ADRIENNE ARSENAULT: LONDON FILE
On the vagaries of a Second Life
November 21, 2006
I clearly wasn't meant to fly.
Truly Magnolia (CBC)
One brief mix up between the up and down keys on the keyboard and Truly Magnolia crashed to the pavement. Truly is my alter ego in the virtual world Second Life, and as I tried to walk her around the neighbourhood she strode right through a tree.
What they don't tell you about the online universe is that it can be a bit tricky to navigate. Definitely not a place for the cyberphobic.
But it is certainly a place worthy of our attention. Or so I am told over and over and over again.
Second Life is not a game, its proponents will tell you earnestly. It's a virtual world designed by San Francisco-based Linden Labs, which made it public in 2003. Since then, however, its popularity has skyrocketed to the point that Second Life has virtually taken on a life of its own.
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The community recently passed one million "residents" and thousands more are signing up every week. The deal is you sign up (a basic membership is free), download the Second Life program and design a character, called an avatar, to represent you. You can also pay a subscription fee (the lowest is $72 US per year), to purchase or rent virtual property. Then you buy your avatar clothes or toys, meet people, flirt, start businesses and, well, live.
You "talk" with other avatars by typing. It's just like instant messaging. In fact much of Second Life is really like a 3-D interactive chat room.
There are no dragons to slay or princesses to save. Instead there are businesses to run and money to be made.
And unlike the world of computer gaming, Second Life is not a male-dominated environment (though one of the more popular spots does seem to be the strip clubs).
The ratio of men to women is typically 80-20 in cybercommunities. In Second Life it is pretty much even.
Following the bucks
The money making potential of Second Life. (CBC)
Justin Bovington operates Rivers Run Red, a London, Eng.-based marketing firm that now does most of its work pitching for companies in Second Life. He is as sharp an observer of virtual behaviour as you might find and his sense is that women are proving to be the most powerful operators in the online world: "They run the businesses, and they're buying the clothes and they're setting the trends," he says.
One of these trends is the money making potential of Second Life. The best guess is that $600,000 real Canadian dollars change hands there every single day. Its inventors will proudly tell you it has an economy that's stronger and growing faster than many real countries.
Indeed, the virtual economy is now real enough that the U.S. Congress is fretting about how to tax all of that income. Second Life isn't the only virtual world out there — it isn't even the biggest — but somehow there is a lot of real money changing hands away from the hungry reach of governments or real governments, and they are getting worried.
Money is of course one of the big appeals of virtual living: Monthly subscribers get a regular stipend of virtual Linden dollars, which they can invest or buy things with. They can also buy more Linden dollars through a currency exchange, which was recently selling them at the rate of 243 Linden dollars per $1 US.
But money still doesn't fully explain why more than a quarter of Second Life residents spend more time in the virtual world than at their jobs, according to some studies.
It is initially a strange experience. If you don't know where you are going, it can feel a bit boring or disconcerting. It's easy to stumble on prostitutes and stalkers. There's a lot of sex. And this is where it gets confusing for a newbie like me. It seems you can buy your avatar all of the necessary, um, attachments and go to town if you find a willing cyberpartner. Really.
A wonderful life?
So is the virtual world just about money and sex then?
Tim Guest doesn't think so. He's a Second Life devotee and he's writing a book about the draw of virtual worlds. His theory is that they are all about the dwindling connections in this life.
In Europe, for example, twice as many people currently live alone than was the case 30 years ago. There are also twice as many bankruptcies now than there were then. Something about this existence, he reasons, is isolating and a bit cruel.
"Life is a constant struggle and I think that the desire to escape that struggle has been implanted in us," he says. "That's part of the appeal of virtual worlds. They seem to offer the promise of ease."
Guest views the drift towards virtual worlds as a type of migration. "Every year it's been 25 and 30 million people spending more than 10-20 hours a week" in virtual realities, he points out. "So it really is a mass migration. More than passed through Ellis Island in all of the 20th century. And these people really are looking for a better place."
Some clearly find it. Guest says in all the interviews he has conducted he has been struck most by the effect of Second Life on the disabled participants. A few months ago he travelled to Boston to meet with a group of Americans with cerebral palsy. "The woman who took care of them said she had never seen anything have as much of an impact on them [as Second Life]. They're earning money and they have a group of friends. They've converted some of their virtual earnings into dollars and sent them to the tsunami relief fund. So they are contributing back in a way that they've never had a chance to."
Rather than an alternate life, the virtual world is simply an add on, Guest and other observers say. But an important one at that.
Virtual worlds open the door to going out without leaving home. They offer the fantasy of creating an ideal look and identity. With anonymity. And apparently they are not the future. They are right now. Truly.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
Adrienne Arsenault is CBC-TV's senior European correspondent, based in London, a position she took up in the fall of 2006 after having spent the previous three years in Jerusalem. From 2003 to 2006, Arsenault was the CBC's Middle East bureau chief covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and regional politics. Before that she was the Washington correspondent.
Arsenault joined CBC in 1991 as an editorial assistant and has worked on a wide variety of assignments. She was named the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association's journalist of the year for 2005. She was also nominated for three Gemini Awards and has won awards from the American Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio and Television News Directors Association, and the New York and Columbus festivals.
