Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life

INTRODUCTION: A DEVELOPER’S-EYE VIEW

INTRODUCTION: A DEVELOPER’S-EYE VIEW I am standing in front of a whiteboard—the dry-erase boards seemingly ubiquitous in high tech company offices—looking at a drawing that offers a bird’s-eye view of Santorini on a letter-sized color printout taped to the board. At least I think this is Santorini, a picturesque Greek island formed from the remnants of a collapsed volcano. In the picture I can see its c-shaped landmass, its steeply rising elevation, indicated by a panoply of colors, all surrounded by a deep blue that also fills its bay, where a smaller island sits. A Cartesian grid divides up the image into neat squares, more than four hundred in all. I had done my first ethnographic field research in Greece, ten years prior, though I had never made it to Santorini (ethnographers feel a keen imperative to spend every possible moment at their “field site”; in my case that was Chania, Crete). Now it is February 2005, and I am in a dimly lit yet loftlike space in San Francisco, at the offices of Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life. The image, with its god’s eye perspective and posted in this work setting, suggests strongly the practice of design, even creation in the large sense. This is a piece of a world that is also an object of work. But at the time my perspective gravitated toward the experiential: I was thinking that soon I will be able to 2 _ I N T R O D U C T I O N walk—and fly—around at least this homage to Santorini. Within a month, I had done so. Virtual worlds require less of an introduction by the day, as they have risen dramatically to prominence in a number of quarters.1 They are characterized by their use of Internet connectivity to provide a persistent , open-ended, and shared three-dimensional space in which users can interact, typically via avatars (virtual bodies that move about and act inside the world). Second Life, launched in June 2003, stands in contrast to many of the other well-known virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Everquest II, Lineage II) in that it has no established and universal game objectives. Users spend their time in Second Life doing numerous different kinds of things. Many of them socialize via textbased chat (more recently, voice capability has been added), and while they do this they may also be dancing through their avatars or playing games or just enjoying a nice view. Second Life has thus quickly risen to prominence as the most celebrated “social” virtual world. Beyond its remarkable growth (at the time of this writing, February 2008, it has millions of registered users and by some accounts about 600,000 active users), its distinctive feature is its users’ access to in-world “tools” for the creation of interactive virtual objects and other content to which they own the intellectual property rights.2 Users can, furthermore, control how these creations are distributed to other users, including through market transactions in the in-world currency, Linden dollars (L$). The land (like that shown on the image I pondered) is also a purchasable commodity in Second Life, and this combination seems to have contributed to the emergence of a remarkable economy, one that also supports buying and selling Linden dollars for U.S. dollars. In short, Second Life supports the production of various forms of capital (social, cultural and market), and this in turn has provided a framework for continuing innovations in Second Life’s use by individual and institutional participants, many of whom have begun not only to pursue market interests but also to explore the potential of Second Life for learning and therapy. The environment now provides a home for a wide range of nonvirtual institutions, from Harvard Law School and A D E V E L O P E R ’ S - E Y E V I E W _ 3 Reuters News Service, to U.S. presidential campaign offices, therapeutic communities, and financial establishments. When I began doing research at Linden Lab in December 2004, approximately thirteen thousand users had created accounts in Second Life—small by the standards of the virtual world industry (at the time the original Lineage, a game primarily popular in East Asia, boasted over two million users worldwide), but this number was...