Whatever happened to Second Life?

Three years ago, I underwent one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life – and I barely even left the office.

I spent a week virtually living and breathing inside Second Life: the massively multiplayer online world that contains everything from lottery games to libraries, penthouses to pubs, skyscrapers to surrogacy clinics.

Oh, and an awful lot of virtual sex.

Back then, the world and his dog were falling over themselves to “be
a part of it”. Rock stars were queuing up to play virtual gigs, Microsoft and IBM were setting up elaborate pixellated offices to host staff training seminars, Reuters even despatched a correspondent to report back on the latest in-world developments.

At its peak, the Second Life economy had more money swilling about than several third-world countries. It had even produced its own millionaire, Anshe Chung, who made a very real fortune from buying and selling property that existed only on Second Life servers.

Three years on, and the hype has been extinguished. Second Life has seen its status as the web wonderchild supplanted by Facebook and Twitter. The newspapers have forgotten about it, the Reuters correspondent has long since cleared his virtual desk, and you can walk confidently around tech trade shows without a ponytailed “Web 2.0 Consultant” offering to put your company on the Second Life map for the price of a company car.

But what has happened to Second Life? Have the hundreds of thousands of registered players logged off and found a real life? Has the Second Life economy collapsed? And what’s become of the extroverts, entrepreneurs and evangelists I encountered on my first visit? There’s only one way to find out. I’m going back in.

Where is everybody?

The first thing I notice upon dropping out of the Second Life sky once more is how empty the place is. On my first visit back in 2006, I couldn’t walk through the training level without clumsily bumping into the throng of fellow newbies. Now, there’s enough room to swing the contents of Noah’s ark, let alone a cat.

I walk and then fly around the landscape for ten minutes or so, but can’t find a single soul to shoot the breeze with. Well, except for a smattering of Second Life bots, which is the intellectual equivalent of striking up a conversation with The Speaking Clock.

I decide to seek out Second Life’s tourist hotspots, using the game’s search engine as my guide. I check out an amazing Gothic castle, which must have taken someone half a real life to painstakingly cobble together, but I’m the only one admiring the architecture.

I dash off to a shopping mall, listed as one of the most popular sites in the game, and yet it’s only me perusing the countless fashion stores. Admittedly, it’s noon on Saturday in Britain – making it an indecent hour for Second Life’s US-oriented audience – but finding people was never this hard back in 2006.

So I change tack, and search for live events taking place now. Surely, the person who organised them would bother to turn up? The first draws a blank, the second likewise. Finally, I find a huddle of people at a “disco”, a good 20 minutes after I first completed my re-entry into Second Life.

I’m suddenly aware of French accents seeping from my laptop’s speakers. It takes me a few minutes to realise what’s going on. I vaguely remember reading that Second Life had introduced voice chat a while back, providing an audio accompaniment to the text-based chatter we used to make do with in “the good old days”.

I’ve clearly landed in the French quarter. With my spoken French generously falling somewhere between “pidgin” and “’Allo ’Allo”, I decide not to barge into the conversation and head elsewhere. But despite another ten minutes of searching, I can’t find anyone who can parlez vous the old Anglais.

Declining numbers

Has Second Life become a digital ghost town? Not according to its makers, Linden Labs. “In total, users around the world have spent more than one billion hours in Second Life,” the company claimed in September.

And it isn’t just using that big figure to distract attention from a slowing interest in the online world: “user hours grew 33% year-on-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,” Linden insists.

Yet, that doesn’t correlate with what I’m seeing. I return a couple of days later, determined to find out whether I’d simply arrived on a slow day or whether Second Life really is on the wane. Again, I check out the so-called tourist spots, but there’s barely a soul to be found. Shopping malls, ski slopes, even the in-game information centre, are all but deserted. It’s starting to get eerie.

I search the event listings once more, and stumble across a discussion called “Has Second Life taken over your life?”, which is due to start in two minutes. I teleport across: if users spend an average of an hour and 40 minutes in-world per visit, as Linden’s stats claims, there should be a fair few turning up for cyber rich tea and sympathy. By the time the meeting starts, however, there are only four.

“It seems a lot quieter in here than it used to be,” I remark to the hostess, who looks like she’s just fallen out of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video. I’m sure I hear a little sigh before she replies: “That’s probably because everyone’s off on a hunt”. “What’s a hunt?” I ask, but before the 1980s pop queen has time to reply, one of the other members of the discussion has sent me an invite to join her hunt.

Although I feel bad about hijacking a discussion and then cutting its attendance in half, I decide to follow the hunter, but my efforts to teleport out of there are thwarted by a warning message: “Adult content: verify age before proceeding”.

That’s odd. The last time I was in Second Life, there was certainly no walled fence for adult content. In fact, it was all too easy to find pornography or groups of avatars performing acts that would make even Formula One bosses blush. So what’s changed?

The adult continent

A little research soon reveals why Second Life seems a lot quieter than the numbers suggest. In June, the company opened Zindra – Second Life’s “adult continent”, a huge plot of the virtual universe dedicated to content rated as “mature”, “adult” or even “PG”.

Given that sex and gambling accounted for the majority of the “most popular places” when I first visited, it was suddenly apparent why I was as lonely as a cloud in the parts of the Second Life universe that wouldn’t upset the clergy.

So why did Linden establish its very own red-light district? It seems the company decided it was time to clean up its act. In 2008, a management shake-up saw founder and CEO Philip Rosedale move into the role of chairman; his replacement was Mark Kingdon, a man who spent 12 years as a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers – about as far from Linden’s “anything goes” culture as you could possibly get.

Kingdon apparently realised that companies such as IBM (which has more than 50 in-game properties) and Microsoft don’t want their reputations sullied by being part of a virtual world where XXX DANA’S NAUGHTY PLAYHOUSE XXX is the star attraction.

So instead of bulldozing the sex shops and brothels, Linden decided to relocate them to their own dedicated island. Now Big Blue and the blue-movie theatres can both comfortably entertain their clients, and never the twain shall meet.

Other vices were quashed a little less amicably. In 2007, Linden caused enormous upset after shutting down casinos and other in-world gambling dens overnight, following an FBI investigation into whether the site was breaking the US ban on online gambling. People who’d invested enormous amounts of time and hard cash into developing their own casinos found they’d literally been wiped off the map, without compensation.

Now, with sex cordoned off and the gaming dens boarded up (you can’t even search for “gambling” any more), Second Life has an air of the reborn Christian about it.

However, the dark side doesn’t take long to resurface. Remember that mysterious “hunt”? After entering a few personal details, and using my UK driving licence to verify my age, I’m free to teleport across and join in the game. “What is a hunt?” I ask my new friend, who has suddenly slipped into something a lot less uncomfortable: a PVC basque.

“You go round and find hidden objects and then move on to the next,” she replies, pointing me towards the first object. “Buy that item and you’ll find the co-ordinates for the next inside.” 400 Linden dollars (just over $1 in real money) later and I have a box full of gimp masks, whips and other S&M gear to slip on, and co-ordinates to join what sounds like a hell of a party.

The bondage gear is positively pre-watershed compared to some of the more salacious and downright disturbing activities taking place in Zindra.

I take a stroll (and I do mean a stroll) through the Red Light District, and before long I’m being offered cards from pretend prostitutes, offering “voice chats” for as little as £2, with some feeling the need to point out that they don’t partake in activities such as “adult/child play” and anal rape (others, incredibly, just add them to the price list).

There are boxes and boxes of hard-core photos for sale, with thumbnails to show you what’s lurking inside. Elsewhere, I find nightclubs where “rough sex” is encouraged, while in another underground den I find a woman giving oral sex to a man in a Trainspotting-esque toilet cubicle. It’s a strange world where searching for “betting” is banned, and yet “rape” returns a string of results.

Thriving economy

Money is, of course, what makes the world go around – even the virtual ones. So has the Second Life economy suffered the same nervous breakdown as the real-world markets over the past year or so? Amazingly, it appears not.

Linden Labs claims Second Life has turned over more than $1 billion in its six-year history. Nor is it slowing down; quite the opposite in fact. Linden claims the in-world economy grew by a staggering 94% year-on-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.

What keeps the Second Life economy ticking? Land and property, which is more than a tad ironic given we’re in the middle of a world recession triggered by sub-prime mortgages. However, Linden Labs has one huge advantage over conventional governments – it can keep adding new land.

In June this year, it added 98 million square metres to the Second Life landscape (including Zindra) and residents soon snapped up the available land, helping to boost land sales by 11% year-on-year.

Total land ownership now stands at around two billlion square metres – which means if Second Life was an actual country (and I can’t believe I just typed that), it would be bigger than both Hong Kong and the Seychelles.

The trade of virtual trinkets also keeps the cash rolling in. Linden claims that in excess of 250,000 user-generated items are created every day – be they cars, clothes, furniture, houses or fluffy slippers for your pet giraffe. Such user transactions are now racking up $50 million a month.

While Linden provides detailed daily breakdowns of the Second Life financials, it doesn’t reveal what proportion of those “goods” are related to adult activity, but I suspect that it’s substantial.

Second Life also has its own currency, Linden Dollars, which has remained remarkably resilient. When I first visited in 2006, one US dollar was worth L$270 – at the time of writing, the exchange rate stands at L$260.

But in much the same way as the governor of the Bank of England tweaks interest rates to keep inflation in check, Linden’s financial wallahs also have ways and means of keeping the economy on the rails.

When a sharp decline in property sales threatened to send Second Life into a mini-recession of its own at the end of 2008, Linden slashed the fees for services, such as in-world classified advertising and uploads, to stimulate the economy. If Alistair Darling needs a job next spring, he knows where to send his CV. And just imagine the eyebrows on his avatar…

The pace of evolution

So, the sex has been segregated, the gambling has gone and yet (somehow) the money keeps rolling in. But what else has changed about Second Life over the past couple of years? To find out, I thought I’d look up some of the people I’d met on my first visit.

And where better to start than the Three Lions Pub, the welcoming British boozer whose patrons helped me find my feet when I first crashed through the saloon doors in 2006? I dig through my landmarks (the Second Life equivalent of a saved address in your satnav) and teleport to the Three Lions.

My plans for a chummy catch-up with the bar staff over a game of darts are abruptly wiped out by the scene that is drawing in front of me. There’s no pub sign, picket fence or picnic tables; instead I appear to be in the middle of a car showroom.

I double-click on the Three Lions landmark once more, convinced my teleporter is on the blink, but no: the Three Lions has gone. Against all my hardened journalistic instincts, I’m starting to feel just the slightest bit wistful.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” asks a salesman appearing from behind a car that looks like the Batmobile would if left parked in Croydon town centre on a Saturday night. “Yes,” I reply. “I’m looking for the people who ran the pub that used to be here,” I add, faintly aware I’m now beginning to sound like I’m on day release from the Alzheimer’s Centre. “Good luck,” says the salesman and toddles off.

The Three Lions isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Hensonian Pennyfeather, the wonderfully kind woman who spent ages showing me around a magnificent church on my first visit, is still here, but now lists “Le Resort – Naughty Fun under the Sun” under her favourite locations (and Lord knows what they get up to there).

The other half-a-dozen or so friends I collected are never online during my return. The only sop to my past is the apartment I rented in Zuni Villas, which is available for let. I pass. It’s time to move on.

Brighton and beyond

Before taking my leave of Second Life for what will probably be my last time, I decide to drop by the Showcase section and check out some of the Second Life locations that Linden wants you to see, rather than the murky depths of Zindra that it doesn’t.

Perhaps subconsciously wanting to cling to something familiar to me, I notice a listing for the New Brighton Pier – a virtual recreation of the Sussex city I live close to. Before long, I’m playing pinball machines on the pier, walking around The Royal Pavilion and bombing down the promenade on a free bicycle. From the ironwork on the beach railings to the sound of seagulls flying overhead, everything is beautifully modelled.

In fact, Second Life seems so increasingly obsessed with aping the real world that it’s in danger of becoming an interactive version of those creepy model villages you only find in English holiday resorts.

There’s a recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing, complete with lunar module and the Earth shimmering magnificently over the horizon. There’s a model of the Eiffel Tower (confusingly located in “Paris New York”) where Second Life couples go for romantic weekends. Yes, honestly.

There’s also a wonderfully authentic mock-up of the singer Richard Hawley’s house in Sheffield, complete with gaudy 1970s wallpaper and a jukebox, pre-loaded with his music.

Academia has also invaded. Stanford, Princeton and Harvard Law School are among the pack of US universities that have established a Second Life presence. Princeton, for example, has a stunningly rendered campus complete with library, lecture halls and a frankly annoying population of wild squirrels.

Business, too, continues to pile into the picture. The IEEE might have taken seven whole years to sort out 802.11n Wi-Fi, but it’s had time to set up a Second Life campus, allowing engineers to discuss the finer points of desert-dry specifications while dressed like Marilyn Monroe’s slutty sister.

And yet, I still can’t help wondering what the point of all this is? Yes, these virtual recreations are magnificent and impressive, but once you’ve wandered around and seen the sights, what else is there to do?

There are no goals, no objectives, no points to be won or levels to be completed. Yes, there’s a degree of social interaction – although precious little of it in these glossy showcase areas. I found more people at a place delightfully labelled “Cumdumpsters” (which promises “rough sex, humiliation and rape”) than I ever did on visits to any of the Showcase sites.

Three years on, and Second Life seems no closer to finding a respectable reason for being than it did in 2006. It might try and shuffle sex into a corner, and pretend that it’s a melting pot of creativity, business and academia, but it ultimately serves no purpose.

It’s like the nouvelle cuisine of the 1980s: pretty, fascinating but ultimately unfulfilling. “What’s the point of Second Life?” I asked one of the “greeters” on the Second Life Help Island, desperate to find something that could make this vast, billion-dollar empire seem worthwhile.

“I’ve had a real life for 28 years and I haven’t worked out what the point of that is yet,” came his unexpectedly philosophical reply. “Second Life’s only been going six years. Give it a chance.”

Sorry, I’m afraid I’ve got a proper life to be getting on with.