Wanna buy a Tractor?

Second Life by Linden Labs is an online concept, virtual world, where you can be someone else, even another gender, while interacting with others via your perfect avatar. It was a forerunner of the Zynga online communities or digital escapes built by Marc Pincus, who has amassed a billion dollars and jumped into the Forbes rich list by selling bits of something worth nothing.

Nearly 300 million people pay money to live and tend the soil in Farmville while building houses and streets in Cityville. For those not happy with this serene online life, Pincus has also built a place where you can engage in criminal activities called Mafia Wars or shoot from the hip in Frontierville. Sure the game scenarios like Warcraft et al have never been far from the bank balance of designers but why are people buying seed to till the soil and wait for harvest season to come around?

Farmville and Cityville are the top two apps worldwide by participation and again it begs the question why? Are our lives so intense and stress filled that people require an outlet where they can accomplish things they could never achieve in real life or are people looking backward to a calmer time where it didn't matter what kind of phone you carried, car you drove or where you lived? Any way you look at it, it's not a cheap option with people spending hundreds of millions of dollars being somewhere else, being someone else and imagining different lives. Must make the libraries envious as books used to be that vehicle of escape in the "old days".

So does owning all this virtual stuff, along with hiring and interacting with virtual people get complicated and does it blur the edges of real life? You've paid a lot of money to own that house of a life time, filled it with the perfect furniture, including that 200cm flat screen TV and then added the ideal partner to live with, while you get chauffeured around in your top of the range German auto. How do you feel, satisfied, a high achiever and well and truly attached to your purchases? That question was recently asked when four virtual property owners in Second Life sued Linden Labs for giving them a false impression of actually owning their online properties.

So with lines blurred it's no wonder the virtual goods market in virtual worlds will pass the $2 billion mark this year. So what are you waiting for, get designing, surely you have something to offer the residents of the 'Villes. Even if it doesn't work in the real world it could attain new heights of efficiency in the virtual worlds. I have to think that Comair, which recently came in as the worst performing, on time airline in the US could achieve on time nirvana in Cityville while flying the skies of Farmville.

Maybe you could even fly that plane while having the flight attendants pander to your every desire. Then when you land, you race to the stadium and score the winning goal at the World Cup, while writing that best selling novel at half time and finishing off building the perfect app, everyone uses on their virtual phones before accepting the winning trophy.

Hmmmmm maybe there is something to this virtual world after all?