Virtual homewreckers FTW!
Worlds in motion alerted me to yet another silly diagnosis of the dangers of virtual worlds. Cyber affairs leaking over to real life.
I can understand the arguments they put forth but really… they require some extremely broad assumptions about what marriage, cheating, and other such things are. We find this in quotes like “if cyber-cheating is egregious and leads to a regular pattern of cruelty in the marriage, or causes the cyber-cheater to abandon completely his marital responsibilities”. Sounds reasonable enough, but let me explain.
Cyber cheating doesn’t legally constitute adultery, but it’s certainly trying it on for size. Someone happy in a monogamous marriage who isn’t prone to it already won’t cheat at all. Someone who is unsatisfied however, or feels the drive to, may very likely experiment with the idea – especially in the “safe and anonymous” space that VR and the internet provide. This being the case, cyber cheating can’t be the “cause” of someone giving up their marital responsibilities. Folk who choose to give them up do so despite the fact that they cheat on the internet. Cyber cheating does not cause abandonment of responsibilities as they are both symptoms of a greater marital problem.
None of this is surprising really. Helpful folk who give us tips for what to look for in a cheating spouse usually site “demand for privacy” as an indicator. Whilst this could be an indication that they have something to hide, it is also possible that they really need some space. Retreating to an online world where their spouse is not privy to their every move is a natural response to irresolvable marital pressures. This is the same sense of claustrophobia which can be a contributing factor in the attractiveness of extra-marital affairs – if not in VR then perhaps ordered out of the catalog of prospective (and discreet) partners offered by online dating agencies. Should the marriage problem remain unresolved it is highly likely that escapist behaviors, be they simple things like retreat from engagement with the partner to complex behaviors such as adultery, will continue and escalate.
Mis Kimberly Young wouldn’t agree with me though. She runs the Center for Online Addiction Recovery in Pennsylvania and has written a book on dealing with a partner cyber cheating. For her the affair as the root cause of that withdrawal from engagement with a partner that I describe as a symptom of broader relationship issues. Like the idea of too much time on the internet as an actual “addiction” (which clinically it isn’t) it creates victims out of folk, implying that some external thing outside the self is the cause of the problem. It is a dis empowering way of looking at things. For people already feeling dis empowered and trying to get away from real world problems in virtual spaces, it is an attractive but dangerous admission. Focusing on an all consuming online life or affair as some problem one can’t control is perhaps less useful than focusing on other aspects of their life that they may have been ignoring. Focus on the problem in this instance simply takes more time and energy away from solving it.
So my argument is this: having a cyber affair is exactly the same thing as having a real one, though perhaps safer and somewhat stranger. But that’s not the point really because people don’t have affairs unless they want to. “I was drunk” is not an excuse, and so neither is “I was on the internet”. Really, even completely sober and real life,the affair itself is less important than the effect it has on the individuals involved. Societal norms and the law shouldn’t be dictating how a married couple comports themselves, plays around, or forgives each other for their transgressions. That some of it might happen on the internet is neither here nor there.
There is one very sensible thing we can gain out of that article though: if your lover starts to sleep wierdly, demand privacy, ignores their chores, starts lying, changes their personality, loses interest in sex, or stops investing in the relationship then watch out! It’s time to reassess if there might be a problem with your marriage. Because if they aren’t having an affair already, and the underlying problem IS the marriage, sooner or later a holiday with someone else will start to look attractive.
The ol virtual worlds numbers game.
Numbers of avs in virtual worlds are hard to figure out, but the other day i was reading this article by Rick Van Der Wal and something didn’t ring true. Sure enough it was the numbers, which I’ll repost here.
These are estimates as provided by Fabric of Folly
Size Active Digital Media Universe: 350,000,000
Active users in ‘online 3d environments without a gaming focus’: 36,550,000
(very) Rough percentage active internet users in Virtual Worlds: 10.44%
You’ll notice I’ve set a few in bold – they’re what I consider serious multi-purpose free-form virtual worlds, as opposed to games or kids stuff. I’m creating a distinction between a VW’s, MMOG’s and avatar based chatrooms here. I’ll also concentrate mostly on Activeworlds and Secondlife, as they’re the worlds i’ve been most active in and am familiar with.
First onto what I’ve left out so you understand my reasoning.
Barbie, whyville, Disney etc are pretty much gaming worlds with a social focus. They’re avatar, chats and so not revolutionary. As a matter of fact they’ve been around since the early ninties, and even in primitive forms in the late 80s. In that way they’re not particularly virtual worlds.
Kaneva is facebook or myspace in 3d, so not a general purpose virtual world either. In that sense IMVU is similar but just scrapes it in on user generated content. From what I can tell WhyVille less so.
As for Entropia, often lauded as a general VW just like the big boys, well I’ll let their homepage speak for itself:
The Entropia Universe is more than a game. The Entropia Universe is for real. Real people, real activities and a Real Cash Economy in a massive online universe.
… looks promising so far…
Join people from around the globe who use the Entropia Universe currency, the PED, to develop their characters everyday on the untamed planet of Calypso.
… erm spend spacebucks on your character on another planet. Nope, it’s a game.
So what about the real virtual worlds?
I’ve never seen good statistics from There.com so I can’t comment precisely. What I have heard though is they’re about on par or slightly better than activeworlds, which we do know about.
Activeworlds says on their site:
Since Active Worlds is primarily an Internet-based platform, the
potential market for all Active Worlds-based products is global. We
currently have over 2 million individual users worldwide who have
downloaded the browser and visited the one UniServer we operate. We
generally receive more than 1,000,000 hits to our universe server per
day, and more than 500 new users download our browser each day. To
date more than 70,000 users have registered to be a “citizen”
of our Active Worlds universe. These users receive enhanced
capabilities in the Active Worlds environment. Users who do not register
are called “tourists.”
OK let’s get the same statistics from Linden Labs and see what the difference is (keeping in mind that activeworlds has been around a lot longer so their total premium accounts figure is going to be higher.
Linden Labs economic statistics page for today says: Total Residents 11,849,438. That’s sign ups, so not counting alternate accounts (2 million by the best estimates i’ve heard) it means that secondlife has attracted just under ten million individual users to sign up for an account. That’s a guestimate, but a pretty good one. So unique logins alone that puts SL about five times the size of activeworlds (which claims 2 million). This doesn’t take into account the fact that activeworlds has been online since 1995 (see history) whilst SL has only been active this century, making it somewhat younger for such a startling figure.
The difference in growth rate can easily be seen by comparing signup rates. Activeworlds boasts 500 new users each day, which may well be mostly unique. From what I can see Secondlife boasts about 15,000 signups a day, which is down from the peak average around 20,000 a day last year, but even so. If we don’t get tricky with the numbers somehow (eg. throw a few away for alt accounts) it simply looks like SecondLife is growing at thirty times the rate of ActiveWorlds.
Total accounts also doesn’t factor in that people leave. All those eleven-million sl accounts have arrived since I’ve been in world (just over 18 months). Activeworlds has a long history, and has been trading since 1995 as a virtual world, and 2001 as a commercial one. The average churn rate for VW users who do become residents is about six months according to some. We must assume that many of those accounts have left activeworlds over that time and a significant proportion of their two million residents are no longer there. This has happened to secondlife as well, but over a much shorter period.
To summarize this point – SecondLife has about as many fake accounts as Activeworlds has total accounts. When it comes to real accounts the difference is staggeringly large. If you imagine that over the 12 or 7 years the activeworlds figures represent, some users have left, then the difference in size between SL and AW are obvious. You’ll notice in the figures from the top ten at the start of this post, all the virtual worlds I’ve pointed out are about the one million users mark.
So if it’s not the total accounts figure it must be something else. If it’s premium accounts or active accounts… let’s see.
Well it’s not as simple as that – to be a member of activeworlds you have to pay to do anything apart from stand around in orange overalls (from memory). So since 2001 there have been 70,000 users registered to be a “citizen” of activeworlds. Many may no longer be paying. We can compare that to two figures in SecondLife, neither of which is particularly illuminating except to create a stark contrast.
If we compare paying secondlife customers then we’re onto “premium accounts”. I only have the published economic statistics for last september, but at that time 91,015 residents were paying for premium accounts. That was for that month, not over the entire history of SL. Some come, some go. If we knock off the churn for activeworlds it looks quite different.
Pulling the “6 month average churn” figure out of the aether (well out of the mouth of Corey Bridges from Multiverse actually) we’d assume AW’s active premium accounts would be much closer to 10,000. As SL’s premiums have continued to grow since september (with a brief dip recently) we can assume that SL has about ten times as many paying customers as AW. However you don’t have to be a paying customer to live in SL, earn virtual cash and do stuff….
The other figure that probably compares better with activeworlds residency is SL “active users”. They can do everything premiums can do apart from own land. We can be generous with AW and say that – back of the napkin – there might be quite a few folk who might wish to run around in world without any powers or rights and just chat. Let’s say that’s 20,000 or so. We compare that to the number of folk who’ve run around SL in the last fortnight and we get Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days – 508,561. So there’s a big difference again. LL defines active residents as those who have accumulated at least 60 minutes in the last 60 days so it’s probably closer to 1.25 million in the figures they publish in their PR.
So there you have it. Based on solid figures from Linden Lab and some guestimates from Activeworlds, the active user base of SecondLife is about sixty times the size of activeworlds. Q.E.D. … well not quite.
These figures however, are patently wrong. This is partly due to the difficulty of getting propper statistics out of these companies, and partly cause of something I spilled on the napkin while working them out. Then again my estimates here are in stark contrast to those of the original article which says they’re both about a million. I know my figures aren’t exactly right, but I suspect neither of us has the whole picture. My best guess is that his stats are also wrong. Given that activeworlds still services their population with “one UniServer” while LL bought online “over 9,000 server CPUs” this year alone, I’d say my figures are closer to the truth.
This is not to poke fun at Mr Van Der Wal, simply to alert anyone who cares to read it that virtual worlds figures aint what they put in the PR. There’s plenty of very poor press going around with very silly numbers in it, both from the news makers, and the virtual worlds folk themselves. Given the poor acuracy of the numbers in the press you’ll often find reputable sources getting the stats very wrong indeed.
I encourage anyone following virtual worlds for professional purposes, and SecondLife in particular, to keep an eye on Mis Tateru Nino’s posts in Massively. She can be relied on to cut through the lard when it comes to silly numbers.
Tags: secondlife, statistics, marketing
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