By Wagner James Au

In Second Life, you are what you make. With no levels to treadmill on and no clans to command, unlike most MMOs, influence and reputation goes to those with the will to build—objects and scripts, yes, and successful businesses, too, but just as important, unique personas who engage and enthrall. What follows is an opinionated and sure-to-be disputed compilation of the most influential players (called "Residents") in a world now 180,000 strong.

Were this list to exceed a top ten, it would include, say, veterans like Catherine Omega, Cubey Terra, Marilyn Murphy, Eggy Lippmann and the Midnights, Cristiano, Chip, Torrid, and Mistress, newcomers like Tateru Nino and Ordinal Malaprop, and several hundred more. (And I'm sure I'll be catching flames from all their friends in the next few weeks.) With so many subcultures and waves of immigrants, it's a monumental task to track the networks of influence, one you could devote your whole academic career to—which is, in fact, what UK Guardian games blogger Aleks Krotoski is doing right now.

I'm ranking each person by three categories on a scale of 1 to 10: Creative Influence, Commercial Impact, and Connection Network. To hold real power— influence, leadership, reputation—it's not enough to be a great creator, or flush with Linden Dollars (the official in-world currency.) You need also to connect with a wide range of Residents on a personal level. Some awesome creators toil away quietly on cool but obscure projects, while some successful businesspeople couldn't influence a dozen folks outside their client base to do anything, even if they paid them. (Though they sometimes try anyway.) In the power hierarchy, connections are all important.

10 - Jenna Fairplay

Creative Influence: 5
Commercial Impact:8
Connection Network: 9

Within months of joining SL in late 2004, Jenna launched The Edge, a nightclub-cum-casino-cum-sex club, and since then it's consistently been one of the most popular spots in the world, the hangout of choice for thousands every week, especially noobies. This could be because of the fairly strange secret behind Ms. Fairplay's success: She runs The Edge, she once told me, based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs , where the noob's urge to feel safe and accepted in a strange MMO comes first, sex, fun, and friends second. And only after having gotten all that is the noob ready for the features Second Life is actually known for: Building, scripting, and owning land. But for Jenna, booty comes first, and her continued success suggests she's not wrong.

9 - Prokofy Neva

Creative Influence: 3
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 9

Actually, everything you're reading in this article is a damn lie. There's no natural aristocracy of connectors who earned their position in the SL—in reality, it's an elite known as the "Feted Inner Core", a shadowy, informal conspiracy between Second Life's top content creators and Linden Lab, who want to create a techno-utopia where the average user is marginalized . That's the likely response this piece would provoke from Prokofy Neva, a successful virtual landlord who's also SL's self-styled dissident and iconoclast. After months of acrimony promoting this theory, he was ejected from the official Forums, but by then, the "FIC" concept had infected the world, as seen in parodies, slogans, and everyday speech. For this reason, I've dubbed him the Noam Chomsky of Second Life— an activist dismissed as an irrelevant extremist by the mainstream, but whose thought still manages to define the terms of the debate. ("Smash the FIC" is the "No blood for oil" of SL.) Like Chomsky, Mr. Neva has a talent for taking a kernel of truth— three years after release, the Second Life user interface is still undeniably confusing and complex in a way that benefits the technically proficient at the expense of the beginner— and weaving around it an all-encompassing theory glued together by suspicion and bile.

Least it seems so to me— but then, I'm a member of the FIC myself.

8 - Francis Chung

Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 6

Ms. Chung made a gun and a hug and changed the world. Created back in mid-2004, the Seburo (a tribute to a fictional pistol from the works of anime artist Masmune Shirow) was and still is among the most fully-formed weapons in SL, with muzzle flashes and spent casings that trail wisps of gunsmoke when they exit the chamber. The hug was just as complex, enabling avatars to embrace each other. A simple enough task, you'd think, until you consider that each avatar has to be perfectly positioned even before two custom animations can be launched. For such a social world, inventing a hug was profoundly powerful, eventually unleashing an entire industry of custom animations that brought Residents together, from kisses to the most acrobatic sex imaginable. The pistol she sold for 1500 Linden Dollars, about $6, and despite the price, a substantial number of Residents have bought it, proving there was a commercial market for gamers in SL. (The hug she sold in far larger numbers.)

Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast, a talented electronica musician named Torley was browsing the Web in search of an online world. A bad case of hyperacusis had just ruined his composing career, and he wanted a place to express himself. Up Googled the guns and hugs of Francis Chung, and a door opened. But that's another story.

7 - Aimee Weber

Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 8

I have to full-disclosure Ms. Weber, now that she's become a regular contributor to my own blog, but she's earned her place on this list many times over as a fashion designer who not only became successful from her massive sales and distinct style, but for the brand and identity she created around it, anchored by her persona, an outrageously brash, flirty, vaguely tipsy ballerina with blue butterfly wings. (Read virtual world expert Betsy Book's fascinating study on the emergence of virtual brands, in which Aimee stars.) To frame this personality (and a prime consumer location), she built the island of Midnight City, a virtual New York with textures and lighting to rival the best of GTA, and is now dabbling in SL-made machinima with ass-kicking results.

6 - Cory Doctorow

Creative Influence: 1
Commercial Impact: 1
Connection Network:10

The Boing Boing blogger and novelist doesn't visit Second Life often, but when he does, his impact is deep and ongoing. (Another full disclosure: Cory's a meatspace bud of mine.) As an avatar, Doctorow resembles himself in real life, and has appeared in-world twice to promote his novels. From these visits (and his mention of them on Boing Boing) have come other luminaries of the Internet age, from Lawrence Lessig to Joi Ito, spreading the influence even further among futurists, the technorati, and not trivially, venture capitalists. While writers like Verner Vinge and Neal Stephenson came before him with their speculative novels about the metaverse, Doctorow is the first author to influence the direction, growth, and culture of an actual online world. As an avatar, no less.

The countdown to number one continues soon...

Wagner James Au covers the new power elite and other topics at New World Notes and searches for Preview Hos on Kotaku.