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Second Life

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Second Life
Second Life
Developer(s)Linden Lab
Publisher(s)Linden Lab
Platform(s)Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
Release2003
Genre(s)MMO
Mode(s)multiplayer
File:Seclife-logo1.gif
Second Life Logo

Second Life is an open-ended virtual world created in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. It is similar to There, another such world created around the same time, which is, again, very open-ended. The brain-child of former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, Second Life gives its users (referred to as residents) tools to shape its world. A large majority of the content in the Second Life world is resident-created, and one of the unique things about this environment is that residents retain the intellectual property rights to the objects they create.


Objects

Second Life includes a 3D modeling tool that allows residents to create complex objects out of a set of basic building blocks known as primitives (prims). The environment includes a set of textures that residents can apply to their objects, and residents can upload and apply their own images, as well. Residents can apply scripts to created objects, thereby controlling the behavior of the objects within the environment. Second Life uses its own scripting language, called Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL has a syntax similar to C, and allows objects to interact with the Second Life world, as well as the Internet (via email and XML-RPC). Second Life uses the Havok dynamics engine for simulated physics, though not all objects in the world respond to physics. An upcoming update will include Havok 2 support, an improvement that Second Life residents have awaited since its announcement by Linden Lab before June of 2002.

All objects and 3D information are streamed in real-time to all clients. This allows for real-time editing of 3D objects so any resident can view what is being created, as it is being created. The interface for creating and editing objects is integrated with the world and requires no external program to use, but editing of textures, and animations for avatar armatures, requires external software that must be purchased separately from third parties.

Avatars

Residents of Second Life are represented in the environment by an avatar, which can be customized and clothed in a variety of ways. Often this is humanoid in shape, but not always. Residents can attach objects to their avatars to further customize them -- the attachments can be something as simple as a pair of glasses, or something as complex as a costume to make the avatar look like something else entirely, such as a cartoon character or a Clone Trooper. Common applications of altering character appearance have included animals (Second Life supports a strong social furry group of over 500 members), robots, mechs, and avatars totally non-humanoid. It is also possible for residents to upload and implement animations in BVH format (acquired via motion capture or created with software such as Poser) for their avatar. In most cases, the items used to customize characters must be purchased and paid for using the game's in-world currency, "Linden dollars" (abbreviated to "Lindens" or "L$").

The environment's most predominant social groups include the party, or "clubbers" groups. These groups include members of various social clubs within the environment, such as The Edge nightclub and Club Elite. Coming up closely behind the clubbers groups are the gamblers' groups, including such organizations as "Free Slot Addicts". Other popular social groups include sex-themed groups (e.g. Bad Girls, Inc.), and Goth-themed groups (e.g. Dark Erotica).

Second Life does not have a predetermined theme — Linden Lab has allowed freedom of identity for all residents.

Subculture

Second Life is comprised of rich, resident-driven subcultures.

Some of Second Life culture revolves around established "Groups." Groups can be created by any resident as long as there are at least three members and a fee of 100 Linden dollars (two weeks' stipend for a basic account) is paid. Residents are given three days to recruit three members, or their investment is lost. The groups that each resident belongs to are displayed in his or her profile. Each group comprises officers and members, with titles determined by group leadership. The officer or member title may appear superimposed above the name of the resident's avatar. The resident may be a member of up to 15 groups, and may choose which group's title to display at any given time. Group activity is usually centered on a particular interest, so creating groups can give people a common ground for discussion and provide for an easy way to break the ice. Some groups maintain websites to bridge the gap between real life (semi-jokingly referred to as "First Life", or abbreviated to "RL") and Second Life (SL) interests.

Aside from groups, many of the subcultures found in Second Life revolve around events. Events can be anything from games, to virtual dance parties, to educational activities, and more.

Another bridge between First Life and Second Life are the Second Life Forums. These bulletin board-type message boards are accessible online, outside of the virtual world of Second Life. They are a place for residents to talk with Linden Lab employees (referred to as Lindens), as well with each other, on broad and varied topics.

Second Life Blogs are also rapidly popping up across the Internet. Here, residents detail their Second Lives, sometimes more extensively than their First Lives.

Teen Second Life

On August 8th, 2005, Linden Lab opened a new environment in the Second Life metaverse that is designed for and open only to teenagers older than 13 years of age and younger than 18. The goal of this addition was an attempt at grabbing the younger audience, drawing them away from such games as There, as well as keeping teens from taking up residence in the more adult-themed Second Life grid (also known as the Main Grid or MG). Teen Second Life is rated completely PG, and no nudity, swearing, or other 'mature themes' are permitted. However, combat simulators and guns are still created by residents, and on the whole are approved by Lindens.

The TG, Teen Grid, also goes by a vague rule that nothing that you can't do in Real Life, can you do in Second Life, for example you may not smoke or gamble, but in the Main Grid you can. These are rules that will most likely never be changed. As stated before, guns are approved, along with vehicles, but you can get in lots of trouble with a Liaison for shooting someone outside of a combat 'sim' (simulator).

The Teen Grid is being run at a financial loss according to public statements by the senior Liaison on the Teen Grid. This and other statements relating to prior notice of and making certain land sales open to a limited number of residents, selective enforcement of inventory transfers from teen residents formerly on the Main Grid in contravention of the LL/SL TOS, and selectively (or not at all) 'disciplining' teen residents who have ventured back onto the Main Grid while maintaining one or more accounts on the Teen Grid are likely reasons for perceptions of favouritism as well as validating hesitation on the part of teens and their parents in making any real monetary investment in the Teen Grid (via ier fees or private island purchases).

Teen Second Life is currently available ten hours each day, from noon Pacific Standard Time (also known as Linden Standard Time) to 10:00 p.m. PST. Officially, this allows the grid to be monitored at all times, in keeping with Linden Lab's terms of service. However the reality is that there is not always a Liaison on the Teen Grid while it is open - yet another contradiction of is PR/marketing statements. The reason for this is simple, Liaisons monitor both the Main Grid and Teen Grid at times though 'officially' only certain Liaisons are 'allowed' on the Teen Grid. The website for Teen Second Life is located at [1].

Requirements

Second Life is available for PCs (800 MHz Pentium III or better, with at least 256Mb RAM) with Windows XP (SP2) or Windows 2000 (SP4) and Macs (1GHz G4 or better, with at least 512Mb RAM) with Mac OS X 10.3.8 or higher. Second Life requires either an nVidia GeForce 2 or better graphics card or an ATI Radeon 8500 (9000 for Macs) graphics card. Second Life also requires a 20Mb download from their web site, and will consume as much disk space for cache as you allow it. A broadband Internet connection is strongly recommended, although dial-up residents may be able to participate during times of low lag, if they reduce visualization parameters to minimum allowed settings. Current system requirements are posted at the web site.

Pricing

Second Life currently has four pricing tiers (all prices in United States dollars):

  • Basic Access -- first time Basic Accounts are free. Additional Basic Accounts have a one-time fee of $9.95 each.
  • Premium Monthly -- $9.95/month (billed monthly)
  • Premium Quarterly -- $7.50/month (billed quarterly)
  • Premium Annual -- $6.00/month (billed annually)

Basic memberships receive 50 Linden Dollars (the in-game currency) each week they log on; Premium memberships receive 500 every week, regardless of logging in or not, and also have the ability to own a small area of land. Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional charge (known to residents as "tier") ranging from $5 a month up to $195 a month for an entire server.

A credit card is required on all accounts for age verification, and 7-day free trials come with all paid accounts. Second Life requires residents to be at least 18 years of age; access to Teen Second Life is limited to individuals between the ages of 13 - 17 and requires the consent of the individual's parent or legal guardian and a valid credit card.

It should be noted that the pricing plan for SL has varied over time. Previous versions of the game did not feature free first-time Basic Accounts. Early beta players benefited from preferential deals, such as a lifetime subscription and tier-free ownership of a large area of land for a one-off payment of around $300.

Economy

Second Life has its own economy and a currency, Linden dollars. Residents receive a small amount of this currency when they start their account, and a weekly stipend thereafter. The size of the stipend depends on the account type. To earn additional money, residents may sell objects or services through shops within the environment to earn Linden dollars. It is possible to convert Linden dollars to US dollars and vice versa through a real-world brokerage run by Linden Lab. The Second Life economy generates about $US 500,000 worth of economic activity per week.

Issues

A number of difficult issues have arisen within the operation of Second Life, both as an online game and a virtual world. These include:

  • The nature of roles and enjoyment in the economy. Because there are no entry-level jobs, and creating content requires the player to have real-world talent, many players find themselves with very limited amounts of money and the source of enjoyment for such players is not clear. In many cases, the most popular locations in the game are those with "camping chairs" which pay players a small amount just for sitting on them (funded from the money paid by the game to the owners of popular areas).
  • The role of the in-game currency. Linden Lab have been critised for at once marketing the game as a viable business channel for making real money, while at the same time including provisions in the Terms of Service which give Linden Dollars no legal value, so that (for instance) Linden Lab are not required to pay any compensation if they are lost from the database.
  • The effect of changes made by the games' developers upon the in-game economy. Certain changes made or proposed by the developers have had the effect of creating new markets, but also have on occasion destroyed or removed the value of existing ones, or given the market leader at a particular (often arbitrary) time unique advantages that entrench them as a market leader in the future, thus creating a coercive monopoly.
  • Some residents have documented that a particular group of players, usually referred to as the "FIC" (Feted - or Fetid - Inner Core), use their connections with Linden Lab staff to trigger game and policy changes that are beneficial to their own businesses at the expense of others.
  • The balance between users' ability to edit the world and their ability to damage it. Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of users abusing the creation tools to create objects that infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers.
  • The land sales system. Building any permanent in-game object requires the purchase of land and an increased monthly subscription. A number of players deliberately "play" the land market for profit, leaving other players who just want to build resentful of being forced to pay extra money to a middle man. Also, the high monthly charges have resulted in buildings being focused on those which can make money in-game, reducing the variety available.
  • In-game scams. Several in-game scams have been sighted in the game, such as people buying small areas of land in public areas, placing ugly objects on them to deface the view from everyone else's adjoining land or block the view of their structures, and then selling the land for extremely high prices.
  • Suspended and banned accounts. Some players have alleged that enforcement of the TOS and behaviour policies by game staff is arbitrary and selective; in particular, that players who own large amounts of land (and thus pay larger subscriptions) are able to get away with more since there would be a greater financial loss in barring them.

Notable members (listed alphabetically by first name)

  • Ailin and Guntram Graef, entrepreneurs/virtual land speculators, aka Anshe Chung
  • Cory Doctorow, author of many published works, known in Second Life by the same name.
  • Nathan Keir, author of Tringo (the only game so far developed in SL to be marketed for an external platform RL), aka Kermitt Quirk
  • Peter Ludlow, college professor, aka Urizenus Sklar
  • Philip Rosedale, Founder and CEO of Linden Lab, aka Philip Linden.
  • Prokofy Neva - resident provocatuer, philosopher-critic of the SL community itself, LL policy and "policy enforcement" and holder of the dubious honor of being the only resident that LL has banned from its forums but not from its world.
  • Thomas P.M. Barnett, New York Times best selling author and leading American military strategist, known in Second Life by the same name.

Most Second Life residents prefer to keep their first life and second life separate. The result of this anonymity makes it difficult to determine the identity and number of residents who live noteable first lives. In particular, artists in various media, and technically-minded individuals abound within the Second Life environment. The efforts of these anonymous individuals are largely what make Second Life into the intriguing, surreal atmosphere for which it has become known.

References

Many Second Life residents have noted the similarities between Second Life and the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. This is actually a stated goal of Linden Lab - to create a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business and otherwise communicate.

When objects are created or instantiated in the world, or load into a client's memory, they are said to "rez" - a reference to the Disney movie Tron. This also appears in the game's internal scripting language, where the command to create an object is llRezObject().

Linden Lab itself is named after Linden Avenue, the street where the company's first office was opened. Many of the areas of the game are named after streets or alleys around the San Francisco area; the very first area of the game to be set up was (and still is) named Da Boom, a combined reference to DeBoom Alley in San Francisco and to the Big Bang.

Competitors

Forums

Newspapers

  • Metaverse Messenger - a free weekly newspaper about Second Life. It began publication on 9 August 2005. Its publishers are Katt Kongo and Phoenix Psaltery (the names of their "avatars" in Second Life). The Messenger is published as a full color, high resolution PDF file.
  • Second Life Herald - Originally established by Peter Ludlow in The Sims Online in the autumn of 2003, the Second Life Herald publishes daily stories on events in Second Life and other virtual worlds, combining a tabloid sensibility with an exploration of questions of free speech and governance in the expanding metaverse.

Weblogs

Individual Residents' Blogs

Photo Galleries

Business Directories

  • Trade & Services Directory - resident-run directory of stores and services, including real-time shopping on the web, by integration with in-world automated vendors.
  • Avatar Central - Alpha-phase directory and classifieds.
  • The SL Exchange Marketplace - Real-time Second Life® shopping on the web - thousands of items created by hundreds of SL's finest content creators.
  • Second Life® Boutique - Another approach to real-time Second Life® web shopping.
  • SecondServer, e-Commerce site where you can buy all sort of items paying with L$ (in some cases with US$) and have them automatically transferred to your Second Life account.
  • Metaadverse - An advertising company where you can get money for putting ads on your land, or get publicity by paying to put ads on other peoples land.

Other Sites

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