So what did these books get right, and what did they get horrendously wrong? Some of their predictions for the future of Second Life are reasonable, and some make “My Virtual Life” look restrained. Glossy textbooks of 300 to 400 pages each, together they can take a reader from learning the basic concepts of a digital world to programming their own tip jars for the Second Life business they might decide to open.
#Second life lindens series
The series closed with 2009’s The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. It received a second edition in 2008, the year that also saw the release of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse, Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life, and Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting. Of the four “organizations who earn substantial amounts of money blogging about Second Life,” one URL now sells steroids, one is now home to an IT company, and one stopped publishing in 2013 (but briefly resurfaced in 2016 to write a bizarre interview with the obnoxious neo-Nazi troll weev).Ī general purpose book called Second Life: The Official Guide came first, in 2006.
There are predictions of long term government and media presence mixed with basic etiquette tips mixed with a look at Second Life’s sex work community. The books are time capsules of the hopes of dozens of SL users and Linden staff interviewed for them, and looking back on them today reveals a medley of the mundane, overoptimistic, and insane. But between 20, as the Second Life hype was building the steam it would need to dramatically barrel over a cliff, five guides to Second Life were published by Wiley with the official cooperation of SL developer Linden Lab. Reports of Second Life’s death were as exaggerated as claims that it would revolutionize technology, as it continues to chug along today for the benefit of a hardcore fanbase. In 2009, Forbes declared that the Second Life hype had “fizzled.” And by 2011, Slate and TechRadar were running “Hey, whatever happened to Second Life?” retrospectives as though it was a relic of antiquity. There was confusion and uncertainty over what SL could and should be used for, so an assumption grew that it could do anything.īut by 2007, as Second Life was appearing in CSI and The Office, Wired was turning bearish on a service they had previously proselytized. Today, the average child learns about these concepts (and their limitations) through games like Minecraft or Roblox, but SL looked like a mature, broad, and high profile step-up from EverQuest, which targeted hardcore gamers, and the cartoonish simplicity of Habbo Hotel, which was aimed at teens. The idea of socialising in an expansive digital world, and using built-in scripting languages and modeling tools to fill that world with your own content, was still new to many people. To put that hype in context, Second Life’s 2003 launch preceded World of Warcraft’s by 17 months and came when only 54.7 percent of American homes had an internet connection. It’s a perfect summation of the hype that was impossible for Second Life to live up to and that “My Virtual Life” was far from alone in creating. It also highlights the money being made by users and the corporations rushing to invest.
#Second life lindens software
It also compares Second Life to World of Warcraft, otherwise apparently known as the business world’s “new golf.” In the most dated prediction, we’re told that virtual worlds like Second Life could become “far more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today’s World Wide Web” and could even challenge Windows as a framework for presenting software to users. In 2006, Bloomberg published a deep dive into the then three-year-old Second Life called “My Virtual Life.” Written as though a traveller had just stumbled into a bizarre foreign city, the article describes the “seriously weird” Second Life as the “unholy offspring” of The Matrix, MySpace, and eBay.
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