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My own experience of SL doesn't quite match the article's analysis. I didn't stay because it always seemed like a ghost town, even in its heyday, and the GUI pr

• mechanical_fish 17y ago
  it always seemed like a ghost town, even in its heyday I spent about ninety minutes on Second Life a couple years ago, back in the days of its hype, and my vivid impression was that it was an urban planner's worst nightmare. Kind of like Phoenix. Everyone had land -- land was considered important and valuable, right? -- so the world consisted of many separate buildings each alone in the center of its acre of land. But the majority of the buildings were deserted, presumably either because not everyone was online at the same time or because they were all off someplace else. After all, if I wanted to sit around by myself in a house full of rooms that I had carefully customized, why would I have logged into Second Life? So I wandered around looking for the mall, or the city, or the theme park, or someplace which might actually have some activity. I spent a lot of time traveling around -- all that suburban living makes for long commutes! -- until I finally found a building full of people, but of course they were all robots and when you talked to one they either started to have sex with each other or offered to have sex with you. Wake me up when they invent a virtual world that's more like Paris than post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.