{"id":5563,"date":"2019-12-02T07:18:28","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T13:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zoha-islands.com\/?p=5563"},"modified":"2019-12-02T07:18:28","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T13:18:28","slug":"the-second-life-that-wasnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/the-second-life-that-wasnt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Second Life That Wasn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

The official guides for Linden Lab’s online world offer a time capsule of optimism and delusion. <\/span><\/p>\n

With the start of the end of the 2019 year I thought this would be a good read on where we’ve been and where we are headed in our Second Life. Thanks to Mark Hill for this Article.<\/span><\/h2>\n
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In 2006, Bloomberg <\/em>published a deep dive into the then three-year-old Second Life <\/em>called \u201cMy Virtual Life<\/a>.\u201d Written as though a traveler had just stumbled into a bizarre foreign city, the article describes the \u201cseriously weird\u201d Second Life<\/em> as the \u201cunholy offspring\u201d of The Matrix, <\/em>MySpace, and eBay. It also compares Second Life <\/em>to World of Warcraft, <\/em>otherwise apparently known as the business world\u2019s \u201cnew golf.\u201d In the most dated prediction, we\u2019re told that virtual worlds like Second Life <\/em>could become \u201cfar more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today\u2019s World Wide Web\u201d and could even challenge Windows as a framework for presenting software to users. It also highlights the money being made by users and the corporations rushing to invest. It\u2019s a perfect summation of the hype that was impossible for Second Life <\/em>to live up to and that \u201cMy Virtual Life\u201d was far from alone in creating.<\/p>\n

To put that hype in context, Second Life\u2019s <\/em>2003 launch preceded World of Warcraft\u2019s <\/em>by 17 months and came when only 54.7 percent of American homes had an internet connection<\/a>. The idea of socializing 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. Today, the average child learns about these concepts (and their limitations) through games like Minecraft <\/em>or Roblox, <\/em>but SL <\/em>looked like a mature, broad, and high profile step-up from EverQuest, <\/em>which targeted hardcore gamers, and the cartoonish simplicity of Habbo Hotel, <\/em>which was aimed at teens. There was confusion and uncertainty over what SL <\/em>could and should be used for, so an assumption grew that it could do anything.<\/p>\n

But by 2007, as Second Life <\/em>was appearing in CSI<\/em><\/a> and The Office,<\/em><\/a> Wired <\/em>was turning<\/a> bearish<\/a> on a service they had previously proselytized.<\/a> In 2009, Forbes<\/em> declared that the Second Life<\/em> hype had \u201cfizzled.\u201d<\/a> And by 2011, Slate<\/em><\/a> and TechRadar<\/em><\/a> were running \u201cHey, whatever happened to Second Life<\/em>?\u201d retrospectives as though it was a relic of antiquity. Reports of Second Life\u2019s <\/em>death were as exaggerated as claims that it would revolutionize technology, as it continues to chug along today for the benefit of a hardcore fan base. But between 2006 and 2009, as the Second Life <\/em>hype was building the steam it would need to dramatically barrel over a cliff, five guides to Second Life <\/em>were published by Wiley with the official cooperation of SL <\/em>developer Linden Lab.<\/p>\n

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The books are time capsules of the hopes of dozens of SL <\/em>users and Linden staff interviewed for them, and looking back on them today reveals a medley of the mundane, overoptimistic, and insane. There are predictions of long term government and media presence mixed with basic etiquette tips mixed with a look at Second Life\u2019s <\/em>sex work community. Of the four \u201corganizations who earn substantial amounts of money blogging about Second Life,<\/em>\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

A general purpose book called Second Life: The Official Guide <\/em>came first, in 2006. It received a second edition in 2008, the year that also saw the release of The Entrepreneur\u2019s Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse, Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life, <\/em>and Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting. <\/em>The series closed with 2009\u2019s The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. <\/em>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 <\/em>business they might decide to open. Some of their predictions for the future of Second Life <\/em>are reasonable, and some make \u201cMy Virtual Life\u201d look restrained. So what did these books get right, and what did they get horrendously wrong?<\/p>\n

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While some of the users and locations they mention are still active, they\u2019re mostly a collection of dead and dormant links that serve as a testament to the same raw speed of the internet that the books warn you about trying to keep up with. The web presences of Amethyst Rosencrans and Nyteshade Vesperia, quoted for their expertise in running Second Life <\/em>sex businesses, have both petered out, although not before Vesperia was able to debut 2015\u2019s X5 Cock<\/a> with \u201cincredibly realistic mesh design\u201d and \u201cunparalleled BDSM owner control.\u201d Genvieve Hutchence, who in The Entrepreneur\u2019s Guide<\/em> gives advice on Second Life <\/em>escort work, <\/em>has only a Facebook page with nothing but four 2008 photos from SL<\/em> to her digital name today. Professor Sadovnycha, owner of the BDSM education Princess Reform School is also MIA, as are Second Life <\/em>fashion blogger Celebrity Trollop, owner of \u201cone of the virtual world\u2019s oldest and most popular clubs\u201d Jenna Fairplay, Second Life <\/em>real estate moguls The Otherland Group, \u201cfounder and CEO of \u2026 one of the largest content creation companies in SL<\/em>\u201d Aimee Weber, and many, many more.<\/p>\n

There are scattered exceptions to the exodus, like Nexeus Fatale. Introduced in The Entrepreneur\u2019s Guide <\/em>as \u201cone of the leading DJs in Second Life<\/em>,\u201d Nexeus worked the SL<\/em> launch parties for Popular Science <\/em>and The L Word, <\/em>among other high profile gigs. In the book, he lauds the ease of interacting with his audience and the variety of music that residents appreciate, while advising aspiring DJs on how to avoid scams and copyright pitfalls. While his DJing days ended in 2012 he\u2019s still an SL <\/em>regular, telling me, \u201cWhat keeps me active is that I get to explore. I try new things out, I do absolutely no-work-what-so-ever. But I appreciate it more because I\u2019m a part of a bunch of communities. And that\u2019s what I think Second Life<\/em> has really begun to turn into, kind of a virtual Reddit.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while it\u2019s easy to flip through these books and conclude that the world has long since moved on, but Second Life <\/em>didn\u2019t die so much as it quietly powered through the insane expectations that were created for it. In 2019 the Second Life <\/em>community forums saw a spirited discussion on \u201cTipping Guidelines for Gentlemen Clubs\u201d<\/a> (in another throwback, one employee of a Second Life <\/em>club comments, \u201cMost of the women I work with, myself included are professional phone sex operators\u201d). In the game\u2019s subreddit<\/a> just shy of 6,000 users share screenshots, discuss their favorite in-world creations, offer shopping deals with slick videos, and troubleshoot technical problems. Complaints that Second Life <\/em>is dead and requests for tips on getting into SL <\/em>can be found on the same page.<\/p>\n

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