Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (review)

Thomas Malaby begins his ethnographic study of the online game-design company Linden Lab with a telling scene. He describes himself standing in the company's dimly lit "lab" space, mesmerized by a detailed drawing of a rocky and still-uninhabited island invented by the company's designers. Rendered in aerial perspective and segmented by equidistant lines of a Cartesian grid, the image, Malaby writes, with its "god's eye perspective" and posted in a setting of glowing lights and digital cultivation, is not merely the product of design, but of "creation in the larger sense" (p. 1).

Based on interviews and fieldwork Malaby conducted during a year spent with Linden Lab's production team starting in 2004, Malaby draws his readers into the inner workings of the company behind the uniquely successful Second Life virtual-world environment. Key to its success was the deliberate affordance of tools that allows users to create new content and to profit from that content in real-world market exchanges. His focus, though, is not so much on the cultural practices of users—which an expanding body of research in game and new media studies has begun to address—but on the experience of workers managing such virtual "play" environments. He sets out, then, to explore the curious liminality of the emerging organizational culture, and "the changing nature of authority" (p. 8), when acts of creation no longer reside in producers' hands alone.

While his study is anchored around Linden Lab's workers—who refer to themselves, as he does, as "Lindens"—his concerns are with broader cultural understandings of governance that user-generated sites like Second Life cultivate. His chapters offer snapshots of Lindens' experiments in distributed, techno-utopic governance: how their design practices cut against bureaucratic control, how their organizational choices promote faith in unfettered individualism and technology, and how their own self-construction practices while building simulated worlds blur experiences of work and play.

Malaby is deft at demonstrating how this culture is not without contradictions. While Linden Lab may not evince the tight, structured management of typically successful organizations, neither can Lindens entirely enjoy the rewards of their organization's success. They struggle on a daily-even hourly—basis with their user population. The greater Second Life's growth, the more expansive users' creative capacities, the more labor required to maintain authority. Among Malaby's most compelling observations, however, is how the very contingency of control can be a source of reward for Lindens—that there is a certain pleasure in having to earn users' approval in a sort of game-like condition. Despite all its difficulties, Linden Lab maintains "a remarkable and anti-bureaucratic commitment to unintended consequences" (p. 16). This, he suggests, might foretell some "ethical" promise for the design of "social policy" (p. 9)—and contingent authority—in our digital future. As he writes: "Institutions may be changing in their ability to govern themselves and others, and the advent of virtual worlds is at the forefront of this transformation" (p. 132).

Malaby's study, concisely and accessibly written, offers much evocative and suggestive material. The sharp distinction he draws between the play-oriented logic of games and the control-oriented logic of governance is compelling, but ultimately less persuasive than his other claims, as it underplays the fact that games are now a serious (and highly profitable) business. Their economic values warrant further exploration: Malaby makes cautionary references to Lindens' neoliberal ethic, but marginalizes analysis of how this ethic gets expressed—even if allowing Second Life's individual and corporate users to newly profit from "play" has been lauded in popular accounts. Do Lindens share the growing concerns of many professional content producers that users' unpaid online content production might displace their work? Are there game-like logics, too, in managing economic risks in the quick rise-and-fall world of digital enterprise?

Malaby's fresh insights are relevant not just to studies...