Castles In The Virtual Air

Imagine a world in which you can be your own God. You can choose your own gender, color, size, or even species. Instead of driving your car to work, you can fly. Today, you can do all this from the chair of your computer desk with a program called Second Life.

Created by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life is a “3-D online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents” that is free to join. Its roughly five million users create avatars, which are virtual character representations of themselves that can be anything from men and women to butterflies. Second Life is not a game so much as it is an “online community” because there is no specific goal or winner. Users are able to interact, create buildings, and buy land on the Second Life globe.

With such possibilities, Second Life fosters unusual creativeness. Weld Professor of Law Charles R. Nesson ’60 even created “Berkman Island” in Second Life to broadcast an extension school class he teaches on internet law.

The idea that students sit in front of their computers rather than engage in a classroom—or more generally, that people live alternate digital lives rather than their own—is the common critique of the Second Life phenomenon.

But more specifically—and I would argue disturbingly—Second Life has forgone massive potential benefits by fostering a skewed worldview. By simply dividing its Grid world into individual domains to be bought and sold, Second Life forgets the principle of a public good, and does not teach the importance of interdependence that is crucial to adult life in the real world. Such benefits include consideration for the environmental impact of development or the sociological importance of creating stable communities. By overemphasizing profit at the expense of responsibility, Second Life discourages the interpersonal cooperation that could provide an example for our lives in the real world.

Though Second Life’s problems involve the foundations of capitalism—economic success and self-interest—it is not capitalism that is the problem in Second Life. In fact, as a reflection of the real world, it is good that Second Life is not an egalitarian utopia to which few could actually relate and from which even fewer could learn.

At the same time, however, the lack of restraint on capitalism defeats the potential good that could be fostered from this malleable digital reality. Rather than promote virtual values that could benefit players, essentially the main objective of Second Life is the reselling of virtual “real” estate at a profit.

In May 2006, Business Week profiled Anshe Chung, a Second Life user who had made $250,000 USD in virtual Linden Dollars. Chung could exchange this for American dollars on the LindeX Currency Exchange that Linden Lab operates through PayPal. Such singular concern for profit does not make Second Life a good teaching tool, even though companies have claimed to use it as such. In an effort to teach young people how to manage money, Wells Fargo & Co. created an amusement park island on Second Life in 2005 where users could withdraw money from ATMs. Underlying this supposedly instructive intent, was, of course, Wells Fargo product placement. Overemphasis on profit and self-interest is indicative of larger problems in Second Life.

A December 2006 report by Dutch think-tank EPN detailed the economics, rights, and well-being of users in Second Life. EPN wrote that “there is no solid middle class in Second Life. People are either ‘poor’ or they earn a lot.” A main cause of this is the ease with which users can pursue their self-interest and desires for profit. But what really unites these problems of profit and short-sighted decisions is a general lack of empathy. Users who pursue wealth at the cost of cooperation, teaching, and sound decisions have implicitly exhibited a hierarchy of values that is headed by money.

Some would argue that Second Life is merely a computer game that does not have social responsibilities or consequences, and that this extreme valuation of money is merely part of the fun. While Second Life is indeed unreality, it also represents a psychological intersection between reality and fiction. In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Philip Rosendale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, discussed what he called Second Life’s “plasticity.” He said, “The world in Second Life is so easy to change. It is so plastic that it’s addictive. It’s infectious. You come to see the real world that way: Why can’t I paint these walls?”

It is not surprising, then, that this intersection of reality and unreality centers on money, arguably the core value of American society today: How else can anyone explain former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain? Second Life suggests that this warped valuation controls not only our real world, but also our fantasy world—a very troubling thought.

Rosendale went on to cite an example of a man who lost seventy pounds after seeing how easy it was to change outward appearances in Second Life. It is precisely such direct connections between reality and fiction that the “plastic” world of Second Life creates.

Thus just as Rosendale touts the benefits that Second Life has brought to some users’ lives, so too should he think that making Second Life a little more socially responsible—and a little less infatuated with money—would be an effective tool for personal change.


Noah M. Silver ’10, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Weld Hall.