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Introduction: A Developer’s-Eye View 1. They have also been called, variously, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs, or simply MMOGs), massively multiplayer online [worlds] (MMOs), and synthetic worlds (Castronova 2005), but virtual worlds currently enjoys precedence, despite the misleading suggestion that “virtual” makes: that there is a clear separation of it from the “real.” 2. This is the number of unique accounts that have logged into Second Life in the past fourteen days as of February 23, 2008. Linden Lab provides a number of regularly updated demographic statistics here: http://secondlife .com/whatis/economy_stats.php. Until mid-2007 Linden Lab’s primary statistic for representing its population was “residents,” which referred to all accounts that had ever been created (most of them free accounts), a number that surpassed eight million at that time. Since then, Linden Lab has instead provided numbers of users sorted by time of last login (seven, fourteen, thirty, and sixty days) as its primary statistic. It is still difficult to tease out to what degree even these numbers are skewed by the number of new accounts that will never be used again. Also, I chose not to use Linden Lab’s term, residents, for Second Life users. While it certainly fits with their marketing efforts, I see no compelling reason for it to stand as an analytic for this or any other virtual world. NOTES 3. All Lindens were informed via company e-mail about my research project and given the choice not to participate, which they could invoke at any time. I use pseudonyms or otherwise avoid identifying Lindens who appear in what follows, in quotations or descriptions. At times, I make exceptions for my interviews with Philip Rosedale and other director-level Lindens, who are public figures that represent the company. I also at times refer to public statements that Lindens made elsewhere, such as on Web logs. 4. Linden Lab moved to a new office in April 2005, from an office on Second Street to one near the bluff below Coit Tower. I allude to this move at several points in the chapters that follow. Also, it bears mentioning that the small number of Linden employees makes delving into individual histories next to impossible without revealing enough identifying details to betray actual identities. I focus on the Lindens’ work lives to a great extent but even there must avoid giving extensive specifics at times—many of the Lindens continue to work there, and lengthy thick description runs the risk of identification. 5. I also looked for new ways to take advantage of digital media, and in mid-2005 Wagner James Au (a journalist who has covered Second Life for a number of years, at first under a contract relationship with Linden Lab) and I began a Linden Lab History Wiki, to which we invited employees of Linden Lab to add their recollections about Linden Lab’s past on a timeline. 6. The island was later named the “Heterocera Atoll” (see http://secondlife .wikia.com/wiki/Heterocera_Atoll, accessed 21 February 2008). This usage suggests that the inspiration for the shape of the landmass may not have been the collapsed volcano of Santorini but rather the circular rings of coral that make up some islands in the South Pacific. 7. It is worth noting that the graphical, avatar-mediated virtual worlds currently prominent owe a great deal of their design to the original text-based virtual worlds, begun in the mid-1970s (see Bartle 2003). 8. Users in Second Life have a special page of their profile dedicated to information about their lives beyond Second Life itself—this tab is labeled “First Life.” 9. For an early treatment of similar issues for a text-based virtual world, see Pargman (2000). 10. The picture of bureaucracy here derives from Max Weber (1946), who proposed that bureaucratic authority, in contrast to charismatic and traditional authority, achieves its legitimacy through the necessity of following rules for the sake of following rules. (One recalls the phrase used by the researchers of Stanley Milgram’s experiments: “The experiment must continue.”) 1 4 6 _ N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 – 1 4 [52.90.40.84] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:14 GMT) N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 5 – 5 7 _ 1 4 7 11. For example, new media scholars have sought to develop...