Second Life: Is There Any There There?

After a week's sojourn, our virtual traveler isn't so sure.

Until recently, I thought “second life” referred to one of those places the Bible says we’ll go after we depart this life.

Now I know it’s a virtual place, a vast collection of electrons on computers all over the world and, more to the point, a state of mind and a place for adventure, romance, business and just plain fun for millions of users.

My editor made me do it. I never would have given Second Life (SL) a second look had she not asked me to write a story about it. I considered myself too old and too serious to dive into something I imagined was designed for twentysomethings looking for virtual sex.

I had two fears. One was that in SL I would be persuaded to reveal — maybe even invent — secrets about myself that would horrify my neighbors, jeopardize my marriage and cost me my job.

My second fear was that I’d get utterly consumed by the experience. I’m already at the ragged edge of addiction to e-mail and ordinary Web surfing, and I didn’t want to find myself up at 3 a.m. navigating my avatar through cyberspace.

So I posed that time-worn question to my editor: Where’s the corporate IT angle in this? Wouldn’t she rather I wrote a story like “How to Replace Windows with Linux on 1,000 Servers Without Breaking a Sweat,” or “The Top 10 Ways to Sort a VSAM File”?

But Bill Gates and others have appeared at respectable IT conferences via Second Life, and HP has conducted job interviews in its virtual offices, so there must be something there, she said. Just do it, and we’ll figure out the angles later.

MONDAY: Square One

So I did it. I started with some background reading. Yes, there is virtual sex in SL, I learned, but that’s not the main point for most users. And I was shocked to learn that you can, and many people do, spend real money in SL.

When I went to Secondlife.com, the type was so small I couldn’t read it without enlarging it two times in Firefox. So it was designed for twentysomethings, after all!

I signed up and downloaded the client software. I declined to use my non-virtual credit card to buy the virtual currency called Linden dollars (after SL’s creator, Linden Research Inc.) , and I declined to buy a headset and mike, which is what you need if you want to talk to your fellow residents rather than type to them.

I was presented a longish list of last names from which to choose. You can then pick any first name, so I became Icon Silverspar. I was assigned a plain vanilla avatar by default, based on gender, but apparently nearly everyone but me changes theirs.

Newbies are required to start out doing four simple tutorial exercises in a place called Orientation Island. Well, three were simple and one was impossible. I finally had to call a colleague for assistance, which I hated to do.

I spent a lot of time stuck on this beginning step, and it was quite frustrating — a little like trying to get Microsoft Word to stop doing those annoying autoformatting things.

But even at this beginning stage, I had my first emotional experience in the virtual world. The pretty young female Asian avatar of a woman who said she was Chinese stopped to say hello. We exchanged a few pleasantries until my (real) telephone rang. When I came back to my PC five minutes later, she had shouted, in apparent frustration, “PLEASE TALK TO ME!” I apologized, and I meant it, but by then, she had walked away.

I had inadvertently dissed this nice woman — or at least I think she was a woman — and I felt bad about it. But it was a good reminder of something that I guess I knew but had not really thought about: Behind the two-dimensional avatars on my screen were real human beings.

TUESDAY: Square 1.01

My colleague couldn’t help me with the tutorial. “Second Life’s user interface sucks sometimes,” he explained, not to my surprise, and he advised me to just move on. I decided to quit trying so hard to learn how to do everything and just chat with the people I met. Maybe they could teach me things.

I moved rather easily from Orientation Island to Help Island, where I found no help and from which I could not escape. I ran into a fellow newbie there, and I asked her if she knew how I could get to a more interesting place, like a big city.

She said she had read somewhere that newbies had to wait for “greeters” to take them off the island. She was waiting for a greeter, and I was welcome to wait with her. We waited, but nothing happened. I logged off and immediately ordered “A Beginner’s Guide to Second Life” from Amazon.com, paying extra for one-day shipping.

WEDNESDAY: Dawn

Advice to readers: Buy a book on SL or get some tutoring from an experienced user. With the help of the book and sheer persistence, I painfully — but, it must be said, with some fun — guided my avatar down the learning curve. I discovered how to get from place to place (yes, you can fly in SL), how to change my appearance (most residents of SL, both men and women, are young and gorgeous), how to search for things, how to read maps and so on.

But now that I had mastered the basics and had overcome much of my initial frustration, some important questions moved from the back burner to the front of the stove: Just why am I here, and what will I do here? What are my definitions of “success” or “happiness” in SL, and how will I find them?

Knowing my editor would ask me about practical IT applications, I sought out a virtual island owned by IBM. To get an idea of how exciting this place is, imagine a 1950s-era IBMer in a starched white shirt and tie with a “THINK” sign hanging on his wall.

I walked into a huge, round auditorium called IBM Theatre I. The seats were all empty, and the stage was bare save for a big white board with some semi-interesting techno-items written on it, each followed by an ordinary Web address. Problem was, the addresses were grayed out, and when I clicked on them, nothing happened. Advice to vendors: If you are going to play this game, make sure it works.

The IBM auditorium was deserted.

Undaunted, I made my way to a Sears store, where I found crude images of Sears appliances. It was possible to click on them and go to Sears’ regular Web site. Wow! And it was possible to get and save a “card” with appliance product specs written on it in plain text. Double wow! I saw no other visitors at the IBM or Sears sites.

THURSDAY: Deja Vu

While booting up, I remembered buying the pioneering PC game King’s Quest for my daughter in 1987. It ran under DOS, and of course my PC had no mouse, so we had to navigate Sir Graham by tedious and clumsy taps on the four arrow keys. Now, 20 years later, SL is barely better. The images are still crude and flat, and the arrow keys no easier to use.

There’s a reason for that. There are usually tens of thousands of users on SL at any given time, and Linden’s servers deliver a dynamic and unique view to each one. (Although some of it does come from the local client software and images.)

Rendering 3-D images realistically in real time is incredibly compute- and bandwidth-intensive, more than we have a right to expect from SL. Still, scenes download painfully slowly, often taking more than a minute on my PC, a high-end, dual-core model that has 3GB of memory and is attached to the Internet at 15Mbit/sec. I worried about the life of my disk, which made little I/O noises nonstop whenever I was logged on.

FRIDAY: Looking for Commerce

I returned to IBM’s main island determined to find an IBMer who could answer some questions. I didn’t find such a person, but I had a long chat with a well-dressed wolf who said he was from FurNation. He said he was only there to use the public “sandbox,” which is provided by IBM, to build things. There are a number of such sandboxes in SL, where residents can go and unpack the bits and pieces in their “inventories” and then work to assemble them into useful objects, such as furniture, vehicles or fashion accessories.

I told him I was trying to find out if companies in SL made any money. Virtual companies make real money, he said, “selling furry avatars, sexual bits, weapons and the like,” while real companies like IBM only advertise and recruit. The wolf was not applying for a job at IBM, it seemed, but he thanked IBM for providing the sandbox. I asked if I might photograph him in front of it, but he refused.

The wolf wasn’t camera-shy, just IBM-shy.

Still fretting about bandwidth, I traveled next to the Cisco Virtual Campus and walked into the Cisco Training Center. A sign indicated that it was for use only by Cisco partners and employees, which raises the question of why it’s on the public Internet and not on a Cisco intranet.

In any case, I found neither partners nor employees in any of the training rooms, and no books, computers or training materials of any kind. Never had it seemed so reasonable to ask if there really was a there there.

SATURDAY: Looking for Romance

I can’t share all the details with you. Suffice it to say I found two choices. I could go to some more or less respectable place and approach some more or less respectable-looking women and chat them up. I did that. Some just walked away, and some made polite small talk and then walked away. I think one problem was I had not taken the time to tweak my appearance, so I still looked like a boring nerdy newbie — no tattoos, no jewelry, no big muscles, no flashy, body-defining clothes.

The other choice was to go to some raunchy place devoted to orgies and just join in. I didn’t do that. OK, I went to some but I didn’t join in. That wouldn’t have been “romance,” would it?

SUNDAY: Reflection

To say I tried everything in SL would be almost as ludicrous as saying I have tried everything in my first life. Readers who are experienced SLers will argue that if I had only done this or tried that, or joined such and such a group, I would have seen the magic in this virtual world — which, after all, has attracted 10 million registered users. Perhaps. But I can only report the disappointments as I encountered them, as seen by a real person during a short sojourn in a virtual world.

The user interface is slow, clunky and primitive, at least compared with what’s available in the best computer games today. Graphics are flat and poorly nuanced, and image downloads would try the patience of Job. But perhaps my biggest disappointment, since I write for corporate IT managers, is that the corporate presence in SL is so tentative and rudimentary, in most ways inferior to the companies’ own Web sites.

To be fair, most of these companies are experimenting, and their islands in SL are nascent works in progress. But I will now reveal to these companies what they need to do, so they can then buy huge numbers of Linden dollars with the real dollars they save on focus groups.

Each major company location in SL should be staffed with a real person, at least during business hours. If some friendly and attractive avatar at the Cisco center had approached me and said, “Yes, sir, how may I help you?” and then had given me useful answers to my typed in questions about training, employment opportunities or products, I would have fallen out of my chair with amazement and delight.

Yes, I know that would cost serious bucks. One or more real people would have to be paid real dollars to do that. But if a company can’t make its virtual experience substantially better — and I mean really head-and-shoulders better — than its existing Web capabilities, it might as well not bother.

Because my wolf friend isn’t going to buy an IBM computer because he spotted it through the window while playing in the IBM sandbox. The IBM island must be a destination deliberately sought out by people with an interest in IBM, with the knowledge that they will have a really cool virtual experience there while being treated like a real human by a real human.

So will I return to SL? I probably will one day. But first I have to knock out that Windows/Linux story.

Gary Anthes is a national correspondent at Computerworld.

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