{"id":6554,"date":"2021-12-06T00:30:25","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T06:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zoha-islands.com\/?p=6554"},"modified":"2021-12-06T00:30:25","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T06:30:25","slug":"6-lessons-on-the-future-of-the-metaverse-from-the-creator-of-second-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/6-lessons-on-the-future-of-the-metaverse-from-the-creator-of-second-life\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Lessons on the Future of the Metaverse From the Creator of Second Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written By Andrew R. Chow<\/span><\/p>\n

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Second Life<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

A screenshot from the virtual reality world “Second Life.” Credit – Courtesy Linden Lab<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this article was published in TIME\u2019s newsletter Into the Metaverse. <\/i>Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

In 2007, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale made a bold proclamation<\/a>: \u201cThe 3D web will rapidly be the dominant thing and everyone will have an avatar.\u201d Considering the success of his creation, it wasn\u2019t an altogether far-fetched idea. Second Life\u2014a virtual world in which participants can explore fantastical landscapes and build their own mansions, forests and spaceships\u2014was reaching the crest of its popularity, with hundreds of thousands of active residents<\/a> and a self-reported $500 million in GDP<\/a>. Second Life appeared on the cover of BusinessWeek<\/i><\/a>; presidential hopeful and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner gave a town hall, with his avatar sporting a blocky suit and red tie. Brands like Reebok and Dell invested in virtual stores, preparing for a new era of sales and marketing. Rolling Stone<\/i> referred to it <\/a>(skeptically) as \u201cthe future of the net;\u201d The Guardian<\/i> proclaimed<\/a>: \u201cToday Second Life, tomorrow the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does any of this sound familiar? It\u2019s hard not to look back on the frenzy around Second Life in the mid-aughts and see parallels to the discourse around the metaverse these days. Rosedale and other Second Life optimists often used identical rhetoric to crypto idioms today: He called Second Life \u201cthe Wild West,\u201d compared its growth to that of the early internet and foresaw the \u201centire physical world as being kind of left behind<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then Second Life stopped growing. It wasn\u2019t uncommon for users to struggle for hours on-boarding into the world, only to find themselves wandering around ghost cities with empty storefronts<\/a>. Reuters\u2014which made a big fuss of opening a bureau in Second Life in 2006\u2014pulled out about two years later; brands abandoned their posts. As we look back on Second Life <\/i>a dozen years after its peak, it\u2019s less a transformative cultural lynchpin than the punchline of a scene<\/a> in The Office<\/i>.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it would also be a gross misrepresentation to view Second Life as a failure. It was responsible for introducing millions of people into virtual spaces for the first time; for fostering incredibly tight-knit communities, especially for outcasts or physically impaired people<\/a>; and for pioneering digital economies. A spokesperson for Second Life\u2019s parent company Linden Lab said that users have spent the equivalent of 500,000 years in Second Life, and that 750,000 monthly active users still inhabit the world: flying around, building and buying stuff, nurturing virtual families.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s plenty that the current builders of the metaverse can learn from Second Life, both for better and worse. To look back\u2014and forward\u2014I talked to Second Life founder Philip Rosedale and Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist who spent two years inside the virtual world at its peak and then wrote the book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Here are some of their main takeaways from the Second Life saga.<\/p>\n

People will stay in virtual worlds, even without an explicit mission.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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