Oh no. Here comes Third Life

AS IF ONE FAKE WORLD wasn't one too many, along comes another one. Strangely-named Aussie company Yoick is launching another virtually-pointless world, called Outback Online, using peer-to-peer technology that the company claims can deal with a hundred times as many visitors as Second Life.

"Second Life is just a village," sneers chief Yoick Randal Leeb-du Toit in the Melbourne Age, adding, modestly: "I've nearly finished building Rome."

Leeb-du Toit maintains that Second Life is rather low-res and that he likes to 'stand there in the rain and watch the sun go down in World of Warcraft because it is so beautiful.' He adds that Outback Online will feature graphics of the same calibre as World of Warcraft.

One question remains: Who will be the first entrepreneur to build a virtual world inside a virtual world, creating turtles all the way down? This glaring omission proves that Second Life is but a pale shadow of the real thing in much the same way that soap operas, which supposedly mimic real life, never feature people watching soaps on TV.

If you really can't think of anything better to do, why not wibble over to Outback Online and meet up with some other losers who still live with their mothers. µ

L'Inq
Melbourne Age