Second Life Larger Than WoW, There, Oahu Combined?

We recently saw the full map of Second Life (now available in hardcopy), but how does it compare to other landmasses, both virtual and real?  Gathering known data from various sources, virtual world explorer and developer Ariane Barnes recently posted this comparison on her blog, Virtual Underworld, which I've taken the liberty of annotating.  By her calculations, the full breadth of World of Warcraft and the islands of There are scarcely as large as SL's main continents.  For that matter, the main island of Hawai'i is maybe smaller by a fourth.  (As someone who grew up on Oahu, I love the comparison.)

I'm a bit skeptical all the data is fully accurate-- check out her math here.  I once thought to make a similar comparison last year, and Second Life seemed closer in size to the tiny Hawaiian island of Lanai.  And of course, in the wake of the Openspace imbroglio, the grid seems to be shrinking.  Then again, it's worth keeping the comparison in full perspective: you can pretty much circumnavigate most of Oahu by car in under three hours.  Hat tip: jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com.

Comments

[Kourosh]

Hmm, it's an interesting idea, but I wonder how the water areas are taken into account. What a neat thought - comparing the virtual worlds in terms of virtual size.

It does lend towards another question of density though. WoW boasts over 11 million subscribers and I only see about 40-50k on SL at any one time. How crowded is one over another?

[Ren Austinmer]

I think it was said on the SL blog that the combined landmasses on the grid was comparable to the island of Malta.

[Ciaran Laval]

You try travelling around WoW without a Mage or a Warlock to get you around!

Yes there's a huge landmass in SL, in the case of WoW if everyone logged into one world like they do in Second Life they'd need a much larger landmass or players wouldn't be able to move.

In SL the huge landmass is both positive and negative, positive because it shows how many people engage and want to create and negative because it's a great shame we can't travel roads to get around the whole grid, but the vast size would make that unappealing, a lot gets missed by many because of the sheer size of the grid.

[Loraan Fierrens]

Kourosh: One key difference between WoW and SL (beyond that tiny detail of the lack of user generated content) is that WoW is "sharded" into multiple realms. Each realm is a largely self contained copy of the world... people can interact within the realm but not outside it (with some exceptions). So, even though there may be 11 million subscribers, only a fraction of that will be on any particular realm at any particular time, and the world will not seem crowded. Of course, a particular realm might have much higher population than another... making it a bit more crowded (but it's not like the whole world is in there at once).

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

This is actually fun :) But for a different reason. I once tried to figure out how much it would cost (in monthly tier) to run a MMORPG in SL, with a size "as large as WoW". I thought it would be an insane amount of money.

Well, it turns out that WoW is *tiny* compared to SL, which came to me as an utter surprise!

[Loraan Fierrens]

Oh, I forgot to mention that I thought this an amusing article. I was just wondering around the pixellated hills of Azeroth the other night wondering how big the world would be if you mapped it into the real world. Now I have some idea.