THE VIEW FROM 100,000

Sometime mid-morning last Thursday, the Resident population numbers on Second Life's dynamically updated hompage clicked into the six figures. I'd watched the figure slowly crawl toward 100,000 through Wednesday night, then waited into early Thursday, with the vague idea that I'd arrive on the scene in-world to take opinions at whatever impromptu party was thrown when the numbers hit 100K. Exhaustion finally won out, hower, so I was asleep when they finally turned.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have bothered. That there are over 100,000 registered subscribers will have no immediate impact on the world itself. (Peak concurrency of Residents in-world is still around 4,500, most nights.) The number is really most meaningful to the world outside, and how SL is perceived by it. For the game industry, an MMO with over 100,000 subscribers immediately joins the handful of top tier persistent worlds that are not based in Asia and not World of Warcraft. For everyone else, I suspect-- technology analysts, developers, artists, academics, the media, government officials, and so on-- the psychological power of the term "six figures" confers legitimacy and significance.

For myself, this means even more challenges in writing this blog. My main assignment has always been to cover Second Life as an emerging society. So what tensions emerge when it's no longer an isolated microcosm, but an open playground that becomes, by sheer growth in numbers, an increasingly integral part of society as a whole?

Throughout 2005, even well before the final approach to 100,000, we've seen Second Life become a platform for government research, a place to prototype a handheld video game, and a tinkerer's shop for new interactive hardware. How many other real world-directed projects will we see at 100,000? At 200,000? And how will the community of most active Residents respond to them? (As it happens, at the very moment that I wrote this entry last Friday, a major media outlet was experiencing that phenomenon first hand.)

To a great extent, Second Life has already emerged as a society. In the coming year, I believe, the larger story will be what emerges, when the outside world pours in.