Second Life News & Events & Guides

SECOND LIFE'S PRECURSOR
In Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, a seminal sci-fi work of the 90s, one of the plots is that there was this whole metaverse exactly like Second Life, only cooler. You had a whole generation of people who read Snow Crash and were talking about this idea of the internet as a 3D world you could immerse yourself in 

Ben Hammersley
Not much, says Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley, and that was the problem.

"You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up," he says.

"They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, Second life linden and after that no-one would bother going in there again. It just wasn't worth the spend."

The "spend" varied from business to business. A retailer like American Apparel might spend £10,000 on designers, as well as storage space from Linden Lab, to build a virtual store.

But at the peak of the hype, the cost of purchasing or building property was worth it.

"The first to go online would make the front page of the Guardian," Mr Hammersley says. "But when you're the 15th country who goes on Second Life, no magazine, no newspaper touches it."

Some businesses and users found it wasn't quite for them. The technology wasn't easily grasped and some computers couldn't handle it.

Second Life has had to temper its ambitions for the quality of graphics to extend its accessibility across varying speeds of broadband around the world, leading to complaints about the cartoony look and feel of the site.

And there is a fundamental question about whether Second Life is a game or a social networking site.

"It's not a really good social space," Mr Hammersley says. "Not as good as Facebook or any general online forum.

Avatars can walk, fly and teleport
Simon Gardner, a 23-year-old freelance social media marketer, believed the hype in 2007.

He signed on, created an avatar with a shock of red hair that vaguely resembled him, and jumped into what he found to be a lacklustre experience.

"It was a real pain. You have to learn how to control things and read manuals on how to get to islands and get off. Half the time you're just wandering around talking to weirdos."