Everyone loves user-created content in virtual worlds. It’s the flavor of the month and a key feature in several new and upcoming worlds. It’s arguably what has made Second Life so popular. Linden Labs has estimated that it has the equivalent of 5100 full-time content creators working for it on content, all for free! How can that be a bad thing?
Some friends and I were talking about this recently, and the question came to me: if everyone loves user-created content and SL is so popular, why do so many people complain of the place feeling so lonely?
The answer: it’s the content, stupid.
Here’s the deal: according to a recent Information Week article, Second Life has about 34 terabytes of user-created content in it – houses, clothes, hair, and tons of other stuff. That’s a huge number, but by current storage standards not really that big of a deal: if you spread that out over everyone who has ever signed up, it’s only 5.4Mb per user. Looking at SL’s recent 30/60 day login numbers, that’s still only 20-30Mb per active user. And looking at this a slightly different (and probably more relevant) way, if only 5% of everyone who’s ever signed up for SL has contributed content, that would average out to about 11Mb per person.
A more relevant number in considering the complaints of emptiness is SL’s concurrent usage. These numbers seem to vary between 25K-35K; call it 34K on the high side to make the math easy. This means that given the amount of user-created data, for every concurrent user there’s about a gigabyte of content available.
You can think of this as a sort of virtual population density. Simple ‘space’ in a virtual world doesn’t necessarily matter, but amount of data-per-user does. Too little data and people have nowhere to go and little to see; too much data per user and the world becomes too large for people to effectively find each other.
To put this in perspective, World of Warcraft has a max server population of around 3000 people, operating on about 10Gb of data – a density of about 1 person per 3.3Mb (0.0033Gb), or 300x the density in SL. SL has a concurrent population (“per server” equals 1, since SL is all in one world) of about 12x that of WoW – but the world size measured in data is about 3400x!
In other words, the average population density in SL is like playing in a world the size of WoW’s Azeroth – but containing only nine other people. Clearly, this raises all sorts of issues regarding finding others and building community.
Now here’s the twist: SL is growing fast, as they continue to highlight on their site and in their PR. More people are, presumably, creating new content all the time – that “virtual staff” of 5100 full-time content creators chugging away all the time. And it is fast exceeding, or has already exceeded, the number of people actually available to use the content as it’s created. More and more empty houses and castles and the like are lovingly constructed as monuments that few will ever see, and each becomes another wall between users, diluting their presence more and more.
It seems unlikely that the pace at which content is created by users will decrease. And, given that none of the old content goes away, this means that the content-per-user ratio progressively (and non-linearly) worsens. As this continues the world becomes larger and larger, and somewhat paradoxically, seemingly more and more empty. This is the “500 channels and nothing on” or “ten million blogs and nothing to read” problem writ ever larger as the new content flows in faster than there are people there to interact with it.
One final issue is that if your world relies on user-created content there’s no way to throttle that content for performance. In many virtual worlds its possible to get a hundred or more people together in the same place, which creates great dynamics for chatting, trading, fighting, etc. In SL, it’s all but impossible to get more than a dozen or so people together unless they start doing things like “taking off their hair” – that is, disabling their more intricate user-created content. What this means is that even if people do manage to find each other, the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.
The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population; and b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other. This is not a strong recipe for building effective, long-lasting community.
Okay, so let’s back off of SL in particular: this is an issue for anyone who hangs their success on user-created content, as many appear to be doing now. The question becomes, how do you give your users the ability to create whatever they want without those creations diluting and limiting the population density, thereby reducing the opportunity for the experience of community that brings people back? How do you prevent users’ self-expression from being the thing that turns your world into a socially empty and uninviting wasteland?
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