I don’t talk much about Second Life here for a variety of reasons. I think it’s sufficient to say that it’s not really what I’m looking for in an online experience. Just the same, despite the bad stuff I have tried very hard to keep an open mind because the idea, at least, is a good one. Scott Jennings regularly has good stuff to say, but today as I was reading Broken Toys he actually made me understand 2L for the first time … a little.

As someone told me explicitly, in these exact words, “In Second Life, men tend to become worse, and women tend to become better.” Freed of their concern for their appearance, age, and RL social status, women take to SL with relish and feed off of each other positively. Most of the most dramatic areas in SL are female-owned. It’s been known through studies that middle-aged women tend to be the social hubs in MMOs - in a social MMO like SL, this becomes raised to the Nth degree. It’s alien to almost anything online that’s come before, and I suspect that alienness - that singularity - is what inspires SL’s most fervently myopic defenders to tilt at the wheel again and again. Because in spite of the flailing newbies, crashing platform and constant drama - this is something that SL’s partisans want to see remain. It’s what is missed in most media coverage, and it’s what the partisans are terrified may go away, washed away in a tsunami of media backlash, moral judgement and clueless administration.