By Wagner James Au

Numbers ten through six are featured in Part I.

5 - Anshe Chung
Creative Influence: 5
Commercial Impact:10
Connection Network: 3

No SL power list is complete without mentioning Ms. Chung, owner of an entire continent and thousands of dollars worth of oceanfront property across the world. In SL-related media, "$150,000" is the dollar figure you'll see the most— it's the amount Linden Lab estimates Anshe makes per year from her in-world real estate business, started from seed money she earned by teaching Residents the tricks of online lovemaking. For all this influence, however, Ms. Chung's power in business seems to negatively impact her Connection Network. (Do things like buy a tight-knit artists' community and convert it into a pleasure resort for the French, and that's bound to happen.)

For the longest time, members of SL society engaged in wild speculation of Anshe Chung's real life identity. Was this person with a dragon lady avatar really a Chinese migr living in Germany, a former member of the Red Communist Party who now beat American capitalists at their own game? Many thought it was too contrived to be true, so more than a few went slack-jawed, when Anshe Chung herself showed up at last November's Second Life Community Convention in New York City—revealing a slight young Chinese woman fresh from Germany, in a cheongsam silk dress and a dragon tattoo on her back.

4 - Kermitt Quirk
Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 9
Connection Network: 6

Scan SL's Event list at any given moment, and one word always stands out: Tringo. A combination of Tetris and Bingo with a gambling hook, the game, created in late 2004, has since consumed the community of SL, played 24/7/7 in casinos, nightclubs, and game rooms. Its success was based not just on its ease of play and gambling aspect, but a clever franchise system Kermitt created that gave buyers an incentive to host Tringo games. (They'd buy a copy from him for the Linden Dollar equivalent of around $60, then make their purchase back (and more) by holding Tringo matches where they collected a cut from the betting.) Selling 70 copies by mid last year, Kermitt's success leaped to whole new levels when the rights for the game were sold for a Gameboy Advance port. This was possible because Linden Lab allows Residents to retain the IP rights over their creations. Nearly a year later, however, Kermitt Quirk remains the only major success story to this policy—and as such, remains the sole role model for the Second Life dream.

3 - Nephilaine Protagonist
Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 9
Connection Network: 7

Like Aimee Weber, Nephilaine's proven the power to create not just a viable business in avatar fashion, but a unique persona that's just as important to her success. Her avatar a delicate belle flavored with goth and industrial stylings, Nephilaine was one of the first clothing emporiums to dominate SL. Often too busy designing to socialize, her Connection Network seems based more on her loyal customer base and just as key, on the numerous, now-successful fashion designers she taught and encouraged on the way up.

In real life, Nephilaine happens to resemble her avatar, a pretty Southern brunette, and as the star of an upcoming documentary film on Second Life, the chances look good for her becoming an influential luminary in both worlds.

2 - Baccara Rhodes
Creative Influence: 7
Commercial Impact: 5
Connection Network:9

Often seen sashaying through the world in a Versace evening gown, Baccara's avatar is decidedly a woman of a certain age, and by sheer force of personality, she transformed herself into the grande dame of SL. Her language is elegant and often high-flown, and she tolerates no vulgar speech. She once decided on a whim to move into the combat-enabled warzone, scolding the gamers there for their rude behavior, and outraged, they launched a series of terrorist attacks culminating in the kidnapping of a monkey in an art gallery rigged with proximity mines. But the terrorists never threatened Baccara directly because, one of them sheepishly admitted to me, she had too many powerful friends for them to risk that. Since then, she's organized numerous elaborate weddings and projects involving dozens of creators, including a 48 acre to the world of Peter Pan. It's projects like this that helped make her the central connector between diverse and often insular groups of builders and scripters with the socializers and casual gamers they rarely interact with otherwise. A mature woman retired on the East Coast, her influence is so great, when MTV arrived in Second Life to shoot a fashion video, the producer—who's half her age— came to Baccara Rhodes, to put it together.

1 - Torley Linden
Creative Influence: 8
Commercial Impact:1
Connection Network:10

In Second Life, a "Linden" last name denotes a staffer with Linden Lab. In this rare case, however, we are speaking of a person who made the world fall in love with her a year before joining the company's payroll, when she was "Torley Torgeson". I say "she", though Torley's avatar has been, at various times, a young man, a large bird, an alien from another dimension, and various other incarnations, though all of them involve watermelons and neon hues of pink and green—reflecting a real life Asperger's condition (a mild autism) and an artist's eye. It's as a woman that Torley, in real life a straight guy, fell in love with Jade Lily, also a heterosexual dude who plays a woman in SL. Torley's blog remains the best place to go for Second Life at its strangest and most dreamlike, where everything's possible—even Torley. Reading her exhaustively enthused journal entries will give you a sense for why she knows and is adored by everyone. Her Asperger's seems to be a key to her charisma: offline it's difficult for her to perceive or communicate emotions; in-world, where most communication is through chat and IM text, she's mesmerizing with empathy and charm. This power has not diminished even after becoming a Linden employee, but enhanced it twice over. Though just a mere "Liaison" (a low-level community and technical support staffer), in the world, Torley arguably has more social influence than even Cory Ondrejka, the head of development, or Philip Rosedale, the CEO himself, both of whom occasionally appear in-world for town hall-style meetings. But while Linden Lab management has the power to pull the world's plug, it's Torley who holds the lever to move it.

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