Returning to Second Life

A decade ago, dozens of media outlets and technologists discovered “The Next Internet.” An original cyberspace science fiction fantasy had finally come to fruition as the world gained a second digitized reality. In a short period of time, countries established embassies, media companies opened bureaus, one of Earth’s biggest rock bands played a concert (sort of), political campaigns took to its streets, and people became real-world millionaires plying their skills in this new arena.

That much hyped “Next Internet?” You may remember it better by its official name—Second Life. For many modern Internet users, the platform has likely faded far, far from memory. But there’s no denying the cultural impact Second Life had during the brief height of its popularity.

Explaining Second Life today as a MMORG or a social media platform undersells things for the unfamiliar; Second Life became an entirely alternative online world for its users. And it wasn’t just the likes of Reuters and U2 lookalikes and Sweden embracing this platform. Second Life boasted 1.1 million active users at its peak roughly a decade ago. Even cultural behemoth Facebook only boasted 20 million at the time.

But unlike Facebook’s continuing rise, the grand vision of some Snow Crash-like immersive virtual metaverse as a de facto second layer for the human experience no longer exists. Actually, it never really did. I wrote extensively about Second Life in its early years and found it to be more successful (and less ambitious) than its critics and commentators advertised. And recently, I returned to it after more than five years away with a question in mind: if Second Life never became the metaverse of futurists’ dreams, what has it evolved into?

Believe it or not, the platform today enjoys a healthy community. Not only does it still exist, but if you ask Second Life’s creators, the platform may be thriving. Ask its users, on the other hand, and the picture gets a bit hazier.

Commerce is king

Let’s start with the numbers. Second Life’s community today is—by one metric, at least—only a little smaller than it was in its heyday. According to Peter Gray, Second Life developer and Linden Lab’s senior director of global communications, Second Life’s monthly active user count today totals “between 800,000 and 900,000.”

Gray also says the platform remains a healthy, profitable business. That profit largely comes from virtual goods transactions within the Second Life community, and these virtual goods are at the heart of what Second Life has become.

Commerce was always part of Second Life’s original pitch (money is obviously integral to our society, so any metaverse layered onto that society would have to prominently involve money, too). But this has taken a wide variety of forms today. For example, I spoke with Second Life user Daemon Blackflag, who creates virtual pet games on the platform. In his work, you get a glimpse of the promise of Second Life as a surreal, alternate reality. “Users actually breed the creatures together to try and make the rarest variants of them,” he explained. “They then trade the offspring around so that others can continue those ‘genetic lines’ as well.” He says the rarest virtual pets still sell for thousands of US dollars.

Linden Lab’s VP of product, Bjorn Laurin, shared another curious anecdote. He brought up those unboxing videos you see on YouTube. “My kids are watching them all the time; adults are watching them. Unbox the iPhone, unbox that,” he says. “Recently we’ve noticed that’s become huge in Second Life. People are buying things in the store and creating their own unboxing videos.”

Second Life has always appealed to users because of unique sci-fi oddities like that, and this organic community building still occurs. But there have been some growing challenges in 2017 that didn’t generate much concern back in 2007.

For example, creation of content has become much more competitive, because the addition of new technologies like mesh support have raised the production values, so to speak. A community member who goes by the name Myf expounded on this. “Once upon a time, it wasn’t too difficult to be able to build say, a house, and have it look nearly as good as one you might buy in a store,” Myf tells Ars.

But now the tools are more sophisticated, and hobbyists and tinkerers have given way to more experienced professionals. “You can still do things the old way, but because the results are very obviously ‘old’ and less impressive than the current ways, you’re disincentivized from doing so.”

There are frustrations on the shopping end, too. User Iki Akari is a fashion designer. Like other Second Life merchants I talked with, she said things have changed a lot over the past 10 years as far as commerce goes. Previously, most shopping took place in in-game stores, some of which were discovered through good old-fashioned foot traffic.

Curiously, something like the Amazonification of retail seems to have happened to Second Life, too. More and more, commerce is shifting to a Web-based transaction marketplace hosted by Linden Lab and away from the virtual brick and mortar storefronts. The exceptions are big shopping events, which are in some sense Second Life analogues to Amazon Prime day, Black Friday, trade fairs, or seasonal Steam sales.

“As a designer I also preferred the old method of selling primarily from my main store rather than having deadlines and hosting new items at events,” says Iki Akari. “Mainly because a lot of things can go wrong and events tend to lag customers heavily. From a Marketing standpoint, it’s also hard for new stores to spread brand awareness when they are being immediately compared to pre-established brands in an event-type environment.”

This is part of a larger issue that today’s Second Life citizens are struggling with just like their real-world counterparts: discovery and navigation have become hard in 2017.

Iki Akari says that 10 years ago, “People would walk around and see what Second Life had to offer. Shopping was done primarily in ‘main stores,’ and the ability to meet other people exploring was a lot more easy than it is now.” Now, she says people buy their own land and stay in their own territory. It has become a more isolated experience.

Wandering has whittled away in recent years, leaving many Second Life users feeling adrift.

Credit: Flickr user: UccelloSL

Exhausting exploration

Commerce may help pay modern-day bills, but it was only a small part of what captured people’s imaginations about Second Life years ago. The sensation of exploration—of wandering a virtual world and socializing with entirely new personas—was always the main draw. But as with the shopping experience, discovery and exploration are things some users are not all happy with right now.

As a regular user a decade ago, I remember wandering aimlessly across Second Life’s endless landscape, experiencing choppy framerates as new wonders popped up at the edge of the draw distance. What would I find? A spa with a random assortment of socializing strangers? A ballroom dancing competition? A political rally? A medieval forest full of in-character, roleplaying wizards?

I found that this is not exactly how it goes down in Second Life anymore. As noted, the random foot traffic is less frequent than it used to be. The community now collects either in siloed private areas or in big public places specifically for calendar events.

There’s also a feature called the Destination Guide, which an editor at Linden Lab populates daily with the most interesting places to visit. Most of these have a couple of dozen people in them. But most of the action really happens around events or on private property. You sometimes have to go outside of Second Life to community blogs to get invited to the cool parties, it seems.

Overall it feels different to me than it used to, and Iki Akari confirmed this feeling with her own experience. “There’s a lot of beautiful places to explore, however the ways to find these areas aren’t as openly advertised as they should be,” she says. “Most areas are found through word of mouth, and while there is a Destination Guide, it’s not widely used.”

I asked Linden Lab’s Gray about this, and he was of course quick to say discovery and community are as strong as ever. “I think many people, myself included, still feel a great deal of that sort of sense of adventure, discovery, and exploration prompted by Second Life,” he said, though he admitted today’s means have changed. “It maybe is not sort of traversing mainland or very slowly walking… Second Life now also has traditions. There are events that happen annually—big shopping events, big fundraisers, big parties, and so those also kind of come back, and with those, I think a lot of times… you’d see some familiar names that you may not have seen in years.”

I understand what users are missing when they talk about discovery and the old days, but I also don’t feel like what Second Life has become is any less interesting. It’s just more evidence that Second Life has evolved into something more specific and personalized. Becoming some completely alternate universe that’s just as serendipitous as our own isn’t the focus anymore; this platform is no longer actually a “second life” as originally pictured—at least, not exactly.

Why it hasn’t become our second life

While its niche communities are worthy of exploration, what about that dream of Second Life as the second, virtual layer to our existence? What about the corporate offices, the embassies, the marketing activations, and the concerts?

Second Life user Karsten Rutledge has every reason to drink the Kool-Aid on the social vision behind Second Life—he met his wife there back in 2007. But even as he referenced the framing of Second Life as “The New Internet” and the comparisons with the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, he was critical of the hype. “It was all nonsense, and most of us saw it as nonsense at the time,” he said.

Sex in Second Life

Sex has always been part of the Second Life story, and it’s often one of the first things people think of when Second Life comes up. Sex is still there. Several of the featured areas in the Discovery Guide are age-gated, adult-oriented content.

Go to one of the dedicated adult areas, and you’ll see the walls plastered with clickable posters of nude women that lead to purchases of sex-related assets. In one case, I discovered what was styled as a virtual gay bar, but it had gone full orgy. The audio from a gay porn film was broadcasted to the whole room, and I saw a number of naked avatars utilizing various community-created animations to recreate sexual acts.

Even wandering the general areas, you will occasionally see people in dominatrix or furry costumes. But just as I was years ago, I’m convinced that framing it primarily as a cybersex emporium isn’t accurate. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the same or even a smaller segment of Second Life is dedicated to sex-related content when compared to what you’d find in the Internet at large.

Second Life is, above all else, a gathering place for people with special interests. In some cases, that means Star Trek role-playing nights. In others, it means very specific fetish dungeons. Like the Internet, Second Life simply stands as an expression of the diversity of human experience.

Rutledge went on to say that he felt Linden Lab had marketed the game as “something it wasn’t and could never be.” But as the frenzy died down, most of the corporate presences in Second Life were abandoned. The media bureaus closed. Now, the core audience that was always there defines Second Life, not the media narrative. “Second Life doesn’t show up in mainstream news much anymore, and I think that’s a good thing,” Karsten added. “It was always there for the wrong reason before.”

Gray didn’t dispute Karsten’s framing of Second Life’s evolution, though he offered a few examples of companies still using Second Life as a virtual meeting place. He and his co-worker Laurin agreed that, like the users, they’re happy with the current focus.

Gray even ventured a theory for why the original narrative didn’t pan out. “I think it’s worth bearing in mind that a lot of those experiments were done before people were very familiar with social media,” he said. “In short, if people were to approach creating virtual experiences for those types of things now, whether it be a marketing outreach or that kind of thing, I think they might take a different approach to do it.”

Laurin added that when Second Life launched, “We used the Palm Treo, we used Nokia phones, there was no Instagram, there was no Facebook.”

They’re right. Social media has come to provide that meta-layer for physical reality and society—the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, et al have collectively made real one of the original dreams behind Second Life. But today’s social media landscape doesn’t offer the immersion or the explorable spaces modeled after real environments, at least not yet. Of course, Facebook acquired Oculus VR in 2014 believing there was still a place for that vision in the social platforms we’re using today. So perhaps not surprisingly, Linden Lab today has been making its own move into virtual reality.

The dream of the ’90s is alive in VR

For Second Life, the biggest change still to come may not have anything directly to do with the platform. Second Life has a new sibling from Linden Lab—a project called Sansar, which went into open beta at the end of July. It’s a VR platform that, like Second Life, allows users to create assets and environments for distribution.

It is not, however, a seamless virtual world in the same way that Second Life can be; Sansar isn’t meant for that. But when I talked to members of the Second Life community, many of them understandably expressed concern that Sansar will eclipse Second Life within Linden Lab’s priorities in the coming months or years.

“Sansar’s a large and ambitious project, no doubt using up a lot of resources at Linden Lab,” says Myf. “There is always a danger with projects of this scope that if and when they fail, they can take down their owners with them. I do worry that Sansar’s failure could kill Second Life.”

Rutledge also expressed concern that Sansar is taking resources away from Second Life, but Laurin from Linden Lab suggested such user concerns couldn’t be further from the truth. “My team has actually been growing on the product side in Second Life,” he says. Still, Gray did caveat his comments on Second Life’s profitability by saying Linden Lab is “making significant investment as we develop Sansar.”

Laurin insists Sansar is not intended as an eventual replacement for Second Life. “I’m actually in charge of the roadmaps here and I have no plans,” he said. “As long as I can plan, I’m planning years ahead for anything to happen; it’s going to be two platforms—two great platforms.”