Sydney Morning Herald
Nick Douglas |
Huffington Post |
Posted Wednesday January 10, 2007 at 03:38 PM
Virtual world Second Life is all over the news this week, and has been for the last year. Reuters has an "embedded" writer and a dedicated news outlet for stories from Second Life. Now virtual-world watchers already predict a 2007 media backlash, possibly hastened by the relentless attacks from the tech blog Valleywag (where I write an unrelated column). Those attacks, particularly those written by tech theorist Clay Shirky, got attention last month from the same blogs that first carried positive Second Life news.
Here's why the media spends so much time on Second Life (For a quick recap of Second Life itself, try Wikipedia or the official site):
- World of Warcraft coverage is getting old. Not much has changed in that world other than the usual game updates, which are relegated to gaming news sites. Not only is Second Life newer, but because it's a world and not a game, qualitative changes can happen all the time.
- It's a testing ground for theories about the future of business. Sears and Circuit City plan to open stores in Second Life; the Associated Press covers the story, focusing on how these stores let customers "see how products look in a 3-D environment." The AP doesn't mention that these models are far from perfect replications, instead predicting what "eventually" will happen. But issues about virtual shopping — for example, don't people go online to escape the crowded feeling of physical space? — could decide billion-dollar deals if Second Life becomes ubiquitous.
- But will it? Linden Labs pumped its numbers by calling anyone who ever made an avatar, a "resident." Despite that word's connotations, these are really just "registered users." For most Web services, there's one active user for every 10 registered users. In Second Life's case, 2.4 million avatars means about 690,000 users in 60 days and up to 22,000 simultaneous users (a peak that crashed the world, according to the AP). Impressive for the company, but far from massive. In contrast, each of World of Warcraft's 7.5 million users represents a player paying about $21 a month, who has presumably logged in during the last 30 days. But hey, WoW is just a game, so who cares that it's over ten times as big?
- The backlashers, meanwhile, come in two flavors: Those who see SL behavior as sick and twisted, and those who just think it's overhyped (Valleywag, for example, keeps pounding on the "Second Life isn't actually popular" story day after day).
- It's a chance to make pop-psychology theories: Real people holding real events get "griefed" by people who treat SL as a consequence-free game. The same dynamic that attracted the media to the virtual world of the Web attracts it to this one.
- Legal action from griefing incidents (one SL user threatened to sue blogs reporting on an incident because footage includes the user's "copyrighted" avatar) will set precedents for how we treat a virtual world, reminiscent of 90s court decisions that set precedents for how to legally treat the Web. If a user creates an avatar, is a photo of that avatar governed as a copyrighted work or as a photo of the user?
- On top of all the theorizing and debate, there's one simple benefit to covering Second Life: How else can a non-tabloid news outlet run photos like the above?
