[December
16, 2011] This page is a little out of date, but it's still
useful. Seocnd Life is still there, is still worth visiting, and
in fact it is running better than it ever has. But it has turned
into something of a backwater.I Led Two Lives!
My Adventures in the SecondLife® virtual world
Copyright © Timothy Horrigan 2006-2008
[December
16, 2011] This page is a little out of date, but it's still
useful. Seocnd Life is still there, is still worth visiting, and
in fact it is running better than it ever has. But it has turned
into something of a backwater.
A
few changes since 2006 which I will briefly allude to are that an Adult
continent was created in 2009, Stroker Serpentine left the (virtual)
world altogether in 2011 (although the human being who wa spushing his
mouse is still around), and in 2011 Linden Lab tried to introduce mesh
objects to the virtual world. Also, starting in 2010, last names
were phased out: every new avatar born after the fall of 2010 has the
last name "Resident." (You can now have a "display name" which
differs from your user name.
If you want me to refer you for membership in SecondLife, you can log onto:
(You don't actually need a referral to join, but if you sign up as a paying member, my avatar gets a small bonus.)
For More Info see:
Some writing samples which I submitted to Linden Lab's recruiters and other recruiters
Unofficial Second Life bookstore— located at Amsterdam (186,99,26)
Prokofy Neva's Second Thoughts blog: very sharp commentary on metaverse issues.
U2 impersonation on Second Life (totally unauthorized by the band)
One hot day in July 2006, I happened to read a story in the newspaper about an online computer game called Second Life. And, even though I have (with a fair degree of success) tried to avoid getting caught up in gaming, I was curious enough to check it out. And I got caught up.
The game falls into the general
category of multi-user role playing games. It is not dissimilar to
games like World
of Warcraft
There is no real violence in the game: there are weapons and explosives but they don't do much. (One day, I did get shot and killed two or three times, but that just meant that I was teleported to a nearby location. I just went right back where I was and get shot and killed by the same guy again.) There is however, lots of sexuality (albeit cartoonish sexuality.) The sex is limited to the Mature (or R-rated) sections of the game's Grid. (Your avatar's body is neuter, but it can be take either a male or female shape, and you can buy prosthetic sex organs. It is even possible for advanced players to get pregnant. Even without the sex organs, you can do some pretty suggestive stuff, especially in a female body.)
The first step in the game is to choose a name. You can pick any first name you please, so I chose my real-life name, Timothy. (This turned out to be a mistake, for reasons which I will explain in a bit.)
At any given time, you are limited to a list of 100 or so last names (which get rotated periodically, so there are really about a thousand different surnames.) I chose the last one on my list: Zapotocky. Some of the surnames are just plain silly, like "Lollipop." Many are names of philosophers, e.g., "Marx" and "Bergson." Some are references to earlier computer games, like "Frobozz." Some are names of people who developed the program. Many are obscure references: "Zapotocky" appears to be inspired by Antonin Zapotocky, former President and Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia.
The next step is to create an "avatar." This term is familiar from Adidam, but here it just means your bodily form. When I signed up for the game, the standard boy avatars seemed relatively boring (although I have seen some pretty cool male avatars once I started wandering around.) The girl avatars had a lot more personality. I tweaked one of them, and ended up being a pink-haired tart. Even though this may not be the most appropriate identity for me in my usual guise as a rather boring old middle-aged man, it is hard to give up even an inappropriate identity.
Another factor which led me to choose the bodily shape I did is that you spend a lot of time looking at your avatar's butt. The standard camera angle is a sort-of first-person and sort-of second-person shot (a sesqui-person view, as it were) taken from about two metres (or seven feet) behind yourself. So, the game is much more enjoyable if you give yourself a cute butt.
I suppose I am
embodying one of the great fears people have about any type of
role-playing on the internet: the sweet young girl who is actually a
cynical middle-aged man. I tried not to make my female form too
young, but it is difficult to make yourself look too old (though you
can get up as high as your early 40s.) My avatar is pretty sweet
(most of the time) and she has the most adorable little pigtails. (In
most of the pictures on this page, she has bubble-gum pink hair, but
since then she switched to a more natural auburn color.)
Teenagers are not allowed on the Second Life grid (although there is a separate Teen Grid) but some players do make themselves very petite, which kind of makes you look childlike. Most players, however, opt to be statuesque and sophisticated.
The majority of the avatars you meet in Second Life are girls: the male-female ratio is about 60%-40%. I suspect that mine is one of many female avatars who are in fact men in real life.
Second Life has more appeal to female players than most games since the gameplay deals a lot with stuff women care about (i.e., relationships, clothes, decorating, money and sex) and not very much with violence and gadgets. (The weapons in Second Life are highly ineffective, and are banned from most public places anyway.) However I am reluctant to believe that a majority of the players are female in real life. (It seems to me, BTW, though I have no hard data on this, that real-life women almost always choose to be women in Second Life whereas men like to swing both ways.)
lthough there are many other "gender imps" on the grid, I am more suspicious than most because of my male first name. The cool people tend to accept me, name and all, but of course sometimes I have to deal with uncool people. I eventually created a couple of "alts" (alternate characters) with female names. They both work as dancers in clubs. (Also, I have two other alts who are named after major characters in my unpublished 80s rock and roll novel whose current working title is Follow the Glare. Until the book is finished, they won't have much work to do, though they do go online two or three times a week just to look around and enjoy themselves— which, come to think about it, is basically also what their big sisters do.)
Although we all look young, the music played in the discos and casinos and such tends to be mainstream rock from the late 1970s or early 1980s, which implies (even though this era is now considered campy) that many, perhaps most, of us are in our 30s or higher. (The hipper places tend to play 1990s techno, still implying that many of the DJs and dancers must be over 30.)
Although the default value for the Grid is ostensibly a PG rating (no sex or nudity allowed), in fact there are only a few PG areas. Ironically, the most decadent place I visited on the Grid was one of the few PG destinations— someplace called Mr. Lee's Casino, where things were constantly exploding and where my character ended up being taken over by a farting animation.
Mr.
Lee's Greater Hong Kong: Jiminy (164, 116, 106)
Second Life is a rare case of software
getting ahead of the hardware. It has its own client: it doesn't run
inside a web browser. (The client may be a precursor of a new
generation of 3d browsers: it's about freakin' time for a new
generation, I think! The old Netscape model of the mid-1990s has
gotten kinda stale, but I digress... ) The client has a very
interesting 3d graphics system: it runs slowly but it's still fun to
use (and luckily you can move around freely even while waiting for
the objects in your immediate environment to download and become
visible— or, to use the verb favored by Second Lifers, "to
rezz.") The client was also designed from the ground up for 21st
century computers, with lots of memory, powerful audio-visual cards,
persistent highspeed internet access, etc. My machine, a
standard-issue 2005-vintage Apple
Mac Mini,
Until January 2006, the client was proprietary, but it has now been released under a GNU Copyleft license as an open source product.
The servers seem to be severely stressed: even though Second Life crashes gracefully, it still goes down a lot. I worry about about how well the system is going to scale up in the future. Even though there has been a lot of buzz in the press about Second Life, the number of users is not very large. There are roughly 7 million members (as of June 2007.) However only two million or so are "active members" who have logged on within the past 60 days. I would guesstimate that perhaps 200,000 or so of those so-called active members are obsessives like me who log on almost every day. Only 20,000 to 40,000 of us are typically online at a given moment (and we are scattered over a universe which is, if you translate it to real-world terms, roughly the size of Rhode Island.) Finally, the number of paying members who pay a monthly or annual fee is probably less than 100,000.
But even with a small population, the infrastructure is severely strained. Performance degrades significantly if you gather too big a crowd in one place: once you have more than a few dozen avatars gathered together, the screen gets updated only once a twice a second, you start to become very clumsy, people's skin turns grey, you can't read the signs on the wall, the music gets distorted. You feel like you're stoned, which is OK in a disco environment but not so good if you're doing something more serious.
The official limit for the number of avatars in a 256 metre by 256 metre "sim" (basically, a sim is an area corresponding to one of the hundreds of servers on Linden Labs' huge server farm) is "about 100." In practice a sim will usually crash before you can get that many avatars on it. "Crashing the sim" becomes the goal of a party: I have heard more than one announcement like "come on down here, invite all your friends, and let's see if we can crash the sim." It's rather eerie being at a disco when the sim crashes, because you simply cannot stop dancing: the software is supposed to log you out when the sim crashes, but frequently the logout routine goes down when the sim crashes.
Amsterdam
Square: Amsterdam (146,55,29)
Two of the more interesting innovations of Second Life have little to do with the technical infrastructure:
Linden Lab has legitimized the practice of buying and selling the game's currency. It is perfectly legal (as far as Linden Lab is concerned) to buy and sell Linden $ outside the game. (The exchange rate currently fluctuates within a range from roughly 250 to 300 L$ to the US$.) New players start out with 250L$, which is just barely enough to wander around and buy some clothes. Premium subscribers get a sign-up bonus and a small weekly stipend. The Linden Dollar Exchange has turned out to be a fairly efficient micropayment system.
Linden Lab lets players keep the rights to intellectual property created in the game (although I am sure there will be lawsuits over who has what rights.) This is an incentive for entrepreneurs to create their own content for the game.
The basis of the game's economy is similar to that of my home state of New Hampshire: flea markets, arts & crafts, real estate, personal services (including what is euphemistically referred to as "escorting"), entertainment, politics, and (until it got banned) gambling— as well as lots of real-world money from outside the game.
