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The “population” of the virtual world of Second Life passed the 600,000 mark sometime early this morning — at least in terms of the number of avatars that have ever been created. But many of these are people who have looked in once and never returned, and many more are “alts,” i.e., alternate avatars created by the same person. (I have about five. Some people have many more.) The SL splash page lists 264,281 as the number of avatars that have logged in over the last 60 days, but even that number overstates the true population in terms of users, due simply to the alt phenomenon.

Whatever the “correct” population number, Second Life has seen strong growth over the past year — strong enough to inspire a mildly famous quarter bet between Linden Lab’s CTO Cory Ondrejka and University of Illinois games researcher Dmitri Williams. Cory puts his coin on Second Life having more North American users than hit MMO World of Warcraft by March 2008. A couple of recent reports suggest Dmitri may have to start saving his pennies (well, 25 of them, anyway) in order to make good on the wager.

The bet pits “total registered users for SL anywhere having logged in in the last several months (shall we say 4?)” against “paying players for WoW in North America.” It doesn’t address alts, but from the sound of things, I don’t think log-in numbers will be reduced to take them into account, where the bet is concerned. So SL still has 250,000 to 300,000 registered users who have logged in over the last several months. WoW, on the other hand, has stayed relatively static at around 1 million North American users, according to a new report from research firm DFC Intelligence.

A post from Mike Sellers on Terra Nova describing the “WoW-nnui” that has gripped him and many other players (including myself) also indicates that World of Warcraft could have a more tenuous hold on the MMOniks of the world than has previously been thought.

I’m involved, loosely speaking (given my lack of attendance), in several different guilds on PvE, RP, and PvP servers. In each, multiple people I know — both those with multiple level 60 characters and those who have never come close to that — have sort of run aground on the over-and-over again gameplay, whether that’s yet-another-kill-X-creatures quest or yet-another-raid for yet-another-piece-of-armor. No one I’ve talked to dislikes the game; there’s no sense of having been spurned or that the experience has curdled. But in even the best parties there seems to sometimes come a moment when, amidst the music and noise you and your friends silently agree “great party; we’re outta here.” For some people that moment has come with WoW. And I’m guessing that trend is only going to accelerate.

He could be right. The MMO space is also now seeing an unprecedented amount of competition for players, with tons of MMOs coming online these days and planned for the next 18 months or so. One question is whether the audience of MMO players can grow quickly enough to support them all. If it can’t, will one become or remain dominant? Or will player communities fracture enough to see moderate populations in many virtual game-worlds?

There’s a huge variety of opinion knocking around about all of these questions. It’s worth noting that comparing SL to WoW is a bit like comparing apples to oranges (or grapefruits to tangelos or something, anyway). But that’s exactly the point. Cory seems to see SL’s adoption curve as something more resembling that of a communications medium, which commonly sees the kind of slow-to-fast growth sometimes called a “J curve” (you can guess why), while Dmitri lumps SL into the kind of growth pattern commonly experienced by MMOs, in which peak user numbers are reached relatively quickly, only to fall back over time. (See Bruce Sterling Woodcock’s excellent MMOGCHART for more.)

For my part, I’d say Cory and Dmitri’s quarters hang in the balance of just how useful Second Life can become as a technology platform, not on whether people can easily find ways to be entertained there (entertainment being only a subset of what’s possible via SL). World of Warcraft has arguably peaked; word occasionally circulates that Blizzard may already be working on its next virtual world, but in any case many more are coming online over the next 18 months that will serve to keep WoW’s subscriber numbers level or falling. If Second Life can continue to grow even moderately over that period, it could conceivably hit a million users by March of 2008. On the other hand, if the technology does not take a rather large step forward relatively soon, SL may shortly hit the limits of what it’s capable of, and find itself unable to attract new users. Linden Lab is working on this, of course, but it remains to be seen how quickly they will move.

Where’s my quarter? I think I’d have to slap it down on top of Cory’s — not necessarily because I believe so strongly that Second Life is the inevitable 3D platform of the future, but only because it’s a far more interesting scenario if the bet were to go Cory’s way. (This explains why I stay away from roulette wheels at casinos in favor of poker, where the only interesting scenario is me winning.) If I were making odds, I’d say the scales are tipped in SL’s favor, but only ever so slightly, at this point. It will be interesting to see what Linden Lab and Blizzard do to try to win as many quarters as they can.

(On a similar note: Though it’s not related to the bet, DFC also points out that the 5 million subscribers World of Warcraft claims in Asia do not pay monthly fees in the same way as subscribers in North America and Europe (where it claims a million each). Second Life accounts, of course, are free, with an option to “own” land and pay monthly fees that seems to have been taken up by fewer than 15,000 people so far, according to chats I’ve had with SL CEO Philip Rosedale. And even as its population numbers grow, Second Life seems to have trouble reaching concurrency rates that are much above 5,000 10,000 users. What does that all mean? You decide.)