The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World

by Wagner James Au

Overview

The wholly virtual world known as Second Life has attracted more than a million active users, millions of dollars, and created its own—very real—economy.

The Making of Second Life is the behind-the-scenes story of the Web 2.0 revolution's most improbable enterprise: the creation of a virtual 3-D world with its own industries, culture, and social systems. Now the toast of the Internet economy, and the subject of countless news articles, profiles, and television shows, Second Life is usually known for the wealth of real-world companies (Reuters, Pontiac, IBM) that have created "virtual offices" within it, and the number of users ("avatars") who have become wealthy through their user-created content.

What sets Second Life apart from other online worlds, and what has made it such a success (one million-plus monthly users and growing) is its simple user-centered philosophy. Instead of attempting to control the activities of those who enter it, the creators of Second Life turned them loose: users (also known as Residents) own the rights to the intellectual content they create in-world, and the in-world currency of Linden Dollars is freely exchangeable for U.S. currency. Residents have responded by generating millions of dollars of economic activity through their in-world designs and purchases—currently, the Second Life economy averages more than one million U.S. dollars in transactions every day, while dozens of real-world companies and projects have evolved and developed around content originated in Second Life.

Wagner James Au explores the long, implausible road behind that success, and looks at the road ahead, where many believe that user-created worlds like Second Life will become the Net's next generation and the fulcrum for a revolution in the way we shop, work, and interact. Au's story is narrated from both within the corporate offices of Linden Lab, Second Life's creator, and from within Second Life itself, revealing all the fascinating, outrageous, brilliant, and aggravating personalities who make Second Life a very real place-and an illuminating mirror on the real (physical) world. Au writes about the wars they fought (sometimes literally), the transformations they underwent, the empires of land and commerce they developed, and above all, the collaborative creativity that makes their society an imperfect utopia, better in some ways than the one beyond their computer screens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061353208
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/26/2008
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

Wagner James Au has written about high-tech culture for more than ten years, and has been, at various times, a freelance reporter, a metaverse consultant, a game developer, a screenwriter, and most pertinent, a white-suited avatar named "Hamlet Au," the first embedded journalist in a virtual world, beginning in 2003—a role he still plays on his blog, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com). His work in Second Life has been cited or profiled in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN International, NPR, Wired, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post, among many other publications and television programs. He also covers the game industry and online worlds for GigaOM.com. Originally from Kailua, Hawaii, he now lives in San Francisco, California. When he needs to escape the virtual world, he enjoys reality-oriented diversions such as travel, politics, dining, sunlight, and dogs.

Read an Excerpt

The Making of Second Life
Notes from the New World

Chapter One

Touching Knowledge

From Virtual Reality to Real Company

If Second Life becomes an integral part of the Internet's next evolutionary stage, it's still quite possible that few will remember Linden Lab, the company that nurtured it in the early years. (Ask people who came of age in the twenty-first century if they remember Netscape, creator of the first commercial Web browser; expect blank stares.)

Building the metaverse wasn't even the company's main goal when it began operations in 1999, in a warehouse on Linden Street, a narrow alley in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Like many parts of the city during the Internet's first boom times, the street teetered between gentrification and drug-addled squalor. On one end of Linden were upscale restaurants serving the arrogant young mandarins of dot-com excess; on the other was an unattended parking lot with a clientele who often slept in their cars. Linden Lab's immediate neighbors were wholly appropriate for the world that would eventually emerge from their servers: a dubiously grungy auto body garage and a fetish boutique.

Into this unlikeliest of spaces came Philip Rosedale, clutching the keys to his shabby new office. He'd just left his position as chief technology officer of Real Networks—then the Net's audio streaming software of choice—and plowed a million dollars of his own money to build . . . well, at the start, that part wasn't exactly clear.

Born in 1968, Philip Rosedale is tall and lanky, with a triathlete's build and the cheeky, boyish good looks usually associated with Hollywoodteen idols. (To rib him on that front, some of his waggish employees once cut out a photo of Rosedale from a magazine profile, glued it into a collage of teeny-bopper stars from the eighties, then tacked the mess to the bulletin board at the company's front entrance. For months afterward, visitors to Linden Lab would get their first glimpse of the CEO as a disembodied head floating amid a montage of Mark Hamill, Michael J. Fox, and Emilio Estevez.) Rosedale has light-colored eyes, and during his rhetorical crescendos (which are frequent), they go wide with a kind of wonder that gives anything he's saying an aura of the inevitable or the evangelical, or both. He is prone to flights of gratuitous cosmology, though it's clear he sees these as directly related to the day-to-day of running his company. Then again, it sometimes seems like conversational judo to dodge oncoming practical questions by flipping them into the stratosphere. (A Second Life subscriber once asked him where Linden Lab was going as a corporation, and Rosedale answered by first talking about the birth and expansion of the entire universe.) Whether it's everyday chat or a bout of ontology, however, Rosedale's honorific of choice is generally "dude."

He spent his earliest years in Maryland, the oldest son of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot who later retired to become an architect and an English major who left her teaching position to raise Philip and his three siblings.

"For a little while, because there was no good public school," Rosedale recalls, "I went to a born-again Baptist school, no kidding, in trailers, in single-wides, in Hollywood, Maryland. And it was so interesting because they just . . . preached fire and brimstone, and it was crazy, and it scared the crap out of me."

For a time, it turned him into a pint-sized proselytizer. "So I would go around and ask people, 'Have you been born again?' So I think that actually helped me critically examine the world around me in a really profound way . . . I [later] realized, this is driven by people, this is not driven by some fundamental truth . . . But it left me with a kind of appreciation of deep thoughts and meaningful things. I just think I kind of had to take that and make my own some sense of it at some point."

Traditional religion discarded, something still kept him yearning to visualize the absolute.

"I can remember standing in the backyard near the woodpile," Rosedale recalls. "Looking into the woods, I can remember thinking, 'Why am I here, and how am I different from everybody else? What am I here to do? What is my purpose here?' But I don't think I thought it in a real religious sense . . . I always had this strong [sense of], 'I want to change the world somehow.'" Thinking back on it now, Rosedale wonders if this was the ultimate origin of Second Life, when he began feeling about for a goal that would match that insight.

His experiences with computing would turn that sense of wonder in a practical direction. As an early teen, he read about a single-cell simulation conceived by theoretician Stephen Wolfram, intended to demonstrate how complexity could emerge from nature if a cell reproduced through very simple rules. Rosedale got Wolfram's simulation working to his satisfaction in 1982 on an Apple computer owned by his aunt and uncle in Santa Barbara. Starting with a single pixel, the Wolfram program quickly transformed the monitor into a starburst of activity.

"You can see the pattern evolving," Rosedale recounts, "so when you get something growing, it's like a little Christmas tree going down the screen. So I looked at that, and I [thought], 'Oh my god, you can simulate . . . anything.'" That intuition was enforced a couple of years later, when he and a friend tinkered with a Windows program that displayed Mandelbrot sets, mathematical constructs that seem, at a distance, to be a single crystal form but as you keep magnifying, reveal layers of thriving intricacy. Once again, he saw the richness and variety of life, simulated through an elegant flourish of code.

Unlike most computer programmers, whose creativity is entirely consumed by the digital, Rosedale maintained a loop into the real world; he had a yen to tinker and reshape it. As a kid he wanted his bedroom door to slide up and down, like in Star Trek, so he got out some tools and made it so. Which is why his parents came home one day to discover that he'd not only taken his door off its hinges but had gone up into the attic, cut a deep groove through the ceiling, and attached it to a pulley system, instead.

The Making of Second Life
Notes from the New World. Copyright © by Wagner Au. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Daniel Terdiman

“[Au] is a thoughtful and erudite writer…. [and his] enjoyable, well-written, and thoughtful…book gives us most complete picture we’ve had of how this complex and valuable virtual world came to be, what has happened since then, and why the world should care.

Editorial Reviews

[Au] is a thoughtful and erudite writer…. [and his] enjoyable, well-written, and thoughtful…book gives us most complete picture we’ve had of how this complex and valuable virtual world came to be, what has happened since then, and why the world should care.

Daniel Terdiman

Au’s book is full of rich details about some of Second Life’s most important people.

New York Post

Technology journalist Au does a fine job explaining how founder Philip Rosedale and his start-up Linden Lab created this peculiar institution, and his status as a longtime Linden contractor gives him perspective.

Newsweek

In Mr. Au’s fascinating account of the rise of Linden Lab and Second Life he interweaves anecdotes so improbable—catching a wireless signal with a soup can?—that you have to remind yourself what’s real and what’s not.... A remarkable corporate story... he offers some keen observations.

Wall Street Journal

[A] comprehensive history of Second Life’s early days…As new virtual worlds come online and try to lure some of Second Life’s users and hype, the story of how Second Life came to be may provide a road map for others.

Reuters

Even while you sleep, Second Life continues to grow. Since its 2003 launch, the three-dimensional Internet virtual world has become a veritable expanding alternate universe for millions of registered users. No one is better qualified to make sense of the headline-making SL phenomenon than Wagner James Au, the world's first embedded Internet journalist. The extensive time that Au spent inside SL's Linden Lab enable him to plot the seemingly implausible rise of this relatively new vortex of web activity. Vivid snapshots of where the 3D action is.

For those unfamiliar with the hype or the ridicule, Second Life is a "massively multi-user online world," a vast simulation created by ordinary loggers-in using 3-D graphic-design tools from the site's proprietor, Linden Labs. Posing as animated "avatars," "Residents" ramble or fly through the videoscape; they socialize with other avatars, create art, have sex, build cities, open shops and nightclubs, spend Linden Dollars (redeemable for real dollars) and fight wars, all while seated at their computer screens. Au, a journalist who chronicled the site as Linden Labs' reporter-avatar, visits the usual dot-com-saga touchstones. There's the shoestring startup by eccentric geeks; the pilgrimage to Burning Man; the bloviating visionary founder, Philip Rosedale ("I'm passionate about Second Life because there doesn't need to be a God"); the marketing gobbledygook about "Leverag[ing] Metaverse Brands." Au celebrates Second Life as a seedbed for unfettered cybercapitalism, a liberating outlet for the masses' pentup creativity and a "lucid dream" that erases the virtual-real divide. Alas, in his telling, Second Life's ongoing fantasia-"the monkey now perched on the wing screamed 'DIEEEE' as he strafed a well-armed babe in a bikini"-feels very much like a recounted dream: creative, certainly, but rather tedious and patently irrelevant. (Mar.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

Linden Labs gave Au, a highly accomplished technology journalist, the opportunity to describe the growth, from launch, of its highly popular virtual 3-D product Second Life. Second Life is appropriately named because individuals can create "avatars," also called "residents," to interact with others and enhance this universe through their own user-generated content. Avatars engage in many humanlike behaviors, such as communication, sexual relations, and wealth attainment. Second Life even has its own currency, Linden Dollars, which is convertible into U.S. dollars. Au has drawn on his own extensive Second Life experience, including online interviews with avatars and offline interviews with the persons behind them. He presents a comprehensive account that shows why Second Life may be the next great frontier and why it is so appealing to individuals and enterprises worldwide. Au also discusses the interaction between real life and this online world, the many ethical and policymaking issues Linden Labs has encountered, and the future of Second Life. This intriguing work is suitable for both public and academic libraries.
—Caroline Geck

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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