Tim Guest - Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds

CONTENTS

Exodus: Leaving the real world behind

Virtual Worlds, Real Selves: Life on both sides of the screen

Linden Lab: Dreamers of the dream

Hacking Matter: Changing the world for fun and profit

Virtual Mafia: My life as a foot soldier

Cyber-Terrorists: Attacking thought

Virtual Riches: Where theres money, theres an addiction

Virtual War: Join up and see the imaginary world

Us: Together in electric dreams

Virtual Sex: Boys who are girls who like boys who are girls

My Virtual Sister: Beyond the nuclear family

Corporations: Branding virtual dreams

Virtual Art: Creating ourselves anew

Korea: King of the world

Conclusion: Back to life

EXODUS

Leaving the real world behind

I n August 2004, Derek LeTellier, then a nineteen-year-old student teacher from Chicago, entered a competition on some land near his home, to see who could stack objects the highest. Dereks entry was a skyscraper, forty stories tall, built entirely out of wooden blocksa triumph of effort and will over gravity and friction. He didnt win the competition, but the land was empty and so LeTellier began to come back every few days to see what else he could stack. At the end of each day, he knocked the towers down. His experiments became a kind of regular neighborhood sideshow: Each week, a handful of locals would gather to watch his towers fall. Derek worked out how to stand on the towers as they came crashing down, and surf the tumbling blocks to the ground. Then a friend, James Miller, mentioned that the tower reminded him of the World Trade Center. Another friend who came along that same week had lost a relative in the real 9/11 attacks. He mentioned he would like to see what it was like to be inside the towers as they collapsed. So, at his friends request, Derek built a second tower, next to the first. The two men, along with a handful of others, climbed inside.

Dereks intention hadnt originally been to re-create the World Trade towers. A lot of what looked like symbols for 9/11 mostly were due to practical reasons, LeTellier told me. The shape of the buildings, the size, and the placement of people inside them. I asked Derek if he had been wary of any controversy the collapse might cause. A little bit, especially when we put that second tower up, he said. At that point I got a little disturbed about what we were doing. How eerie it looked. Before that, its only an experiment. At that point, it became something more.

Derek had also developed a tradition: As he knocked over his towers, he shouted a single word. The day he and his friend sat next to each other inside the tower, he shouted it aloudDie!and the two towers fell again.

And, as a result, the world endedor at least part of it. The two buildings, which had taken Derek just five minutes to build, were among the largest constructions that area of the world had ever seen, and when they fell, as if in a rising pall of smoke, the world went black.

Literally. Because all of this was nearly, but not quite, happening. Derek was in his apartment in Chicago. Others were in their offices in San Francisco, and all across the United States. Dereks re-creation of the World Trade Center attacks took place in the Olive district of a virtual world called Second Life. The towers, which had taken just a day to build, were the largest constructions Second Life had ever seen. When they fell, the world crashed. Every player was ejected.

Second Life is a virtual world: a computer-generated place, created by real people from all across the world who log on to live other lives online. The playersknown in Second Life as residentssee these worlds as 3-D computer-generated images on their screens. They can watch their virtual selves on their monitor as if through the eyes of their online self, or, more often, from behind their head, a perspective called the third-eye view. Using their keyboard and mouse, they can watch their virtual selves wander over digital terrain. In the real world, of course, Second Life exists only as ones and zeros on the hard drives of seven hundred Debian Linux servers in a San Francisco data warehouse. The Second Life computers function like Web servers, only, instead of serving up Web pages, they serve up a whole 3-D world. All the buildings, objects, and terrain Derek and his friends could see on their computer screens were digital; the other people, who also paid to inhabit this virtual world, also looked computer-generated, but at the helm of each was a real person, somewhere on the real globe.

In virtual worlds, you are born fully grown: Each new character is an adult, albeit one who doesnt yet know how to be. In every virtual world, you can walk, talk, and move things around using your keyboard and mousebut in each world these controls are different, and have to be learned anew. Second Lifes solution to this problem is for each character to appear first in Orientation Island, a jumble of tropical hills and beaches where, like rehabilitation in fast-forward, you learn how to operate your self and inhabit the world. When I first logged on, under the virtual skyperfect shades from blue to white, like the sky seen from a 747I wandered the island. Here and there, placardswhich I clicked on to read, and which appeared as text on my screentaught me how to walk, how to talk, how to move objects at a distance, how to fly. (If the first part felt like rehabilitation, the second part felt like superhero school.) At the end of the final lesson, a teleport button transmitted my virtual self into the wider virtual world, where all the other people were.

In Second Life, you can move around, talk with others using the keyboard or a microphone, interact physically with others second selveshug, waveand, although I didnt know this when I began my journey into virtual worlds, you can get married, make money, commit crime, and almost forget the real world even exists. And although only a handful watched Derek LeTelliers towers fall, the dream they shared, of entering a new place and leaving the real world behind, had already begun to colonize the imagination of millions.

Dereks experiments were a local affair, but virtual worlds were already on the scale of entire nations. By 2004, around twenty million people were regularly logging on to virtual worlds like Second Life; at the time of this writing, that figure has more than doubled. Between fifty and seventy million people worldwidefar more than passed through U.S. immigration at Ellis Island in the whole twentieth centurynow regularly log on to these new online spaces to abandon reality in search of a better place. This time, though, our new lands have no indigenous inhabitants to dispute our claim to the territory. Virtual worlds are empty except for us, and are shaped entirely to our desires.

In the past, mankind could only dream of such utopias. Heaven, Eden, Ozlands somewhere over the rainbow. But now, through computer technology, we have built ourselves a new kind of heaven: perfected virtual worlds, where we can finally move in and take up residence. Through computer screens in homes, offices, libraries, cyber-cafs, military bases, colleges, and schools, more people than inhabit Australia have stepped through the electronic looking glass to create second lives. In virtual worlds, it seems, we can finally break free of the forces of nature: We can shed gravity (in most games, you can fly) and we can rid our lives of friction (in online worlds, nothing takes any physical effort at all).