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tExt tiM GUEst πHOtOG®AπHy A∂Am fUss The virtual world of Second Life made headlines last year with its first property millionaire and a dedicated news feed to Reuters. It is now home to nearly 3.5 million residents, among them a simulated Mia Farrow and a cyber Jay-Z. Another Man talks to the internet pioneer who made a childhood dream into a virtual reality. When I first met Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, the company who make Second Life, in 2005, he seemed to have everything worked out. We met in Linden Lab’s open-plan offices in San Francisco. Around us, 30 or so Linden Lab employees sat at their desks, most focused intently on the screens of their high-end PCs, one intently blow-drying a collection of hand-painted fantasy figurines. The office walls were lined with pictures of far away places – a Japanese temple, a tropical beach – which looked like travel posters, but, on closer inspection, turned out to be charts of a different kind of yearning: pictures of popular destinations inside the world of Second Life. I sat at Rosedale’s desk and he showed me his creation. Second Life is a virtual world: a computer-generated place, created by real people across the world living other lives through the electronic looking glass. By using their keyboard and mouse, they can design and control their other selves: they can walk, talk, embrace, flirt, get married, be divorced, and die, all under a perfectly blue, virtual sky. In Second Life, you can fly, and, with the click of a mouse, you can build, or become, almost anything imaginable. Residents can even earn virtual profits – as journalists, property developers, and even virtual escorts. When Philip and I first met, the dream of virtual worlds – of living an entirely new life – had already permeated the imagination of millions. Across a range of virtual worlds – including Korean-made Lineage II, then the planet’s largest with eight million players – between 25 and 30 million people regularly left their real selves behind to inhabit an imaginary arena. The concept was compelling. In one survey, conducted by economist Edward Castronova, a professor at California State University, one in three residents of EverQuest, one of the first significant online worlds, spent more time in their virtual shoes than at their real jobs, and one in five said that they thought of the domain of their virtual self, not their real apartment, as their home. Millions of people, starved for space to connect and express themselves, were finding it easier to be themselves online. When I first visited Linden Lab, Second Life had 25,000 residents. Of those, around one in ten, Philip told me, spent more than 80 hours a week as their virtual self. Philip was in love with the world he had made, but the one thing he couldn’t understand was why everyone else wasn’t too. “We can’t understand why there aren’t a million people inside Second Life,” he told me. Since then, their world has grown. Just over a year ago, Second Life had 100,000 residents. By last October, the millionth resident entered Second Life. At the time of writing, there are over 3.3 million residents, and 30,000 more are joining every day. Recently, I asked Rosedale what he felt about the success of his world. “I have to resist the urge to say, ‘I told you so!’” he said. “Nobody believed in this idea in 2002. Everybody thought we were nuts. Nobody would invest money in it. But I didn’t care, because in the beginning, I had enough money to fund it myself, and then after that, we found these incredible angel investors, and the rest is history.” When Rosedale gets excited, his eyes become wide open. And when he talks about Second Life, he gets really excited. When we spoke recently, he’d lost none of this enthusiasm, and it was easy to see why. In two years, his world had grown from 25,000 residents and 140 acres, to millions of people inhabiting a virtual world the size of Manhattan. Second Life has been featured in Business Week, the New York Times, and on Good Morning America. Mia Farrow, Jay-Z and Suzanne Vega have all ventured on to his virtual soil. On my own journey through Second Life, I’ve met disabled people liberated by virtual worlds, as well as the vice president of IBM who believes virtual worlds like Second Life are the future of the internet. The world’s first virtual millionaire, a land baron called Anshe Chung (a Chinese-born German named Ailin Griff) held a Second Life press conference to declare her milestone. “There was no way to market Second Life at the beginning, which I found cool in a Zen-like way,” Rosedale told me. But Linden Lab has now clearly solved the marketing problem. Virtual worlds are big business. Most charge a subscription fee to enter, and in 2005, the combined annual revenue from these ventures was estimated at £1.9 billion – a figure predicted to reach £9.8 billion by 2009. But one unique aspect of these worlds is that the residents themselves can share in the bounty. In “On Virtual Economies”, Edward Castronova examined the economy of EverQuest. Players could buy and sell items inside the game, and cash-rich, time-poor players were willing to pay real money to acquire non-existent things. One EQ platinum piece was worth about 1 cent and so he calculated EQ’s percapita GNP was $2,266, making it richer than India, Bulgaria or China, and almost on a par with Russia. By these standards, the world’s 77th largest economy was a sub-continent that only nearly existed. By 2005, a company which specialised in trading virtual goods put the market at £400 million. The recent boom in press attention surrounding Second Life, in which Linden Lab specifically encouraged exchange between real and virtual currencies, was driven mainly by the entry of real-world businesses – American Apparel have set up a virtual store, General Motors bought islands to market virtual cars, and Comic Relief have planned virtual fundraising events. The focus was on the money – after all, consumption is a metaphor our society easily understands. But at root, the Second Life explosion has a different cause. Most virtual worlds restrict what residents’ online selves can do. World of Warcraft, now with 7.5 million subscribers, steers residents along pre-planned quests. The result is a little like a residential theme park, with millions of players in similar costumes, lined up to perform the same tasks. From the beginning, though, participants’ ingenuity surprised even the virtual worlds’ designers. The designers of EverQuest were stunned when they came across their first in-game wedding. In The Sims Online, a virtual world based on the world’s bestselling PC game, players couldn’t build things, but could join things together. They very quickly began to construct their desires – in one case, building a piano from tables and chairs, using cigars for the keys. Second Life was designed specifically by Linden Lab to foster and exploit this kind of creative input. Compared to the amusement park atmosphere of other games, the world they envisioned was more like a public space, with a minimum of rules. Linden Lab would create the physics, design the interface, and invent the basic rules covering ownership, and with luck, a whole virtual society would emerge and develop. They christened their world after what they saw as its unique benefit, “We agonised over the name,” Philip says. “We took the classic marketing perspective, where you talk about features and benefits. So the feature is a distributed computing environment in which you can build anything, the benefit is a second life.” “We’re trying to create an environment in which anything can happen. It’s the residents’ own world,” Philip told me. “All these really incredible things are coming from the community.” Linden Lab built only a small portion of the world, but once residents began to inhabit it, and use it to enact their dreams, the contents blossomed into a strange, dream-like landscape, where giant chessboards, fairy-tale castles and suburban neighbourhoods jostle for space. It is this facility, for people to create what they want, that makes Second Life unique – and this freedom to create is exactly what Philip Rosedale always dreamed of. In fourth grade, Rosedale built his first computer from a kit. In eighth grade, he bought a retractable garage door motor, climbed into his attic, and sawed a hole in the ceiling so that when he pushed a button his bedroom door would slide upwards, Star Trek style. It wasn’t easy, though, to shape the world according to his dreams. “I would imagine some neat thing, and then try and build it in the real world, and it was rather difficult,” he told me. That year, frustrated by his growing ambitions, he began to yearn for a “magical machine”, a supertechnical tool-belt that would let him build whatever he wanted. 188 AnOtherMan
page 191
Even as a child, Philip was drawn to the underlying mechanics of things. “I just inherently had an interest in how things worked. What caused gravity? Why did a rock stay in one piece? As I got into building things, it struck me that it was quite easy to imagine objects, but even with the skills I had learnt, it was fairly difficult to build them. I think when computers came round, and I got into programming, I was struck that computers offered a better environment with which to build things. So I combined that with a knowledge of physics and that led me to question, couldn’t computers just do everything? Couldn’t we simulate everything, with rules that are rich enough to enable us to build what we dream about?” Rosedale decided that what he wanted wasn’t the ability to change the world, but to replace it with something better – a virtual world, with no barrier between thought and action. However, he decided computers weren’t powerful enough. By June 1999, after putting himself through college with funding from his software company, Rosedale had left his position as CEO of RealNetworks (which brought out his video streaming software that would eventually become Real Video) and joined forces with an old colleague, to form Linden Lab. Their vision was a renovation of his childhood dream: a world where people could build whatever they liked, and become whoever they wanted. “It was ‘ploughing the dark’, to quote Richard Powers,” Philip said. “The idea of just creating something from nothing.” Philip believes that the freedom to create and connect with others inside Second Life will improve us. “Second Life is a world which is in many ways identical to the one we live in, but, in significant ways, it is better,” he told me. “Second Life can make us more collaborative. It can make us communicate. It can make us better people.” Computer games generally have a reputation for nerdiness, but the demographics don’t always match up – inside Second Life, you’re just as likely to meet a man as a woman, for example. In other ways virtual worlds are a great medium for shy people, those not at home in their body, like Philip himself. “Eye contact is uncomfortable, physical proximity is threatening,” he says. “Second Life is like a gateway drug, because basically it makes you more willing to communicate.” Philip sees Second Life as a correction to our early, disempowering media – a better place, owned by us all. “Second Life is the statistical average of all our dreams,” he told me. “It represents nothing less than what we collectively want the world to be. When you look at Second Life, what does it look like? It looks like Malibu. And why is that? Because Malibu is the average of all our dreams. It’s what people want. They want the sunset, a powerboat, they want palm trees, they want to be living on the seafront. That’s what we all want.” Philip’s zeal for his virtual world borders on religious. Virtual worlds are an inhabitable form of an age-old human dream: a perfect place, beyond sorrow and loss, where the self can be renewed and set free. Eden, heaven, Oz and now Second Life – we’ve always dreamed of leaving the world behind, only now can we actually inhabit the place we want to leave it for. Virtual worlds afford liberation – a lethal and life-giving combination of experience without risk. By presenting us with a perfect, airbrushed world, where beautiful people live easy lives, they enchant us into denying our own troubled, anxious existence. “You can hold yourself back from the suffering of the world,” Kafka wrote in his diaries. “But that very holding back is perhaps the only suffering it is in your power to avoid.” Of course, we can run from trouble, but trouble always catches up with us. And trouble has followed us into virtual worlds too. Last year, Second Life was repeatedly attacked by self-replicating objects, virtual terror attacks by devices, which copied themselves until they crashed the world. With freedom comes responsibility, and many virtual residents, being infantile in their desire for fulfilment, don’t want to take responsibility. Crime has come to Second Life, as well as extortion, and even child pornography. After one resident recreated the World Trade Center collapse – he and a friend, who had lost a brother in the real terrorist attacks, sat inside as the towers fell – residents gathered to berate him for being insensitive. Then other residents arrived to defend the freedom of their land and the right to do as you please. One resident, tired of the moral struggle, protested on a website. “When does our Third Life come out, so we can escape our Second Life?” “Did I know there would be conflict? I suspected there would be, because we knew that people want to control space,” he says. “But it is my belief that increasing the rate of communication between people, even if sometimes they don’t want it, is very empowering.” In Second Life, you can look as you please. When I met Wilde Cunningham, a group of nine men and women with cerebral palsy who had discovered a new lease of life online, they decided their virtual self would have orange skin, as there were both black and white people in their group. “I think that Second Life will reduce some of society’s conflicts that are based on cultural stereotypes,” Philip says. “I hope that Second Life, depending on how widely it gets used, will be likely to quickly close barriers between cultures, in ways that make us less warlike than we’ve traditionally been. With the terrible case of war, it’s easier to kill people you don’t know. Second Life makes it so easy for you to double-click to go to, say, Japan. But I think that there’s a question, a more meditative one, about what kinds of conflicts will emerge in a perfectly mutable world, and whether they might not be even more psychologically destructive than the ones we have today. They could be, I don’t know. We’ll have to see. Do people make each other cry in Second Life? Oh my god, yes. Very much so.” From the inside, Second Life feels like the whole universe, and Philip Rosedale, king of his world, believes it “very much resembles the future of everything”. For a while, late last year, the UK media seemed to buy into his dream, with newspapers like the Guardian publishing Second Life stories sometimes twice a day. In recent months, though, there has been the beginning of a backlash against Second Life. Having spent close to $20 million, Linden Lab are only now just breaking even, and some have begun to question the numbers of residents. When we spoke, Philip was keen to point out, “There aren’t 1.3 million people using Second Life. But there are 80,000 people a day in the world now.” With global attacks, and a series of database errors, on some days it is hard to log into Second Life at all. One afternoon, I logged on to find that, along with thousands of others, I had spontaneously changed sex. Philip is honest about these problems too. “What’s so funny about Second Life, is with all this attention, it still doesn’t work all that well yet,” he said. “But we know we can improve the technology, things like search, crash rates, all that stuff. As we improve that side of it – you think it’s growing now!” Philip Rosedale is excited by the possibility of new voice technology, which would make business meetings inside Second Life even more productive. (Over a thousand IBM staff are already using Second Life for meetings.) But ultimately, it’s the philosophical implications of his world that seem to excite Philip most. The child who dreamed about a magical tool-belt has grown into a man enchanted by his re-imagined heaven. “The real world we live in now... I’m painting a possible future, but the futurist in me says that the real world will become like a museum. It doesn’t mean that we won’t go to places like New York, it’s just that they will be like amusement parks, where we have carefully preserved memories of what they were like before. So it will be fantastically cool to go to New York, but in the same way that it’s cool to go to the Mayan ruins – the big buildings will still be there, but they’ll be covered in dust, as no one bothers too much with them any more.” Philip’s zeal reminds me of people who dream about space, who neglect the unique importance of the earth, and imagine mankind will soon explore and colonise the stars. Over the last century, we have discovered how inhospitable the universe is. The notion of outer space as full of possibility is a romantic dream. Philip’s notion of virtual space seems to me just as romantic. Nonetheless, he isn’t just another idealist. Virtual worlds are a new kind of place, an extension of the real. They make real the previously spiritual idea – one as old as mankind – that there are other realms beyond the physical. The themes of virtual worlds are the themes of religion: death, rebirth, loss, heaven. And now we can move in to heaven, to discover firsthand the trouble and the consolation hidden there. AnOtherMan 189

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tExt tiM GUEst

πHOtOG®AπHy A∂Am fUss

The virtual world of Second Life made headlines last year with its first property millionaire and a dedicated news feed to Reuters. It is now home to nearly 3.5 million residents, among them a simulated Mia Farrow and a cyber Jay-Z. Another Man talks to the internet pioneer who made a childhood dream into a virtual reality.

When I first met Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, the company who make Second Life, in 2005, he seemed to have everything worked out. We met in Linden Lab’s open-plan offices in San Francisco. Around us, 30 or so Linden Lab employees sat at their desks, most focused intently on the screens of their high-end PCs, one intently blow-drying a collection of hand-painted fantasy figurines. The office walls were lined with pictures of far away places – a Japanese temple, a tropical beach – which looked like travel posters, but, on closer inspection, turned out to be charts of a different kind of yearning: pictures of popular destinations inside the world of Second Life. I sat at Rosedale’s desk and he showed me his creation. Second Life is a virtual world: a computer-generated place, created by real people across the world living other lives through the electronic looking glass. By using their keyboard and mouse, they can design and control their other selves: they can walk, talk, embrace, flirt, get married, be divorced, and die, all under a perfectly blue, virtual sky. In Second Life, you can fly, and, with the click of a mouse, you can build, or become, almost anything imaginable. Residents can even earn virtual profits – as journalists, property developers, and even virtual escorts. When Philip and I first met, the dream of virtual worlds – of living an entirely new life – had already permeated the imagination of millions. Across a range of virtual worlds – including Korean-made Lineage II, then the planet’s largest with eight million players – between 25 and 30 million people regularly left their real selves behind to inhabit an imaginary arena. The concept was compelling. In one survey, conducted by economist Edward Castronova, a professor at California State University, one in three residents of EverQuest, one of the first significant online worlds, spent more time in their virtual shoes than at their real jobs, and one in five said that they thought of the domain of their virtual self, not their real apartment, as their home. Millions of people, starved for space to connect and express themselves, were finding it easier to be themselves online. When I first visited Linden Lab, Second Life had 25,000 residents. Of those, around one in ten, Philip told me, spent more than 80 hours a week as their virtual self. Philip was in love with the world he had made, but the one thing he couldn’t understand was why everyone else wasn’t too. “We can’t understand why there aren’t a million people inside Second Life,” he told me. Since then, their world has grown. Just over a year ago, Second Life had 100,000 residents. By last October, the millionth resident entered Second Life. At the time of writing, there are over 3.3 million residents, and 30,000 more are joining every day. Recently, I asked Rosedale what he felt about the success of his world. “I have to resist the urge to say, ‘I told you so!’” he said. “Nobody believed in this idea in 2002. Everybody thought we were nuts. Nobody would invest money in it. But I didn’t care, because in the beginning, I had enough money to fund it myself, and then after that, we found these incredible angel investors, and the rest is history.” When Rosedale gets excited, his eyes become wide open. And when he talks about Second Life, he gets really excited. When we spoke recently, he’d lost none of this enthusiasm, and it was easy to see why. In two years, his world had grown from 25,000 residents and 140 acres, to millions of people inhabiting a virtual world the size of Manhattan. Second Life has been featured in Business Week, the New York Times, and on Good Morning America. Mia Farrow, Jay-Z and Suzanne Vega have all ventured on to his virtual soil. On my own journey through Second Life, I’ve met disabled people liberated by virtual worlds, as well as the vice president of IBM who believes virtual worlds like Second Life are the future of the internet. The world’s first virtual millionaire, a land baron called Anshe Chung (a Chinese-born German named Ailin Griff) held a Second Life press conference to

declare her milestone. “There was no way to market Second Life at the beginning, which I found cool in a Zen-like way,” Rosedale told me. But Linden Lab has now clearly solved the marketing problem. Virtual worlds are big business. Most charge a subscription fee to enter, and in 2005, the combined annual revenue from these ventures was estimated at £1.9 billion – a figure predicted to reach £9.8 billion by 2009. But one unique aspect of these worlds is that the residents themselves can share in the bounty. In “On Virtual Economies”, Edward Castronova examined the economy of EverQuest. Players could buy and sell items inside the game, and cash-rich, time-poor players were willing to pay real money to acquire non-existent things. One EQ platinum piece was worth about 1 cent and so he calculated EQ’s percapita GNP was $2,266, making it richer than India, Bulgaria or China, and almost on a par with Russia. By these standards, the world’s 77th largest economy was a sub-continent that only nearly existed. By 2005, a company which specialised in trading virtual goods put the market at £400 million. The recent boom in press attention surrounding Second Life, in which Linden Lab specifically encouraged exchange between real and virtual currencies, was driven mainly by the entry of real-world businesses – American Apparel have set up a virtual store, General Motors bought islands to market virtual cars, and Comic Relief have planned virtual fundraising events. The focus was on the money – after all, consumption is a metaphor our society easily understands. But at root, the Second Life explosion has a different cause. Most virtual worlds restrict what residents’ online selves can do. World of Warcraft, now with 7.5 million subscribers, steers residents along pre-planned quests. The result is a little like a residential theme park, with millions of players in similar costumes, lined up to perform the same tasks. From the beginning, though, participants’ ingenuity surprised even the virtual worlds’ designers. The designers of EverQuest were stunned when they came across their first in-game wedding. In The Sims Online, a virtual world based on the world’s bestselling PC game, players couldn’t build things, but could join things together. They very quickly began to construct their desires – in one case, building a piano from tables and chairs, using cigars for the keys. Second Life was designed specifically by Linden Lab to foster and exploit this kind of creative input. Compared to the amusement park atmosphere of other games, the world they envisioned was more like a public space, with a minimum of rules. Linden Lab would create the physics, design the interface, and invent the basic rules covering ownership, and with luck, a whole virtual society would emerge and develop. They christened their world after what they saw as its unique benefit, “We agonised over the name,” Philip says. “We took the classic marketing perspective, where you talk about features and benefits. So the feature is a distributed computing environment in which you can build anything, the benefit is a second life.” “We’re trying to create an environment in which anything can happen. It’s the residents’ own world,” Philip told me. “All these really incredible things are coming from the community.” Linden Lab built only a small portion of the world, but once residents began to inhabit it, and use it to enact their dreams, the contents blossomed into a strange, dream-like landscape, where giant chessboards, fairy-tale castles and suburban neighbourhoods jostle for space. It is this facility, for people to create what they want, that makes Second Life unique – and this freedom to create is exactly what Philip Rosedale always dreamed of. In fourth grade, Rosedale built his first computer from a kit. In eighth grade, he bought a retractable garage door motor, climbed into his attic, and sawed a hole in the ceiling so that when he pushed a button his bedroom door would slide upwards, Star Trek style. It wasn’t easy, though, to shape the world according to his dreams. “I would imagine some neat thing, and then try and build it in the real world, and it was rather difficult,” he told me. That year, frustrated by his growing ambitions, he began to yearn for a “magical machine”, a supertechnical tool-belt that would let him build whatever he wanted.

188 AnOtherMan

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