How to define an online metaverse

When tens of thousands of people can gather in a fully 3D environment to buy and sell fanciful clothing, defy gravity by flying, make friends from all over the world, build residential communities, speculate on land prices and create and license software, what do you call it?

For three years, Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, has grappled with that question.

Second Life is one of a very small number of so-called virtual worlds that eschew the traditional medieval fantasy-based roleplaying game play common to such online blockbusters as World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Ultima Online. As such, Linden Lab is loathe to call Second Life a game, despite the accessibility of such a term.

In the beginning, "we did this thing with Second Life where we positioned it like a videogame because it was very easy to" understand, said Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab's CEO. "Today, there's almost a rebellion against that. The breadth of use you see today speaks to the fact that people are trying to use it differently."

But Second Life and its conceptual cousin, There, are patterned more on the infinitely open-ended notion of Neal Stephenson's groundbreaking novel Snow Crash and his creation of the metaverse than on group-based slaying of monsters. So defining exactly what genre the two titles belong to can be a challenge.

With that in mind, Linden Lab convened some of the leading thinkers about virtual worlds for a round table discussion in New York on Thursday and tried to tackle precisely that question: what is Second Life?

To those gathered for the third annual State of Play conference -- a mix of lawyers, academics, consultants, journalists and others -- the question revolved around the dynamic that Second Life has become something akin to a platform, an operating system and a browser all rolled into one.

"What do we want to call this space?" asked Julian Dibbell, a writer for Wired magazine and the round table's moderator. "Is it a virtual world, or has that been played out? Or do we just want to call it the metaverse?"

A matter of trust
Several attendees pointed to the trust factor in Second Life as an element of its identity. Wagner James Au, who is paid by Linden Lab to be Second Life's embedded reporter, explained that not long ago, residents began collecting money to be given to Red Cross Katrina funds. The key, he explained, was the trust between members and the user who organised the fund-raising, as all the funds went initially into his bank account.

Dibbell, who had at one time been earning a significant amount of money trading the weapons, clothing and armour of the online game Ultima Online, agreed, relating how he had once allowed a fellow UO player he didn't know very well to use his in-world house to store virtual goods with tangible value.

"There was real trust developed with the UO... guy," Dibbell recalled. "There was bonding because he was entrusting stuff to me with real market value."

Eventually, Dibbell turned the conversation toward the economies of virtual worlds like Second Life. He explained that in the early days of persistent worlds, when they were two-dimensional experiences, there was no such thing as a developed virtual-world economy with virtual items carrying real-world value.

"And then came massively multiplayer online role-playing games with their huge size and their incredibly directed framework for activity," he said. "That seemed to almost naturally generate these rich economies, which then spun out into the real world."