Geography of virtual world usage

I ran across this visual representation of the geographical distribution of virtual world users. Interesting for a few reasons...one, it shows that the US is not the leading user of virtual worlds and that there are numerous countries that have close if not equivalent usage. I would argue that actual geography likely plays a large part in this; virtual worlds are an effective tool in connecting people together, and some of the leading countries (Australia, New Zealand) have populations distributed in a way that may make virtual worlds an effective communication tool.

This theory also holds true for the trend data in the US. New York and California were the first states with concentrated interest, but now Georgia and other states with large rural populations have overtaken them.

Please note that this data was taken from Google; because of this, Asian countries are most definitely skewed. Asian countries do not tend to use Google as their search engine, and any of these trends are only as good as the data used.