Here's a nice handful of reviews of games that might appeal to dedicated Second Life players — games where you get to buy and sell in-game wealth with real-world money, where you're allowed to make stuff that you end up controlling, and where you can change the world:
Where are the best candidates as viable alternatives to Second Life?
In order to answer this question, I've come up with the three things that in my opinion make Second Life irreplaceable at the moment. Since these are entirely formed from my little brain, we'll call them "Onder's Big Three". They are:
1. Cash transactions must be easy and readily accommodated flowing both into and out from the system.
2. Users must be able to create unique content and retain some form of ownership over it.
3. The fabric of the world itself must be possible to affect. IE: land ownership, room decoration, or some other content that remains viable even when the player who created it is logged off. ("Pervasive" is the word I'm groping for here…)
(via Wonderland)
