Yeah, the post over at Electric Sheep is actually about CopyBot, and the meeting that Philip Linden held yesterday. But there were stats dropped, and as we all know, this blog likes stats. 🙂
There are some economic stats there, but by and large, there’s no other worlds to compare them to, so there’s little point in reprinting them as they mostly just come across as breathless numbers. More interesting are the ones that we have a basis for comparison:
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Just a quick bulleted list.
My dad just called me to let me know that Julian Dibbell was on NPR’s Fresh Air program talking about Exploring the Online Gaming World. I haven’t listened to it yet, but hey, when this stuff reaches my dad, you know it’s seeping into the mass consciousness. I guess all those Second Life articles are having an effect. 😉
It certainly seems like everyone is talking about this issue. Both Cory and Robin have had their say, Second Lifers are organizing boycotts and ‘legislation’, and the original authors of the code that led to CopyBot seem slightly flummoxed by the whole thing.
In short, what’s happening is a small-scale social crisis that brings into sharp relief the split between the hacker-ethic-libertarian-info-must-be-free ethos that underpins much of the technology of virtual worlds, and the rampant commercialism that has actually enabled its embodiment. What we have here is a case of bone fighting blood.
Growing number of educators explore ‘Second Life’ online – CNN.com. It appears to be presented as part of the Welcome to the Future special CNN is doing.
Misleading stat watch:
Now some 1.3 million people around the world log on to live out their second lives.
There’s definitely a little bit of an SL backlash building up among the MMO folks at this point, in part because of perceived overhype and in part because of the use of the registered users metric… a bit of a shame that we can get distracted from SL’s very real achievements because of the surrounding stuff — some of which, no doubt is a bit of jealousy.
