Analyzing the press' Second Life obsession

For the past few years, journalists in both the gaming and mainstream press (Joystiq included) have been enamored with Second Life, covering every minornew"first" in the quickly growing virtual world as more evidence that it is destined to become the first true metaverse. Valleywag contributor Clay Shirkey has taken a good look at this press hype and determined that Second Life is a phenomenon "built on sand."

Shirkey's major argument is that Second Life's impressive registered user numbers are inflated by a "Try Me" effect where people sign up, tinker around, and then leave in relatively short order. While there are over 1.9 million registered Second Life accounts, Shirkey estimates that there are less than 10,000 or so active users walking the game's servers at any one time. That's not nothing, but as Shirkey puts it, "in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error."

Shirkey points to other failed metaverse experiments like MUDs and VRML that were once touted as the holy grail of virtual spaces only to quickly fade to obscurity. He doesn't quite make the same prediction for Second Life's eventual fate, but he makes a good case for the virtual world becoming more of an social niche than an Internet revolution.

Maybe we're all just focused on the wrong virtual world -- after all, World of Warcraft just recently passed seven million registered users.

[Via Boing Boing]