B. The writer completely misses the point when comparing SL to a video game. The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world. Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization, better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the crazy world that second life is.
From my very brief foray into it, I have to say that SL has completely succeeded in doing what it aimed to do. It has grown a very involved community and they have built their own world or worlds. And of course most of second life is beset by weird and bizarre things and people, but then again, if you think about it, that was to be expected.
The above being said, it is actually a very interesting technical problem to do the optimizations you usually expect in video games for a completely user designed world like Second Life.
In a video game when you have something seen from far away (for example a city seen as you approach by air) it is usually specifically hand designed by artists to be seen from far away. Once you come close, you will see what seems to be the same buildings but they will be different renderings designed to look good up close.
Of course Second life cannot do that because people create and break down buildings all the time, so they cannot have artists render the town from far away all the time.
But what could be done is to have an engine specifically blend details and combine polygons in a way similar to the way objects blend in distance as seen by the human eye. This would make both the world more realistic and the networking load lighter as fewer polygons need to be transferred.
This is an interesting possible improvement that SL does not do. But to the best of my knowledge no other computer game does it either, so you cannot blame SL for this.