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How big is Second Life?

January 9, 2009 By

It’s this big (as of November 2008):

secondlife_map

The map comes from this site and you can download the full 13MB version to get a better understanding of the magnitude of Second Life.

We’ve featured maps of the Second Life grid before, and they’re useful to reinforce the scope of virtual worlds. Those who haven’t spent time in a large world have no concept of their size and complexity until shown something 2D like the map above. Combine it with a brief tour of Second Life and the penny starts to drop.

Back in November 2007, Second Life was roughly the size of two Wagga Waggas at nearly 900 square km- it’s grown a lot since then to 1871 square km, which isn’t that far off the size of the Australian Capital Territory at 2400 square km. That should also help provide some mental imagery for the skeptic.

Thanks to New World Notes for the heads-up

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Gender and virtual worlds: new research

December 15, 2008 By

Dmitri Williams from the University of Southern California has completed some research in conjunction with Mia Consalvo (Ohio University), Scott Caplan (University of Delaware) and Nick Yee (Stanford University). The title of the research is Looking for gender (LFG): Gender roles and behaviors among online gamers. The research employed a range of survey tools as well as some key health measures like Body Mass Index – the rigour in approach is certainly there.

Some standout points from the research (some aspects are direct findings, others are cited findings in reviewing the literature for the research):

  • The average player in the study had more than six alternate characters
  • Males were more focused on achievement as a reason for gaming
  • Female players tend to play more for social reasons and now comprise 40% of all gamers
  • Female players played the most and were the most healthy

    • There’s a lot more in the findings than the points above, but some of them alone challenge some significant stereotypes aimed at online gamers. There are obvious ramifications of research like this that turns common stereotypes on their head.

    Download the full paper here in MS Word format.

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    The Second Life economy: calm before the storm?

    November 13, 2008 By

    Linden Lab today released the Second Life economy statistics of the third quarter of 2008 and it shows some healthy growth in some areas:

  • hours spent by users in Second Life passed the 100 million mark
  • the total land mass continued to grow significantly to just under 2 billion square meters
  • the monetary value of user-to-user transactions in-world hit 102 million US dollars – identical to Q2 2007, the last period before the gambling ban which saw a large drop

    • There continues to be a decline in premium subscriptions althugh no specific data is given. Linden Lab claim this isn’t of great concern to them:

    ..a decline in premium subscriptions does not mean we have a reduction in the number of land owners. Therefore it should not be used as a measure of the health of the land market, of the Second Life economy or the health of Linden Lab. We are currently in the process of evaluating ways to make premium subscriptions more valuable to Residents and less dependent on Linden dollar stipends.

    If it’s of no concern, I don’t understand why the same graphing prowess couldn’t have been applied as it is to the other measures. At the very least it’s a rough measure of Second Life mainland health.

    The results overall are very positive but Linden Lab themselves admit the Openspaces issue will impact the next quarter’s performance. Add to that the real-world economic climate and we may see a very different picture come January 2009.

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    World of Warcraft demographics: no big surprises

    October 27, 2008 By

    Over at GamerDNA they’ve crunched some numbers on some key demographics of World of Warcraft players – the sample group are GamerDNA members combined with Armory data, so the sample is representative to say the least.

    The results aren’t surprising but still interesting. The key points:

    1. There remains a preference to sign up an Alliance character than a Horde one, particularly if the player is female.

    2. The Hunter class is the most popular across both factions.

    3. Men tend toward the more ‘manly’ classes such as Warrior.

    As Sanya Weathers, the data cruncher says:

    The most popular class, the Hunter, is slightly preferred by female players by the same margin in both factions. Same for Mages. Priests skew heavily female in both factions, again by roughly the same margin. Rogues and Paladins have the same stair step proportion across the factions, but with men outnumbering women. More men play Warriors than women across the board, but the difference is more pronounced on the Horde side thanks to the whole “women don’t do Orcs” thing.

    The only flaw I can see in the gender analysis applies across all virtual worlds: there’s arguably a lot of avatars out there that are the opposite in gender to their real-world counterpart.

    Aside from the obvious interest of such stats to WoW players, there’s a much wider application. Don’t imagine that marketers, game developers and educators aren’t looking at data like this intensively. There’s a thousand PhD theses in this sort of information and a few hundred of them are likely well underway.

    If you’re a WoW player, do the statistics match your impressions?

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    Australians in Second Life Update – small declines

    October 25, 2008 By

    Linden Lab have released their metrics up until September 2008, and in the Australian context there’s been a slight drop in activity – 686,872.48 hours, which is nearly eight thousand hours less than last month. Across 10-15 thousand active users, that’s not a big drop and Australia maintains the 11th spot worldwide.

    Overall:

    - user hours dropped from 34.8 million to 33.2 million

    - the number of islands owned jumped from 1,610 to 1,723

    - in-world accounts with positive cashflows grew from 60,788 to 62,633

    - premium accounts (those that people pay a monthly fee for) continued their decline to 83,23, down from 84,883 last month and December 2007 highs of 93,219.

    It’s a mixed picture and I’ve had a lot of people ask me in recent weeks how the real-world economic issues is impacting Second Life. These metrics don’t point to a significant decline related to the worldwide economic downturn and I’m not seeing any erosion of confidence. That said, the worst of that downturn occurred in October from a public perception viewpoint, so next month’s metrics should make for fascinating reading.

    What are your thoughts? Are you seeing people spend less in-world? Have your spending habits changed in recent months?

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    Kids and virtual worlds: the ever-growing market

    September 11, 2008 By

    Virtual worlds metrics gurus, Kzero, have done some further hypothesising on the growth of the kids market for virtual worlds in the next year or two.

    If the prediction of 110 million kids using virtual worlds by 2010 is close to the mark, even the most cynical corporates are going to start taking notice. Take Hello Kitty as an example. That one brand is likely to draw an enormous following if their latest trailer is anything to go by:

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    Age demographics and virtual worlds

    July 24, 2008 By

    Metrics gurus Kzero have released a new breakdown of the age variances by type of virtual world frequented.

    There’s no big surprises but the figures do further emphasise the power of the pre-teen and teen market for social virtual worlds.

    Thanks to Pavig Lok for the heads-up.

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