Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?

An anonymous reader writes "Second Life appears to be suffering a bit of a backlash from its PR efforts. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge, newly-returned muckracker Peter Ludlow at the Second Life Herald and Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture have all recently taken Linden Labs to task for their non-stop, arguably deceitful, PR machine and frequent downtime. Further, over on Terranova a veritable cornucopia of long-time, experienced virtual world developers, including Raph Koster, Mike Sellers, Randy Farmer, the aforementioned Matt Mihaly, and Daniel James, have piled on, calling into question the fundamental utility of Second Life. Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations? What do Slashdot readers think?"

Comments

Second Life has plenty of good uses

[FlipperPA]

As a fairly well-known Second Lifer, I think it's got plenty of good applications. The most obvious is clearly entertainment: the ability to attend live music acts several times a week now that I'm in my married 30s instead of my single 20s has a huge appeal to me. My real-life company also uses it to train our field technicians on the under-the-asphault workings of gas stations. For some reason, the community has a really cool feel to it, and I've made quite a few friends who have transitioned to become real-life friends, and mingle with my real life friend crowd. I don't understand the haters at Slashdot: I'm not a gamer, never have been, and Second Life is the only 3-D application I really use these days. Second Life is not a game, it's a far more complex application and network (everything is streamed), so comparisons to MMOGs that store 99% of the content on the hard drive and have professional content creators really isn't fair.

I never got a good feeling of community at Active Worlds, which Second Life has in spades. There's a huge academic community within Second Life as well who seem fairly convinced that the educational possibilities of Second Life are immense. When I first joined Second Life after reading about content creators retaining IP rights to their creations on Slashdot in 2003, I thought I'd check it out for the free one-week trial. Here I am three years later, running real-life conventions for Second Life enthusiasts with keynote speakers like Mitch Kapor! Try it, it might surprise you.

Re:Or to give it its full name...

[AuMatar]

If people want something, by definition, it has value. If people don't, it could be made out of the rarest material in the universe and it still wouldn't have value. Nothing has an inherent value. And as long as people are willing to trade goods/services for a piece of virtual property, it has as much value as a piece of real property.