THE STORY OF SECOND LIFE will be strikingly familiar to Americans.
I. Colonization Small settlements of alpha testers arrive in March 2002. Cultural rifts appear during beta, when militaristic immigrants arrive from the strategy game World War II Online.
II. Tax Revolt Linden Lab’s policy of taxing residents for objects they create meets vehement resistance. In July 2003, rebellious residents [see images at left] dress in colonial garb and cover the land with giant tea crates and defiant signs that read born free: taxed to death!
III. Declaration of Independence On the advice of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig – the Thomas Jefferson of SL – Linden Lab abolishes the tax in November ’03 and establishes a new policy stating that residents should retain intellectual property rights over their creations.
IV. Manifest Destiny A great land rush begins in December 2003. Settlers fan out and stake claims to property on the best servers. A class of land barons who sublet real estate to other residents emerges.
V. The Gilded Age Reports in old-world journals (BBC, Fox, BusinessWeek, Wired) describe wonders and wealth beyond measure, spurring a gold rush of entrepreneurs and carpetbaggers. US corporations, including Coca-Cola, MTV, and Microsoft, establish beachheads in SL.
Second Life is an entrepreneur’s dream: no taxes, minimal regulation, no marginal cost of production, subsidies to encourage innovation. No wonder per capita trade volume grew by 32 percent from Q4 2005 to Q1 2006. The 17,000 or so landowners make their living off of rents, but those who own no land can create and sell content for Linden dollars (L$), which are easily convertible into American greenbacks on the LindeX currency exchange.
LOCATION
3,000-plus servers at a data center in San Francisco
POPULATION
518,524, growing by 36 percent a month
PERMANENT RESIDENTS
236,562 (Residents who logged in at least once in the last 60 days)
AVERAGE AGE
3.6 months (Skews young due to high birthrate; oldest living resident: 4.5 years)
AVERAGE TIME SPENT IN-WORLD
40 hours per month
MAJOR ETHNIC GROUPS
Blingtards, Elves, Furries, Geeks, Goreans, Goths, mechas, Steampunks, grad students looking for a grant project
MAJOR CRIME CATEGORIES
Pushgun assaults, retail fraud, cyberterrorism, mafia racketeering
TOTAL AREA
About 83 square miles, growing daily
LANDOWNERS
16,908
AVERAGE PRICE PER SQUARE METER OF LAND, SECONDARY MARKET
L$6
LOCAL CURRENCY
Linden dollar (L$); convertible to $US at secondlife.com/currency
EXCHANGE RATE
L$309 : US$1
ECONOMY
Free market
COMPATIBILITY
Windows XP, windows 2000, and mac 0s X (Linux client in alpha)
TAXATION
Caste-based: Basic accounts pay no monthly fee; Premium accounts pay US$9.95 per month and up, receive L$400 stipend per week
MONTHLY TRANSACTION VOLUME
L$1.93 billion.
Travel Advisory: Second Life is a rapidly expanding and mutating world. Stats true as of August 2006.
Outdated Infrastructure
The interface – an array of menus and buttons – can be confusing, intimidating, and downright unfriendly. For the n00b, simple tasks like walking or opening a door can be as difficult to master as a Bangkok squat toilet.
Traffic and Congestion
Since the entire world is streamed to your computer via broadband, crowded locales will often lag, slowing your frame rate to a slide show-like crawl. Natives accept this as a fact of life, like rain in the Pacific Northwest.
The Tragedy of the Commons
The chief virtue of Second Life is also its most glaring flaw: Everyone is free to create anything they like. The endless sprawl can be ugly and overwhelming – imagine a mashup of the Mall of America, Vegas, and Woodstock.
This cube (see images at left) is the fundamental building block of every object in Second Life. Residents can use these "primitives," or prims, to make anything – a cathedral, a pocket watch, even a sports car. Just tweak their shape and size, apply colors and textures to their surfaces, and program them to perform different actions. The final creation belongs to its maker, who can designate whether it should be copy-protected or freely duplicable. Creative Commons licensing can even be attached.
Thanks to antigravity and matter dislocation systems, personal flight and point-to-point teleportation are the preferred means of transport (Teleporting allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the SL universe. Look for the “Click here” links in our story to take you to the destinations mentioned in the article). But for a broader view of the land, newcomers should consider more leisurely modes of travel, like automated dirigible tours or chartered sailing ships through the country's many waterways and lakes.
If the official welcome and orientation isn't enough, don't log off in despair – head over to the campus of New Citizens Inc. on the Kuula server (Click here to teleport). NCI Volunteers (not associated with Linden Lab) teach noobs how to make sense of the interface and manipulate objects. They even offer classes on building and scripting. Best of all, they don't charge a single Lindenbuck.
credit (none)
In July 2003, rebellious residents dressed in colonial garb and covered the land with giant tea crates and defiant signs that read BORN FREE: TAXED TO DEATH.
credit Jae Lee
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Second Life
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