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In a virtual Irish pub in a corner of virtual Dublin, the discussion has turned to underwear and, more specifically, who in the room isn't wearing any. The theme is Irish, but the mood is cosmopolitan - and, in this pocket of the digital world of Second Life, nobody seems to be aware that they're sitting in the middle of an elaborate tourism promotion.
In Second Life - a place where people can frequently be found without underpants - nightclubs act as chat rooms with a visual twist. This particular establishment, a popular pub called the Blarney Stone, was set up by Tourism Ireland, but virtual-world ventures are starting to pop up at the behest of destinations around the world in a bid to attract real-life tourists.
In Second Life, the most popular free-form virtual world today, where more than 30,000 players regularly log on at once, netizens can visit an ersatz Amsterdam, a swath of Sweden, a hypothetical bit of Paris or a street in, say, Galveston, Tex. - all courtesy of local tourist boards.
Some of these neighbourhoods are bustling with visitors in avatar form; others are virtually windswept.
But are any of them actually turning virtual visitors into real-world tourists?
"Of all the different sectors that can use virtual worlds, tourism marketing is kind of in a sweet spot," says Nic Mitham, the founder of Kzero, a British consultancy that advises clients such as Finnish cellphone giant Nokia on marketing virtual worlds. "Virtual worlds have the ability to put someone in the venue itself."
Mitham points to the Mexican tourist board's replica of Chichen Itza in Second Life. The board built the attraction in part to promote its bid to have the ancient ruins added to the list of the New 7 Wonders of the World.
"I'd certainly never heard of Chichen Itza myself before entering Second Life," he says.
Elsewhere, the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions recently launched New Holland, a neighbourhood's worth of generically Dutch cityscape. Like other Second Life replicas, it's not a detailed recreation, just more of an impressionistic take: a few blocks of row houses, canals, clubs and a windmill.
But despite the scenery, the Van Goghs scanned and hung on walls, the promises of bike rides and free tulips, the place is empty. And in worlds like Second Life, where the big draw is chatting with other residents, when there's no one to talk to, there's nothing to do.
"This is the error that many marketers make in Second Life," says Ken Hudson, a new-media observer who heads up the Second Life campus of Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont. "They expect - like a website - you make it and it works for you."
Hudson says these simulations are more like showrooms and require full-time staff to succeed. "Without a guide or host, people are lost and feel worse about a place," he says.
But for every avatar in Second Life, there's a real person sitting at a computer somewhere. And if a virtual showroom needs to be staffed, someone will have to be paid.
Luckily for marketers, Second Life is full of people who are willing to work for virtual wages. It's common for players to hold down "Second Life jobs," paid in the world's own currency, at rates that seldom add up to more than a dollar an hour in the real world.
In Little Dublin, for instance, a hostess going under the name Starchild Renoir is busy bantering with guests and keeping an eye on the place. In real life, her name is Trish Roche, a 43-year-old social worker.
She acts as both a welcoming committee and bouncer, fostering conversation and ejecting visitors who disrupt the bar's amiable ebb and flow. Roche was a regular at the pub before she joined the staff. Community moderators like her are the first line of defence against disruptions that might turn a promotional effort into a PR nightmare.
And while the value of the virtual landscape might be questionable, the ability to meet real-life denizens of destinations like Ireland could provide a real incentive to prospective travellers.
Of course, not everything is as simple as it seems. In virtual Dublin, Roche's character is labelled as a Dubliner. In real life, she's the daughter of Irish emigrants, raised in Australia and now living outside London.
"The thing we share is a love of Ireland," she says as her Second Life character compliments the pub's other avatars on their evening wear.
The virtual Dublin simulator recently hosted a two-week celebration called Discover Ireland, which brought hundreds of avatars to the location with the explicit goal of promoting tourism. Throughout that event - and regularly at the pub - live Irish musicians broadcast their songs into the virtual world.
Despite all that, few people are rushing to book trips to the real Ireland.
"I would be shocked if a lot of people visited virtual Dublin then decided they had to go to Dublin," says Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author of The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, a book that chronicles his time as the editor of the virtual world's in-house newspaper.
Ludlow says that, for the moment, virtual versions of real-life destinations have the qualities of simulacra - Disneyland-like imitations that don't necessarily evoke the real thing.
"If you have a simulacrum of Venice in Las Vegas, for example, I don't know that that makes you want to go to Venice in the same way as a travel brochure does."
A Second Life simulation that can accommodate a few dozen patrons at once won't reach nearly as many eyeballs as a brochure, Ludlow points out.
However, the lessons that marketers are learning in Second Life will prove useful as this niche market creeps toward the mainstream.
To that end, STA Travel, a real-world travel agency, has opened an office in Second Life. Players can book real trips with Bob Stein, either by typing messages to his avatar, Globetrekker Bob, or by speaking to him - the virtual world lets people chat that way too.
Stein says virtual worlds offer real advantages over websites when it comes to serving customers. Websites are convenient, but they "don't tell you what you don't know," Stein says.
A live agent in a virtual world, on the other hand, promises the best of both worlds: the convenience of booking travel online plus the knowledge and responsiveness of a human operator.
Another selling point, Stein says, is that Second Life makes it easy to chat with your travel agent from wherever you've travelled to.
"I have a client who's flown from the U.S. to Canada on two occasions now. When she arrived in Canada the first time, she logged on to Second Life. I said, 'How did your flight go?' "
The STA Travel office is still an experiment: Stein is the office's only full-time employee (though, like Tourism Ireland, he is assisted by Second Life residents working for virtual dollars) and he says he has sold only a handful of packages thus far.
But he sees the operation expanding to the point where travel agents from around the world will work shifts online, dispensing region-specific expertise to whomever needs it.
And STA has found a way to keep people coming to its office: It has partnered with Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, to serve as a training centre for players entering the world for the first time.
The result has been a steady stream of arrivals looking for something to do in the strange, aimless space of Second Life. And STA has an itinerary ready for them - a guided tour of the virtual world's top destinations. Next stop: virtual Dublin.
