Gaia Online…Yet Another Online Time Suck
By stephanie - Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
Since I do work as an Internet Consultant, I can sometimes justify my time spent on online communities as time keeping in touch with the field I work in. (Ummm…yeah.) Tonight I’ve been puttering around Gaia Online, which is an online community that offers elements of role playing. Everyone on the site gets an avatar, which you can dress up and house in your own custom house (if you can find a vacancy, that is).
Like many online MMORPGs, Gaia Online has its own currency, which you can use to buy new clothes and goodies for your character. You can earn coins by playing games, by referring members (woo hoo, I’ll get 50 gold coins on each sign up, so I can buy me a new hat…yippee skippity), and by otherwise not having a real life.
The site appears to be partially built upon an expanded version of the phpBB bulletin board system, which somewhat surprises me. They’ve mixed that in somehow with a lot of Flash, so this conglomeration all works to create an avatar version of MySpace complete with custom profile pages, online journals (or blogs), and forums. It’s all a bit cutesy, but charming in its own way.
Some online games are available…nothing too exciting so far, but you can play online blackjack and earn some tickets for more virtual goodies. But as we’ve seen, people will often pay real money to get their hands on some virtual cash when they get addicted to these universes.
I am waiting for the day, sometime in the future, when virtual reality really becomes a reality, and all these virtual goodies will actually feel real. I can see an entire generation being lost to virtual worlds. Which is fine by me, there’s too much traffic anyway.