Second Life hucksters

Linden Lab's online community, in which participants' avatars chat, and trade virtual goods such as artworks and real estate, has fed on the credulity of the press. Ooh, the world's first virtual Reuters correspondent! A virtual land baroness! Online marketers discover Second Life! The press coverage is embarrassingly breathless, but that's because it suits everybody involved.

It's cheap publicity for Linden Lab, the San Francisco startup funded by Benchmark Capital, Jeff Bezos and Mitch Kapor, among others; Linden's Second Life, which is all techno-utopian and collaborative, needs all the help it can get to compete with the more violent attractions of World of Warcraft.

The coverage feeds the egos, and the nominal net worth, of Second Life's most active participants, so they play along: the release about the game's first virtual millionaire was put out by Anshe Chung, the avatar, rather than by Second Life itself. And reporters play along with these Second Life stories, because they seem innocent enough, and fun, a glimpse into the future first imagined by novelists such as William Gibson.

Only Second Life, with it's exhortation to new users, Buy Land Now, tells us less about the cyberpunk future, and more about the hype-driven present. When the press finally turns more cynical, which it will, Second Life will pay a heavy price for all the good publicity it's been getting.

7:56 AM on Mon Nov 27 2006
By Nick Denton
239 views
4 comments

Comments

George Nimeh at 01:22 PM on 11/27/06
Reply by Email
*

If there is a bubble (and I think there is - it is just a much more selective bubble this time) Second Life will be the poster child when it bursts. They will be the Boo.com of the over-hyped side Web 2.0 ... and they won't be alone.
jasonpettus at 10:28 PM on 11/27/06
Reply by Email
*

Is this really what Valleywag has come to -- articles about how Second Life sucks because they're popular? Please bring back what made this website so much fun in the first place; smart bitchy writing about all the horrible things that happen in the tech industry. This high-school crap is way below the usually excellent snotty standards of Gawker.
fedbait at 09:01 AM on 11/28/06
Reply by Email
*

How long until Donald Trump makes an entrance into Second Life? After all, he has already perfected the kind of hype-fueled business model that the game seems to be trumpeting.

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2006/11/27/how-soon-until...
ReverendJeffy at 11:19 AM on 11/28/06
Reply by Email
*

Honestly, I agree with this assesment of the situation. I've been a big time fan of Second Life for years, ever since I wrote an article about virtual property for a legal newspaper, but this is getting a little nuts. I used to tell everyone about how cool it is.

Now, however, I'm constantly being put in a position where I have to caution clients against getting involved. We've seen a massive population growth in the last six months, but no demographics to explain the implications of that growth. In general, it is starting to feel a little like the hype is getting out of hand.

I imagine people probably love Second Life because it is the first of a new breed of open-ended virtual worlds with real-world-equivelant currency and intellectual property rights. But it is just the first of these worlds that's come about. It won't be the last and it might not even be the best.