I would never have heard about Gaia Online if I didn’t have a teenaged daughter. As Wagner points out, the service began as a fan site for teens who were interested in Japanese-style animation, or anime (and may have started with some animation students from Toronto’s Sheridan College, according to this three-year-old article from Forever Geek) and has been kind of flying under the radar — at least until it raised a bunch of venture capital financing last year. Now it has two million unique users a month, many of whom come for the online games but also for the chat forums and the various anime-related, role-playing fiction forums. 

The latter are what my 13-year-old daughter spends most of her time on, although she does play games from time to time and has also accumulated a fair stockpile of virtual Gaia currency,gaia online gold (which unlike Second Life can’t be exchanged for real-world currency — an interesting decision on the part of Gaia’s creators). But her favorite thing is to join a forum where someone has begun writing a story about a particular character, and to help expand and extend that story — with half a dozen other writers all taking part.

  I find it fascinating, and she clearly does too. And it seems to have a considerable amount of staying power, since she has been involved with the site for two years or more now. 

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