Sweden to open “virtual embassy” in Second Life
MSNBC reports that Sweden is planning on opening a “virtual embassy” in Second Life, to be staffed by real government employees. Joystiq makes the good point that it’s more of a tourist bureau than an embassy, since Second Life is not a sovereign nation in any way, shape, or form, and Sweden gains nothing by having “diplomatic relations” with a software company. However, I’m sure Sweden is quickly going to learn that Second Life is not all that it is hyped up to be. Sweden is going to find it impossible to justify the hourly wages they’re paying people to maintain the in-game presence, especially once they realize very few people are actually dropping by. To get appreciable visitor numbers in Second Life you basically need to be a casino, a sex club, or a hangout for marginalized fetishists (like the furries and Goreans).
Also, I find it necessary to rebut (yet again) Linden Lab’s misleading marketing hype, which MSNBC seems to have accepted at face value without even attempting to verify:
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world built and owned by its residents. It was created by Linden Lab and opened to the public in 2003. It says it now has more than 3 million inhabitants from around the globe.
This number of supposed inhabitants is ludicrous. That’s just the number of registered accounts, which anyone on the Internet will tell you means absolutely nothing. Hell, I’ve registered three accounts and haven’t played in over a month … but I still count as three of the “3 million inhabitants from around the globe”! One actually valid statistic to look at is the concurrency figures, that is, the number of people who are logged into the game at once. Second Life’s peak concurrence is around 27,000, and its average is below 20,000. Compare this to really successful online virtual games, like World of Warcraft, and you’ll see that it’s between one and two orders of magnitude smaller. Hell, World of Warcraft has 8 million subscribers: people who are currently shelling out $15/month to play the game. If Blizzard wanted to use the utterly unrealistic metric of “how many user accounts were ever registered” (like Linden Lab does), they could easily claim over “30 million inhabitants”.
There is no charge for a basic account but a one-time $9.95 fee is charged for additional basic account. Premium accounts start at $9.95 a month and allow you to own land on which you can build, entertain and live.
This isn’t true. You don’t own land in Second Life by any reasonable or legal definition of the term. At best it can be described as a land rental (although Linden Lab can revoke the rental agreement at any time, making it not much of an agreement). But the second you stop paying the (rather large) monthly land rental bills, boom, it’s all taken away. Yes, rented land can be transfered to others in exchange for money, which is probably where the confusion about land ownership comes from. The person you transfer the land to is now the one paying rental fees to Linden Lab.
