Its funny you know. I spend a lot of my time online in Second Life. I’m constantly getting asked by people out in the Real Life what Second Life actually is, and I still can’t give an answer to that I’m satisfied with. I can’t really convey to people that don’t use it just what it really is.

I’ve started taking the cop out that its like Real Life, bit Virtual and without the rules of physics or chemistry. It is a whole new world, it just happens to be inside your computer.

But that doesn’t really begin to describe it. Thats as vague as saying that New Zealand is somewhere within our solar system.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, I saw an interesting article about Second Life from one of the games writers there. I don’t like the classification of Second Life as a game, but I can understand why people do it.

He had an interesting description of Second Life. Its still not complete and still doesn’t do it justice, but its a good start.

What is this place? It’s Second Life, a virtual reality computer “game”. The word “game” is misleading, however. It’s more than that. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it just feels as if it’s more than a game. A scenario? A simulation?

Second Life is hailed as the new frontier of cyberspace, partly on account of its advanced 3D graphics but mostly because it has been created and is effectively owned by its 500,000 residents, who spend virtual money to build little sovereign enclaves.

These virtual dollars (called Lindens after the San Francisco company Linden Lab which developed Second Life) are worth real money. $L300 is worth $US1. You get an initial account of Lindens after paying the company to enter Second Life. The cheapest entry point is $US10 a month, for which you get $L1000 plus a weekly allowance of $L500. You can buy anything. Houses, shops, cars, hoverpods. You can buy tattoos, clothing. Likewise you can sell anything. You can create T-shirts, for example, open a shop in a mall and sell them. I met a man one day who was sitting alone in a deserted desert-scape building surreal Dali-esque clocks, using 3D imaging, which he hoped to sell.

You can gamble. You can have sex in conventional positions or go full-on kinky. You can buy or sell sex. There’s a lot of gambling and sex in Second Life, in-game, as they call it. Gambling, sex and pornography are the mainstays of the internet and also of real life, or as our flesh-and-blood existence is called by devotees of this kind of thing, meat-space.

As I write this, 9120 people are online participating in it, talking to each other (by typing), walking around (using the keyboard’s arrows), flying, dancing, fornicating, flirting, fighting, getting married, building houses, making money and losing money.

You can do a lot or very little; you can sit in bars and watch streaming movies, clean or unclean. Many will just be sitting on a deckchair right now watching a small part of the world go by. The “world” itself is a vast digital continent — a mainland and hundreds of outlying islands. They are navigated by detailed search functions and maps that find people, places, events, anything.

Never trust a man with wings – Sydney Morning Herald

Sure, it is all those things and you can do all those things, but even that doesn’t really even begin to describe what Second Life is, or is even about. You can do all those things, but its more than just a virtual reality. Its more like a completely new world. Let me explain some in the full post.

“I had an unexpected spiritual experience two days ago about this very thing. I was watching on YouTube the video of the Suzanne Vega performance [in Second Life] she was doing with John Hockenberry on Infinite Mind, the NPR show. I’m watching them and what I’m seeing is her avatar, she’s playing guitar and there’s a live performance going on, I’m hearing it on my headphones because the audio is being streamed, but I’m watching a director cutting between multiple camera angles of a live concert. I udenrstand this is likely assembled in post-production, but there’s no technical reasaon it can’t be done live.”

“So what am I seeing here? There’s a studio audience for this radio broadcast. The studio, though, is a virtual one, not a real one. The camera is panning around, looking at residents, so I’m watching a kind of television broadcast of an event that is simulatneously real and virtual. And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a million-fold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened. Where this is going is in the full interpenetration of the terrestrial reality made up out of atoms, and virtual realities made up out of bits. It’s not a seperate thing, it’s not a cartoon, it’s not a game, it’s a much, much, much, much unimaginably larger reality, and that is powerful.”

Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life – From keynote at SLCC06 – 3pointD.com

Here is a man who has helped shape the history of the PC as we know it. It was Lotus 1-2-3 that forever changed the way spreadsheets were done. Sure, Visicalc spawned the idea, but Lotus 1-2-3 combined with the new PCs is what really shaped and changed things.

Anyway, this is a man who has been involved with Second Life from the beginning and even he is still trying to come to terms with what it really represents now. He calls it as bit a paradigm change for the online community as DARPA opening up and freeing the Internet itself.

And it really is. I don’t know if I can quite convey just how different it is, but the simple truth is, my Internet experience now largely revolves around Second Life with Google Talk thrown in for those that don’t/won’t/can’t access Second Life.

Put it another way… Many years ago, the web was a new toy to me. At the time, IRC was where I lived and breathed my Internet interactions. Then the web started maturing some and progressively IRC was replaced with web forums that were much more like the BBS of old. Now, Second Life has replaced my web. Not entirely of course, just as I still venture to IRC servers now and then.

And heres the kicker. Second Life is so much not a game that I still go and play games to enjoy a gaming experience. Second Life is another reality that extends and compliments the Real Life world we live in, with a Second Life world. The emotions, the interactions, the people we meet and spend time with in Second Life become just as real to us as the people we live with, the people we see every day.

In Second Life I can go shopping with my friends, even though some might be in Australia, or the UK, or the US. We can buy gifts for each other. We can go clubbing and hang out together, or just chill and play games or talk. The emotion is real, the interaction and the friendship is real. The only difference is that its happening inside a world made of bits and bytes, not of atoms and molecules. Only now there are no borders or boundaries. The rules are those we make for ourselves.

And for those of you that question my sanity, remember something. Several of my closest friends in Real Life were met online. Either on the BBS’s before the Internet, or via the Internet itself. I was even engaged to a woman I met online.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Second Life will replace Real Life. Thats not possible. However, the sense of community I have discovered in Second Life, the friendships I have made with people all over the world through Second Life… I have not experienced that in my local neighbourhood around my house since I was a child and every kid in the street played together with every other kid in the street.

It is that open. Its also a lot easier to meet people of like mind. I can search for and then teleport straight to places those people might hang out. :-)

Oh… And the best part of all? Unlike places such as World of Warcraft, the main grid is R18 (Adults Only) and so the maturity of the people you meet is considerably higher than my entire experience within WoW.

This has gotten really long and I’m still struggling to even get anywhere near being able to describe Second Life properly. I think when push comes to shove, the simple truth is there really is no way to accurately describe what Second Life is in much the same way you can’t really call the Internet just a really big network.

So I guess I’ll leave it there and leave you with the video of Susan Vega performing *live* in Second Life. If you didn’t read it the first time, this was a live radio broadcast. But instead of only going on the radio or via ShoutCast, it actually took place inside Second Life as well.

Meh, even something as simple as that I’m struggling to describe now. Too many mediums are beginning to blur together now. Is all starting to get sooo confusing. ;-)

Folks, Virtual Susan Vega.

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