The depth of content creation in Second Life

What do people do in Second Life?

Socialise? Of course. Many people use SL to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances, in some instances purely on a virtual basis.

Explore? That too. With a landmass and population comparable to a real world city, there’s a lot of places to visit and check-out.

But what about content creation. As Linden Lab puts it, Second Life – Your World, Your Imagination, nicely sums up a key aspect of SL – the ability to create. And, it’s this aspect which demonstrates the depth and involvement related to a new type of user generated content – virtual items.

For the uninitiated, many of the items created and available for sale in SL are showcased on the SL Exchange website. SL Exchange is in a way, Ebay for Second Life products, except that none of the items are second-hand, well, not in the typical sense anyway.

Interestingly, it’s not really until you visit a site like SL Exchange, or the Electric Sheep Company version called Onrez, that you begin to get a sense of the scale of virtual creation – it’s bigger than you think.

SL Exchange lists by category items created by SL residents. In-world, these items are typically available for purchase in the stores owned by the creators. The website however, allows quick and easy access to product listings with SLurls to take potential customers directly to the purchase point.

Using data openly available on SL Exchange, a series of pie-charts have been created to assess the different product types available as at Feb 2008. The chart below shows at a top level the range of items available to purchase on SL Exchange in Feb 2008. In total, almost 326,000 items have been created and made available for purchase.

Looking at these major categories and their respective values provides a great insight into what we (avatars) consume as products in a virtual world – what we want – what we need. The largest category is Apparel, accounting for almost 35% of total items. This equates to over 113,000 items.

Now, although this data is based on supply of products as opposed to demand, manufacturers (be it virtual or otherwise) don’t make things unless they think they can sell them, so what conclusion can we draw here?

A major conclusion, which appears obvious, it that we all want to customise our avatars. Why? Because (just like in the real world) we care about our appearance. We want to look different or at the very least, we want to look as though we’ve given consideration to how we look. And, let’s face it, no-one wants to walk (fly or teleport) around looking like a newbie – the virtual world equivalent of a tourist. The white T-shirt and jeans look might have worked for Nick Kamen in the 1980’s Levis commercial but unfortunately doesn’t cut the cloth for the avatars of today. However, maybe Levis’ missed a trick by not supplying (branded) jeans on orientation island for new avatars

Sure, there’s more than one look available per sex when a new account is created (there’s six in total), but that’s still pretty limited, hence the popularity of clothing. But in the context of apparel creations in SL, as shown below in the chart showing the breakdown of items within the Apparel section, the focus here should be on womens clothing as opposed to mens. Continue reading →