As my post about Second Life seemed to attract some resentment from Second Life fans, I wanted to clarify something: Second Life is an excellent platform for user self-expression. Its utility to anyone but Linden Labs is, as far as I can see, creative self-expression, which is great. Creative self-expression is highly entertaining to many people, though of course so is leveling up in World of Warcraft. My issue with Second Life is that Linden grossly and willfully misrepresents it, from trumpeting near-meaningless registration numbers, to leading users to believe they have some sort of enforceable ownership within Second Life, to the scale of the opportunity for engaging in real-world commerce using Second Life as a platform.

Sure, there are statistical outliers like Ansche Chung (SL real-estate baron), but for the most part, there isn’t much indication that Second Life is particularly good as a platform for anything but entertainment/socialization (I don’t see a big difference). That’s not any kind of slam. My games are definitely not good, in the main, for anything but entertainment/socialization, and the most-used virtual worlds are all very consciously about the same (World of Warcraft, Runescape, the big Asian virtual worlds, etc).

So yeah, I do apologize to SL users who felt that I was diminishing the value of their self-expression in Second Life. I’m not. Second Life clearly enables self-expression to a greater degree than most (if not all) virtual worlds. Linden, however, is like the geek who suddenly becomes cool and ditches his old friends. It doesn’t want to talk about what actually goes on in Second Life, because it’s aware that furries, as one example, don’t paint the image for itself that it wants. (Furries are one of, and perhaps the, largest special-interest group in Second Life. See here, for instance.) Linden is turning its back on the bulk of its own users in order to cater to the next press release, and I’m not going to apologize for pointing that out, however caustically.