By Dominic Walsh
Linden Labs' Second Life seems to have gripped the media's attention in a way not seen since Apple decided a flat panel slider was the best way to control an mp3 player. Yet in marked contrast to the tales of how computers are corrupting the nation's youth and stopping everyone from going outside, the coverage it's received has, for the most part, been surprisingly positive. Whether this is deserved or not, the first impression seems to be that Linden Labs either has a superhuman PR team or has caught the media zeitgeist perfectly.
Naturally, for every pro-Second Life story, there is another, usually less high-profile, attempt to combat the assertion. A prime concern seems to be with subscription numbers: while Linden Labs claims to have over six million users, looking at the actual figures suggests that the vast majority of these users haven't logged on even once for over two months.
Using the figure of how many residents actually spent in-game money in April - assuming this is a fair measure of those users that aren’t just one-time experimenters - we arrive at a population of just over 300,000. While a reasonable figure, it pales in comparison to other online worlds or games with more rigorous criteria for ‘citizenship’. Really, can you imagine the need for a Swedish embassy in Coventry in the real world??
However, a high churn rate and ever-so-slightly-overestimated population needn't in itself debunk the claims that are being made for Second Life. But what is more worrying are the continued attempts to sell Second Life as a platform for stuff it’s just not suited to.
While an excellent medium for art, music, performance, design and simple social networking, a lot of business applications that are being touted - such as conferencing, presentations and shopping - are still better suited to older, less media-friendly technologies such as 2-D websites, email and messaging, the telephone and even, heaven forefend, actual face-to-face communication. There is the risk that in the media rush, the actual benefits of Second Life will be drowned in hype.
And therein lies the main problem: what could be an interesting precursor to a "new" type of online environment is being stifled as it's co-opted for purposes it was never designed for. There's also the problem that greater corporate involvement is pushing up the price of membership, specifically land ownership, to the degree that the original inhabitants who made Second Life newsworthy may be put off. Crazy as it might sound, a virtual island now costs more per year than Central London council tax…
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