3pointD.com

God bless IBM. Of all the big bad corporations doing business in the virtual world of Second Life, these guys — and, on an individual basis, the company’s employees — are near the top of the “most creative and ambitious” league table (mostly, I suspect, because they can afford to be). The latest: an IBM employee with his own private island in Second Life has had some coins minted that are each worth one Linden dollar. That’s right, you can now hold the Linden dollar in your hand and actually spend it — if, that is, you’re on »Tender Island«, which has been owned by IBMer David van Gent since March.

The coins come complete with an “SL” mintmark, and are “accepted as legal currency on Tender Island.” Before you get your knickers in a twist over who’s allowed to mint coins denominated in a particular currency, keep in mind that in the U.S., at least, creating your own tender is perfectly acceptable — you can print all the money you want (as long as you’re not counterfeiting dollars), it’s just a matter of whether you can get anyone to accept it. Linden Lab, of course, is not a government. But their rhetoric (”I’m not building a game, I’m building a country“) indicates there shouldn’t be anything objectionable in Tender Island coins.

A few of the coins were made available on eBay, where they went for $26.61, although I can’t tell how many were included in that auction. In any case, only 75 coins were struck, which means that the eBay buyer is paying collector’s prices, not foreign exchange prices. Van Gent (SL’s Davidovic Dean) is now considering other series of coins. I doubt this is much more than an interesting experiment and something to do with some spare time and cash, but it’s still very cool.

Incidentally: The story comes to me via IBM’s Ian Hughes (aka SL’s epredator Potato), who, along with his colleague Roo Reynolds, was largely responsible for sparking the corporation’s charge into virtual worlds. The latest nice piece of news w/r/t Ian and Roo is that they’ve been invited to do a guest-posting stint with the eggheads over at Terra Nova. Ian already has a first post up, a very interesting look at how the corporate workplace may resemble certain tropes of online games and virtual worlds, and whether those digital environments can be used to bring more openness and collaboration, and a more level playing field, to the workplace. So that we can all collect more coin.