There’s an article over on Terranova this morning talking about whether Second Life should be discussed more on Terranova or not. The article’s author, Greg Lastowka, points out numerous bits of pseudo-mainstream press coverage like the Economist and Wired, wondering whether the media coverage alone warrants more discussion of Second Life. Leaving aside the fact that Linden Labs is presumably paying their PR firm - Flashpoint - to help generate, and to place, these stories in the media, my answer is no. Media coverage doesn’t mean something is actually worth talking about. Just turn on American TV news to see what I mean.

Personally, I think Second Life gets media attention because mash-ups are accessible: Harvard course in a game! Fashion in a virtual world! These are easy-to-grasp stories for the media to pitch and actually have a kernel of potential interest to your non-virtual-world-using public, for whom a story on the motivations behind WoW moving from 40 to 25 man raids would be pretty inaccessible.

Purely anecdotally, the only time we’ve gotten nationwide TV coverage was when we put Gleam (addictive drug) into Achaea, allowing reporters to title stories, “DRUGS IN A GAME!” Gleam is not a very interesting part of our games, as far as I’m concerned, but that parallel to something that everyone understands in the physical world made it a powerful media hook.

I guess I don’t see a reason to focus on something just because the media is focusing on it. World of Warcraft, or Runescape, or Habbo Hotel, or Cyworld, etc all have far bigger impacts on the world both in terms of the consumer and in terms of influencing the creators of new virtual worlds. They are what matter in the virtual world space in terms of impact. Second Life remains a relatively small virtual world that has little impact on the virtual world space as a whole, I think.

That’s not to say SL isn’t doing some interesting things, but almost every story in the media about SL runs the same way, “Brick&Mortar institution jumps on the PR bandwagon and sticks something in Second Life.” What we don’t seem to get a chance to see is how impactful that actually is beyond generating an initial press release for Linden and the Brick&Mortar institution. Suzanne Vega’s much-touted in-world performance, for instance, was reportedly seen by only a few dozen people. Wells Fargo decided to move its experiment to ActiveWorlds, etc. All we tend to hear is an initial flash of hype, and then little else.

So in summary, I believe that (and I mean no disrespect to Linden), is that Second Life generates media attention not because it’s having much of an impact, but because its genre-less world makes it easy to generate endless PR opportunities touting “Thing from physical world in Second Life.” Better yet, those PR opportunities seem to require no follow-up. The investment needed to generate it is so small, relatively speaking, that it doesn’t matter if it actually has an impact. The press release is the main intended impact, or so it typically seems to me.