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Second Life (SL) is a privately-owned, partly subscription-based 3-D Virtual world, made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life "world" resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab. The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as "residents") tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its economy.

The majority of the content in the Second Life world is resident-created. Linden Lab actively promotes the concept that residents retain the intellectual property rights to objects they create (although they are required to offer Linden Lab a limited license for the purposes of promotion and marketing *).

Avatars

Residents of Second Life are represented in the environment by an avatar, which may be customized in a variety of ways. The basic avatar is humanoid in shape and, through a series of GUI controls, allows for a large amount of modification as to size, build, color and hair style. Residents can also create or buy clothing, and attach 3D objects to their avatars to further customize them. The result can either be faithful to the original humanoid avatar, or can result in a completely non-humanoid representation of the character.

Attachments can be something as simple as a pair of glasses, or a complex series of objects in order to make the avatar look like something else entirely. It is also possible for residents to upload and apply animations (in BVH format) for their avatars. These animations can be made with the free program Avimator that is made specifically for SL, Poser, or they can be acquired via motion capture using a third-party application.

Common applications of altering character appearance have included animals, robots, mechs, furries, Star Wars-related characters and "tinies", which are just "folded up" (via a static animation--a "pose") regular avatars.

Objects

Second Life includes a built-in object editor tool that allows residents to create complex objects out of a set of basic building blocks known as prims (short "primitives"), which are actually parametric models that support dynamic scalar LOD. The environment includes a set of textures that residents can apply to their objects, and they can upload and apply their own images as well (for a 10 Linden dollar * fee). Uploaded images can be in JPEG, Windows bitmap (BMP), or Truevision TGA format. JPEGs, although smaller in file size, are not recommended since they will be converted to JPEG2000 file format on upload regardless of original file format. TGA files have the added advantage of alpha channel transparency.

Residents can apply scripts to created objects, thereby controlling the behavior of the objects within the environment. Second Life uses its own scripting language, called Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL has a syntax similar to C, Java, and, to a lesser extent, Python, and allows objects to interact with the Second Life world, as well as the Internet via email, XML-RPC and most recently, HTTP *. Second Life uses Havok for simulated physics, though not all objects in the world respond to physics. A future update will include Havok 2 support, an improvement that Second Life residents have awaited since its announcement by Linden Lab before June, 2002.

All objects and 3D information are streamed in real-time to all clients. This allows for real-time editing of 3D objects so any resident can view what is being created as it is being created. The interface for creating and editing objects is integrated with the world and requires no external program to use, but editing textures requires external software from third parties (e.g. Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)).

Although there is no additional charge for creating objects in Second Life, there is a L$10 cost for each image, sound, or animation that is uploaded.

Requirements

Second Life is available for PCs (1 GHz Pentium III or better, with at least 512MB RAM) with Windows XP (SP2) or Windows 2000 (SP4) and Macs (1 GHz G4 or better, with at least 512MB RAM) with Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher. A Linux alpha client (i686) that has been tested on Debian, Fedora Core 4, Gentoo and Knoppix is currently available for download and testing, and runs with a few limitations.

The graphics require either an nVidia GeForce 2 or better graphics card or an ATI Radeon 8500 (9000 for Macs) graphics card. Second Life also requires a 21MB (Windows) or 32MB (Mac OS X) client download, and will consume up to 1GB of allocated disk space for cache. A broadband Internet connection is required. Dial-up users will find that their connection speed does not allow them to view the world at anything approaching an acceptable framerate. Current system requirements are posted at the web site.

Pricing

Second Life has 3 Membership Plans
  • First Basic - Free
  • Additional Basic - Additional Basic accounts are available for a one time fee of $9.95 per additional account
  • Premium - The only differences between this accounts and First Basic accounts (aside from the fee) are the ability to own land (Basic account holders can rent), a L$500/week Stipend and a L$1250 signup bonus. There are three billing options for Premium accounts:
    • Monthly — $9.95
    • Quarterly — $22.50 ($7.50/month)
    • Annually — $72.00 ($6.00/month)

Basic accounts originally received L$250 starting money and a stipend of L$50 a week. However, basic accounts created after May 29th 2006 no longer receive the L$50/week stipend, and basic accounts created after June 6th 2006 no longer receive starting money [http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=112077. However, Basic accounts originally required billing information to be presented (even though no charge was made) because of the need to prevent people creating multiple basic accounts in order to benefit from the stipend multiple times; now that this has been removed, Basic accounts can be created with only an e-mail address.

Premium memberships still receive a L$500 stipend every week, regardless of logging in or not, and also have the ability to own up to 512m2 of land without additional cost. Owning larger areas of land ("parcels") attracts an increasing additional charge (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from $5 a month up to $195 a month for an entire 65536m2 "simulator" ("sim").

The pricing plan for Second Life has varied over time. Earlier versions did not feature free first-time Basic Accounts. During the beta period, residents had the option of a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of $225. After the release of SL 1.2 and the introduction of tiered land payments, this turned into a lifetime tier-free ownership of 4096m2 of land.

Subcultures and countercultures

Second Life is composed of rich, diverse, user-driven subcultures and countercultures.

Some Second Life cultures revolve around established "groups." Groups can be created by residents for a fee of L$100. Residents are then given 3 days to recruit an additional 2 members, or their investment is lost and the group is deleted. A group must then maintain a membership of at least 3 members at all times in order to remain active. The groups that each resident belongs to are displayed in that user's profile.

Each group comprises officers and members, with titles determined by group leadership. The officer or member title may appear superimposed above the name of the resident's avatar. Residents may participate in up to 15 groups, and may choose which group's title to display at any given time. Group activity is usually centered on a particular interest, so creating groups can give people a common ground for discussion and provide an easy way to break the ice. Some groups maintain websites to bridge the gap between real-life (referred to as "first life", or abbreviated to "RL" for "real-life") and Second Life (commonly abbreviated as SL, but 2L is also used) interests.

Groups are allowed ownership of land and resources, so they comprise the closest thing to a corporation within the Second Life environment.

Aside from groups, many of the subcultures found in Second Life revolve around events. Events include many activities related to arts, culture, charity, support groups, commerce, discussion, education, games, contests, nightlife, entertainment, pageants and sports.

Second Life is also being influenced by many Internet phenomena which include the Moskau Dance, Ulae, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Many of these memes are in the form of gestures, which are animations that the avatar uses. These gestures are a cause of Internet culture spread in Second Life.

Second Life blogs are also appearing where residents detail their second lives, sometimes more extensively than their first.

Future improvements

Philip Linden stated at a the Town Hall Meeting on 18th May 2006 (mp3 recording of Town Hall meeting is available), the group tools are due for several improvements:
  • Being able to be in more groups (current limit is 15)
  • Minimum membership count lowered to 2 (current minimum is 3)
  • Improved communication
  • Sending objects to everyone in a group (currently possible to implement with LSL but difficult to maintain as membership of a group increases)
  • Defining roles and capabilities of roles (roles will be similar to the current Officer and Member title system)

Economy

Second Life has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden dollars (L$). Residents receive an amount of L$ when they open an account, and a weekly stipend thereafter--the amount depending on the type of account. Additional L$s are acquired by selling objects or services within the environment. Residents may purchase L$ directly or convert between Linden currency and U.S. currency through Linden Lab's currency brokerage, the LindeX Currency Exchange. The ratio of US$ to L$ fluctuates daily as residents set the buy and sell price of L$ offered on the exchange. Linden Lab has stated that the Second Life economy generates an average of US$500,000 in economic activity each week.

Issues and criticisms

A number of difficult issues have arisen within the operation of Second Life, both as an online game and a virtual world.

Economy

  • Duality of Linden Lab's stance on the value of the Linden: Linden Lab has been criticized for marketing SL as a viable business channel for making real money, while at the same time including provisions in the Terms of Service which give Linden dollars no legal value, Linden Lab is not required to pay any compensation if L$ is lost from the database.

  • Unusual phenomena in currency market: Services for buying and selling Linden dollars are structured in a similar way to real life currency dealing: amounts are bought and sold through brokers at variable market rates. However, because the actual economy of Second Life does not correspond to a self contained country (a large proportion of the population have no way to earn money other than buying it with money from outside, and those who earn large amounts of money often only do so in order to sell it for money from outside), the currency market exhibits unusual phenomena: consumers and those with less money within SL have no limit to how low they would wish the exchange rate to fall, and sellers and the rich have no limit to how high they would wish it to rise. This creates conflict and complaints whenever currency market trends persist for long periods of time; consumers complain that a rising L$ gives them bad value for their US$, and sellers complain that a falling L$ gives them bad return on their work.

  • Effect of in-world economy changes made by Linden Lab: Certain changes made or proposed by the developers have had the effect of creating new markets, but also have on occasion destroyed or removed the value of existing ones, or inadvertently given a market leader at a particular time unique advantages that entrench them as a market leader in the future. The most well known example of this is InfoNet, an in-world newspaper and information delivery service run on a for-profit basis, and formerly (as with many such systems in SL) of limited effectiveness due to a limited range of access points. When the old concept of "telehubs" was removed from the game, Linden Labs replaced them with "InfoHubs" each of which including an InfoNet access point which was hosted for free on system owned land; it also placed InfoNet access points in the Welcome Areas where new users arrive, where no user is normally permitted to leave business-related objects. This had the effect of giving InfoNet an instant and substantial advantage *.

Land

  • Lack of zoning: With minor exceptions, Linden Lab has not placed any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their real estate. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations, frequently with mixed success. Part of the problem concerns the amount of activity/resources from objects on business property causing lag for neighbors of that area that use it more of a personal manner. E.g. a business property could use objects that take up a lot of loading/rendering time or communicating with the servers, thus causing lag for others that may not be on the same property but nearby due to the nature of Second Life and everything in a certain distance must cache. The lack of zoning is also a prime target for graffiti, deliberately obstructive and/or offensive content with the intent of defacing the local view. Such proneness to vandalism has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.

  • Land hosting restrictions: A common criticism of the Second Life land system is that it is a closed network. Currently land/simulators are restricted so that the only way to have land in Second Life is to rent and buy server space/land from Linden Labs. Many users wish for Linden Labs to open up the "grid" and allow privately owned servers to run the simulator programs, and be accessible from the grid. Due to the way the Second Life world is currently designed, with a central secure asset server controlling all of the objects in Second Life, and the way the simulators and the asset server interact, hosting your own simulator is impossible unless a major redesign of the "grid" is implemented.

  • Land sales system: Building any permanent in-world object usually requires the rental or purchase of land (from Linden Lab or another resident), the former requiring an increased monthly subscription as more land is required. A number of people speculate on the land market for profit, usually forcing residents to purchase large portions of land from the speculators instead of directly from Linden Labs, at a marked up price. However Linden Labs does have a "First Land" program, which reserves small blocks of land for first time land buyers, in an attempt to decrease the cost of land for new premium accounts. Also, the high monthly charges related with "island" simulator ownership have resulted in many privately owned simulators being focused on content that can return a profit (more than $195 a month), reducing the variety available.

  • Shared hosting limits. A single "region" of Second Life can support only a limited number of avatars (40 for a mainland region - the figure 100 quoted above applies only to a private island), meaning that a single popular area within a region can make it impossible for others to enter other areas of the same region.

Other

  • Adult content: There have been complaints that sims (areas) marked in SL as "mature" (permitting mature content such as swearing, nudity, etc), are overwhelmed with sex-based "jobs" and entertainment *, to a greater degree than other "free-form" MMORPGs. Some residents have requested a strict enforcement of the separation of PG zones from mature zones. There exists a teen version of SL that is entirely separated from the adult version, where content is strictly PG and adult residents are not permitted. Neither version (Adult or Teen) has an official ESRB rating.

  • Balance between users' ability to edit the world and their ability to damage or disrupt it: Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers.

  • Favoritism: Some have complained that a group of residents referred to as the "FIC" (Feted Inner Core) use their connections with Linden Lab staff to trigger policy changes that are beneficial to themselves at the expense of others and that these policies by Linden Lab staff are arbitrary and selective. The phrase "Feted Inner Core" was coined by Second Life resident Prokofy Neva. In addition, users who own large amounts of land (and thus pay larger subscriptions) are generally seen to have greater influence on Linden Lab due to the financial loss in removing them.

  • Linden Lab lawsuit: Linden Lab is currently being sued by attorney Marc Bragg *, claiming Linden Lab defrauded him of $8,000 worth of virtual property.

  • Mac version is just a port of the PC version: The Mac version is just a conversion of the PC version, and thus delivers inferior results because it is not tailored to the platform it is running on. Some people have created petitions, but none are big enough to make Linden Labs make a Mac version to take full use of the resources. While some of the Alpha Builds of the Universal client are available and make better use of the Mac's system, some users have still noticed a difference.

Residents who achieved notoriety through Second Life

Listed alphabetically by first name
  • Ailin and Guntram Graef, entrepreneurs/virtual land speculators, Second Life name: Anshe Chung.
  • Laukosargas Svarog was the subject of an article featured on Slashdot that focused on their work in creating an artificial eco-system for SecondLife *
  • Nathan Keir, known as Kermitt Quirk in Second Life. Developer of the game Tringo. Keir licensed the game to Donnerwood Media, however retains rights to the game inside Second Life.
  • Philip Rosedale, Founder and CEO of Linden Lab, Second Life name: Philip Linden.

Notable people who became Second Life residents

Listed alphabetically by first name Many Second Life users prefer to keep their first life and second life separate. This pseudonymity makes it difficult to determine the identity and number of users who live notable first lives.

In addition, American Apparel opened a branch inside the game selling digital renderings of clothings modeled after real-life merchandise. *.

Second Life as the Metaverse

Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the metaverse described in the novel Snow Crash, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.

External websites such as SL Census allow residents to locate each other from outside of the virtual world, and SLURL allows external links through the Second Life World Map to locatins in-world.

Open standards

Linden Lab is currently replacing several proprietary portions of Second Life with open standards; open-source technologies such as Apache and Squid are already being used. Throughout 2006, the built-in instant messaging system will be replaced with Jabber, and the current proprietary built-in virtual machine will be replaced with Mono Linden Lab is also working on an Open GL port of the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine, called version 1.10.1 of the Second Life client, uBrowser is being used to render the HTML Help feature. The plan is to eventually move everything to open standards and standardize the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, Vice President of Product Development, has stated that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as open source [http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/42" target="_blank" >*.

Second Life protocol

In May 2006 it was revealed that the Second Life protocol had been reverse-engineered. A wiki was set up to further the effort An open-source Second Life library is being worked on [http://sbn.jhurliman.org/wsvn/libsecondlife/trunk/.

The Second Life Protocol Wiki had two tools anonymously donated to them: snowcrash and slice, which quickly furthered the effort. Snowcrash is a tool for decrypting the file comm.dat, which contains a description of the communication protocol. Slice is a tool for dumping the content of Second Life's cache files.

Trivia

  • When objects are created (or instantiated) in-world and then transferred to the user's computer, they are said to "rez"--a reference to the Disney movie Tron. This also appears in the environment's internal scripting language, where the command to create an object is llRezObject().*
  • Linden Lab itself is named after Linden Avenue, the street where the company's first office was opened. Many of the simulators of SL are named after streets or alleys around the San Francisco area; the very first sim of the world to be set up was (and still is) named Da Boom, a combined reference to DeBoom Alley in San Francisco and to the Big Bang.
  • The list of available avatar family names includes a large number of references to Doctor Who, including the names of both characters and actors from the British TV series.
  • The list of available avatar family names also includes many of the most famous 20th century economists.
  • Their was once a infamous criminal player named "TheRoffleCopter Aliev" who scammed people in to giving their residence and or property. "Aliev" started as a blue amoeba like thing with facial features that were quite grotesque. It later evolved in to a kind of 1950's blonde model with enormeous breasts which were used to attract unsuspecting victims.

More trivia can be found at Second Life History Wiki

Competitors

Screenshots

Image:appearance-modify.jpg|Avatar customization in Second Life; over 200 settings to tweak Image:Building-tools.jpg|Building/modifying an object in Second Life with the in-world 3D modeling tools

External links

News coverage

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Second Life".

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