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"According to Peter Grey, Second Life developer Linden Lab’s senior director of global communications, Second Life’s monthly active user count today totals “bet

"According to Peter Grey, Second Life developer Linden Lab’s senior director of global communications, Second Life’s monthly active user count today totals “between 800,000 and 900,000.”" I find this pretty surprising. I wonder who they are. I never got the appeal of Second Life but if this is accurate then it clearly appeals to a group of people.

wolco 9y ago
The possibilities were endless in secondlife but the experience was choppy in 2006.
- xellisx 9y ago
  It's still choppy today. I decided to check it out earlier in the year, and the lag was just horrendous and the controls were just horrible.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    That to me was always the most surprising thing about SL. It got so many complicated things right, yet they messed up so many things liked the controls which were a solved problem many years before SL was released.
    - xellisx 9y ago
      I'm surprised they haven't worked on a version 2 of SL. With all the advances we've seen since it's been released in gaming engines.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
The big furry clubs are pretty nice. Somehow they manage to have DJs running music 24/7, or at least for all the days and hours I checked.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Are you sure they're live people? They might put on a bot avatar for some time slots, I would imagine.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    I doubt it. They weren't shy about just playing music when no one was on stage DJing.
jaredhansen 9y ago
>I wonder who they are It's a bit dated (2010), but Netflix has a highly engaging documentary[0] on exactly this question. [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/70129457 https://www.netflix.com/title/70129457
lithos 9y ago
Bots play a pretty pivotal role in the game. There are benefits to "faking" traffic, in order to boost your search result. Likewise bots are the only way to interact with quite a few APIs, so even when it's silly to use a bot you're still forced to (bot referring to a modified client to do things like searching land, getting zone data, and similar). As for who they are. There is baby boomer after baby boomer when it comes to real users (at least 8 years ago when I played. The youngest of the boomers). It's also worth noting that when it comes to the typical MMO, they are really really bad at providing a social experience. So Second Life as a game that doesn't have the grind or ways to kill other players, does a really good job of drawing in lots of the people who will play a game just to talk (since once you provide ways for The stereotypical Achiever/Grinder or Player killer to control gameplay they tend to dominate the game). Also very few games offer the level of expression and modification.
- LaikaF 9y ago
  I played back when the teen grid was still a thing. You forget about the large collection of people in the midwest who are relatively isolated from other people. I've always described SL as a chat room with a 3d modeler and a scripting engine.
LarryMade2 9y ago
In the circles I hang in SL, its a social experience, many of the users are older, some may be housebound for one reason or other, unfortunately for some its a was to socialize in their twilight years. In other groups I see a bot of creative folk, however janky it may be the primitive and scripting is easy to approach and gets people doing virtaul 3D visualizations pretty readily. SL doesn't require anyone to dodge virtual bullets, they can just wander, socialize, create. Thats what draws me there. New SL advances have introduced mesh objects into SL and allow the prim count (now Land Impact) to go down to near non existence so you can have more stuff in whatever virtual land you have. Frame rates vary but I think stability has been improving (not as many catastrophic sim-crossings, etc.)
rdtsc 9y ago
I know someone who is handicapped and wheelchair bound. In SL they get to fly around an interact with friends and communities they have made. So they still go there. Oh and they also have a kinky side, so that's another appeal apparently.

wolco 9y ago

The possibilities were endless in secondlife but the experience was choppy in 2006.

xellisx 9y ago
It's still choppy today. I decided to check it out earlier in the year, and the lag was just horrendous and the controls were just horrible.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  That to me was always the most surprising thing about SL. It got so many complicated things right, yet they messed up so many things liked the controls which were a solved problem many years before SL was released.
  - xellisx 9y ago
    I'm surprised they haven't worked on a version 2 of SL. With all the advances we've seen since it's been released in gaming engines.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

The big furry clubs are pretty nice. Somehow they manage to have DJs running music 24/7, or at least for all the days and hours I checked.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Are you sure they're live people? They might put on a bot avatar for some time slots, I would imagine.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  I doubt it. They weren't shy about just playing music when no one was on stage DJing.

jaredhansen 9y ago

>I wonder who they are It's a bit dated (2010), but Netflix has a highly engaging documentary[0] on exactly this question. [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/70129457 https://www.netflix.com/title/70129457

lithos 9y ago

Bots play a pretty pivotal role in the game. There are benefits to "faking" traffic, in order to boost your search result. Likewise bots are the only way to interact with quite a few APIs, so even when it's silly to use a bot you're still forced to (bot referring to a modified client to do things like searching land, getting zone data, and similar). As for who they are. There is baby boomer after baby boomer when it comes to real users (at least 8 years ago when I played. The youngest of the boomers). It's also worth noting that when it comes to the typical MMO, they are really really bad at providing a social experience. So Second Life as a game that doesn't have the grind or ways to kill other players, does a really good job of drawing in lots of the people who will play a game just to talk (since once you provide ways for The stereotypical Achiever/Grinder or Player killer to control gameplay they tend to dominate the game). Also very few games offer the level of expression and modification.

LaikaF 9y ago
I played back when the teen grid was still a thing. You forget about the large collection of people in the midwest who are relatively isolated from other people. I've always described SL as a chat room with a 3d modeler and a scripting engine.

LarryMade2 9y ago

In the circles I hang in SL, its a social experience, many of the users are older, some may be housebound for one reason or other, unfortunately for some its a was to socialize in their twilight years. In other groups I see a bot of creative folk, however janky it may be the primitive and scripting is easy to approach and gets people doing virtaul 3D visualizations pretty readily. SL doesn't require anyone to dodge virtual bullets, they can just wander, socialize, create. Thats what draws me there. New SL advances have introduced mesh objects into SL and allow the prim count (now Land Impact) to go down to near non existence so you can have more stuff in whatever virtual land you have. Frame rates vary but I think stability has been improving (not as many catastrophic sim-crossings, etc.)

rdtsc 9y ago

I know someone who is handicapped and wheelchair bound. In SL they get to fly around an interact with friends and communities they have made. So they still go there. Oh and they also have a kinky side, so that's another appeal apparently.