As Second Life continues to broaden its domain, industries not normally associated with the virtual world are taking interest. Although Second Life may be old news to you and me, it’s become new territory for many emerging service-oriented companies and industry giants alike, such as Crescendo Design or Cisco Systems.

Cigna Healthcare, a Philadelphia based health-service provider, is the most recent company to take the virtual leap by announcing its development of an island-based community geared towards a technologically savvy audience.

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After studying MMOs, spooks decided they needed to have two things: the first being the egregious ability to state whatever they have on their minds and, second, they would commission Doc Brown to build a virtual time machine that did not require a DeLorean going 88 mph, accruing 1.21 Gigawatts. This was only mentioned after the allegation that terrorists (whose hate is for your freedom) may be lurking in virtual worlds akin to Second Life. The contention had also been made that young people playing all kinds of MMOs (including WoW) were unfit to join the intelligence community for a number of reasons: they spread misinformation about their identities, many share files, check their e-mail compulsively and have a predisposition for gaming addiction.

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Recently, I came across a Sportbike and Formula1 racing trend in Second Life. The experience for me was something less than exciting… and perhaps a little depraved. I had no idea that SL had cars, let alone racing circuits.

The first SL race track that I competed on was entirely in Italian, so I kinda blew it off as merely an activity only Italians do due to their apparent predisposition to fast cars.

But after a bit of link-hopping I found that this trend is more widespread than I originally assumed. There’s even a midget racing circuit.

Naturally, a race wouldn’t be complete without SL’s news and TV organizations providing video coverage of tournament SLASCAR races.

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Despite the Virtual World genre’s recent success, there is evidence to suspect that the VW “boom” may soon go bust. In a recent article about the future of VWs, Bruce Damer, a VW enthusiast and co-founder of the Virtual Worlds Timeline project, expounded upon a few of the reasons why gamers might reasonably expect to see the VW genre go into recession sometime soon. And no, it’s not because the real world is becoming more appealing.
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There’s nothing like a good prank to add +1 to your tomfoolerly attribute.

During an address in front of 500 delegates of a “symbolic alternate parliament,” a couple of pro-Kremlin activists (read: Second Life griefers) crashed the party with a flying phallus.
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