Dr. Phil Features Second Life in Show on Game Addiction

Dr. Phil is featuring Second Life and Linden Lab's Ebbe Altberg in an episode on gaming addiction, unsurprisingly titled, "Won’t Work, Won’t Go to School: 'My Son Just Wants to Game All Day'". Haven't seen the episode yet, but it's very valid to include Second Life within the topic of addiction, for at least a couple reasons:

• According to Linden Lab's own stats, Second Life's most heavily engaged users are in SL ten-plus hours a day.
• According to a 2011 academic study, people get more happiness from being in Second Life than getting good news from real life.

I field a lot of media requests from reporters who want to discuss Second Life as an example of gaming addiction, so it's not surprising Dr. Phil's people approached Linden Lab on that front. As it happens, I was just thinking about this topic from another direction, when reading comments on last week's post explaining why Second Life is best understood as a game - like this one from George Karmand:

There are very few publications where you could get articles about Second Life published if you (Wagner James Au) framed it as a non-game. For example, that article you wrote for Polygon (a video games blog) repeatedly referred to Second Life as a game. Polygon almost certainly wouldn't have published it otherwise.

For the record, in the Polygon post, I originally described Second Life as "an MMO", which is ambivalent enough of an acronym to mean "massive multiplayer online roleplaying game" or "massive multi-user online world", but didn't protest when the editor just changed that to "game". Why? Partly because, having written about Second Life for over twelve years, I'm resigned to the reality that the outside media is going to put Second Life in the category it most resembles and non-users can easily understand, and that's "online game". And I'd rather have Second Life featured in the media than not at all. I imagine Linden Lab made that same decision when they decided to work hand-in-hand with Dr. Phil to feature Second Life in a show about gaming addiction.

Anyway, more about Dr. Phil behind the scenes in Second Life on Strawberry Singh's blog.

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Comments

[Scarp Godenot]

Hey! I think I'll go play the game 'business phone call' for a bit. Then I can play the game 'online shopping'. After that I'll play the game 'email my friends interesting information'. Then maybe play a few minutes of the game 'Skype' with a couple of family members.

After a game of 'online business meeting', I think I'll go for a game of 'learn new things for my career on the internet'. That game can be very interesting I've found.

At the end of the day, I'll play the game 'Facebook' and maybe even look at the feed from the game 'Twitter' and the other game I love, 'Plurk'. Following that up with the game 'uploading my artwork to Tumblr and 500 pixels'. Great games in and of themselves.

Everything is a game, right? If it's on the internet that is.....

[Iggy]

"Won't Work, Won't Go to School"? Sell kid's computer and send kid to military school.

Problem solved.

[adec]

So in ansa to your earlier article, looks like Ebbe disagrees.. "..so it's not a game..."

[Persephone Emerald]

So you haven't seen the show, but decided to review it anyway? I didn't read your whole blog post & decided to comment on it anyway.

Looks like another rehash of your old opinions without taking other views or facts into account.

[Yettisburg]

You can't buy advertising like this! I bet new sign-up's are through the roof.

However, what is desperately sad is that not a single new user has been able to pass through the portals in Learning Island since last Friday. Something with the portals is broken and anyone going through one immediately crashes. So the initial experience is a crash followed by a relog!

We first reported this on Friday, as of Sunday it is still happening. LL say they are looking into it.. but talk about missing the chance of a life time!

[Canary Beck]

@ Yettisburg - we looked at new sign-ups on and after the show aired, and compared with the previous three weeks. There was bump, but not much (just over 1000 more than average (±11,000/day).

http://canarybeck.com/2015/07/20/dr-phil-second-life-show-user-signups/