Real life invades online world: Gambling banned in 'Second Life'

'Second Life' is a very popular online game, with 8.5 million avatars (representing real people). Now, since creating an avatar is free, this figure is not representative of all the total number of people involved in Second Life, but the number is still a fairly high number. Second life promises a real world online, where you can . Since gambling is a major part of life, gambling inside second life is also common, with the ability to gamble at baccarat, poker, and other games. Now, the difficulty for Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life is that online gambling is explicitly banned in the United States, and in the past, authorities have taken steps to enforce the ban. Second Life may be different, since the gambling is done by avatars, and not by the real person, yet Linden Labs has backed down, and enforced a ban on gambling, and threatened to take a number of measures if it sees gambling happening:

Although "Second Life" is home to large corporations such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Intel Corp., which have virtual advertisements and marketing promotions, thousands of gambling shops dominate commerce. Virtual characters, known as "avatars," may compete at baccarat, poker, slots or other games.
San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which operates "Second Life," imposed the gambling ban last week, citing in a blog "conflicting gambling regulations around the world." The company may remove violators' virtual equipment and may suspend or terminate accounts. Linden Labs also threatened to report user information to authorities.
Numerous "Second Life" fans complained in message forums and on their blogs that the ban was a heavy-handed move to restrict freedom, and experts said the ban could crimp revenue.

This step would be a big shock to users, who would have not had the expectation that constraints from the real world would come zooming in, and the company would buckle down. Depending on user reaction, and given the sense of shock that a lot of users would have felt, the membership and revenue would go down to some extent (there was some initial reaction at the blog, refer this link). On the whole, not a good thing. There are numerous other things that happen in online games, and if the reason for curtailing this is because the US Government is not getting a cut of the online gambling revenue, then it seems very mercenary.