Entropia: another online world

The Entropia Universe is another online synthetic world that claims to have a “real” economy. Currently it claims to have about half a million members.

It all takes place on a planet with several continents, moons and space stations. Unlike Second Life, only the accounts are free. Everything in the world costs money which you either earn by working or import using a credit card. This includes food and drink (because avatars in Entropia have to eat and drink to stay alive) and building materials.

Work includes hunting, farming, mining, trading, manufacturing and so on.

This is an intriguingly different mix of game and platform. It contains some of the things that are missing in Second Life and should be there if we are to model a virtual culture properly. Perhaps we need to think in the long term of learning some lessons from both of these and applying them to a world of our own creation in Multiverse, if that launches successfully with a range of tools that we can use without recourse to java and C++.