I’m seeing more and more people criticizing SecondLife as being “overhyped” in the media.
Often, it’s pointed out that SecondLife has far fewer users than a world-beating Massive Multiplayer game like World of Warcraft (WoW), the contention being that since WoW is 10x the size of SecondLife that they should have a similarly large amount of coverage.
This point misses the sheer weirdness and number of new interesting things happening within SecondLife due to it being an open platform for programmers, artists and all sorts of businesses.
WoW is an awesome game and has captured a huge following, but it’s pretty straightforward: you know what you’re getting into, what’s going to happen.
When unexpected things happen in WoW it’s a big story: checkout the huge number of stories about the outbreak of Corrupted Blood disease spreading between players back in 2005. A point many people raised at the time was that the virtual virus infection spread just like a real virus outbreak and maybe this online behavior could be used to model the real world effects of Ebola or Monkey Pox. [as an aside: You know life is weird when a real disease sounds like it belongs in a video game and the fake disease sounds like some bad complication of Hepatitis.]
Something that weird, unexpected and with possible lessons to teach about the real world happens every week in SecondLife.
- Live music events
- Emergent behavior experiments with simulated ants
- Virtual objects being turned into real ones
- A live currency market with speculators, arbitrage and ignorant people giving bad advice (just like the real world).
To pull things back to the last generation of technology, how many stories were written about cool things happening “in” AOL, versus on the open Internet. All of this isn’t to say there aren’t SecondLife puff pieces written by clueless reporters who haven’t (or just can’t) login to SecondLife even to check it out. However, that shouldn’t take away from the legitimate cool new things that people are creating.
technorati tags:SecondLife, MMO, MMORPG, Backlash, Press, Media
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