Wandering the empty spaces of Second Life

Warren Ellis reflects on his Second Life explorations.  Note the melancholy sense of empty spaces:

it’s been jumping into a series of empty, abandoned clubs. It’s eerie, the way this place can seem so utterly fucking desolate sometimes. Like the 80s image of a city after a neutron bomb — buildings still standing, all humans exterminated... Some days, it must feel like they threw a universe and no-one showed up.

Reminds me of this earlier description of a MMOG during its last, failing days.

I'm revving up my own SL exploration, and will post.

Comments

[Mia Wåhlström Bäcke]

I'd love to see you in SL... :)

[Bryan Alexander]

Yes! Where can I find you and your pals?

[Andy Havens]

First of all, I hate blogs with comments turned off, as is Ellis'. Yeah, yeah. He's famous and crap. We're not. But it's not a blog, then, is it? It's a web site. Fine. I'm done with today's dose of bitterness.

Second. He doesn't get why SL is empty. It's not because SL is the size of Boston with 1/3 the pop. It's because it's the size of Boston, with 1/3 the pop... that only logs in for an average of 10 minutes a day.

I made that stat up. But it feels right, and Bush is my president, and the only benefit I get from that is that I can make up crap and defend it by saying "it feels right."

But you get my point. If you play on SL for a couple hours a week, that's about 1% of your time. In real life, I "go absent" from the world for, let's say, 6-8 hours a day when I sleep. That's when I'm logged out. Call it 30% of the time. In SL, on average, I'm logged out 97% of the time. So if the pop is 30% of a similar sized chunk of land, and the gang is only on for 3% of the time instead of 70%... I can't do the math in my head.

Again, you get the point. It's not just fewer peeps, it's much, much, much less time "in world." It really is "an abandoned" place for most of the day/night.