Re: Students vs Second Life

Tiessa Montgolfier — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:05:20 -0000

It could be a couple of other things:

1) The average millennial isn't old enough to play adult SL (born: 1992, age: 16), only the 1982-1990 born can.
2) GenX is at the right age to play: the entire generation is old enough to play, was raised on playing video games, and mostly has the money or time to play.

If you are going to talk about the statistical spread in SL, don't just look at the raw numbers. Those are misleading, look at the relative numbers. As a percentage of the total population of their age group, do GenX versus Millennial versus Baby Boomer play SL? As a percentage of the eligible players?

For example, does a larger/smaller percentage of the total population of 21 year olds play SL? Compare that to the same statistic for 31 year olds, etc. If the total population of 18-26 year olds is 5 million and the total population of GenX is 25 million, then you should expect, on average, 5 times the number of GenXers to Millennials playing.

Yes, the numbers become small as a percentage of the total number of people of that age, e.g 5000 versus 500,0000, but this is just normalizing for population distribution and age distribution, rather than grouping all of a generation, including one not even old enough to completely use SL and irregardless of the number of them. Now, we know the Baby Boomers had a much larger generation size, population-wise than the GenX, how about the Millennial?

I think it is better to exhaust the potential population distribution (and wealth if possible), than to start to say that the Millennials are less "creative and freeform" than the GenXers. That's an awfully big generalization from a thin analysis of the numbers.

Re: Students vs Second Life

Tiessa Montgolfier — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:31:32 -0000

So, I decided to do a bit of investigation:

SL Reports:
18-24 year olds account for 15.42% of usage time
25-34 year olds account for 34.76% of usage time
35-44 year olds account for 28.31% of usage time

The census bureau as of 2004 (the latest year I could easily google data for) Reports:
18-24 year old population is 20,971,000
25-34 year old population is 40,032,000
35-44 year old population is 44,108,000

So, accounting for population distribution, the 25-34 year olds spend slightly (~2%) more time in world, per percentage of the US population, than the 18-24 year olds.

There are a couple of caveats to this data, its from 2004 census and its only US, but since the original post tried to draw conclusions based on US child rearing habits of the past couple of decades, I don't feel too bad about using the same basic data. Also, it is usage data, not population data in SL, but I couldn't find data specifying the numbers of users of the various ages in SL.

So, given a bit of better data analysis and the relative similarity of the usage data, I feel that it's specious to conclude that the Millenials basically need things "spoon fed" to them.

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Re: Students vs Second Life

Re: Students vs Second Life