Surveys, articles and posts are available about dating, relationships and weddings inside Second life. People do show their real feelings inside Second Life, do need a partner to be with and enjoy this virtual reality together. Now how much you really trust SL relationships when, starting such one, being anonymous in Real Life and knowing that is easy “not to be as honest and faithful as expected to be” or “has no severe consequences (no divorce papers and lawyer fees applied – just hurt feelings)”, is up to you to judge, evaluate and decide (actually how much different is that from Real Life?). Articles such as: “Morality and involvement in social virtual worlds, the intensity of moral emotions in response to virtual versus real life cheating”, or “Does Second Life Love threaten Real Life marriage?” are topics of discussion and editorial posts for both people using their avatars inworld and people researching and studding this virtual phenomenon. Yes a virtual world but for many, with real emotions and feelings (see below for families).
What else is Second Life? A million dollars of virtual loot. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services. It's a concept that's difficult to wrap your head around, but that's exactly what for example virtual real-estate developers accomplished in the 3D virtual world Second Life. When their entrepreneurial success story hit the press, it spread like wildfire, leading many to ask: What exactly are the business opportunities available in Second Life? Are people really turning their love for Second Life into a full-time business? We know that the in-game currency is called Linden Dollars. According to the book “How to make Real Money in Second Life”, Linden Dollars is “fully convertible to U.S. dollars with a specific exchange rate.
Chris Stokel-Walker mentions in one of his articles posted in 2013: in the mid-2000s, every self-respecting media outlet sent reporters to the Second Life world to cover the parallel-universe beat. The BBC, (now Bloomberg) Businessweek, and NBC Nightly News all devoted time and coverage to the phenomenon. Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop in Second Life, aiming to capitalize on the momentum it was building — and to play to the in-world consumer base, which at one point in 2006 boasted a GDP of $64 million and he continues: Of course, stratospheric growth doesn’t continue forever, and when the universe’s expansion slowed and the novelty of people living parallel lives wore off, the media moved on. So did businesses — but not users. Linden Lab doesn’t share historical user figures, but it says the population of Second Life has been relatively stable for a number of years.
Buying land in Second Life is not a complicated process. “The world of Second Life consists of nearly a half million acres of virtual land, and almost all of it belongs to other users, or Residents. As more new users join Second Life, (a million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Life is about), we keep adding more and more virtual land - so the world actually gets bigger every day…virtual land is like a 3D web site: a blank space where you can make anything happen. You can purchase both developed land (“move-in ready”) or undeveloped land (create it any way you wish). When you have land in Second Life, you're actually renting storage/server space…each piece of land takes up a certain amount of dedicated storage space - the more land, the more space. So, it's like renting a hard drive.