The Creative Power of Second Life

Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "

Created a what now?

[FooAtWFU]

Created an "artifact"? What qualifies? If I take one of Second Life's "prims" and just place a sphere somewhere in space, does that count? I think the statistics are... overrated.

And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?

99% of it is shit

[QuantumG]

And therefore it would only cost Linden Labs about $4m a year to produce work with more significant quality. It's kinda stupid to do this kind of analysis anyway. The whole point of Second Life is that it is different. Comparing Second Life with, oh, I don't know, WoW, is like comparing apples and oranges. You can like both, it's ok.

If only...

[C10H14N2]

...the graphics in Second Life weren't oh-so-1995--and yeah, everyone is making stuff. Well, that's just great. Kind of like the last time I was at a county fair and realized the same thing...and not only didn't want any of it, but wanted to get as far away from it as humanly possible.

Creative my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I went and downloaded the linux 'alpha' client, read about how wonderful Second Life was on the forums, read how an initial registration for a single new user account was free, and thought that was wonderful.

Then, on page 2 of the registration process, after having already picked out a name and given an email address I find out they need a credit card number for 'age verification'. That is, if you are in a country that they cant send a verifying SMS message to a mobile, as was my situation.

The only other industry I have seen 'free' accounts need age verification via CC for is porn. This is also notorious for its fraud and infiltration by organised criminal syndicates. Suffice it to say that it will be a cold day in hell before my CC details are given to this MMOG - like porn, the best can be had for free.

And thus the great Second Life experiment came to an end. Hmmph.

Re:Creative my ass

[EZLeeAmused]

Pissing people off isn't a crime, but your friend wasn't put in jail. Granted some people either have thin skins or what they consider offensive is strongly related to political correctness. Some people need to get a sense of humor. Second Life isn't life, it's an opt-in entertainment venue. But on the other hand:
Say you're a member of a club, one that has a physical building (health club, Elks club, whatever). You can do and say a lot of things inside that building. But not very many such places would let you paint graffiti on the walls, even if they could clean it off easily. Second Life doesn't want graffiti on their walls.
Also, Linden Labs is trying to make a profit. If you have a griefer (who pays one membership fee to be there) wandering around annoying people, and his/her actions cause two other people to quit or not buy in after a trial membership, Linden's net profits are reduced. Second Life isn't life, it's a business.