Originally written by Isabelle Pavlova for mmorgy.com
At the moment, most press/blogs are concentrating on virtual
economies, i.e. real money spent on virtual objects, or virtual money
turned into real money. But what happens when we combine those two,
ending up with virtual money spent on things meant to be used outside
of the virtual world?
Kirame Flashgreen Dildo, by Kyrah Abbatoir
Available at
KDC, Livigno (219, 154)
Recently, Future Salon
reported that SLBoutique, a popular
web based store for items in the
Second Life
world,
would start offering real, physical items in trade for Linden Dollars.
This brings up an interesting question... Might the abstraction of
MMOs be a good place for the adult industry to start selling their
wares? In this article, we look at
Red Light Center, a virtual world
trying to capitalize on adult products, as well as outlining what
could happen when "monopoly money" starts buying tangible products.
Red Light Center
It walks like
Second Life,
it talks like
Second Life,
but it's named Red Light Center, and
if they have their way, people will be paying $20/month to cruise
their faux-grungy adult district. Known in a former life as
Red Light World,
RLD recently reopened with a new rendering engine and server setup.
Red Light District is an MMOVS... Store? Users go there specifically
to have sex, or buy something related to sex. The "have sex" part
mimics
Second Life/There
to a startling point, with users being able to pick poses for their
characters and either type to or audio chat with each other. The only
thing that sets it apart is the fact that without the $20US/month VIP
Access fee, your character cannot get naked, cannot engage in sex, and
cannot get close to areas where others are engaging in sexual
activity. There is no zoom feature, so the plebs are left to wander
behind the velvet rope and lust after the couples who have offered up
the cash to use the 3 or 4 poses currently available in the world.
What sets Red Light District apart from other worlds is marketing.
Mainly, the fact that marketing for real, non-virtual-world objects is
EVERYWHERE. For everyone that can't find a partner in world or want to
just buy porn instead, the RLD developers have created a 3D front end
to porn and adult web surfing. Unlike other worlds, where you either
must create your own content or find others to do it for you, content
generation and placement are taken care of by the owner company, which
is definitely a plus for the busy porn studio owner. On the user side,
this doesn't make much of a difference, though. Click on a cube
textured with a Sybian picture, and your web browser pops open to the
Sybian store to buy one. Click on a picture of a naked woman (of which
there are copious amounts, not a male to be seen unless fondling a
female), and you're wisked to yet another webpage to enroll for an
account on a porn website.
However, with the lackluster textures and boring architecture, what
RLD has basically done is implemented managed VRML for porn sites.
There is no cohesiveness to the world, no economic system, it is
simply used to market porn or toys. It has the capabilities to let you
"meet others" through profile searches, though in my time there, I saw
1 woman (who was doing a very good job of selling the service, moaning
"all this can be yours if you have a vip account..." except with many
more typos, whlle taking on a very quiet man) and 6 men (1 with VIP
priviledges), so the pickings were slim. There is no virtual money,
only links to things that will happily take your real, non-play-money
backed credit card. The "Ooooh Shiny" factor of a virtual world may
attract some people to at least pay the $20 for an initial account,
but there doesn't seem to be any innovation in the product selling
factor here.
SL Boutique and the Safety of the Monopoly Dollar
SL Boutique, on the other hand, might
have a good idea going on here. SLB provides a way for
Second Life
vendors to market their wares on the web. Not only is this usually an
easier interface for shoppers (as they have access to hundreds of
content creators without having to worry about teleporting and
flipping through vendors), it allows for buying of objects with in
world money without having to actually /be/ in the world.
Being able to buy real objects with your SL money on SLB is similar to
trading in your Skee-Ball tickets for a prize at the local arcade.
This transaction has quite a few features that would be positives for
the adult product marketer, mainly due to abstraction from the
customer.
A major problem for both the consumer and the business with marketing
adult material is credit cards. For consumers, credit cards represent
tracking. If someone orders a product on their credit card, it shows
up on their bill. If that bill is seen by someone that the consumer
doesn't want knowing about the product, it suddenly turns into a
problem for the business, in the form of a chargeback. Chargebacks are
the term for credit card disputes between a consumer who feels they
have been ripped off (charged for something they never received or
applied for, for instance) and a business. Chargeback fees can be very
expensive, and if enough happen to a business, the credit card company
may refuse to deal with them anymore. Most adult businesses simply
choose to refund the customer the cash, even if the transaction was
correct in the first place.
Spending in virtual dollars put both the consumer and the business at
ease. For the consumer, the money is already "converted", meaning that
they'll either already have the Linden dollars, or will feed cash to
Linden Labs to create the currency. Of course, like the skee ball
analogy, the exchange rate will always be in the favor of the market,
not the consumer, but with the added protection that the money will
provide, it's possible that few will find this an issue. The business
will receive the real US currency as converted by SLB on either their
own exchange or the Lindex
(Second Life's
built in currency exchange). The issue of anonymity, money changing,
and chargebacks therefore rests on the shoulders of SLB. If they can
actually sort those issues out (remember, this is all speculation at
the moment), then they may very well have solved one of the toughest
issues plaguing adult product sales.
In terms of adult market evolution, virtual worlds and economies are
going to be an exciting place to watch. Virtual money will provide
abstraction, and that always makes the consumer feel better when in
the process of an uncomfortable buying situation.
