Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life

3. KNOWING THE GAMER FROM THE GAME

The day wears on at Linden Lab’s Second Street office in March 2005. As five o’clock approaches, I see a developer here, a marketing person there, start to gather personal possessions and head home for the day. But the room is still mostly full as the first shout rings through the air: “Yes!” Some scattered laughter follows, and a quick look around the room shows about six Lindens, their faces illuminated by the swiftly moving and colorful graphics on their monitors, sitting in the classic PC gamer pose: one hand on mouse, another with fingers poised over the w, a, s, and d keys of the keyboard. I glance at the nearby screen of a member of the QA team, and catch a brief glimpse of futuristic guns firing and armored avatars running around a hilly landscape , with many objects and buildings around as available cover. This is not the comparatively placid Second Life landscape—it is a game of Tribes: Vengeance, a multiplayer online game that allows two teams (of up to sixteen players) to play Capture the Flag and other contests while equipped with powerful weapons, armor, and jetpacks (these allow players to fly for a short distance). The generally dark environment of Linden Lab adds to the atmosphere; as one Linden put it, “It [makes] the Tribes games kind of eerie. . . . Shouting, you know, and . . . all these screens with action on them.” 3_KNOWING THE GAMER FROM THE GAME I later learn that there have been a number of games that have occupied the role of end-of-the-day diversion, and in interviews with Linden employees it was clear that many of them considered themselves committed gamers. Those who did not, correspondingly, often went out of their way to mention it to me and how it related to hearing about Linden Lab (“I’m not a gamer, so I just got a forward with about twelve [job] postings”), being interested in Second Life (“I thought it was gaming . . . that just sound[ed] too game geeky”), and using Second Life (“I kept bumping against the wall and I couldn’t figure out the spatial things—I wasn’t game-savvy enough,”). These comments were, by and large, the exception—gaming was part of Linden Lab practice. The category of the “office game” existed as a social fact around Linden Lab. As Cory Ondrejka put it in a comment he contributed to a Web log discussion (Combs 2006): [Members of] the core development team [the earliest members of the company] . . . were fairly serious FPS [first-person shooter], console, and other game players. Counter-Strike was the office game for nearly three years. My background was arcade, combat/race, and race games, all about as far removed from MMOs as you could get. The online office game was supplemented by offline games, the most popular of which was the Nerf battle—many Lindens kept loaded Nerf brand guns (which shoot small, polyurethane foam rockets) close at hand. At any moment (though more likely toward the end of the day or just before lunch) a Nerf battle could break out. There were also a number of games available to play in the gaming room, including a number of gaming consoles (PlayStation2, Xbox), “stand up” arcade games (Street Fighter II, Galaga), and a pool table (after moving to the larger, Sansome Street location). What is more, a good number of Lindens came to the company, like Ondrejka, from game development backgrounds. Of the approximately fifty regular employees (that is, not counting contractors) in early May 2005, about twenty had some professional background in games, whether computer games or others, 8 0 _ C H A P T E R T H R E E K N O W I N G T H E G A M E R F R O M T H E G A M E _ 8 1 and this number was disproportionately high among developers (a group of about fifteen at the time). Of course, Tribes was quite different from Second Life in some ways. Its environment was not a persistent world (its games began and ended), it could not accommodate more than thirty-two users, and there was a narrower scope for user creation. But the two pieces of software shared a number of important characteristics, and these are most obviously seen in the interface itself...