Everything was going to change. Snow Crash was becoming a reality. It's hard for anything to live up to such lofty expectations, especially running on a crummy Dell laptop built circa The software was glitchy and slow.
It felt like a glorified chatroom. It seemed to me that, like a lot of Silicon Valley creations, "Second Life" offered the promise of a revolution, but merely delivered a normative, if slightly recontextualized reality.
Another transfer of wealth with good PR. Instead of U. In a world where everyone could fly, people still built stairs. Eight years after I first tried "Second Life," I logged in again. My partner was teaching an internet art class that utilized "Second Life. By this point it was already on the decline. When my partner purchased a house to display her students' work, it was in the middle of an empty suburb, surrounded by homes abandoned long ago, waiting for owners who would likely never return.
We made matching avatars. They had smooth nude bodies without genitalia, and giant eyeballs for heads. We roamed around, low-level trolling. We visited a red light district. There, one could buy 3D models of genitals to attach to their avatar. One vendor offered a free sample, called the Demo Dick. It is limited in that it is purely cosmetic; it can't get erect. I immediately installed one on my avatar. With my new Demo Dick, it seemed appropriate to visit a nude beach.
We spotted a couple making love on an outdoor bed. We watched. Maybe it was our eyeball avatars, which perhaps suggested a level of voyeurism too extreme even for "Second Life," but users were pretty uptight about it. One man became so distressed by our presence that he actually ran away. We chased this nude man around the beautiful beach, as he yelled at us to leave him alone. It was a great night. I was probably a little too harsh on "Second Life.
And it's actually pretty fun, especially if you have a friend to explore with. After that encounter on the boardwalk with the creepy ghost girl, I decided to find the old John Edwards SL headquarters. It was created in to promote the former Senator's presidential campaign. This was before he lost the primary, and it was revealed that he had had an ongoing affair while his wife was dying.
In February of , it received mainstream media attention after it was vandalized. According to a blogpost on Edward's campaign website , all sic :. I witnessed this event, taking names and photos, including the owners of the pictures.
I also kept and saved a copy of the chat log. I have filed an abuse report with Linden Labs, and am awaiting their investigation. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar to how elements of the election played out online, well, yup. The internet has always been the internet.
Nothing showed up in the game's search engine. I tried asking around. I visited an '80s-themed night club and asked anyone if they knew where Laguna Beach was. I was immediately warped to a dance podium, where I started dancing, against my will. I warped to another nude beach. I was greeted by a sign explicitly stating that no erections were permitted on the beach. There were actually a few people at the beach, but none of them seemed active and were most likely AFK. How long had computers been running, with their ghost avatars waiting in suspended silence?
A user going by the name Carina was finally willing to help out. The whole Laguna Beach area had been deleted, she explained. The John Edwards campaign headquarters was long gone.
Exploring empty areas gets boring pretty fast. I wondered if there were parts of "Second Life" that are still alive. According to one estimate from , there are , active users. Where were they? Second Life exists because Linden Lab, a private company, runs it. Linden Lab makes its money via premium memberships, virtual land use fees i. On October 18, , Second Life surpassed one million residents. Understanding the Appeal in In true qualitative research fashion, when I first joined Second Life, I was obsessed with understanding the appeal.
The Second Time Around The sudden onslaught of the COVID pandemic and the total shutdown of in-person research forced me to look for ways to make online qualitative more immersive. Using the virtual world to its fullest requires a powerful computer with a dedicated graphics card. Second Life became popular right around the time that laptops supplanted desktops. At that time, laptops usually had integrated graphics cards.
While Second Life can run on such machines, graphics render much slower and the experience is subpar. Even using a powerful machine today, Second Life can still be laggy and slow to render images.
The learning curve was and still is steep—very steep. Even the most technologically sophisticated person needs time to understand how to use and master the building tools and virtual world protocols.
In , the grid had difficulty accommodating the rapid population growth of late and The grid was often down, users could not login, or the in-world experience was painfully slow. With the world at your fingertips, it can be difficult to decide where to go and what to do.
It takes time to understand how to sit down, how to raise a hand, or even how to simply begin a conversation with someone. Perhaps most telling, many venues lacked critical mass of attendance due to the nature of virtual worlds themselves.
For example, Starwood built an amazing virtual rendition of its then-concept, an Aloft Hotel property. However, whenever one went there, it was empty. Social networking relies upon a critical mass of people to post, view, and participate. However, sites like Facebook do not need to have everyone participate simultaneously—as long as users see a steady stream of activity over the course of time, their interest level is steady. With Second Life however, seeing the activity as it happens is critical.
A party is not much fun if most of the guests are not there at the same time. For businesses, creating a virtual space still means needing to staff it and getting people to come through the door.
They make a system that turns your avatar into a robot, so to speak. Like it gives it functions where you can add programming roles and all that. And other people can control you via a remote. Exploration is probably the other big thing for me because there's just so much to see. Steve H. He met one of his best friends while working out at an in-world gym.
Those great conversations have led to dates and the aforementioned friend, whose wedding he was a groomsman in in I'd need to keep in touch with them. Those who I spoke to had full Second Life lives, filled with many of the same hobbies and activities one might enjoy in their first life.
Meri, for example, is a music fan, and that was a big reason why she joined in Like her avatar, she is dark-haired, blue-eyed and pretty. And like her avatar, Bremont has plenty of friends. The appeal for Bremont, and many other Second Life residents, is social. Linden, which tracks in-world stats in real-time on the secondlife. Jumping on the bandwagon No matter: The population growth of Second Life and the real money changing hands has convinced big corporations to set up camp — or island — in Second Life.
American Apparel has an in-world shop to sell hoodies and t-shirts to comfort-craving residents. One way to reach the hyper-wired residents of Second Life is to build a game in-world. Games within a Since many residents have played games before, most are comfortable and familiar with game mechanics like using the arrow keys to move around or in-world chat to communicate. The game pitted residents against each other in their quest to become the ultimate hired assassin.
Players had a hit list and weaponry, and the prize was 1 million Lindens, the largest payout in Second Life history. To hook players, NBC released new weapons throughout the day game period.
Within 18 hours of the game launch, residents hacked the weaponry cache to give themselves a leg up. But rather than go after the hackers, NBC decided to see the violation as a form of flattery. Competitors and imitators have rushed to cash in on The Next Big Thing.
As the technology improves — performance issues and frequent maintenance outages are a common grouse among Second Life residents — more people will be using these virtual worlds for all kinds of reasons: Education, collaboration, research and — of course — entertainment.
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