![]() ![]() “I think the reason why tens of millions of people tried it out was the promise of the ability to be creative and expressive in a realistic, lifelike domain,” Rosedale says. Rosedale says this unbounded potential for creation was a key reason for Second Life’s success. “A lot of people check these things out because they hear about them, but then sort of discover something that they enjoy doing or a community they enjoy interacting with that they didn’t know about ahead of time.” “It’s often not that going into a virtual world is sort of fulfilling a pre-existing need,” Boellstorff says. People will stay in virtual worlds, even without an explicit mission.īut Boellstorff and Rosedale say that this potential flaw is actually an essential reason that many people stuck around in Second Life. Here are some of their main takeaways from the Second Life saga. ![]() To look back-and forward-I 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. So there’s plenty that the current builders of the metaverse can learn from Second Life, both for better and worse. A spokesperson for Second Life’s 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. 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 and for pioneering digital economies. On the other hand, it would also be a gross misrepresentation to view Second Life as a failure. As we look back on Second Life a dozen years after its peak, it’s less a transformative cultural lynchpin than the punchline of a scene in The Office. Reuters-which made a big fuss of opening a bureau in Second Life in 2006-pulled out about two years later brands abandoned their posts. It wasn’t uncommon for users to struggle for hours on-boarding into the world, only to find themselves wandering around ghost cities with empty storefronts. Rosedale and other Second Life optimists often used identical rhetoric to crypto idioms today: He called Second Life “the Wild West,” compared its growth to that of the early internet and foresaw the “entire physical world as being kind of left behind.”Īnd then Second Life stopped growing. Rolling Stone referred to it (skeptically) as “the future of the net ” The Guardian proclaimed: “Today Second Life, tomorrow the world.”ĭoes any of this sound familiar? It’s 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. Brands like Reebok and Dell invested in virtual stores, preparing for a new era of sales and marketing. ![]() Mark Warner gave a town hall, with his avatar sporting a blocky suit and red tie. Second Life appeared on the cover of BusinessWeek presidential hopeful and Virginia Gov. ![]() Second Life-a virtual world in which participants can explore fantastical landscapes and build their own mansions, forests and spaceships-was reaching the crest of its popularity, with hundreds of thousands of active residents and a self-reported $500 million in GDP. In 2007, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale made a bold proclamation: “The 3D web will rapidly be the dominant thing and everyone will have an avatar.” Considering the success of his creation, it wasn’t an altogether far-fetched idea. Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet. A version of this article was published in TIME’s newsletter Into the Metaverse. ![]()
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