportunity.
I can’t really see a problem with putting money into virtual worlds. I think that there have been many vices that people invested in offline, and we may not think it’s prudent, but it’s an option available to them. I remember watching an episode of MTV’s True Life series. They chronicled people who had alternate lives online. One girl was an aspiring singer, but she had extreme shyness. She utilized second life to put her music in the public realm and even had a sizable following in Second Life.
I don’t look at her and think she’s pathetic, I think that there are different ways to achieve what it is you want to do. I do however think that, if you put so much of your efforts into these virtual worlds, you lose the chance to improve your life offline. I always think what these people would be capable of if they took their time and efforts and just applied it to better themselves in the real world.