"Saying that virtual life is not real life is like saying that a phone conversation is not a real conversation."  When engineer and yoga therapist Manx Wharton said that in the "Plastic Reality" workshop of day three of the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco, she was echoing a theme spoken often during the convention: the wide gulf between how people who are not active in virtual worlds tend to view people who do.  Of course, a hundred years ago critics expressed some of the same things about phone conversations that critics today express about virtual worlds.

Related to that, Manx and Tuna Oddfellow both spoke of the problems of persuading ex-hippie parents, who saw them as simply wasting their time playing video games all day, that they were really serious entrepreneurs building a business.

Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon expressed this theme of impending change strongly when he spoke of Second Life someday having a billion residents, which will require exponential growth from its current 1.3 million residents who've logged on during the last ninety days.  Second Life isn't yet close to the growth needed to achieve that increase in residents, but is achieving it in terms of content in Second Life, which is doubling every year.  Today Second Life content, nearly all of it generated by residents, requires 270 terabytes of storage - a thousand billion bytes.

Former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale also spoke of change, saying that it would be revolutionary, but cautioned that like all real change, we won't like all of it.

On day two of the conference, Beyers Sellers spoke of the fear of many people of being left behind by others abandoning them for virtual worlds.  On day three Capn Kurka assured people that being a believer in the importance of virtual worlds doesn't mean abandoning the real world.  People still have a need to come together in person.  He also spoke of the role art can play in virtual worlds in providing an alternate vision to the violent, sexist images that dominate mainstream media.

Sunday, August 16, 2009 is the final day of SLCC 2009.