What Are people doing in Second Life anyways?

I heard an interesting theory from a smart guy that works for a vendor of ours. His observation of Second Life is that people go there to have a second life. His firm does a lot of political work, so they're basic take was that fantasy land was not the place to try to communicate about people's real life issues.

I think there is definitely a kernel of truth here, but if you have a message that can be communicated in a fun environment, maybe SL is worth a look. Driving a car on a test track sounds fun and is certainly not something I can do in my real life, so having a car manufacturer set this up on a SL island might work. (It has been done, I do not know if they think it worked.)

I've had an idea for a while about developing a simulation game that would be interesting and fun and sneakily educate people about the background that goes into a particular industry's issues. most business' political issues stem from their particular business models and the unique factors that come up in that business.

Showing that business model and its unique factors has always struck me as an underused way to show the underpinning logic behind often selfish seeming political requests.

Lots of people know what they know about evidence because of CSI, even if they're wrong. My guess is that lots of people know what they know about counter-terrorism from Tom Clancy's video game series. If you make the game realistic enough, people will probably assume that these details are correct, even if they are slightly exaggerated for affect.