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Total hours per month spent in Second Life

Reader Darren Herman has generated a really nice-looking set of charts based on the recent statistical release of user and economic data from the virtual world of Second Life. It’s slightly unfortunate that these are in a PDF (which makes them much harder to share on the Web), but they’re very pretty to look at. More importantly, because of how our minds work, and the fact that they do pattern-recognition better than computers, there are often important things to be gleaned from the visual display of quantitative information. (Can someone buy me a copy of that, please?) Take a look at the Second Life gender demographics after the jump, for example, and you’ll see what I mean.

You can see at a glance the trends in almost three and a half years of data, whereas if you were looking at two stacks of figures it would be much more difficult to discern. What the chart can’t answer, of course, is what happened in 2005 to cause the proportion of female users to fall. My bet is that the wave of publicity that Second Life has received since then has drawn more male users from the world of gaming. The second-order questions: whether this chart is based on active avatars or simply sign-ups, and whether any of these people have actually stuck around.

And the wish: Some data along three vectors that we can leverage SL’s capabilities with by constructing a 3D graph in-world. Now that would be cool.