BOOKS

When Avatars Come Out to Play

Review by Rick Docksai

The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au. HarperCollins, www.harpercollins.com. 2008. 274 pages. $25.95.

As a young boy, Philip Rosedale wanted to change the world. In 2003, he would do just that by launching Second Life, recounts tech journalist Wagner James Au. In The Making of Second Life, Au takes readers on a tour of the online world that he calls “the best candidate to be a key feature in the Internet’s next generation.”

“Even if you have no home inside it now, odds are that you eventually will (or at the very least, find yourself becoming an occasional visitor),” Au writes.

Au spent three years as avatar Hamlet Linden, an “embedded journalist” who traversed Second Life’s cities, wastelands, and continents to report daily on its most newsworthy developments.

Second Life is an online world whose whole interior is formed and developed by registered users, or “Residents.” Residents interact as three-dimensional online personas, or avatars, and buy or sell a wide range of goods using Linden dollars. Second Life sets virtually no limits on what avatars look like, what they can build their surroundings into, or what kinds of commerce they can conduct.

“Everything within Second Life is given form and substance by its Residents,” Au writes.

He argues that, while many online worlds came before Second Life—Everquest, World of Warcraft, Active Worlds, and There, among others—the freedom of Second Life Residents to create and recreate their domain makes Second Life unique.

“In most online worlds, reality is part and parcel a conception of the company that created it,” he writes, arguing that it makes Second Life far more likely to impact real life than other online worlds. He recalls numerous examples from his travels of seeing it do so. Real-world adults dated and married after meeting each other in Second Life, and real-world relationships have ended because one partner was having affairs with other avatars in Second Life.

Au shares success stories of individuals who earned real-world income by selling services in Second Life: Jason Foo, an unemployed Iraq war veteran, earned $450 per week from running a Second Life casino. Alyssa LaRoche, a retired consultant, created the Second Life fashion line Preen, generating as much as $4,000 a month by selling clothes and accessories to avatars.

Real-world businesses, nonprofit groups, and politicians also have sought greater publicity by holding events as avatars in Second Life. These include the American Cancer Society, which has hosted virtual fund-raisers, and onetime U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner, who became an avatar in September 2006 to speak to other avatars about his campaign.

That someone might use Second Life for professional reasons hardly surprises Au at all: “Any real-world business or enterprise that can be enhanced or leveraged by a 3-D world has a future at stake here,” he writes.

But how big a stake?

Au’s descriptions and anecdotes, while amusing and intriguing, leave questions about Second Life’s ultimate importance largely unanswered. The American Cancer Society was highly successful long before Second Life was born. And Warner’s avatar wielded little real-world electoral power: Warner is today a forgotten also-ran in the 2008 presidential race.

And if Second Life’s user freedom is a strong selling point, Au’s own numbers do not suggest it. He notes that, in mid-2007, Second Life had 500,000 active subscribers. He also notes that World of Warcraft had at that time around 9 million.

Even the buzz surrounding Second Life is relatively modest. Steve Rubel, an Edelman Digital marketing executive who publishes technology blog Micro Persuasion, noted that Technorati, a search engine that searches only blogs, recorded 12 times more blogosphere mentions of YouTube than of Second Life.

“Second Life is not growing nearly as fast as many perceive or as rapidly as other communities that encourage participation,” Rubel notes.

Au demonstrates in The Making of Second Life that Second Life is a remarkable test case in the capacities of virtual technology. He offers useful resources and tips for businesses hoping to establish a presence in Second Life, including a helpful glossary. But is he right in predicting that Second Life will become the Internet’s Next Big Thing? That remains for readers, and avatars, to find out.