[ImperatorLunae]

"The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world. Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization, better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the crazy world that second life is."

You haven't seen Minecraft then, have you? The users, in fact, can build the environments on their own, and the game loads and runs at a playable speed.

Perhaps Minecraft has greater "video gameness" than Second Life, but couldn't the designers of Second Life have focused on user experience instead of delivering laissez-faire, polygon jungle? Although Second Life wouldn't fare well reverting to voxels, there are other approaches to optimize a user-developed game experience and maintain flexibility; it seems the developers aren't looking hard enough, if at all.

[hristov]

I have seen Minecraft, but it's graphics and detail are nowhere near to what second life has. Again some people like video game like responsiveness, some people like better graphics. It would be ludicrous to design and shop for clothes in minecraft, for example, but a lot of people enjoy doing that in SL.

[hartror]

You are comparing apples and oranges. The canvas in MC is very limited, whereas SL has a broad tool set with a large amount of user customization.