>> Around 2006 – 2008 I was playing around with SecondLife and found the only thing that interested me there was coding objects with their LSL scripting language. I happened to fall in with a content creator (eg. a really good artist that could create cool looking things from the in world primitive object tools) that sold “campers” which were objects on which you could basically park your avatar in some kind of pose and your account would be sent a small amount of money each hour. This was useful because the discoverability of locations in the world was substantially increased by the presence of avatars. A lot of people at your place meant your place was popular. So the typical implementation of campers was that a place would build a bar with 10 or so barstools and embed a camper script in them, so people could come up, choose to camp on a stool, and get their couple of bucks a day. But these implementations were pretty lame because without any kind of activity by the real life user, avatars would timeout and just slump forward over the bar. So these places, while technically having a higher presence of people, looked like a terribly depressing place with a bunch of passed out drunks.
So this content creator I met had the idea of working a little hard on the product by creating a little scene of things (as opposed to just dropping a script in a barstool) and then also writing the code to animate the avatar in some kind of loop. So for example, she created a little patch of garden and a wheel barrow, and when someone chose to camp on it, their avatar got on all fours and appeared to be working on the garden, like weeding or whatever. Another one was a ladder that could be placed by a window and the avatar would climb up it and appear to be washing the windows. We had 5 or 6 different campers like this. For obvious reasons this product blew up. I don’t remember what she sold them for but at the peak I was pulling in $100 a day and my cut was only a fraction of the total cost. This continued for at least a year before we had a falling out about another product and she dumped me from the cut.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31768464