The popularity of Second Life just won't peak. Last year major news agencies got involved with the virtual world, and in the last six months the online population has tripled. I'm starting to seriously consider playing this game. If people are still making millions of real dollars off of six million excessively bored people, then it can't be that hard to emulate. This is the topic that the BBC will cover this Friday, when it broadcasts its show The Money Programme inside Second Life's Rivers Run Red Cinema for the online players to view.

"It will look at the rise of businesses in Second Life that have utilised the real-life currency "feature" to amass multi-million pound turnovers, focusing specifically on marketing company Rivers Run Red. The show will also address massively-multiplayer online gaming, the growth these worlds, and issues such as gold farming and virtual crime."

Give it two more years and their population will be similar to small countries. What if they start a real war? With millions of impressionable players running around without a cause, all it would take is a convincing online Hitler to rally the retards to do something devastating in real life. Wouldn't it be embarrassing to have to tell your kids one day that World War III was fought by brainwashed furries?

In other news, check out the new commenting format on the site. The small upgrade now allows you to apply basic HTML effects, such as making words bold or even making a small list. It's nothing huge, but it's still more cool than Second Life.

These two unrelated stories are scarily similar in their stupidity. First up is last week's online bombing of ABC's Second Life island -- the ugly picture to the right is the island before the bombing. Yes, it's that ugly in Second Life. ABC Island is the third most visited commercial area in the MMO game, with six million members globally, and it was found obliterated as a "bombed, crater mess." All that was left was a single digital transmission tower and graffiti logos for online Second Life company rivals Nike and Puma. A case of commercial business terrorism? Or just another pissed off player resorting to online nukes? Here's where the other, unrelated Second Life story comes into play. The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) plans to get involved with a Second Life police force, but for different reasons than you'd think: 

The VPD has been prepping to become the first real police force to join the more than 6.7 million inhabitants who live, work, play and learn inside their computers -- an initiative aimed at finding real-life people with computer know-how to join the force.

On Thursday, the department will go public with a recruitment seminar inside Second Life -- the most popular online metaverse or alternative universe on the web -- aimed at attracting the next generation of police candidates from around the globe.

Taking police stereotypes to new levels, the donut devourers will now sit on their asses indoors all day, associating with people who engage in online rape, online prostitution, online human sacrifices, and my personal favorite, online summoners of dildo storms. These are the people that the police are willing to hire to solve online crimes -- the people who are usually responsible for them. Not the well organized World of Warcraft guild members. Instead they'd rather start their online exploration in a world full of weirdos and sexual deviants. I can't wait to see headlines in six months when they hire a hacker who infiltrates their own database to pull off a real world crime, and then frames the police officers as the prime suspects.

By Second Life law, whenever there's any good news to report from the online community of creepy players, there's far more disturbing news to focus on. Second Life is the only game in which there are more actual cats than kitty porn sex offenders. It's also the only game where the sky isn't the limit, yet both clouds and Cloud look like shit.

The good news:  Back in February Final Fantasy VII fans joined together in the Second Life world to recreate Midgar on an island within the game. It's a nice tribute to show their appreciation, but the shrine doesn't end in its appearance, you can even play through the area as a mini FFVII sim game. When you first arrive you choose between the sides Shin-Ra SOLDIER or AVALANCHE rebel, then choose between Fighter, Gunner, and Caster class. A few more clicks and you're buying materia and shopping for weapons.

The people running the level take on the job of Dungeon Master as they act as NPCs, and help pull plot twists at the right time to help the role playing progress from one area and event to the next, like some freaky carnival. I'd rather just play the game again, although I have to admit, this shows more dedicated role playing than any game I've ever seen. Ironically, they have asked Square Enix for permission to run this Midgar Sim, and are assuming their lack of response so far is an undeclared ok. So, with a littler luck, in a few weeks I'll get to bring you headlines such as "Square Enix summons Shiva on Second Lifers" or "Midgar murdered by materia."

Oh, and the bad news? Real life laws may need to be re-written to include the possibility that under-the-age gamers can now "rape" adults online. So, if it's a dude dressed as a dog and a chick dressed as a cat, does that still count? Or have we discovered a loophole in the Constitution, in which human-on-human-on-online bestiality is included as rape? Welcome to 2007. Again.

Give Second Life an online inch, and they'll take a whole Linden mile. It seems to have finally hit its sexual and violent limits, with a large number of veteran players demanding answers, and rabble-rabble-rabble-ing until they're heard. Linden Labs remained silent until yesterday, where they quickly spoke their mind and kept their cryptic plans for the future vague, and then disappeared leaving the rabbling to continue. This may have not meant much to the pissed off people who like playing in Second Life, but it means a whole lot of possible bad news for people who don't like the game or the types of crowds it attracts:

"We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement. At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale."

To scale . . . where? Bigger populations on PC? Better graphics on PC? Or better graphics somewhere else . . ? Maybe if we pretend nobody has a Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3 yet, they'll lose interest in our markets. Now that going online is the future for all three consoles, it's opened up a terrible hole I don't think we'll be able to close. One dimension's hole is another dimension's infinity, and if we let Second Life in we'll never see them end of the scary future that awaits. Perhaps Sony truly are the smart ones, and are playing weak because they think it'll draw the market to the 360 instead. PS3 Home might just be the cure it takes to protect your 1080p gameplay from furries. Or chicken soup and 7-Up. All I know for sure is that Second Life brings hobo threats, and the best way to deal with that problem is to guide it elsewhere.

The online comic XKCD has had a few good gamer comics in the past, and this is another clever work of art. This is their map of the Internet if you could actually divide it up into landmasses where the most people hang out online. It even organizes it all in four different directions of logic, as opposed to just north, south, east and west. Somewhere in the Not far from Wikipedia in the south is The Last Boss inside the Blogipeligo, spreading information, and up top are the mindless Mysapces. Travel further east and you find the online gaming communities, although I think it's time for World of Warcraft to invade some of Second Life, they don't deserve to own that much land based on the size of their community. Check out the full map image below.

One of the sites that linked to my Second Life nuke story had an irresistible related story: "Sex shopping in Second Life." I should have known better:

"I examined what seemed an appropriate penis attachment for my male avatar. The "aroused cock cut version" was a "scripted penis with HUD control unit, skin color control, sound, animations, cum, pee, touchable by other players to make you aroused." First off ... SOUND? Is having a great-sounding cock now important, as well as length, breadth, stamina, and sperm volume (judging by favorite spam email subjects)? My attention was diverted by these questions when I realized that two people had materialized nearby and were fucking on the desk next to me."

He was then chased out of the building by a half naked avatar, bringing a whole new meaning to Second Life dildo storms. Next was a bukkake bride and a furry player chasing him up a tree - typical. I don't think there's anything left to surprise us in Second Life anymore. I'll spare you further discussion of digital diseases, if you're brave enough to get a better look at what he was talking about above, then check out the Second Life genitalia graphics picture below.

Last year the virtual population of Second Life soared from 100,000 online players to well over 2 million. As a community grows that large it's normal for the original players to become defensive as the newcomers start changing the way things are run, but in an online world where anything is possible (online embassies, terrorism, borderline genocide, and the infamous dildo storms) the worried veterans have resorted to drastic actions that I didn't even know were possible within the game.

Marshal Cahill started playing Second Life before the boom came, and has since witnessed arrogant gamers grow rampant. Players hog real estate, step on each others' free speech, and run online mafias that harass the entire community. So how does he plan to solve this problem? Nukes of course. Even online humans are predictable. But instead of plastering people in main towns he chose to set us up the bombs near in-world corporations that would draw real world attention. The first nuke was detonated outside an American Apparel store, with an encore explosion occurring outside a Reebok store. 2-22-07. Never Forget... To Never Play.

Declaring himself as a political officer for the Second Life Liberation Army, Cahill is fighting in hopes that the game's Linden Lab creators will give his army more influence in the future of the game through voting: "The population of the world should have a say in the running of the world." He goes on to compare himself to John Adams proving he's just as arrogant as his enemies, but this will still gain his army the attention they long for. Fool Linden Labs once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool Linden Labs . . . you, you can't get fooled again. That's their stance and they're sticking to it.

If they actually allowed an entire Second Life World War to break out, I'd join immediately. It would be recorded as one of the lamest online battles of all time and I'd Fraps every second of its furry fighters until dildo rainbows rose above silent battlefields. All that's left to do is alter the video to black and white, splice out a photo of an avatar wearing tattered Reeboks, and submit it as "Migrant MMOer" for my Pulitzer Prize.

The Art Institute Online is a division of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (hey, that's my crappy college!) that has opened an online student campus in Second Life. Basically, instead of just taking an online class and communicating conveniently through email and chat rooms, and not having to deal with your teachers on a regular basis (a good reason for taking an online class in the first place), the Art Institutes think it will be cool to make a virtual environment where they can hold online teaching sessions. So if you want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a game arts degree, but don't want to make the most of your money, then the AI schools are cool with teaching you everything they know about the future of the game industry through lackluster low poly 3D classrooms. Ripoff.

Jeannie Novak is an academic program director for AI Online, and described it herself as "An environment such as this takes advantage of lateral and community-based learning." Taking a  educational step to the side? Way to appeal to gamers - know your fucking target audience - the majority of AI students might be into disturbing anime fox porn and Yugioh, but we draw the line at Second Life. Way to make me proud AIP.

It appears as if Second Life knows no limits. The television show Big Brother started an online season until the contestants were caged and set on fire, and even the Reuters news agency is willing to set up an online studio to report the game's online news each day. Second Life has even had a charity organization play a hobo who does nothing all day except collect money for their company's work. But now Sweden has set a new record of ridiculous by declaring that they will build an online embassy for their country inside the game's virtual world. The embassy's purpose is not to provide passports or visas, but instead instruct online players how to obtain such things in the real world. I don't see how there's a huge demand for such a thing, but with almost 3 million Second Life players it's definitely a great way for your country to gain more attention and tourists.

I can see Second Life getting really ugly in the future. It'll be sad if there's ever an online game that takes itself so seriously that Miranda Rights are involved, and killing online characters can equal real life repercussions due to strict terms of agreement when joining the game. I signed up for Second Life once last year after reading about all the people getting rich off designing clothes for the players. As soon as my account was registered I was in the middle of nowhere, yet ten different players ran up and stared at me without texting a single word to me. The next hour of wandering around was just as creepy and I never played again.

Well, I dare you to say they couldn't. When someone buys YouTube you stop doubting what they're capable of. But how feasible is it? I've joked about a Google game in the past, but it seems like Google actually be interested in making an online game of their own. It's a rumor with no convincing support that mentions Google creating a Second Life styled MMO game that lets players waste their real lives by living in a virtual world obsessively. There's no story or objectives in Second Life, you just do stuff, but for some it's exciting because they get to create a virtual world and affect the evolution of the entire game. Google Earth already has a decent map of damn near everything on the globe - why not throw some quests up?

A few months ago I was startled to find out Google even had their own simple 3D modeling software called , and was letting dedicated fans create 3D objects to place on top of their Google Earth images. Suddenly the statue of liberty doesn't look so flat anymore and you've got an online world worth exploring. Recently I found some guy on YouTube that was on a vacation in Africa and was uploading videos of animals killing each other every night, it was awesome. Using a Google Game to create an instant window to anywhere on Earth is genius - give the project two more decades and Google might buy out Electronic Arts and have them redoing everything in HD quality graphics. Matrix movie fanatics will quit their day jobs and start an online revolution.

If Google pursued a game like this and made it more like a YouTube network I think it would get a huge following. Don't make it a full blown game, but let us create online characters that can travel to different places and explore foreign cities and jungles for a few minutes out of the day. If someone offers you an online tour around Venice or the Taj Mahal, why say no? Hopefully it wouldn't degrade into the majority of Second Life's population, but it could shape the future of the Internet if they could pull it off.