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Second Life

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Second Life
Second Life
Developer(s)Linden Lab
Publisher(s)Linden Lab
Designer(s)Linden Lab
Engineproprietary
Platform(s)Mac OS X, Windows, Linux (alpha)
Release2003
Genre(s)MMO
Mode(s)Multiplayer
File:Seclife-logo1.gif
Second Life Logo

Second Life (SL) is a privately-owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab [1], founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life "world" resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as "the grid" [2]. The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as Residents (login required)[3]) tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its economy.

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 (1 GHz G4 or better, with at least 512MB RAM) with Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher[4]. A Linux alpha client (i686) that has been tested on Debian, Fedora Core 4, Gentoo and Knoppix is currently available for download and testing, and runs with a few limitations[5].

The graphics require either an nVidia GeForce 2 or better graphics card or an ATI Radeon 8500 (9000 for Macs) graphics card. Second Life also requires a 25MB (Windows) or 50MB (Mac OS X) client download, and will consume between 50MB and 1GB of allocated disk space for cache. A broadband Internet connection is required. Dial-up users will find that their connection speed does not allow them to view the world at anything approaching an acceptable framerate. Current system requirements are posted at the web site.

Pricing

Second Life has 3 Membership Plans

  • First Basic - Free
  • Additional Basic - Additional Basic accounts are available for a one time fee of $9.95 per additional account
  • Premium - The only differences between these accounts and First Basic accounts (aside from the fee) are the ability to own land (Basic account holders can rent), a L$400/week Stipend and a L$1000 signup bonus. There are three billing options for Premium accounts:
    • Monthly — $9.95
    • Quarterly — $22.50 ($7.50/month)
    • Annually — $72.00 ($6.00/month)

Basic accounts originally received L$250 starting money and a stipend of L$50 a week. However, basic accounts created after May 29th 2006 no longer receive the L$50/week stipend, [6], and basic accounts created after June 6th 2006 no longer receive starting money without confirmation of credit card or other valid identity information [7]. However, Basic accounts originally required billing information to be presented (even though no charge was made) because of the need to prevent people creating multiple basic accounts in order to benefit from the stipend multiple times; now that this has been removed, Basic accounts can be created with only an e-mail address.

Premium memberships receive a stipend every week regardless of logging in or not, with those registered before Friday July 21st 2006 receiving L$500/week and those registered on or after receiving L$400/week [8]. Premium also have the ability to own land (up to 512m2 without additional fees). Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from $5 a month up to $195 a month for an entire 65536m2 of land or individual island [9] [10].

The pricing plan for Second Life has varied over time. Earlier versions did not feature free first-time Basic Accounts. During the beta period, Residents had the option of a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of $225. After the release of SL 1.2 and the introduction of tiered land payments, this turned into a lifetime tier-free ownership of 4096m2 of land.

Residents

Main article: Resident (Second Life)

Residents are the users of Second Life, and their appearence is their avatar. A person may have multiple accounts, and thus be multiple Residents (a person's multiple accounts can be referred to as alts or multis), and a single Resident may have multiple avatars. All scripts and 3D content are created by Residents using nothing by the client, and even though animations, textures and sounds have to be created outside the client, every experience in Second Life is entirely user-created.

Recent improvements

The group tools received many improvements:

  • Being able to be in up to 25 groups, previous limit was 15
  • Minimum membership count reduced to 2, previous requirement was minimum of 3
  • Improved communication
  • Sending objects to everyone in a group (also possible to implement with LSL)
  • Defining roles and capabilities of roles (roles will be similar to the current Officer and Member title system)

These improvements were implemented on August 23, 2006, with the release of Second Life client version 1.12.0

Open standards

Linden Lab is currently replacing several proprietary technologies used in portions of Second Life with open standards technologies [citation needed]. Open-source technologies such as Apache and Squid are already being used.

Open Standards improvements throughout 2006

The plan is to eventually move everything to open standards and standardize the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, Vice President of Product Development, has stated that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as open source [11].

  1. Throughout 2006 the built-in instant messaging system will be replaced with Jabber[12]
  2. The current proprietary LSL virtual machine will be replaced with Mono [13].
  3. uBrowser, an OpenGL port of the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine, has been used in the client since version 1.10.1 [14] to display the Help documentation, will also be used to display webpages on any of the surfaces of any 3D object the user creates.

Second Life protocol

In May 2006 it was revealed that the Second Life protocol had been reverse-engineered. A wiki was set up to further the effort [15]. An open-source Second Life library is being worked on [16].

The Second Life Protocol Wiki had two tools anonymously donated to them: snowcrash and slice, which quickly furthered the effort. Snowcrash is a tool for decrypting the file comm.dat, which contains a description of the communication protocol. Slice is a tool for dumping the content of Second Life's cache files.

Since Linden Labs has allowed third-party programs to access Second Life[citation needed], a project called libsecondlife [17] has been established. Among functions developed are a map API and the ability to create objects larger than normally allowed.[citation needed]

Economy

Second Life has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden dollars (L$). Residents receive an amount of L$ when they open an account, and a weekly stipend thereafter--the amount depending on the type of account. Additional L$s are acquired by selling objects or services within the environment. Residents may purchase L$ directly or convert between Linden currency and U.S. currency through Linden Lab's currency brokerage, the LindeX Currency Exchange. The ratio of US$ to L$ fluctuates daily as Residents set the buy and sell price of L$ offered on the exchange. Linden Lab has stated that the Second Life economy generated US$3,596,674 in economic activity during the month of September 2005[18].

Issues and criticisms

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

Economy

  • Duality of Linden Lab's stance on the value of the Linden: Linden Lab has been criticized for marketing SL 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, Linden Lab is not required to pay any compensation if L$ is lost from the database.[citation needed]
  • Unusual phenomena in currency market: Services for buying and selling Linden dollars are structured in a similar way to real life currency dealing: amounts are bought and sold through brokers at variable market rates. However, because the actual economy of Second Life does not correspond to a self contained country (a large proportion of the population have no way to earn money other than buying it with money from outside, and those who earn large amounts of money often only do so in order to sell it for money from outside), the currency market exhibits unusual phenomena: consumers and those with less money within SL have no limit to how low they would wish the exchange rate to fall, and sellers and the rich have no limit to how high they would wish it to rise. This creates conflict and complaints whenever currency market trends persist for long periods of time; consumers complain that a rising L$ gives them bad value for their US$, and sellers complain that a falling L$ gives them bad return on their work.[citation needed]
  • Effect of in-world economy changes made by Linden Lab: 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 inadvertently given a market leader at a particular time unique advantages that entrench them as a market leader in the future. The most well known example of this is InfoNet, an in-world newspaper and information delivery service run on a for-profit basis, and formerly (as with many such systems in SL) of limited effectiveness due to a limited range of access points. When the old concept of "telehubs" was removed from the game, Linden Labs replaced them with "InfoHubs" each of which including an InfoNet access point which was hosted for free on system owned land; it also placed InfoNet access points in the Welcome Areas where new users arrive, where no user is normally permitted to leave business-related objects. This had the effect of giving InfoNet an instant and substantial advantage [19].

Land

  • Lack of zoning: With minor exceptions, Linden Lab has not placed any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their real estate. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations, frequently with mixed success. Part of the problem concerns the amount of activity/resources from objects on business property causing lag for neighbors of that area that use it more of a personal manner. E.g. a business property could use objects that take up a lot of loading/rendering time or communicating with the servers, thus causing lag for others that may not be on the same property but experience problems because in the SL environment, everything within a certain distance must be cached. The lack of zoning is also a prime target for graffiti, deliberately obstructive and/or offensive content with the intent of defacing the local view. Such proneness to vandalism has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.
  • Land cost: SL real estate is seen by some as very expensive and very limited in terms of primitive count and parcel size, considering the in-world (and real-world) cost associated with land ownership. For example, an SL "small island" simulator (sim) is 65,536m2, can support 100 users at a time [20], and costs $1250 to setup (mainly to cover the cost of the hardware the simulator exists on, up to 4 simulators can be run on the same server [21]) + $195/month to maintain. [22]
  • Land hosting restrictions: A common criticism of the Second Life land system is that it is a closed network. Currently land/simulators are restricted so that the only way to have land in Second Life is to rent and buy server space/land from Linden Labs. Many users wish for Linden Labs to open up the "grid" and allow privately owned servers to run the simulator programs, and be accessible from the grid. Due to the way the Second Life world is currently designed, with a central secure asset server controlling all of the objects in Second Life, and the way the simulators and the asset server interact, hosting your own simulator is impossible unless a major redesign of the "grid" is implemented.
  • Land sales system: Building any permanent, in-world object usually requires the rental or purchase of land (from Linden Lab or another Resident), the former requiring an increased monthly subscription as more land is required (objects may be built in 'public sandboxes' and saved in inventory). A number of people speculate on the land market for profit, usually forcing Residents to purchase large portions of land from the speculators instead of directly from Linden Labs, at a marked up price. However Linden Labs does have a "First Land" program, which reserves small blocks of land for first time land buyers, in an attempt to decrease the cost of land for new premium accounts. Also, the high monthly charges related with "island" simulator ownership have resulted in many privately owned simulators being focused on content that can return a profit (more than $195 a month), reducing the variety available.[citation needed]
  • Shared hosting limits. A single "region" of Second Life can support only a limited number of avatars (40 for a mainland region - the figure 100 quoted above applies only to a private island), meaning that a single popular area within a region can make it impossible for others to enter other areas of the same region.

Adult content

Second Life regions are rated either "PG" or "Mature." There have been complaints that sims (areas) marked in SL as "mature" (permitting mature content such as swearing, nudity, etc), are overwhelmed with sex-based "jobs" and entertainment [23], to a greater degree than other "free-form" MMORPGs. The majority of the over 3000 regions on Second Life's grid are marked "Mature" rather than PG. Gambling is allowed in both PG and Mature regions. [24] [25]

Other

  • Balance between users' ability to edit the world and their ability to damage or disrupt it: Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of Residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers.
  • Favoritism: Some have complained that a group of Residents referred to as the "FIC" (Feted Inner Core - a term coined by Second Life Resident Prokofy Neva) use their connections with Linden Lab staff to trigger policy changes that are beneficial to themselves at the expense of others and that these policies by Linden Lab staff are arbitrary and selective. In addition, users who own large amounts of land (and thus pay larger subscriptions) are generally seen to have greater influence on Linden Lab due to the financial loss in removing them.[26]
  • Linden Lab lawsuit: Linden Lab is currently being sued by attorney Marc Bragg [27], claiming Linden Lab defrauded him of $8,000 worth of virtual property.
  • Mac version is just a port of the PC version: The Mac version is just a conversion of the PC version, and thus delivers inferior results because it is not tailored to the platform it is running on. Some people have created petitions, but none are big enough to make Linden Labs make a Mac version to take full use of the resources. While some of the Alpha Builds of the Universal client are available and make better use of the Mac's system, some users have still noticed a difference.[citation needed]



Real-World businesses and organisations that have operated inside Second Life

This list is not intended to include businesses, organisations, originating solely from Second Life, such as ANSHECHUNG Studios, Ltd., nor is it intended to include media networks created in a similar manner For information on notable persons related to and operating in Second Life, see Resident (Second Life)

[30].

Second Life as the Metaverse

Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and the Cyberpunk literary movement . The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the metaverse described in the novel Snow Crash, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. Although it has notable competitors, among them Active Worlds, considered by many to be the founding company of the 3D internet concept in 1997, There and newcomers such as Entropia Universe and the Dotsoul Cyberpark, which is rapidly gaining recognition around the cybersphere as a metaverse aspirant with an emphasis on noncommercial culture.

External websites such as SL Census allow Residents to locate each other from outside of the virtual world, and SLURL allows external links through the Second Life World Map to locations in-world.

Trivia

  • When objects are created (or instantiated) in-world and then transferred to the user's computer, they are said to "rez"--a reference to the Disney movie Tron. This also appears in the environment's internal scripting language, where the command to create an object is llRezObject().[36]
  • Linden Lab itself is named after Linden Avenue, the street where the company's first office was opened. Many of the simulators of SL are named after streets or alleys around the San Francisco area; the very first sim of the world 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.
  • The list of available avatar family names includes a large number of references to Doctor Who, including the names of both characters and actors from the British TV series.
  • The list of available avatar family names also includes many of the most famous 20th century economists.

More trivia can be found at Second Life History Wiki

Competitors

Screenshots

News coverage

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