A quick note to virtual gods: If you create a virtual world, you’re probably going to wind up with virtually everything that occurs in the real world, and that includes crime, sex, economic upheaval and so on. No one knows that better than Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, which has seen a variety of such behaviour over the years. This time, the virtual proletariat are up in arms about an increase in what might be called virtual taxes — the fees that Linden Labs charges for various features inside the world/game. In this case, it’s a fee increase for what are called “Openspaces.” Here’s a description from the Second Life blog:

“An Openspace is a type of private island that we made available for light use countryside or ocean … but Openspaces differ from normal regions in one particularly significant way; unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU (so 16 on a quad core machine), sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).”

The issue, Linden says, is that people are using the Openspaces for things that they weren’t intended to support, and that is putting a strain on the company’s infrastructure. Just as cities and states raise taxes to pay for repairs to highways and so on, Linden clearly feels that it needs to charge more to offset the cost of maintaining these private islands. Sensible enough, yes? Not if you’re a Second Lifer. Or rather, not if you are a Second Lifer who has built a business based on the services and features that are attached to that Openspace. Here’s the problem as one person sees it:

“There is demand for the ‘original’ OpenSpace ‘void sim’ application: lower primcount, very few scripts, very few avatars–just very light load, and only in areas surrounding other, full-primmed sims. There is also a clear demand for heavier use OpenSpaces–still much lower density than full-primmed sims, but posing much more demand on the backend services than does the ‘void sim’ application. These need to be separated into two distinct products with different fee schedules; let’s call them ‘Void’ and ‘Low-Density’ sims.”

Don’t feel badly if none of this makes any sense to you. I’m pretty familiar with Second Life, and a lot of it makes my head hurt too. It’s a little like reading a science-fiction book, in which the author has made up new words for everything, and you have constantly flip to the index to figure out what everyone is talking about. The issue is whether Linden underestimated what people were going to do with Openspaces and priced them too low, or whether people are misusing the world somehow and should therefore be expected to pay more. Regardless, people are upset.

As Wagner James Au notes in his piece for GigaOm, the problem for Second Life is that there is an open-source version of the game/world called OpenSim that has been attracting more users as a result of the changes at Linden Labs. It’s hard to maintain a half-decent world when people who don’t like the way things work can just move to the one next door.

Two recent news items got me thinking about “virtual theft” and other crimes that either take place inside virtual worlds or involve virtual goods. I don’t know why exactly, but this kind of thing fascinates me. Maybe it’s because it’s another example of online behaviour clashing with real-world laws and principles, much like music or movie downloading is. The two stories involve a woman who was jailed in Tokyo for “killing” her virtual husband, and two Dutch teens who were convicted of stealing a Runescape amulet and mask from a fellow teen. These aren’t the only such cases, of course: a Dutch teenager was arrested last year for stealing $6,000 worth of furniture from the online kids’ game/world called Habbo Hotel.

Does it make sense to charge people for “crimes” that are committed inside virtual worlds? Mike Masnick at Techdirt argues that it doesn’t really, and that the Dutch kids who “stole” the Runescape amulet and mask from another teen at knifepoint should properly have been charged with assault rather than theft. The Dutch court, however, argues that virtual goods are just as worthy of protection as real-world goods, and so theft is the proper charge. This is an issue that some have been thinking about for awhile now, and one Wagner James Au has argued should be a concern for plenty of Web 2.0 companies as well, since they effectively deal in “virtual goods” such as reputation, etc. and user-generated content.

The fascinating thing with virtual theft and other “crimes,” of course, is that there are so many different ways of stealing money and property and engaging in all sorts of other bad behaviour inside Second Life or some other virtual world. You can hack the game to generate money or credits, you can run scripts that copy artefacts and property (which you can then sell inside the game), and you can sell the money you got illegally to noobs and then virtually mug them to take it back inside the game. The possibilities are endless. Should they all be real-world crimes too?

So it seems that Coca-Cola is still trying to find the magic combination of virtual world and aggressive marketing that will produce the magic results it seeks. The New York Times has a story about how the carbonated sugar-water behemoth has launched an abomination marketing effort called Coke Island in the virtual world known as There Inc. (a competitor of Second Life, but without all the flying penises).

As PaidContent points out, Coca-Cola has been down many a virtual marketing road — including the launch of its own world, known as Coke Studios, about five years ago. Although it claims to have attracted millions of members, it can’t be doing that well, since the company is effectively transporting (or teleporting) the entire shebang into There.com. Customers will apparently be able to use virtual Coke coupons to buy merchandise for their avatars and that sort of thing.

From the look of the screenshots on Mashable, you can wander around the island — shaped like a giant Coke bottle — and sit on giant Coke-logo benches and so on. I just have one question: who in their right mind thinks anyone is actually going to want to do this? Is there some kind of Kool Aid that gets passed around at the meetings where they come up with this kind of idiocy?

It reminds me of the scene in the movie Big — the one where Tom Hanks makes a wish as a young boy and is turned into an adult for a few months, and finds work at a toy company. A rival at the company is trying to compete with Tom’s brilliant Transformer-style toys, and says he has one that’s better because it turns into a giant skyscraper, at which point Tom says: “It turns into a building? What’s fun about that?”

Wandering around a giant Coke-shaped island with Coke logo benches and trading in virtual Coke coupons? What’s fun about that?

Lots of commentary out there this weekend on virtual worlds such as Habbo Hotel — which Wagner James Au writes about for GigaOm here — and Second Life, which is the subject of a feature in the New York Times and one in the Globe and Mail as well, by my colleague Erin Anderssen. And then there’s the somewhat ambitious prediction from the CEO of ICANN that virtual worlds are “the future of global commerce.”

That last one might be a bit of a stretch, considering that — as the NYT piece notes — a number of the companies that set up shops in Second Life (such as Adidas) or built their own private islands (such as Wells Fargo) have pulled up stakes and departed for greener pastures. Maybe when the guy who sells superfast rollerblades in Second Life becomes a global enterprise, the ICANN CEO’s prediction will have some merit.

Until then, Second Life seems more interesting to me as a social experiment than a business proposition. The fascinating thing is that even in a world where they can be and do anything they want (which can also cause problems, as Erin notes), people choose avatars that look like supermodels and spend hundreds of dollars on shoes. In an interesting economic twist, people won’t buy things that appear expensive in Linden dollars, even though in “real” money they are extremely cheap.

Habbo Hotel, as Wagner notes, doesn’t get a lot of publicity — perhaps because there are no blue-haired vixens with gravity-defying breasts in Habbo, and no flying pink penises either — but it definitely deserves some, and perhaps more than Second Life. Although it offers only blocky, 1985-style graphics, it has become a hit with young users and generates revenues of about $77-million (likely orders of magnitude more than Second Life).

Wagner says that a recent talk by one of the principals at Sulake — the Finnish company that created the site — made several points about virtual worlds, including the necessity for multiple revenue streams and the high turnover rates that such “games” have (something Second Life has also demonstrated). Gamasutra has more on the address here.

To me, one of the most interesting things about Habbo is that it is what the Sulake founder calls “a gameless game,” in which virtually anything can become a game. When my 12-year-old daughter used to play it a lot, she played something called “falling furni,” in which tiny avatars tried to catch pieces of virtual furniture as they fell from the sky.

Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? But she loved it. Second Life is also a gameless game in many ways — and that is a big part of its appeal. Whether it can ever become a real business still remains to be seen.

This video (hat tip to Valleywag) made me laugh out loud. If you’ve ever been in Second Life and tried to move around or engage in pretty much any kind of behaviour requiring fine motor skills, you’ll know what I mean.