Get a (Second) Life
By ANDREW CHLDERS, Staff Writer
Virtual world a growing fascination for many. (Published October 15, 2006, The Capital, Annapolis, Md. Copyright © 2006)
Bud Sparhawk of Annapolis, a Nebula Award-nominated science fiction writer, travels the virtual world of Second Life, a three dimensional computer universe, as Budka Groshomme.
Bud Sparhawk gets paid to let his imagination run free, but sometimes even Nebula Award-nominated authors need some help visualizing their wildest dreams. Needing to get his head around a spacecraft he was attempting to describe, the Annapolis science fiction writer leaped into Second Life to give digital life to his daydreams. "I went in and walked around and looked at it from different angles," he said. It's a marriage made in geek heaven - a science fiction author and Second Life, a virtual, 3-D universe where participants can adopt new personas and purchase and develop property, known as sims.
Mr. Sparhawk, known as Budka Groshomme in-game, decided his first life was not enough two years ago when his son tipped him off to the world of Second Life, a creation of San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The user-created universe hooked him from his first trip. "Gosh, this is really interesting," he remembers thinking during that first visit. "Where the hell did the four hours go?"
In a world increasingly without frontiers, Second Life has become terra nova for a digital generation. There, imagination is the limit. Unbound by terrestrial limitations, the Second Life universe will infinitely expand - given enough processing power - with users free to create whatever they choose. "People are buying islands - whole islands," Mr. Sparhawk said. "When I first got there the mainland was just one island that kind of looked like Australia and was about as populated." Now more than 660,000 people have signed up for the virtual world, which offers both free accounts for tourists and paid subscriptions for those who want to purchase property and carve out their own slice of digital utopia. Who are you? Bespectacled with a gray buzz cut, Mr. Sparhawk may not come across as the typical Internet geek, but he said he has found older computer lovers are commonplace in Second Life. "A lot of them are retirees," he said. "It isn't the young geeks in there."
Tropes about books and covers apply just as well to Second Lifers and their customizable digital personae, called avatars. "The idea of identity is one that preoccupies everybody in there," said Mr. Sparhawk, who has dabbled in online gender-bending with mixed success and has written articles on thefluidity of identity for the Second Life Herald, a virtual newspaper covering the goings-on of the community with the motto "Always Fairly Unbalanced." Despite an array of avatars and some flirtation with life as a woman, Bud Sparhawk and Budka Groshomme are pretty much the same person.
"No, my base avatar is pretty much me," he said. "I try a different personality with the others, but probably not well. I once tried to act like a woman with my female (avatar), but that was so out of character the person I was talking to saw through it. Guess I'm not made for an acting career."
Virtual economics More than an escape from the drudgery of the real world, Second Life has fostered a booming virtual economy that pays real- life dividends. Participants need to earn Linden dollars - the in-game currency - to purchase property and accoutrements for their avatars, and nearly $351,000 in real-world money was spent in-game on a recent Wednesday.
A writer by trade, Mr. Sparhawk took a job reporting for the Second Life Herald. "I'm a sightseer," he said. "I have no interest in owning a house or a sim, but I am interested in seeing what other people are doing." And wordsmithing is far more lucrative in the virtual world than in real life, he discovered, earning 1,000 Linden dollars for each article he wrote as opposed to the 5 cents per word he estimates his novellas and short stories bring.
Second Life's exchange, converting real world currency into Linden dollars and back, has meant some ambitious entrepreneurs have been able to carve out livings for themselves. Despite being a wholly fictitious currency, Linden dollars have developed their own exchange rates with other national currencies. "It helps to think about what makes the dollars in your pocket have value. If you take them out of your pocket, they're just paper," said Dr. Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and author of "Synthetic Worlds, The Business and Culture of Online Games." "It only has value because people say it has value. You can't eat them." And just like in first life, Second Lifers will pay well for prime real estate and the latest fashions. At his peak in the early days of Second Life in 2003, Chip Matthews of Germantown was able to bring in $2,000 a month designing avatar "skins"- custom body designs for players. But with an increasingly crowded market, these days he takes in about half of that monthly. "It's kind of turned into a nice little second income," said Mr. Matthews, a computer animator who has risen to Second Life prominence as an in-game designer. Social experiment Not just a freemarketeer's utopia, social interactions - beyond a few warnings from Linden Labs about harassing fellow Second Lifers - also are largely unchecked, allowing participants to define their own roles in the virtual culture.
"It's kind of interesting," Mr. Sparhawk said. "There's no government. It's anarchy, as if the geeks inherited the world." Where government fits into a virtual universe is an ongoing debate in Second Life, said Mr. Sparhawk, who has toured islands where groups have experimented with every form of social organization from slavery to communism. However, real-life government is also intruding into the virtual utopia. Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, teasing a possible Democratic presidential bid in 2008, became the first politician to virtually campaign in Second Life on Aug. 31. "The challenge was to keep his avatar dignified," said Susan Qualls, spokesman for the Forward Together political action committee, which Mr. Warner chairs. Dressed in a navy sport coat and obligatory red politician tie, Mr. Warner's avatar flew onto the stage for the interview and promises to hold more town hall meetings in the future. In the not-to-distant future virtual campaign workers could be handing out e-fliers to prospective voters, and roadside campaign signs could become just as commonplace in-game as out.
From politics to property, Second Life is evolving to mirror real society. Just because a property only exists on a company's server in San Francisco does not devalue it, according to Dr. Castronova. "The fact that something only lives in a digital world doesn't affect its potential value," he said. "Things are valuable even though they're not tangible."