The End of Winter Quarter
This will be my final blog post as a student of Dr. Neil Hair’s Commercializing Virtual Worlds class. It was an interesting experience overall. More importantly, it has been the first time I have been meaningfully challenged in a long time. It is something I truly appreciate.
I was fortunate to work with excellent team members. Anne Pelkey brought a contagious sense of optimism and hope that compelled us to work hard and achieve a higher standard. Bradley Fuller tackled the difficult challenge of creating and modifying our Second Life location. I would like to believe that I added value but I am loathe to do a self-assessment due to natural bias.
A Second Life investor attended the presentation and communicated with Bradley for a significant length of time. The investor asked some tough questions and was immediately able to hone in on our greatest weakness: knowledge of Second Life’s population. We haven’t spent much time, relatively speaking, in Second Life as the established residents. The investor asked us how we would approach selling the business to others and provided unique perspectives on the norms of Second Life. They asked us a question we were unprepared for: how would we approach the less socially accepted aspects of Second Life such as slave shops and sex clubs?
Our perfunctory answer was to tailor ourselves to the market. While we believed that we could find a way to deal with the sex clubs, we were sure that slave shops were off the table. In the end, we did receive an offer—although it was far lower than what we desired. We were excited that someone even though that an offer was worthwhile.
I learned a lot in this course. If the course if offered again, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a challenge. If you’re looking for an easy “A,” I suggest that you look elsewhere and also consider why you are going to school. I have seen and done many things in the short time that I have been on this planet; this is definitely a unique experience and one that I will remember with great detail.
Tags: Commercializing Virutal Worlds, Neil Hair, Second Life