I did a bit of onlime gaming until recently, and, some of my team mates used to play second life. Basically its exactly that, a second life. You build yourself a character and get a job and stuff!
Some people actually make money on the game by buying land and reselling it, or, buy being ablke to build things from tools and weapons to computers or making clothes!!
I played it for all of about an hour and lost patience with it and went back to shooting people in Day Of Defeat : Source. Thats much more my type of thing!
TIO