Why a Second Life?

Yes, as if one wasn't enough, they invented a Second Life for us to live.

Of all the Virtual Worlds, metaverses and other 3d digital frontiers out there, this one, created and run by San Francisco based Linden Lab, is the most "out there". Not necessarily because of the content, or the subject matter, or its membership either.

No, it's so out there because no one knows exactly what it is:

Is it a computer game, one of those so called MMORPGs?
Well, yes, but no. There's really no element of goal-based gameplay intrinsic to Second Life. It's just a place you can go and hang out. With other people. And vampires. And aliens. And big flaming birds.

OK, so it's a chatroom?
Well, yes, but no. There's a huge social element to Second Life, but how many chatrooms allow you to buy a piece of Virtual Real Estate, build a shop and start selling your own brand skater wear, haute couture, flying vehicles, original photography, scripted pets that follow you and pine for you when not logged in, or go and try on the latest high street styles without stepping outside the house (and order them into the bargain).

OK, so it's a social experiment for trying out new economic and political models?
Well, yes, but no. There are embedded economists and politicians in Second Life, running experimental programs. There's even a currency (the Linden dollar or L$) and an exchange (the LindeX) where you can convert your hard earned L$ to real money. And some people make literal six figure salaries in real money selling virtual goods. But whoever heard of an experimental petri dish evolving into a society the size of a small city?

OK, so is it "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by millions of people"?
Well, yes, but more often twice or three times daily. There are parallels to Gibson's Cyberspace and Stephenson's Metaverse. As a system that puts a simulacral (or virtual) reality at the core of your interactions with data and other individuals, Second Life has no peer. The Gibsonian future of the Internet³ may yet transpire and we may be witnessing its early manifestation. Futurologist Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, former CTO of RealNetworks, always seems to have a knowing, visionary gleam in his eye, and the financiers haven't been slow in recognising the potential, either.

Open ended

Really Second Life is about freedom. Freedom to be who you want and to choose what to do. It's like a version of real life that hasn't had tens of thousands of years to make loads of mistakes. That's probably why it's so hard to define.

If you like, it's as open ended as the Internet.

It starts off like a combination of an instantly immersive avatar chat environment with some really interesting people from all round the world, combined with a form of adult LEGO Technik (Second Life's inworld content is all built by its residents, and made interactive using LSL - Linden Scripting Language. The rights to all original content is also owned by the resident creators), and a massive, bottomless dressing up box.

Add to that the ability to buy land and build whatever you like on it and the potential becomes acute. These parcels of land, which range from being as small as a suburban front garden to as large as a small country, can host anything, from your dream future home, to a shopfront for your virtual or real world creations, or a musical venue where you promote the latest bands, streaming music from real-world live performances, or distributed learning organisations where people from all round the world can come and learn a language, or virtual movie studios turning out new forms of cinematic expresison, or a disaster simulation environment for training emergency response workers in how to react to an anthrax attack on a major city centre.

All these applications exist in Second Life. And there's more we don't yet suspect.

How?

Second Life is an idea driven world. The society (and it is a society, make no mistake, not just an aggregation of people around some social tools) revolves around a core of people and companies who create content in the world for the majority to consume and interact with.

Making a world driven by the ideas of its inhabitants has a lot of interesting consequences.

Think about this world. There's zero material overhead to the act of creation in this world: anyone can create an object and it costs nothing to do so. There's also no need for traditional methods of subsistence, so the economy that has arisen is also totally non-materialistic. It's quite literally an economy of ideas, a knowledge economy.

Of course, the human mind resists the shock of the new and so more traditional types of market forces still thrive. The market for virtual land is particularly cutthroat and inflationary and some very shrewd businesspeople have managed to become wealthy because of this. Imagine that there's a limited amount of server space on the Internet and a few realtors have cornered the market. That's what it's like.

For real commercial applications, you can lease land in hectare chunks (called sims or simulators) direct from Linden Lab and glue them together to form continent sized landmasses - the equivalent of leasing commercial webspace.

The ability to own land (server space) and then build what you like on it (content) is the key to the open-endedness of Second Life and why we feel it is a Virtual World platform that has some serious legs in terms of the potential for organisations in the real world moving into the virtual realm.

Technically, it means that it also has to be a staggering achievement. Most online games, no matter how sophisticated, rely on a huge installer which plonks a bunch of objects and textures on your hard disk, so you don't have to waste time or suffer delays downloading them. It's almost the first rule of online persistent environments - minimise download packets as they hinder interactivity and add latency to the gamer's experience. The amount of creativity you can exercise in these games is therefore limited because you're basically stuck with what you're given.

Linden Lab, Second Life's creators, have thrown this particular rule out of the window. and said to the users, "you go ahead and create stuff to your hearts' content. Upload custom textures for your buildings and clothes, write your own scripts to animate vehicles. We'll worry about how it displays and works."

This means that while the installer itself is pretty small, every time a user interacts with any content in the world, they will have to download it anew. The Second Life rendering engine and asset servers are, in the background, making sure that wherever you are, you're seeing the right shapes, with the right textures and these are streaming down to you or being fetched from your client side cache as fast as possible.

Second Life also interacts well with other systems. There are simple, well documented web services that allow us to create complex web based backend systems that can run your enterprise inworld and report back from it.

Potential

The emphasis on open-endedness means that Second Life is one of the few massively multiplayer online worlds that is still experiencing exponential growth in its userbase. This time last year, the total population stood at about 50,000. Right now, it's fast approaching one million. The landmass and population are roughly equivalent to a city the size of Leeds.

This is a system that's approaching a tipping point. Already, organisations as diverse as record labels, high street fashion retailers, sportswear manufacturers and the BBC have dipped their toes in the rapidly expanding pool of potential that this nascent world represents.

Other worlds, with their restrictive game based societies, tend to straitjacket the residents and eventually they get "gamed-out". Second Life has its fair number of dropouts, but the burnout is often temporary and people often return. The creative freedoms and the sense of a free-wheeling and booming open economy means that the sense of taking part in something new leads to evangelical levels of enthusiasm from its tight-knit and genuinely smart resident base.

Yet the current population is still comprised of ultra-early adopters and the real drive will be to attract the man in the street, the housewife who's never played a game before, the kid from Africa with more ideas than she can realise in the real world.

Then the potential for Second Life, with its built in e-commerce and social networkng tools will really burst into life. I mean, who wants to spend a miserable afternoon in Ikea when you could design your perfect bedroom or kitchen inworld with your partner or housemates, using the online Ikea showroom and pay and have it delivered the same day? The possibilities for entertainment, arts and culture, helping environments for people with bodily and other disadvantages, education, and all forms of leisure are equally as exciting as the commercial potential.

The Guild and Second Life

The Guild have approaching three years experience working with Second Life.

Our core expertise lies in tying in web based systems that allow for the management of complex businesses in the virtual world, but we can and do bring the whole range of our abilities to play, from branding and creative design, via the creation of inworld content and software applications to marketing and project management.

One project that has encompassed our skillset from end to end is Languagelab.com, the innovative virtual world based language school. We've designed and implemented their corporate identity offline, on the web and inworld, as well as advising on how their business interacts with their customers in terms of service and support. We've also built a web based application for Languagelab.com that allows them to manage their complex venue booking, staffing and scheduling needs inworld from a web admin system that also drives their public facing website.

If your interested in talking to us about how and why you should consider taking your organisation into the 3D virtual realm, we'd love to hear from you.

You can also get in touch inworld by messaging Kei Mars or Giskard Mars.