When I was in film school, I once got a call from a fellow student in the critical studies concentration alerting me that there were not one, but two games classes being taught in the department for the winter quarter: a game narrative class (taught by Larry Tuch, on loan to us from USC) and a Second Life class (taught by Jackie Morie, your classic "I don't really understand technology but if I use enough neologisms people will think I'm really smart" academic, the sort that make the rest of us look bad). The game narrative class was great and once led to having my dinner paid for by the one and only Flint Dille. The Second Life class, on the other hand, was so bad I paid UCLA something like $50 just to forget I ever enrolled in it.

Sharing the nightmare with an academic friend, the latter chuckled, sighed, and said, "They must have thought it up six months earlier, back when Second Life actually seemed like a big deal."

For a while now, we've laughed scornfully at the hyperbole, the mainstream media naively quick to assign to the game all the promises of total VR and a new cultural revolution, when we really knew it was MySpace in 3D with even fewer redeeming factors and far more polygonal penises. And thank god, Linden Labs has finally copped to it and admitted that while it has millions and millions of registered accounts, it only has about 68,000 active users.

(Which is still better than the 10,000 Scientologists, but what-hey.)

The thing I really want to know is: can I go back to Morie and personally demand compensation for all those hours and real-world dollars I hemmorhaged in that game trying to get a machinima to work on an inferior graphics card and a terrible wide-angle lens, now that we know her entire premise for scholarship was flawed?

VentureBeat: Q&A: Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon on Second Life's latest evolution.