A few years ago the author Barry Collins spent a week in Second Life and was left bewildered by what he saw.
After a three year hiatus, he’s returned and written an eminently readable piece called Whatever Happened to Second Life for the UK Web site PC Pro.
This time around he’s less than impressed. It seems what he’s found is a virtual wasteland rather than the socially vibrant world he once explored.
Has Second Life become a digital ghost town? Not according to its makers, Linden Labs. “In total, users around the world have spent more than one billion hours in Second Life,” the company claimed in September.
And it isn’t just using that big figure to distract attention from a slowing interest in the online world: “user hours grew 33% year-on-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,” Linden insists.
Yet, that doesn’t correlate with what I’m seeing. I return a couple of days later, determined to find out whether I’d simply arrived on a slow day or whether Second Life really is on the wane. Again, I check out the so-called tourist spots, but there’s barely a soul to be found. Shopping malls, ski slopes, even the in-game information centre, are all but deserted. It’s starting to get eerie.
But he’s found an island of sex. Quite literally, if digitally so.
A little research soon reveals why Second Life seems a lot quieter than the numbers suggest. In June, the company opened Zindra — Second Life’s “adult continent”, a huge plot of the virtual universe dedicated to content rated as “mature”, “adult” or even “PG”.
Given that sex and gambling accounted for the majority of the “most popular places” when I first visited, it was suddenly apparent why I was as lonely as a cloud in the parts of the Second Life universe that wouldn’t upset the clergy.
Read the original to get his account of the salacious virtual sex (and gimp costumes) he comes across but what’s really interesting is that the Second Life economy continues its rapid growth, real world economies be damned. Sex, no doubt, sells. So too real estate. The virtual world is now larger than Hong Kong.
While Collins sees no need to ever return (eg., the world “ultimately serves no purpose”), a few defenders in the articles comments say this is precisely the point.
Says one:
[Second Life] is really a lot like [Real Life]. You have to set your own goals, create your own motivation…
With my sim, I’ve recreated a memorial in memory of the real life industrial tragedy in Bhopal, India, where toxic fumes killed thousands in 1985, and have not been properly compensated up to today.
Which is really the point, after all.
Like Facebook and Twitter, Second Life was once the digerati flavor of the year. It’s not anymore, and that’s ok.
Someday too, neither will today’s golden children. But it still has and — we assume — will continue to have purpose and meaning for many.
Education is booming there. And we still remember fondly a weekend we spent there visiting the Heron Sanctuary, a virtual world for those with physical and emotional disabilities. The video from that experience is below.
