There Are Times
There are times, in my real life, when I reflect on my Second Life, and think that I've lost my mind. As coincidence in any kind of life would have it, it's often on those days that a mention or an article on Second Life shows up in a mainstream real life publication. Once again, it shakes up my real life perceptions and assumptions about the world.
Take today. Right there on the front page of the The Wall Street Journal: Cheer Up Ben: Your Economy Isn't As Bad as This One. There it was, on page one of that venerable rag of corporate America, The Wall Street Journal. If you're going to talk mainstream, it doesn't get much better than that.
The article focuses on the banking crisis in Second Life, where virtual banks are on the verge of collapse. The affected avatars are frantic, as they should be. Alas, it looks like sometimes even real life problems (and worse) can rear their ugly heads in virtual realities. I really did feel sorry for those avatars. Yet I wondered, couldn't the avatars have prevented this mess? Couldn't they have created a Second Life without real life problems?
But, there was another fact that I found in the article that was even more striking. That fact was buried in a chart depicting the number of "active Second Life avatars" in various countries. It will probably come as no surprise that the United States has the fine distinction of having the highest number of active Second Life avatars in the world: 187,000. Think about that - 187,000 active Second Life avatars in the United States alone. Germany came in second, and the United Kingdom came in third, with 42,000 and 35,000 active Second Life avatars respectively.
In an effort to get my mind around the numbers, I tried to equate the number of 187,000 to the population of a neighboring city, imagining the real life people as avatars. For the purpose of comparison, I found that the nearby (to me) real life city of Palo Alto, California has 61,200 residents. So, the number of active Second Life avatars in the United States is slightly less than three times the real life population of Palo Alto, California. It boggles the mind.
Then again, it might boggle the mind, but there is power in numbers. And, one can't deny that 187,000 represents a lot of avatars.
I've decided to become an real life avatar expert.
