Does second life have a second life?
Can you create an Avatar of your own, like in the recent film by James Cameron? Well I’m pretty sure you can’t, not in real life anyway. There is another option of course – Second Life.
For those who missed the Second Life hype upon its first release to the world and are sitting there reading this still thinking “Huh, what IS Second Life?” Let me enlighten you. Second Life was released for public use in 2003 by a company called Linden Labs. The self proclaimed “internet-based virtual world” founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale enables the users to:
“Interact with each other through motional Avatars, providing an advanced level of social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and buy items (virtual property) and services from one another”.
Let’s explain why we decided to look at Second Life right now. When it was first aired that we were to re-visit the virtual world of Second Life the most common response was that of “That’s been and gone hasn’t it?”, “Is that still around?” and ”That is old news”. The question is why do so many people have this immediate opinion? Has the user base decreased rapidly over the last few years? Has the Second Life economy crashed? Or maybe the media has portrayed some idea that it has run dry?
There was only one way for us to find out and that was to look at the cold hard statistics. So we went away and did exactly that and what did we find? Confusingly the direct opposite is true. There are more users than ever before; they are racking up more average hours per visit; and there is more e-commerce activity year on year, month on month (with some small variations).
So why is there such a difference in the opinion of Second Life success and usage, against the statistical evidence? Well you have probably just realised exactly why we wanted to spend some more time researching Second Life, to answer (among other things) that very question!
It became very clear that trying to answer that question would prove to open up a giant can of other questions:
- “Why do people sign up to a virtual world?”
- “What benefits are there in a virtual world that the real world can’t offer?”
- “Are virtual worlds like Second Life the next step in social networking?”
- “Can Second Life still be used successfully in business?”
- “What effect have the changes imposed by Linden Labs, such as the gambling restrictions, had on the demographic of the user base?”
This is what we have set out to do! If you are interested in virtual worlds, have a prominent question you think we are missing or would like to help out then you can contact me below.
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