Victor Keegan’s recently summed up virtual worlds over at The Guardian, which these days makes it a consistent source of positive vibes about the metaverse. But this stuff is important – it’s starting to feel like the press is turning the corner from the “virtual worlds falling” meme of a year ago, the occasional sordid sad sex scandal notwithstanding. Whether the failure of Google’s Lively will give the good press cold feet remains to be seen, but I suspect it will get chalked up as another example of Google’s apparent lack of focus rather than a harbinger of the future of virtual worlds.

Keegan joined Second Life in 2006, and he is proud to report that he’s published a book of poetry and opened up an art gallery. He watches ballet in SL and follows a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe theater. Not only this, but he’s in tune with the other virtual worlds – Twinity and Entropiauniverse and the popular kid sites, like Club Penguin and Habbo.

He provides a nice and brief overview of all these sites and their economies and user statistics. He gets into the details of what makes Second Life so good – it is all user-generated content – and Twinity’s one major detraction, being that you can’t create content. He writes about Beyond Space and Time, and reiterates some common thoughts about Google Earth: “…that in the long term Google will turn its Earth feature, which already embraces three-dimensional versions of actual streets, into the virtual world to end all virtual worlds, in which avatars will be able to meet anywhere in the world on the streets of Google Earth.”

To solidify his argument that virtual worlds and avatars are not going away, Keegan notes that, rather than banning virtual transactions, the Chinese government recently imposed a 20 percent tax on these sales, making them as legit as buying a chocolate bar or a house. China is also planning a series of vws able to host hundreds of millions of avatars at once. The point of this would be to sell items directly to consumers at the cost set by the Chinese, eliminating the middle man (meaning: the rest of the world) and giving all profits to the country.

In the end, he notes that many of the major vws right now – World of Warcraft, Habbo, Runescape – are European owned. We don’t really care where the virtual worlds come from – they are virtual after all? – just that they are of a high enough quality for us to care about.