By: Alice Taylor

I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, and Cory Ondrejka, Creative Director of Second Life, has just stepped off stage having delivered us a quick 15 minute overview of Second Life and its creative mechanics.

To give you a bit of background, the room is full to the brim with what Tim O'Reilly calls alpha geeks: Dave Sifry from Technorati is onstage as I write this; Ray Ozzie and Esther Dyson are present, as are Waxy, three of the four BoingBoingers, Bruce Sterling. Web 2.0 is coughing and picking its nose right here in this room, and for the first time proper, games are beginning to pop up here and there on the ETech radar. Raph's been musing recently on what should happen if Web 2.0 met gaming. I'm watching it happen, right here.

So back to Cory's mini presentation: he was, as usual, at pains to point out that Second Life isn't a game but a virtual world, but nevertheless it's certainly playful. It's a sandbox, a playpit, a business petri dish. Second Life can already interface with the web: in-world browsers, RSS readers, music streaming and the like are commonplace. Players write scripts and build objects to make this happen: In-world cinemas, or libraries, or bingo parlours - and they love to do it! Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here:

Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week.

That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. Second Life is not alone in this area either: Will Wright is harnessing some of this power within his new game Spore: player-generated creatures will populate Spore's worlds. His precursor, The Sims, has been offering up creative play for almost a decade now, and many lessons have surely been learned. As a curious aside, both The Sims and Second Life have an approximately 50% female player base.

It seems that creative play may be the key to a number of game industry business issues. If you want to appeal to more females than you already have, it can't hurt to think creation: you'll pull in more guys too, there's not a chap out there who doesn't want a swooshier car or a more elite set of spauldrons. If you want to build yourself a maintenance system that looks after itself, just google for modding The Sims and roll around in the ton of player-created content for a while. According to an interview with Will Wright, around 90% of the assets available to The Sims are player-generated: imagine the human-hours on that!

Maybe you want to make money without resorting to subscription packages. Second Life is a successful example of real world money flying around wildly in a digital world space. There's no subscription model here any more: as Cory puts it, customers "purchase permanence" in the form of in-world land. We've all heard the story of the in-world real estate trader who makes $150,000 in actual US dollars per year by buying and selling Second Life real estate. There's another side to it too - last year I met a guy who sells genitals in Second Life. Yup - stick-on genitals, because the default avatar has none. I didn't ask how much he was charging per set, but he did let me know that you can pick them up from in-world vending machines. Now that's creative.

Back to ETech: there's a quiet but growing clarion call to make software and web applications "more playful". Playful applications are more successful applications. At the same time, we're seeing the real world creeping into digital spaces: in-game advertising, AOL opening up the API to AIM to allow in-game instant messaging. It's pretty obvious where this is all going: many virtual worlds in which you can do real world things, where your crafting grinds or hand-designed gauntlets turns into real cash, or your in-game emails can be officially classified as "working".