Fieldnotes from the Metaverse — Second Life
This time we talk about the platform that established itself as the “first prototype Metaverse” in public perception — and how it earned that reputation.
Setting the scene
Ultima Online launched in 1997 to massive success, reaching 100,000 paying subscribers within six months, far exceeding that of any single virtual world before it. Asheron’s Call and EverQuest launched in 1999 as the first successful 3D MMOs. Phantasy Star Online followed in 2001 as the first MMO on consoles.
Star Wars Galaxies launched in 2003, developed largely by the team that had created Ultima Online. While many MMOs of the time offered theme park experiences, SWG leaned towards a sandbox-like experience. Raph Koster, the creative director for SWG, described it like this:
“Players had formed governments…Entertainers were going on tour…People were building supply chain empires and businesses with hundreds of employees. An interconnected society of not only heroes, but also shopkeepers, hairstylists, and local bands.”
At the end of 2005, SOE reported it had sold over a million copies of the game.
World of Warcraft launched in 2004, redefining the MMORPG genre. Designed as a pure theme park experience, it featured a vast world with visual and tonal variety, deep lore, and colorful characters. The quest system (encouraging players to move around the map) and character progression (similar to action RPGs) were widely adopted by other games, even by already established games like Star Wars Galaxies, retrofitting their systems to match WoW.
World of Warcraft quickly became the most popular MMORPG to date, reaching a peak of 12 million paying subscribers in 2010.
Meanwhile, a developer studio called Linden Lab had another idea: An MMO as a pure sandbox, rebuilding real life in virtuality.
Second Life
Second Life was one of the first virtual worlds that got widespread attention outside the gaming community. Developed in 2003 by Linden Lab, Second Life was not really a game per se, but a virtual world focused on socializing and personal exploration. If MUDs established the spectrum from “Theme Parks” to “Sandboxes”, Second Life was pushing the boundaries of what a social sandbox could be.
One element was the adaptation of Raph Koster’s “A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars” (August 2000), which proclaimed player rights around self-determination and ownership, but also certain duties. It described a social contract between an individual player and the player community, forming a populace that self-affirms and self-imposes rights and restrictions upon their behavior. Although it is not Second Life’s official code of conduct anymore, the declaration is still available in the official Wiki.
Article 1: All avatars are created free and equal in dignity and rights. They are to be endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of avatarity.
In line with giving the players significant self-governance rights, Linden Lab announced a policy change in November 2003 to allow Second Life residents to retain full ownership of their virtual creations:
Second Life’s Terms of Service now recognize the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers who make it. The revised TOS allows subscribers to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs.
This allowed the creators of virtual items to freely present, sell and trade their creations, within and outside the game, even imposing their own rules and regulations around their goods. By the end of 2003, players had created over 12,000 individual virtual objects for sale with a total of 100,000 user-to-user transactions for goods and services.
By 2007 Second Life had two million monthly active users, having traded the equivalent of around $3 billion USD since launch.
In 2013, Linden Lab published an infographic for their 10th anniversary, stating that Second Life had 36 million total user accounts, 1 million monthly active users and 2.1 million user-created goods for sale, with 1.2 million daily transactions of virtual goods.
Second Life is still running today in 2022, with its 20-year anniversary approaching. It still attracts around 200.000 active daily users. It is now marketed as a platform to explore and meet, and to create and monetize user creations to earn real profits in a virtual economy. Linden Lab also created their own payment platform called Tilia.
Impact
Second Life introduced virtual worlds to entirely new audiences. While World of Warcraft soaked up the core gamer audience, Second Life targeted casual gamers and socializers. In many ways, it was a social network with a 3D frontend. Other sandboxes at the time still had designated core concepts. For example, EVE Online, released in 2003, still had core game mechanics and gameplay loops. Project Entropia, released in 2003, revolved around a complex real-virtual economy model. In Second Life, the sandbox was the core. It was not based around entertainment, a setting or story, but provided the bare minimum in terms of world and physics as a blank slate where residents could create their own content, make their own entertainment, explore different, virtual sides of their personality, doing whatever.
It was also the first virtual world that big brands would join to provide virtual experiences, from adidas to Intel to The Weather Channel. The experiences range from events like movie premieres, concerts, and gatherings to brand stores, stands or simply entertainment venues. This also spawned the first “metaverse developer” companies like Anshex (led by Anshee Chung) or Millions of Us.
In 2006, Anshe Chung (Ailin Graef in real life) became the first (reported) Second Life millionaire. She initially made money by buying and selling virtual land, later leading a team of artists and designers that would also develop the properties with custom experiences. She became a prominent figure in the mainstream media, representing the Second Life business community in BusinessWeek and other traditional news media.
The approach to player ownership of assets made it possible to trade Second Life items on third party platforms. Several developers and publishers actively opposed the real-world trade and asked trading platforms like Ebay to block all virtual items based on the violation of their intellectual property. At first, Ebay removed individual items on request, but eventually created a policy to ban all sales of virtual game items in January 2007.
Ebay also carved out an exception for Second Life, which they “didn’t consider a game”, also stating that “Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, maintains that all virtual items created by the players are the property of the players, not Linden Lab.” Other resale platforms followed this approach and the market for Second Life virtual items continued to thrive.
The success also attracted griefers and killers. The infamous imageboard 4chan was launched the same year as Second Life and the community was known to raid virtual worlds “for the lulz”, causing confusion and mayhem in the general population. In Second Life, one such incident was the disruption of a live interview with Anshe Chung by spawning flying penises. As this seemed beyond the ability of the community to self-govern, Linden Lab intervened by banning accounts and updating the code of conduct.
Beyond being a virtual world, Linden Lab also tried to turn Second Life into a protocol by allowing third-party clients to access the game. The Second Life servers would keep the canonical state of the world and provide its physics, while offering defined interfaces to interact with it to clients and devices in different contexts. Some third-party clients offered a complete game experience, while others specialized in specific aspects. An example would be text-based clients, focusing on accessibility or just offering group activities such as sending notices and IM’s.
Afterthoughts
Second Life broke a lot of new ground on the way towards the Metaverse. The aspirations of Second Life were in its name: A Second Life. A life parallel to the real one. And as such, it was the first large scale virtual world that aimed to create a Metaverse-like experience in the most “boring” and mundane (and thus: scale approachable) sense.
Second Life was neither the first sandbox virtual world, nor the first focusing on socializing and player interaction, nor the first providing creator tools or a player-driven economy. But it combined these elements in a way that was not only attractive, but also approachable to an audience not familiar with games or virtual worlds.
Through careful governance and community management, Linden Labs achieved what few virtual worlds did: It could stay mostly hands-off and let player actions (and conflicts) play out and resolve on their own. The occasions when Linden Lab had to intervene were so rare, they were called “Acts of Linden” by the community.
This open approach, and the audience it attracted, offered new opportunities for research and studies around human interaction and identity exploration. For example, Jeremy Bailenson and his team published some amazing work based on Second Life.
A question often asked is: “What led to the downfall of Second Life?” However, the question is misleading. With 200k average daily users across 200 countries, a virtual economy with a GDP equivalent to $600 million and over $80 million in creator cash-outs in the last 12 months, it is easily more successful than all new Web3 Metaverse platforms combined.
A more interesting question is: “Why isn’t Second Life more prominent in the current Metaverse narrative?” My guess is that it didn’t really evolve as a concept or as a brand. It stagnated as a platform and failed to attract new generations of players. It couldn’t create an updated narrative to stay relevant. When talking about Second Life, average people do not associate recently added capabilities, regions, or events, they think about news articles from the early 2000s.
Just like social networks, it seems like virtual worlds are generational.
Here is a great documentary about the history of Second Life by a French resident of Second Life named Bollycoco. It’s not the most polished video, but this is also the point: It’s like an old resident welcoming the new neighbors. (There is also a more polished one by the National Geographic).
About the series
The term “Metaverse” is currently claimed by many groups, driven by different incentives. Some groups attach the term to specific technologies (for example VR, AR, XR, Digital Twins or Blockchains), others see it as a future vision or narrative (sometimes dystopian, sometimes utopian). Some groups talk about the coming Metaverse, others argue that it already exists.
“Fieldnotes from the Metaverse” is a series that discusses the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. The goal is a holistic and inclusive view of the Metaverse space, separating visions, signals, trends, and hype.
