Second Life is more than a programmer's paradise. Michael tells you why, and John Jainschigg gives you peek at what DDJ is up to in-world.

April 03, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/get-a-second-life/198702201

It just isn't a real virtual world until you have your first terrorist attack.

Last year, in the virtual world Second Life, terrorists fired on shoppers in the clothing store American Apparel. "Push guns" used the scriptability of the store and the inherent physics of the SL platform to propel virtual visitors out of the store, disrupting commerce and wreaking virtual havoc. An organization called the "Second Life Liberation Army" took credit for the attack, then announced that it was the in-world political wing of a political movement seeking to pressure SL owner Linden Lab to institute basic rights for SL residents.

SLLA has since paid mercenaries to attack commercial targets in SL, and this year, unleashed virtual nukes, which (like push guns) do no lasting harm to the objects and avatars in SL, but disrupt activity and are just generally obnoxious or entertaining or both. SLLA thinks that it can best achieve its goals in the virtual SL if Linden Lab sells residents shares in the real-life (RL) company. O-kay.

I don't know at just what point in my exploration of the phenomenon that is Second Life I first lost sight the boundary between "reality" and the world of mental constructs. It may have been while reading an RL interview with the SL avatar who is the leader of the SLLA.

Whimsical as this virtual "terrorism" may be, it hints at something big that is starting to happen in Second Life, something that has as much to do with real life as with the virtual kind.

What It Is

Second Life is a virtual world. It's not the first, but it is by most accounts the most interesting such creation to date, and it's getting something like 20,000 visitors a day. Linden Lab has attracted such tech-celebrity investors as Ray Ozzie, Jeff Bezos, and Linden's board chairman Mitch Kapor. More specifically, SL is a 3D environment that you enter and explore by means of an avatar—a 3D representation of yourself. SL implements basic physics such as gravity and force and proper collision behavior, and a shared world of defined territory and persistent objects. Users (members) can purchase land, build on it, and create all manner of objects to keep or sell.

You create things using a scripting language—Linden Scripting Language. Scripts can attach to objects and spaces, giving them characteristic behavior. Scripts can operate on the objects to which they are attached, linked objects, avatars and objects in the physical vicinity, and the SL infrastructure (e-mail, chat, IM). You can assign complex permissions to objects indicating who can modify, copy, or sell the object. You own the things you build and can decide to give them away or sell them for Linden dollars, which have an interesting and evolving relationship with real dollars.

Practically everything in SL was built by members, from clothing for avatars to entire islands filled with buildings and roads and vegetation; and there are a lot of members and they build so much that nobody can any longer keep up with all that's being built on any given day.

Like any virtual world, SL is its own private reality. That's the point of a virtual world. One consequence of this is that if you've never been in-world, you will probably find most descriptions of the experience unenlightening. Residents go on and on about "events" they've "attended" in SL and talk about "dancing" in SL, leaving you to guess just what they are really doing when they're "attending events" or "dancing." But this is perfectly reasonable: It makes no more sense to describe a Second Life dance experience in terms of mouse movements than it would to describe a real-life dance experience in terms of sequences of foot placements—unless you're a dance instructor.

You just have to spend some time in SL to grok what the experience is, as is true of any virtual world. In the case of SL, though, the sense of reality in the virtual reality seems to be particularly deep and wide ranging. The lore of SL is rich with examples of people who have launched a second (make that Second) career as an SL fashion designer or real-estate developer. Anshe Chung has become a real-estate magnate in SL and claims to have become a millionaire in real money from selling virtual property in SL. (The relationship between Linden dollars and real dollars is worth an essay in itself. How Linden Lab keeps residents comfortable that their in-world earnings have real value without coming under the scrutiny of Federal regulators is impressive.) DDJ's John Jainschigg tells of the salon owner from Atlanta "who spends every night [in SL] booked to the hilt as a lounge singer." More SL lore can be found in the book Second Life: The Official Guide, by Michael Rymaszewski, et al. (Wiley Publishing, 2007).

When it was first launched in 2001, SL was called "LindenWorld" and was a platform for testing virtual reality and touch-interface technology. By the end of 2003, after the public was invited in and it had become Second Life, this virtual world had experienced culture clashes, war, and a tax revolt. The organized revolt by SL residents pushed Linden Lab to replace monthly fees (taxes) with land use fees (property taxes?). At the same time, LL gave residents the power to freely trade Linden dollars for real dollars and to retain intellectual property rights in their SL creations, setting up the basis for an in-world economy.

Soon, jobs came into existence. You could make in-world money (hence, real money) opening a store, buying and selling land or currency, designing clothing for other residents' avatars, organizing in-world events, working security, performing as a musician or dancer or model or escort, or providing skilled services like scripting or building or landscaping or animation, although most of these jobs paid at third-world RL rates or below.

Soon, too, RL businesses decided that there was RL money to be made in SL and started moving in. This commercialism raised some hackles among the residents, but those businesses that took the trouble to understand the culture of SL were better received. Whether any RL business has yet made money from opening a place in SL is a good question.

What It's For

A great deal of what goes on in SL, as in other virtual worlds, is social—chatting, hanging out with friends, entertainment, cybersex. Because SL is a (virtual) place and not just a page, people seem to enjoy simply hanging out in SL environments in a way that isn't true of, say, MySpace.

But for those of us to whom code is a verb, it's the ability to build things that intrigues. And while the language might not be ideal (minimal math and data structures), it affords SL builders a great deal of power. (The currently back-burnered project to move the interpreter to Mono should make scripts run faster as well as open up SL to other scripting languages, such as Python, if it's ever finished.)

SL residents are not just building things, though: To a large degree, they are building Second Life itself.

Still, haven't we heard all this before? Wasn't this the kind of thing that was being said of MUDs in the early '90s? Didn't some of us, to our later embarrassment, even join in the cheerleading for LambdaMOO and VRML and Virtus Walkthrough? What reason is there to think that Second Life is going to achieve anything more than those technologies did? The simple answer is that it already has. Merely as a gallery of architectural and conceptual and electronic art, Second Life justifies its existence. Go and see what people have built. It's pretty amazing.

[Click image to view at full size]

Figure 1: Interacting with an object in one of Second Life's "sandboxes."

It goes beyond hanging out and looking at pretty constructions, though. Arguably, it is the interplay between real life and virtual life that makes Second Life potentially far more important than it might seem.

Making It Real

The social aspect of SL has obvious and not-so-obvious connections with the real world. There is the story of two avatars who became friends in SL and had never met in RL until his RL home was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, and she let him stay in her RL home for months. There are the weddings and romances and collaborations, but you've heard those stories about the Web as well.

The various payment plans and the ability to trade Linden dollars, the wars and insurrections and terrorist attacks, the clubs and events and towns and collaborative building projects are in effect experiments in economics and politics and sociology and group dynamics. Some of this ferment is driven by fiat decisions by Linden and some is instigated by residents; but either way, it makes SL a laboratory for trying out new ways to live together.

It's also in the SL activity of building things that SL bleeds out into RL. One such SL-RL link is prototyping. Necessity is the mother of invention and creativity is the child of constraint. Changes in the infrastructure technology, scripting language, and LL business model over the years have imposed different constraints that transformed SL from one kind of sandbox to another.

You can use SL and LSL to prototype software, trying out user interface ideas in 3D or 2D, exploring immersive environment behavior, testing distributed computing paradigms. Some would fault SL development for the emphasis on 3D, but even granting that 3D is a distraction, a resource hog, a design bear, an awkward user interface, and a constraint on imagination (why impose the constraints of RL on a virtual world?), it has its uses, as in the prototyping of RL objects. One LSL coder worked up a new kitchen for his house in LSL after having tried and rejected more conventional design tools. And when he was done, he extracted parameters from his SL objects and sent them to suppliers and implemented his SL kitchen in his RL home. The virtue of prototyping a room in a virtual world like SL is that you can then move your avatar around in the room, getting a 3D feel for the aesthetics and traffic flow and convenience, even invite people in to get their impressions. If, on top of that, you could write or buy a script that extracts all the parameters that suppliers and contractors needed to build the room—or to take it a step further, extract the parameters that need to be fed to automated tools to produce the components of the RL room—then the benefits start to get real.

The last parts of that scenario are as yet only imagined, but that's what makes SL so interesting: It's a great environment for imagining and for trying out what you've imagined. We're going to do that. Maybe we'll see you there. Preferably without bombs, but whatever.

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