Feature: 'Serious Games Summit Keynote: You Can (Not) Be Serious'

In another update to Gamasutra's Game Developers Conference 2006 coverage, we now present a full, extended write-up of Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale's Serious Games Summit opening keynote, "You Can (Not) Be Serious," with a good deal of exclusive information from the keynote. In this extract, author Simon Carless reveals a number of interesting statistics revealed during the speech: "At 32,000 acres, the current virtual size of Second Life, which has more than 160,000 users, is bigger than Boston. The service currently carries more than $5 million dollars per month in goods and service transactions, and there are 10 million in-game objects, including 15 terabytes of user-created data. The game uses 2 teraflops of CPU power for the simulation, and 230,000 discrete, differently named objects are sold or traded monthly. Some of the other major stats noted during the presentation - 43% of all users in Second Life are female, with a median age of all Second Life users of 32, and 25% of all users are international." You can read the full Gamasutra coverage, including a plethora of information on Second Life's virtual world (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).