Massively^™

I suppose they lack the patience as well to deal with the little quirks of Second Life. The tools provided are not focused on the millennial when it comes to social networking and viral trends.

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The problem with "Millenials" as a demographic label is it's too easy to market to them. These kids'll take any trinket virtual worlds experience that falls out of a cornflake packet and lap it up. Well that's what the marketers will have us believe - and well educators... every next generation is millenial to them :P

Truth is I've two millenial siblings and have often hung out with them and their friends being the "cool adult" of the Gen X (rather than boomer generation of our parents), and I've found them to be just as exploratory as we were in the punk period.

The problem is we're too damn old, and we have no idea what they're up to. Old farts in the marketing industry imagine that their attraction to tightly structured spaces means they like them that way - not true. They gravitate towards tightly focused products (and virtual worlds) because these are well developed, work, and are solid enough to engage in the meta-game. They're actually savy consumers.

Second life, and the more ambitious virtual world projects, simply aren't finished. Tighter focused worlds and games are. These kids can sniff beta a mile off, and if they've explored anything online off the beaten track they've probably beta tested something more exciting than a general purpose virtual world. Where's the payoff? They're probably happier moving fast and free with a couple of social network profiles so they can flashmob whatever's interesting this week with their significant friends network. Their own peers are a far more potent marketing force than anything _we_ can throw at them.

One thing they'll always like though is causal worlds and games - they're good for a spot of chat and tinker here and there. So effectively they're doing in cutting edge flash based worlds what your aunt is doing with email and solitaire - goofing off. But we keep hearing that is the primary focus of "what they like".... nah it's faffing... they're a lot more interesting than that.

Frankly I don't think we give the millenials nearly as much respect as they deserve. There's a lot of hand flapping about what they like (crap we obligingly give em) and who they are (too dull to know it's crap), but in my own experience hanging out with them, they're way undersold on those fronts. It's just marketers and educators looking for simple answers to complex questions.

My experience of the millenials; surrounded by them at a party downloading dead kennedys on kazza, cleverly deconstructing the way that the cynical record industry tries to sell them disposable music, teaching each other to; make their own music, knit their own gloves, braid their own hair. Discussing the relation of certain game dynamics to their canonical forms with reference to old snes stuff they play in emulators. Lamenting how their parents, teachers, the job market try to package them according to their own obsessions agendas.

And we imagine they're idiots.

So SL is yet to offer them a super compelling experience, partly cause it's full of oldbies, partly cause their peers aren't there (though there's more than we imagine).... but mostly because half of the millenials aren't allowed in the gate..... officially :P

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As a Millenial myself, the Metaverse Journal strikes me as amusing, condescending, and rather misguided. The idea that we are incapable of enjoying free-form play, or that we are "not bold" enough to explore creative activities, is utter nonsense.

While it's true that my generation has been force-fed mass-produced playsets and adult-directed after-school programs since birth (thanks, mom!), that hasn't left us an entire generation of zombie consumers. (Nor has the cultural climate of the previous generation rendered everyone above the age of 30 a self-driven, free-spirited creative soul. Don't flatter yourselves. ;-P )

Look at the popularity of the Spore creature creator, or The Sims, or the "customize your avatar" Flash virtual worlds. Look at the blogs, the podcasts, the YouTube videos. These are clear evidence of self-directed creative activity by Millenials. (Not that these things are popular with justh that one demographic. I assert that free-form play has universal appeal, no matter the age group or culture.)

So assuming that it's true that Millenials tend not to be interested in SL, why might that be?

Perhaps because the things that older generations find novel and fascinating about SL are old hat to most of us youngsters. Made a friend from Japan? Did that when I was 12. Dressed yourself up in big boobs and high-heels, and cybered with a hot studmuffin? Yawn.

Without the novelty of these experiences, SL just looks like a shoddy program with bad graphics and few of the features we want -- in other words, a waste of time. Aside from the rare soul who find something personally appealing about SL, why would any of us want to spend our precious few free moments on such a second-rate experience?

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As I commented on the original article, the population distribution needs to be accounted for. As a percentage of the eligible players of adult SL for an age group, what is their usage pattern?

The average millennial (born in 1992, age: 16), is not old enough to log into the adult grid, the raw population numbers *cannot* tell the whole story.

If there are 5 million Millennials old enough to play SL and 25 million GenXers, the you should expect, on average, 5 times the number of GenXers.

I bet that distribution is more than enough to account for the difference without getting into the relative "creativity and appreciation for free-form play" of the two generations.

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So, I decided to do a bit of investigation:

SL Reports:
18-24 year olds account for 15.42% of usage time
25-34 year olds account for 34.76% of usage time
35-44 year olds account for 28.31% of usage time

The census bureau as of 2004 (the latest year I could easily google data for) Reports:
18-24 year old population is 20,971,000
25-34 year old population is 40,032,000
35-44 year old population is 44,108,000

So, accounting for population distribution, the 25-34 year olds spend slightly (~2%) more time in world, per percentage of the US population, than the 18-24 year olds.

There are a couple of caveats to this data, its from 2004 census and its only US, but since the original post tried to draw conclusions based on US child rearing habits of the past couple of decades, I don't feel too bad about using the same basic data. Also, it is usage data, not population data in SL, but I couldn't find data specifying the numbers of users of the various ages in SL.

So, given a bit of better data analysis and the relative similarity of the usage data, I feel that it's specious to conclude that the Millenials basically need things "spoon fed" to them.

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I think any "generation gap" discussion of Second Life runs into several problems.

First, I'm a Gen-X who is a teacher in RL and I have spent inordinate amounts of time shepherding 14 year olds off the adult grid and into the "Teen" grid... to the point that my X and Boomer friends call me a "Den Mother". I don't think we have any real "facts" on the numbers of kids on the adult grid because, quite frankly, the teen grid is full of content created by teens...and strangely enough...it's "really boring" compared to what's on the adult grid created by professional graphic designers, artists, and programmers of some expertise. It's also impossible to know how long they've been there. (I met a student from my school the other day...he's 18 now, but his profile says he's been in world since he was 15. He's a professional scripter.)

Second, SL is a unique experience to every user. Whether you found something worthwhile to you in the first 3 hours of play...whether you found anything worthwhile in the first three days...three months...each of these milestones determines whether or not you're "retained" amongst its citizens and it's a hit or miss proposition. Most of us who've made it past our first RezDay had a mentor...a project...a dream...a love of live music...SOMETHING that kept us coming back.

[And, in response to a few comments above..."sex", doesn't keep anyone coming back to SL. Nor does merely "talking to someone from another country". Listen, whippersnapper, I've been chatting with half the planet since the 80's...before you were born!] Ahem, sorry, outburst control initiated. ;)

Third, most of the time you don't know how old someone is in SL until they tell you..if you believe them. My best friends, the ones I've known long enough to have earned the truth, tend to be male and over 50. (I'm in my 30's) Why this is I can't say particularly...but it tends to be the case and is part of the "lore" of SL psychology.


Lastly, the reason I responded to this post is simply that I get very tired of the same comments about SL again and again. It's one of the most possibility- filled virtualworlds that you can explore, create, and socialize in at this writing. (Go and look if you don't believe me.) It's a petri dish and a mirror all in one. You get back what you reflect into it. If that's appealing to you, good. If it's not, that's fine too.

But, what I DO have an issue with is those who think they know why I (or anyone else) log in. You want to know that, ask. Everything else is just speculation. For some reason, when it comes to SL, that speculation tends to be mean, one-sided, and rather offensive. It also tends to be from individuals who from their own statements have little to no information about what they're belittling.

The real question of interest to me about SL isn't the demographics...it's the amazing virulence of its "haters". I can think of a hundred different software programs I've used or been abused by in the last two decades, but I can't think of one that caused me such pain that I'd have to scrawl "WoW Sucks" on forum and comment posts, let alone attack its users as in some way subhuman. THAT is the phenomenon that someone should get interested in, in my opinion. I'm sure somewhere behind it all is demographics. Yep, I'm pretty sure there's something in that that smells of a generation gap.

***DON'T TRUST ANYONE UNDER 30! (They usually don't know what they're talking about.)

;) lol

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As is so common with this kind of data analysis – the analysts need to go back to school and study inferential statistics. The demographics are actually quite similar to the general population statistics for the SL usage figures. The posting above by Tiessa Montgolfier makes it fairly clear that the population usage of SL is fairly close to the distribution of the various age groups within the general US population (for 2004).

I think it is also important to remember that 18-24 year olds are disproportionately buried in immersive social environments outside of online time (college life), and are not yet as mature a group of consumers over-all as the older groupings are (having left home for the first time) and are not mature in SL (although SL is only five years old there are mature users in terms of history with the virtual world. Teens under 18 are forbidden SL access and teen usage is very small – so they will have had by necessity more experience with highly structured gaming worlds, and, therefore, more comfort with those environments. The more mature SL users are NOT going to be in the younger group by the numbers – a no-brainer).

I don’t think we have yet to see where or what the various demographic groups will do with SL – SL and all virtual worlds are at the infancy stage in development – very much like Compuserve was in the early days of the internet and WWW.

But the internet was here to stay and so are virtual worlds, and so is, many of us believe, SL. Because, like the internet, SL is user created and user driven, and because it is going slowly but inexorably towards shared central processing, as did the internet, I have high hopes that it will survive and thrive through these years of change.

2 cents thrown in.

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Something that we've observed anecdotally: The more technically knowhow a user has, the less likely they are to be retained.


I doubt that's a function of technological know-how per se - only that they probably have RL jobs to do and don't have time for SL. :)

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