Rabbits can be pests -- just ask anyone in Australia. The
animals aren’t native to the island continent and, as an invasive
species, grew to extraordinarily large populations (they bred like, well,
rabbits), choking part of the nation’s ecology. It was a big problem, but
that’s a story for another day.
It’s also a story that Second Life should be immune too. You’re probably
not aware of Second Life -- except for a brief heyday in around 2006,
it’s found mostly niche appeal. If you want to know more about it, its Wikipedia entry is extensive, but for
our purposes, the first paragraph of that will do:
Second Life is an online virtual world, developed and
owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23,
2003. By 2013, Second Life had approximately 1 million regular users. In
many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online
role-playing games [MMORPGs]; however, Linden Lab is emphatic that their
creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set
objective".
Like many other MMORPGs, Second Life has its own economy,
only more so because unlike most other “games,” there’s really nothing
else to do except participate in the economy and build yourself a virtual
life. That can be profitable in the real world, too; there’s an exchange
which allows Linden Dollars, the in-universe currency, to be converted
into real currency. As a result, many entrepreneurs have built businesses
inside the interface -- businesses which are subject to real world laws
and real world courts.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, let’s talk about a booming
industry in Second Life -- breedables, which are basically virtual pets.
As VICE explains, “these scripted, modeled and
animated objects take countless forms—from cats to chickens to dragons to
shoes to flowers— with the general premise being that someone buys them
blindly (usually in egg or nest form) with certain odds of getting rare
versus common varieties.”
As of a year or so ago, Ozimal LLC was one of the businesses selling
breedables in Second Life. Ozimal’s main business was bunny rabbits --
virtual ones, of course. Per PC Gamer, “they eat, breed, they hop
around a bit—pretty much what you'd expect from a real-life bunny, minus
the poop under the couch,” and of course, they were really cute. Demand
was high and, because they were nothing more than a bunch of 1s and 0s,
supply was effectively infinite.
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