Buy this dwarf as a memento of Ted's visit to SL.
Edward Castronova, the soi-disant expert on virtual world economies, is coming to speak in Second Life today at Metronome-ics-- and has asked for residents to make him a female dwarf avatar for his appearance.
My headline should have been a Herald headline, but they're both too busy chasing bots and bukkake, and Uri is in RL somewhere and might not be critical of his fellow Luddologist Luddite anyway.
Why ageplay? Well I suspect that Ted has read enough headlines lately about the Lindens cracking down on the lewd depiction of children that he's decided to push the envelope a bit to see if he can tweak the Lindens with something that he can say "BZZZT! NO! It's a female dwarf, not a child, nyah nyah". And even if he hasn't read the headlines, and you'd have to be living under a rock to not have at least heard of them, he sneeringly sneeringly finds SL a hoot, a place where he imagines you have to be a diapered furry vampire BDSM Star Wars geek or you just haven't virtualized. (Caleb in fact ditched his antelope thing for a business suit). So making a female dwarf is Ted's contribution to the weird Star Wars bars of SL as he sees it through the Web 1.0 geek keyhole -- and an extra in-your-face way of telling us that he really, really doesn't care about Second Life. As Uri explained, he just prefers those tighter magic circles...
In fact, Castronova hates Second Life, saying its subscriptions and log-ons are "dwarfed" (what is it with this dwarf fetish?!) by the large games like World of Warcraft -- as if they are anything alike. Yes, we know everything about the hype numbers, as we SL bloggers are the first to debunk them. So? SL's intellectual and social importance are far beyond these closed-world games, but that's too challenging for Ted.
The reason is because Second Life has a real economy -- although it has its troubles that persist even since I wrote this critique of it as a game. Real economies scare Ted. He likes to be in control -- even tyrannical as I've explained. He looooves synthetic economies that he gets to control. RMT is fascinating...but not a RM *economy* that is robust like Second Life -- that might expose him as a game-god wannabee who failed.
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