Great Throughts Treasury

"It's still comparatively small now, but I see endless potential. Realize that 10 million objects have so far been built by our members. I'm stunned by people's endless desire to create."

"People are companies too."

"People in Second Life have created over 1 billion in-world ?objects? occupying total storage space of about 100 terabytes. I wouldn?t agree that these are mostly game-like; most derive their value from their intellectual, utility, or artistic appeal. If anything, Second Life is more diverse than the real world in terms of types of activities, not less."

"Second Life as a platform is inherently less supportive of anticompetitive or monopolistic activities, which I think is one of the things that makes it so appealing. For example, there are really no ?natural resources,? meaning that no one can corner the market on them. Genuine appeal and intellectual value tends to drive Second Life pricing more than distribution muscle and brand."

"The thing that was always striking to me was that we as people could have so many really amazing ideas about things we'd like to do, but are so often unable, in the real world, to actually do those things."

"We have a large team dedicated entirely to dealing with fraud and abuse. It is an important competence for us to build ? any platform offering the capabilities of Second Life must necessarily also afford some ability to break the rules, and tracking and managing those cases is important to our success. However, much of the overall ?security? of Second Life is provided by those using the platform, such as communities in-world that set their own ?zoning? guidelines around content use."

"By nature of its unlimited potential, Second Life has already attracted a large community of creative individuals from a wide range of disciplines. By creating the Linden Lab Fellowship, we hope that we will encourage students of the expressive arts to explore the potential of the virtual world, for the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art."

"It's a bit like The Matrix . We provide the land, and the community builds the actual world, which gives everyone a huge sense of being pioneers in a great experiment."

"Everything you're seeing now, the community built. It's part of a new weird nation where all bets are off. Here, the future is yours to create."

"Whether sitting in front of a computer is bad for you is a function of whether what you are doing there is more or less challenging than real life. If you are mindlessly shooting monsters, the environment has the risk of making you oversimplify the real world. If, on the other hand, you are confronted with a complex human environment with people from all over the world who are demanding of you in your interactions with them, you could actually be better off in front of the computer. Second Life can teach people new skills and connect them with new cultures in a way that the real-world environments of many places cannot."