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

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.