The place where you can live like a King, but spend like a pauper

If the recession is making you cut back, you'll be glad to know that there's a place where you can go to the best nightclubs wearing a new wardrobe of the finest designer clothes with change for a tenner ($18). Not only that, you will be guaranteed good weather and you'll always look your best.

Those places are virtual worlds like Second Life, which Forbes Magazine says are due to benefit from the economic downturn as people cut back on going out and stay indoors. Back in April when the current crisis was just getting going, Second Life's most famous blogger, James Wagner Au, thought the mortgage lending crisis could provide the virtual world with an unexpected opportunity.

Wagner Au pointed to 2003, when a lot of tech companies had made people redundant after the first dot.com boom: "I can't tell you how many people I met then...who were out-of-work programmers and web designers creating content in SL while they looked for jobs."

Six months on, and industry leaders quoted in Forbes agree. "As things get worse, people spend more time at movies or spend more time on a site like Gaia Online, which provides a relatively inexpensive respite from the offline world", said Gaia CEO Craig Sherman.

In theory it's possible to spend time in worlds such as Second Life for free, although kitting yourself out with a better "skin" and clothes costs £5 ($9) - £10. But once you've spent that money you are more or less set, unlike a 'real world' night out where you pay several times that amount every time.

The predicted growth in people having virtual world escapes, chimes in with other research that shows in-home spending on the increase. According to Hitwise, visits to home improvement and furniture sites have gone up as people find it more difficult to sell their properties. And consumer electronics sales (in particular) TVs have held up even as overall spending has gone down.

Image - Second Life 'designer' clothes store, Armidi. By Catero.