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Wikipedia

Second Life

January 26, 2023

This article is about the virtual community. For other uses, see Second Life (disambiguation).

Second Life is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003, it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users.[1] Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017 the active user count had declined to "between 800,000 and 900,000".[2] In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective".[3]

Second Life Viewer
Developer(s)Linden Lab
Initial releaseJune 23, 2003; 19 years ago (2003-06-23)
Stable release
6.6.7.576223 / November 1, 2022; 2 months ago (2022-11-01)
EngineHavok (physics engine)
Platform
LicenseOpen-source
Websitesecondlife.com 
Second Life Server
Developer(s)Linden Lab
Initial releaseJune 23, 2003; 19 years ago (2003-06-23)
Stable release
2022-11-11.576542 / November 11, 2022; 2 months ago (2022-11-11)
PlatformLinux
LicenseProprietary
Websitesecondlife.com 

The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab's own client software or via alternative third-party viewers.[4][5] Second Life users, also called 'residents', create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, and are able to interact with places, objects and other avatars. They can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, and trade virtual property and services with one another.

The platform principally features 3D-based user-generated content. Second Life also has its own virtual currency, the Linden Dollar (L$), which is exchangeable with real world currency.[6][7]

Second Life is intended for people ages 16 and over, with the exception of 13–15-year-old users, who are restricted to the Second Life region of a sponsoring institution (e.g., a school).[8][9]

History

 
Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life

Philip Rosedale formed Linden Lab in 1999 with the intention of developing computer hardware to allow people to become immersed in a virtual world. In its earliest form, the company struggled to produce a commercial version of the hardware, known as "The Rig", which in prototype form was seen as a clunky steel contraption with computer monitors worn on shoulders.[10] That vision changed into the software application Linden World, in which people participated in task-based games and socializing in a three-dimensional online environment.[11] That effort eventually transformed into the better known, user-centered Second Life.[12] Although he was familiar with the metaverse of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, Rosedale has said that his vision of virtual worlds predates that book, and that he conducted early virtual world experiments during his college years at the University of California, San Diego, where he studied physics.[13]

Second Life began to receive significant media attention in 2005 and 2006, including a cover story in BusinessWeek magazine featuring the virtual world and Second Life avatar Anshe Chung.[14] By that time, Anshe Chung had become Second Life's poster child and symbol for the economic opportunities that the virtual world offers to its residents. At the same time, the service saw a period of exponential growth of its user base.

One of the principal developers, Cory Ondrejka, was forced to resign as chief technology officer in December 2007, with Rosedale citing irreconcilable differences in the way the company was run.[15] Nevertheless, the platform continued to grow rapidly, and by January 2008, residents spent a total of 28,274,505 hours "inworld" and on average 38,000 residents were logged in at any moment. The maximum concurrency (number of avatars inworld) recorded was set at 88,200 in the first quarter of 2009.[16]

 
Headquarters of Linden Lab creator of Second Life.

Second Life was honored at the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the development of online sites with user-generated content in 2008, adding to the media attention. Rosedale accepted the award.[17] although he had announced plans to step down from his position as Linden Lab CEO and to become chairman of Linden Lab's board of directors instead in March 2008 .[18] Rosedale announced Mark Kingdon as the new CEO effective May 15, 2008.[19] In 2010, Kingdon was replaced by Rosedale, who took over as interim CEO. After four months, Rosedale abruptly stepped down from the Interim CEO position. It was announced in October 2010 that Bob Komin, Linden Lab's chief financial officer and chief operating officer, would take over the CEO job for the immediate future.[20]

With the platform's failure to continue its high rate of growth after 2009, Linden Lab announced layoffs of 30% of its workforce in 2010.[21] Some 21.3 million accounts were registered by this point, although the company did not make public any statistics regarding actual long-term consistent usage and numbers of dormant accounts.[22]

Despite speculation as to the actual size of the user base, Second Life continued as a commercial success. In 2015, Second Life users cashed out approximately $60,000,000 (60 million US dollars) and Second Life had an estimated GDP of $500,000,000 (500 million US dollars), higher than some small countries.[23]

Recognizing improvements in computing power and particularly in computer graphics, Linden Lab began work on a successor to Second Life, a VR experience called Sansar, launching a public beta in July 2017. Uptake was low and Linden Lab halted development in 2020 to focus their attention fully on Second Life. The rights to Sansar's assets were sold to Wookey Search Technologies, who are expected to continue development on the title without Linden Lab.[24] Second Life, the usage of which peaked in the first decade of the 21st century, has been cited as the first example of the metaverse,[25] a concept which has been taken up by other major corporations such as Facebook in 2021. As a notable precursor (which retains a small and loyal following), it provides several examples of virtual reality social issues and lessons learned.[26]

Classification

 
Landscape scenery from The Pilgrim's Dawn located in Second Life

During a 2001 meeting with investors, Rosedale noticed that the participants were particularly responsive to the collaborative, creative potential of Second Life. As a result, the initial objective-driven, gaming focus of Second Life was shifted to a more user-created, community-driven experience.[27]

Second Life's status as a virtual world, a computer game, or a talker, is frequently debated.[who?] Unlike a traditional computer game, Second Life does not have a designated objective, nor traditional game play mechanics or rules. It can also be argued that Second Life is a multi-user virtual world, because its virtual world facilitates interaction between multiple users. As it does not have any stipulated goals, it is irrelevant to talk about winning or losing in relation to Second Life. Likewise, unlike a traditional talker[vague], Second Life contains an extensive world that can be explored and interacted with, and it can be used purely as a creative tool set if the user so chooses. In March 2006, while speaking at Google TechTalks,[28] Rosedale said: "So, we don't see this as a game. We see it as a platform."

Second Life used to offer two main grids: one for adults (18+) and one for teens. In August 2010, Linden Lab closed the teen grid due to operating costs. Since then, users 16 and over can sign up for a free account.[29] Other limited accounts are available for educators who use Second Life with younger students.

There are three activity-based classifications, called "Ratings", for sims in Second Life:

  1. General (formerly "PG"—no extreme violence or nudity)
  2. Moderate (formerly "Mature"—some violence, swearing, adult situations, some nudity)
  3. Adult (may contain overt sexual activity, nudity, and violence)

Residents and avatars

 
Several avatars together

There is no charge for creating a Second Life account or for making use of the world for any period of time. Linden Lab reserves the right to charge for the creation of large numbers of multiple accounts for a single person (5 per household, 2 per 24 hours)[30] but at present does not do so. A Premium membership (US$11.99 monthly, US$32.97 quarterly, or US$99 annually) extends access to an increased level of technical support, and also pays an automatic stipend of L$300/week into the member's avatar account, and after 45 days that resident will receive a L$700 bonus, making it L$1,000 for that week. This amount has decreased since the original stipend of L$500, which is still paid to older accounts. Certain accounts created during an earlier period may receive L$400. This stipend, if changed into USD, means that the actual cost for the benefit of extended tech support for an annual payment of US$72 is only about US$14, depending on the currency exchange rates. However, the vast majority of casual users of Second Life do not upgrade beyond the free "basic" account.

Avatars may take any form users choose (human, animal, vegetable, mineral, or a combination thereof) or residents may choose to resemble themselves as they are in real life.[31] They may choose even more abstract forms, given that almost every aspect of an avatar is fully customizable. Second Life Culture consists of many activities and behaviors that are also present in real life. A single resident account may have only one avatar at a time, although the appearance of this avatar can change between as many different forms as the Resident wishes. Avatar forms, like almost everything else in Second Life, can be either created by the user, or bought pre-made. A single person may also have multiple accounts, and thus appear to be multiple Residents (a person's multiple accounts are referred to as alts).

 
Riding bicycles is just one of many forms of transportation.

Avatars can travel via walking, running, vehicular access, flying, or teleportation. Because Second Life is such a vast virtual world, teleportation is used when avatars wish to travel instantly and efficiently. Once they reach their destination, they may travel in more conventional means at various speeds.

Avatars can communicate via local chat, group chat, global instant messaging (known as IM), and voice (public, private and group). Chatting is used for localized public conversations between two or more avatars, and is visible to any avatar within a given distance. IMs are used for private conversations, either between two avatars, or among the members of a group, or even between objects and avatars. Unlike chatting, IM communication does not depend on the participants being within a certain distance of each other. As of version 1.18.1.2 (2007-Aug-02), voice chat, both local and IM, was also available. Instant messages may optionally be sent to a Resident's email when the Resident is logged off, although message length is limited to 4096 bytes.[32]

Identities in Second Life can relate to the users' personality or creating their own character. It is based on their decisions on how to express themselves. Most avatars are human, but they can choose to be vampires or animals. Sometimes, what they choose does not relate to their offline selves.[33]

In Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff notes that the interface of Second Life is designed with the purpose of disconnecting a player's virtual identity from their physical identity in mind.[34] As of 2015 Second Life has made it possible to display one's legal name in the player's profile or as their screen name, but when Boellstorff first published the book in 2008 users were required to select a last name from a pre-determined list of options. Boellstorff describes this mentality as being in direct contrast to the one held by other mainstream social media websites, where anonymity is shunned and users are encouraged to make the link between their online and physical presence clear.

Content

 
Many different clothes created by users can be purchased in the Second Life metaverse.

The ability to create content and shape the Second Life world is one of the key features that separate this from online games. Built into the software is a 3D modeling tool based on simple geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects. There is also a procedural scripting language, Linden Scripting Language, which can be used to add interactivity to objects. Sculpted prims ("sculpties"), 3D mesh, textures for clothing or other objects, animations, and gestures can be created using external software and imported. The Second Life terms of service provide that users retain copyright for any content they create, and the server and client provide simple digital rights management (DRM) functions.[8][35][36] However, Linden Lab changed their terms of service in August 2013 to be able to use user-generated content for any purpose.[37] The new terms of service prevent users from using textures from third-party texture services, as some of them pointed out explicitly.[38]

Economy

Main article: Economy of Second Life
 
An avatar in the virtual world Second Life
 
User-generated content in the virtual world Second Life

Second Life has an internal economy and closed-loop virtual token called the "Linden dollar (L$)". L$ can be used to buy, sell, rent or trade land or goods and services with other users. The "Linden Dollar" is a closed-loop virtual token for use only within the Second Life platform. Linden Dollars have no monetary value and are not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab. A resident with a surplus of Linden Dollars earned via a Second Life business or experiential play can request to refund their Linden Dollar surplus to PayPal. Linden Lab reports that the Second Life economy generated US$3,596,674 in economic activity during the month of September 2005,[39] and in September 2006 Second Life was reported to have a GDP of $64 million.[40] In 2009, the total size of the Second Life economy grew 65% to US$567 million, about 25% of the entire U.S. virtual goods market. Gross resident earnings are US$55 million in 2009 – 11% growth over 2008.[41] In 2013, Linden Labs released an info graphic that showed that over 10 years $3.2 billion in transactions for virtual goods had exchanged between Second Life residents, with an average of 1.2 million daily transactions.[42]

There is a high level of entrepreneurial activity in Second Life. Residents of Second Life are able to create virtual objects and other content. Second Life is unique in that users retain all the rights to their content which means they can use Second Life to distribute and sell their creations, with 2.1 million items listed on its online marketplace.[42] At its height circa 2006, hundreds of thousands of dollars were changing hands daily as residents created and sold a wide variety of virtual commodities. Second Life also quickly became profitable due to the selling and renting of virtual real estate. 2006 also saw Second Life's first real-world millionaire; Ailin Graef, better known as Anshe Chung (her avatar), converted an initial investment of US$9.95 into over one million dollars over the course of two and a half years. She built her fortune primarily by buying, selling, and renting virtual real estate.[43]

Major tech corporations have tried to use Second Life to market products or services to Second Life's tech-savvy audience. IBM, for example, purchased 12 islands within Second Life for virtual training and simulations of key business processes, but has since moved on to other platforms due to maintaining costs.[44][45] Others, like musicians, podcasters, and news organizations (including CNET, Reuters, NPR's The Infinite Mind, and the BBC) have all had a presence within Second Life.[46]

 
Car cruising near an airport.

Virtual goods include buildings, vehicles, devices of all kinds, animations, clothing, skin, hair, jewelry, flora and fauna, and works of art. Services include business management, entertainment, and custom content creation (which can be broken up into the following six categories: building, texturing, scripting, animating, art direction, and the position of producer/project funder). L$ can be purchased using US dollars and other local currencies on the LindeX exchange provided by Linden Lab. Customer USD wallets obtained from Linden Dollar sales on the Lindex are most commonly used to pay Second Life's own subscription and tier fees; only a relatively small number of users earn enough profit to request a refund to PayPal. According to figures published by Linden Lab, about 64,000 users made a profit in Second Life in February 2009, of whom 38,524 made less than US$10, while 233 made more than US$5000.[47] Profits are derived from selling virtual goods, renting land, and a broad range of services.

Technology

 
Male avatar in Desert Wilderness.

Second Life comprises the viewer (also known as the client) executing on the user's personal computer, and several thousand servers operated by Linden Lab.

Client

Linden Lab provides official viewers for the operating systems Windows, macOS, and most distributions of Linux where the more known ChromeOS has been excluded so far. The viewer renders 3D graphics using OpenGL technology. The viewer source code was released under the GPL in 2007[48][49] and moved to the LGPL in 2010.[50]

There are now several mature third party viewer projects, like Firestorm as the most popular one, that contain features not available in the Linden Lab 'Official' client, target other platforms or cater to specialist & accessibility needs.[51] The main focus of third party development is exploring new ideas and working with Linden Lab to deliver new functionality.[52]

An independent project, libopenmetaverse,[53] offers a function library for interacting with Second Life servers. libopenmetaverse has been used to create non-graphic third party viewers.

There are several Alternate Viewers published by Linden Lab used for software testing by volunteers for early access to upcoming projects.[54] Some of these clients only function on the "beta grid" consisting of a limited number of regions running various releases of unstable test server code.

Server

 
Winter landscape in Second Life.

Each full region (an area of 256×256 meters) in the Second Life "grid" runs on a single dedicated core of a multi-core server. Homestead regions share 3 regions per core and Openspace Regions share 4 regions per core, running proprietary software on Debian Linux. These servers run scripts in the region, as well as providing communication between avatars and objects present in the region.

Every item in the Second Life universe is referred to as an asset. This includes the shapes of basic 3D polygon objects formally known as Primitive Mesh (commonly known as primitives or prims for short), the digital images referred to as textures that decorate primitives, digitized audio clips, avatar shape and appearance, avatar skin textures, LSL scripts, information written on notecards, and so on. Each asset is referenced with a universally unique identifier or UUID.[55]

Assets are stored on Isilon Systems storage clusters,[56] comprising all data that has ever been created by anyone who has been in the Second Life world. Infrequently used assets are offloaded to S3 bulk storage.[57] As of December 2007, the total storage was estimated to consume 100 terabytes of server capacity.[58] The asset servers function independently of the region simulators, though the region simulators act as a proxy for the client, request object data from the asset servers when a new object loads into the simulator.[59] Region simulators areas are commonly known as sims by residents.

Each server instance runs a physics simulation to manage the collisions and interactions of all objects in that region. Objects can be nonphysical and non-moving, or actively physical and movable. Complex shapes may be linked together in groups of up to 256 separate primitives. Additionally, each player's avatar is treated as a physical object so that it may interact with physical objects in the world. As of 9 July 2014, Second Life simulators use the Havok 2011.2 physics engine for all in-world dynamics.[60] This engine is capable of simulating thousands of physical objects at once.[61]

Linden Lab pursues the use of open standards technologies, and uses free and open source software such as Apache, MySQL, Squid and Linux.[62] The plan is to move everything to open standards by standardizing the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, former CTO[63] of Second Life, stated in 2006 that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as free and open source software.[64]

In January 2021, Linden Labs completed the migration of all of its services and databases to AWS servers.[65]

OpenSimulator

Main article: OpenSimulator

In January 2007, OpenSimulator was founded as an open-source simulator project. The aim of this project is to develop a full open-source server software for Second Life clients. OpenSIM is BSD Licensed and it is written in C# and can run under Mono environment. From 2008, alternative grids began to emerge and many of these allow cross visits from other grids through the hypergrid protocol[66] using OpenSimulator.

Applications

Arts

Main article: Arts in Second Life
 
Virtual concert in Second Life.

Second Life residents express themselves creatively through virtual world adaptations of art exhibits, live music,[67] live theater[68] and machinima,[69] as well as other art forms.

Competitive entertainment

A wide variety of recreational activities, both competitive and non-competitive, take place on the Second Life Grid, including both traditional sports[70] and video game-like scenarios.[71]

Education

Main article: Education in Second Life
 
Demonstrating Second Life for audience in Brisbane.

Second Life is used as a platform for education by many institutions, such as colleges, universities, libraries and government entities. Since 2008, the University of San Martin de Porres of Peru[72] has been developing Second Life prototypes of Peruvian archeological buildings, and training teachers for this new paradigm of education. The West Virginia University (WVU) Department of Special Education has used Second Life widely in education, and it provided teaching certification and certificates of degree in seven different distance education programs.[73] WVU started a pilot program in the college's computer lab in spring 2011.

Embassies

 
The Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Poland located virtually in Second Life.

The Maldives was the first country to open an embassy in Second Life.[74][75] The Maldives' embassy is located on Second Life's "Diplomacy Island", where visitors will be able to talk face-to-face with a computer-generated ambassador about visas, trade and other issues. "Diplomacy Island" also hosts Diplomatic Museum and Diplomatic Academy. The Island is established by DiploFoundation as part of the Virtual Diplomacy Project.[76]

In May 2007,[77] Sweden became the second country to open an embassy in Second Life. Run by the Swedish Institute, the embassy serves to promote Sweden's image and culture, rather than providing any real or virtual services.[78] The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, stated on his blog that he hoped he would get an invitation to the grand opening.[79]

In September 2007, Publicis Group announced the project of creating a Serbia island as a part of a project Serbia Under Construction. The project is officially supported by Ministry of Diaspora of Serbian Government. It was stated that the island will feature the Nikola Tesla Museum, the Guča Trumpet Festival and the Exit Festival.[80] It was also planned on opening a virtual info terminals of Ministry of Diaspora.[81]

On Tuesday December 4, 2007, Estonia became the third country to open an embassy in Second Life.[82][83] In September 2007, Colombia and Serbia opened embassies.[84] As of 2008, North Macedonia and the Philippines have opened embassies in the "Diplomatic Island" of Second Life.[85] In 2008, Albania opened an embassy in the Nova Bay location. SL Israel was inaugurated in January 2008 in an effort to showcase Israel to a global audience, though without any connection to official Israeli diplomatic channels.[86] In 2008 Malta opened an embassy on Second Life.[87]

Religion

 
The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life.

Religious organizations have also begun to open virtual meeting places within Second Life. In early 2007, LifeChurch.tv, a Christian church headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma, and with eleven campuses in the US, created "Experience Island" and opened its twelfth campus in Second Life.[88] In July 2007, an Anglican cathedral[89] was established in Second Life; Mark Brown, the head of the group that built the cathedral, noted that there is "an interest in what I call depth, and a moving away from light, fluffy Christianity".[90]

The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Second Life was established in 2006. Services have been held regularly, making the FUUCSL Congregation one of the longest-running active congregations in Second Life.[91]

The Egyptian-owned news website Islam Online has purchased land in Second Life to allow Muslims and non-Muslims alike to perform the ritual of Hajj in virtual reality form, obtaining experience before actually making the pilgrimage to Mecca in person.[92]

Second Life also offers several groups that cater to the needs and interests of humanists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers. One of the most active groups is SL Humanism which has been holding weekly discussion meetings inside Second Life every Sunday since 2006.[93]

Relationships

Romantic relationships are common in Second Life, including some couples who have married online.[94] The social engagement offered by the online environment helps those who might be socially isolated. In addition, sex is often encountered.[95] However, to access the adult sections requires age verification.[96] There are also large BDSM and Gorean communities.[97][98]

Second Life relationships have been taken from virtual online relationships into personal, real-world relationships. Booperkit Moseley and Shukran Fahid were possibly the first couple to meet in Second Life and then marry in real life. Booperkit travelled to the United States to meet Shukran and he returned to England with her after one week. They married in 2006, had twin boys in 2009, and are still married. Some couples meet online, form friendships, and eventually move to finding one another in the real world.[99] Some even have their weddings on Second Life, as well as in a real-world setting.[100]

 

Relationships in virtual worlds have an added dimension compared to other social media, because avatars give a feeling of proximity making the voyeur experience more intense than simply a textual encounter. The complexities of those encounters depend on the engagement levels of the people behind the avatars, whether they are engaging disassociatively (entertainment only), immersively (as if the avatar was them), or augmentatively (meaning they engage for a real-life purpose).[101]

Science

Second Life is used for scientific research, collaboration, and data visualization.[102] Examples include SciLands, American Chemical Society's ACS Island, Genome, Virginia Tech's SLATE, and Nature Publishing Group's Elucian Islands Village.

Social network

Second Life can be a real-time, immersive social space for people including those with physical or mental disabilities that impair their first lives, who often find comfort and security interacting through anonymous avatars. (Indeed, some academics believe using Second Life might even help improve motor ability for people with Parkinson’s disease.).[103] An example of how Second Life has been used by disabled people is Wheelies, the widely publicised disability themed nightclub founded by Simon Stevens.

Music streams

ShoutCast and Icecast Internet radio stations can be streamed into a land parcel in Second Life. Streaming codecs are currently MP3 as AAC and OGG are not currently supported. There are internet radio providers that offer these services or select from a list compiled by Lindal Kidd and is updated whenever by whoever as there's no officiant for it. At the time of this writing, media on a prim (MOAP) is not a reliable enough way of displaying media and such, sites listed work best with Parcel Media or Parcel Audio.

Work spaces

 
Fashion For Change fashion show held in Second Life in 2015.

Second Life gives companies the option to create virtual workplaces to allow employees to virtually meet, hold events, practice any kind of corporate communications, conduct training sessions in 3D immersive virtual learning environment, simulate business processes, and prototype new products.

In 2020, CEO of Second Life Ebbe Altberg announced a microsite for Second Life to serve as a space for digital meetings to take place amidst global social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.[104]

Notable events and influence

Ban of Woodbury University

 
The controversial campus of Woodbury University's School of Media, Culture and Design, which was deleted in 2010 by Linden Lab

Linden Lab has twice, in 2007 and 2010, banned a California educational institution, Woodbury University, from having a representation within Second Life. On April 20, 2010, four simulators belonging to the university were deleted and the accounts of several students and professors terminated, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Edward Clift, dean of the School of Media, Culture and Design at Woodbury University, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that their campus "was a living, breathing campus in Second Life", including educational spaces designed mostly by students, such as a mock representation of the former Soviet Union and a replica of the Berlin Wall. According to Clift, the virtual campus did not "conform to what Linden Lab wanted a campus to be".[105][106][107]

The article in The Chronicle of Higher Education concluded with: "Meanwhile, many people in Second Life expressed on blogs that they were glad to see the virtual campus go, arguing that it had been a haven for troublemakers in the virtual world."[106]

The Alphaville Herald

Main article: The Alphaville Herald

In 2004, the newspaper The Alphaville Herald, founded and edited by the philosopher Peter Ludlow, migrated to Second Life, and in the following years the newspaper played a prominent role in reporting on Second Life and in the public discussion of the game.[108] The newspaper, which was known as The Second Life Herald from 2004 to 2009, was later edited by the Internet pioneer Mark P. McCahill. According to scholars Constantinescu and Decu, The Alphaville Herald was the first "virtual free press," pioneering mass communication in virtual worlds.[109]

2007 "Virtual Riot"

In January 2007, a "virtual riot" erupted between members of the French National Front (FN) who had established a virtual HQ on Second Life, and "anti-racism" activists, including Second Life Left Unity, a socialist and anti-capitalist user-group.[110][111][112][113] Since then, several small Internet-based organizations have claimed some responsibility for instigating the riots.[114]

Marketing

Corporate marketers, especially during the height of Second Life in the cultural zeitgeist of 2005–2010, have been accused of being overly credulous of the actual reach and influence of Second Life. Journalists have theorized this might be partially due to blithely accepting total account statistics rather than harder-to-discern active player counts. Reasons for account "inflation" can include in-world systems which encourage the creation of bogus extra accounts such as "traffic bots" which simply remain stationary in a store, causing the system to rank the store as popular because there are people there, as well as simply idle and long inactive accounts.[115][116] One article in Wired featured a marketer for Coca-Cola who found Second Life to be essentially deserted when personally inspecting it, yet still funded a marketing campaign there anyway from fear of missing out.[117][118]

Griefing and denial of service attacks

See also: Griefer

Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that harass other users or damage the system. This included grey goo objects which infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers;[119] orbiters which throw an avatar so far upwards they cannot get back down in a reasonable timeframe without teleporting; cages which surround avatars, preventing them from moving, and similar tools. Although combat between users is sanctioned in certain areas of the world, these objects have been used to cause disruption in all areas. Attacks on the grid itself, such as Grey Goo, are strictly forbidden anywhere on the grid. It was possible to perpetrate denial-of-service attacks (DoS) on other users simply by scripting objects that spew screen filling characters from anywhere on the grid to another avatar's location, thereby disabling a clear view to the virtual world. Bugs in the client and server software were also exploited by griefers to kick users, crash servers, and revert content before being patched out.[120]

The Emerald client and in-world logging scripts

The Emerald client was developed by a group of users based on Snowglobe, an opensource fork of the Second Life client. Several groups alleged that the Emerald viewer contained Trojan code which tracked user details and demographics in a way that the developers could later recover. One of these groups was banned from Second Life by Linden Lab after publishing their discovery.[121] Shortly afterward, a member of the Emerald team was accused of a DDOS attack against another website. In response, Linden Lab revoked Emerald's third-party viewer approval and permanently banned several of Emerald's developers.[122] Due to what happened with Emerald, Linden Lab instituted a new third-party viewer policy.[123][124]

The support staff and one of the developers of the Emerald project, who was not banned, left to work on a new viewer project, Phoenix (using some of the Emerald codebase, but without Off-the-Record Messaging nor any potentially malicious code).[125] The Phoenix team are now the developers behind Firestorm Viewer, a fork of Second Life's "viewer 2.0" open source client.[126]

Criticism and controversy

Second Life has seen a number of controversies, as well. Issues range from the technical (budgeting of server resources), to moral (pornography), to legal (legal position of the Linden Dollar, Bragg v. Linden Lab). Security issues have also been a concern.

Regulation

In the past, large portions of the Second Life economy consisted of businesses that are regulated or banned. Changes to Second Life's terms of service in this regard have largely had the purpose of bringing activity within Second Life into compliance with various international laws, even though the person running the business may be in full compliance with the law in their own country.

On July 26, 2007, Linden Lab announced a ban on in-world gambling due to federal and state regulations on Internet gambling that could affect Linden Lab if it was permitted to continue. The ban was immediately met with in-world protests.[127]

In August 2007, a $750,000 in-world Linden Dollar bank or Ponzi scheme called Ginko Financial collapsed due to a bank run triggered by Linden Lab's ban on gambling.[128] The aftershocks of this collapse caused severe liquidity problems for other virtual "Linden Dollar banks", which critics had long asserted were scams. On Tuesday, January 8, 2008, Linden Lab announced the upcoming prohibition of payment of fixed interest on cash deposits in unregulated banking activities in-world.[129] All banks without real-world charters closed or converted to virtual joint stock companies by January 22, 2008.[130] After the ban, a few companies continue to offer non-interest bearing deposit accounts to residents, such as the e-commerce site XStreet, which had already adopted a zero-interest policy 3 months before the Linden Lab interest ban.

Technical issues

 
Canoeing through the virtual world.

Second Life has suffered from difficulties related to system instability. These include increased system latency, and intermittent client crashes. However, some faults are caused by the system's use of an "asset server" cluster, on which the actual data governing objects is stored separately from the areas of the world and the avatars that use those objects. The communication between the main servers and the asset cluster appears to constitute a bottleneck which frequently causes problems.[131][132][133] Typically, when asset server downtime is announced, users are advised not to build, manipulate objects, or engage in business, leaving them with little to do but chat and generally reducing confidence in all businesses on the grid.

Another problem is inventory loss,[134][135][136] in which items in a user's inventory, including those which have been paid for, can disappear without warning or permanently enter a state where they will fail to appear in-world when requested (giving an "object missing from database" error). Linden Lab offers no compensation for items that are lost in this way, although a policy change instituted in 2008 allows accounts to file support tickets when inventory loss occurs. Many in-world businesses will attempt to compensate for this or restore items, although they are under no obligation to do so and not all are able to do so. A recent change in how the company handles items which have "lost their parent directory" means that inventory loss is much less of a problem and resolves faster than in recent years. "Loss to recovery times" have gone from months (or never) to hours or a day or two for the majority of users, but inventory loss does still exist.

Second Life functions by streaming all data to the user live over the Internet with minimal local caching of frequently used data. The user is expected to have a minimum of 300kbit/s of Internet bandwidth for basic functionality. Due to the proprietary communications protocols, it is not possible to use a network proxy service to reduce network load when many people are all using the same location, such as when used for group activities in a school or business.

Quality assurance

Criticism of quality assurance of Second Life states that Linden Lab focuses too much on bringing new features to the production environment instead of fixing long-standing bugs that, in the worst case, cause financial loss for the users. On April 30, 2007, an open letter signed by over 3,000[137] users was sent to Linden Lab to protest the quality assurance process of the company.[138] Linden Lab has responded to the open letter.[139]

Frame rate

Computer hardware and Internet connections capable of smoothly rendering high quality content in other MMOGs may perform poorly in Second Life, resulting in low frame rates and unresponsive controls on even minimal graphical configurations. The problem is especially prevalent when large numbers of avatars congregate in one area. The problem is largely due to the fact that the world is entirely user created, and the majority of content created by users is made without any sort of basic graphical optimization. As a result, objects with both unnecessarily high polygon counts, and unnecessarily high resolution textures are prevalent. It is not uncommon for users to have to download and use upwards of a dozen times the amount of resources than would actually be required for the equivalent visual result. Certain areas have guidelines for script usage, which helps reduce lag by reducing resources used server-side, but does nothing to alleviate the primary issue above.

Congestion

 
Fishing boat in Second Life.

A single region (65,536 m2 of land hosted on a single CPU) is set to accommodate a limited number of Residents (40 on 'mainland' regions, up to 100 on private islands), causing some popular locations such as teleportation points to become inaccessible at times. It is possible for an area of land a Resident has paid for to become inaccessible because another area in the same region has exhausted the avatar limit.

Customer security

On September 8, 2006, Linden Lab released a news bulletin that revealed their Second Life database had been compromised and customer information, including encrypted passwords and users' real names, had likely been accessed.[140][141] However, it was later revealed that the hacker had in fact been focused on trying to cheat the in-world money system[142] and their access to personal information was believed incidental, although a full alert was still raised for safety's sake.

Fraud and intellectual property protection

Although Second Life's client and server incorporate digital rights management technology, the visual data of an object must ultimately be sent to the client in order for it to be drawn; thus unofficial third-party clients can bypass them. One such program, CopyBot, was developed in 2006 as a debugging tool to enable objects to be backed up, but was immediately hijacked for use in copying objects; additionally, programs that generally attack client-side processing of data, such as GLIntercept, can copy certain pieces of data. Such use is prohibited under the Second Life TOS[143] and could be prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Linden Lab may ban a user who is observed using CopyBot or a similar client, but it will not ban a user simply for uploading or even selling copied content; in this case, Linden Lab's enforcement of intellectual property law is limited to that required by the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA which used to require a regular mail DMCA complaint. However, since 2019 an electronic DMCA complaint form is also available.[144]

A few high-profile businesses in Second Life have filed such lawsuits,[145][146][147][148][149][excessive citations] none of the cases filed to date have gone to trial, and most have been dismissed pursuant to a settlement agreement reached between the parties.[150][151][152] Another case where settlement and dismissal was gained may be found in the matter of Eros, LLC v. Linden Research, Inc. As of October 7, 2010, the case was transferred to private mediation and the plaintiffs filed for dismissal of charges on March 15, 2011.[153]

Most users in the world as paying, private individuals are, likewise, effectively unprotected. Common forms of fraud taking place in-world include bogus investment and pyramid schemes, fake or hacked vendors, and failure to honor land rental agreements. A group of virtual landowners online have filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming the company broke the law when it rescinded their ownership rights. The plaintiffs say a change in the terms of service forced them to either accept new terms that rescinded their virtual property ownership rights, or else be locked out of the site.[154]

OpenSpaces

 
Map over Bay City, the largest virtual city of Second Life, located on the continent of Sansara.

Linden Lab, for a period, offered Openspace regions to users: regions which were purchased in packs of four, with all four running on a single CPU core, intended to be placed next to an existing region to create the effect of larger size. The fee for 4 Openspaces was identical to that for a single private region. However, in March 2008, this rule was modified to permit Openspaces to be bought individually and placed elsewhere, as well as increasing the prim load each one could handle. Openspaces were made available for a US$415 downpayment plus a US$75 monthly fee.

In October 2008, Linden Lab announced that the Openspaces being used for this purpose were being misused; there was in fact no technical throttle limiting their usage. Linden Lab raised the monthly fee per Openspace to US$125, the same cost as half a region; added an avatar limit of 20; and renamed it to Homestead.

A week after the initial announcement Linden Lab stated its intention to add technical limits. A revised Openspace product, with far fewer prims, a no-residency rule, and costing the same monthly amount, was announced.

In May 2009, Linden Lab announced they were "grandfathering" Openspace sims (now rebranded as "Homesteads"), after a protracted protest movement[155] caused a major amount of negative publicity and funded potential litigation.[156][157]

Sex

Some media attention has been given to sexual activity involving avatars with a childlike appearance.[158] The United Kingdom[159][160][161][162] and Germany[163] are among the countries investigating new laws to combat simulated child pornography. The USA has attempted to pass several laws forbidding simulated child pornography; however, each one has been struck down by the US Supreme Court as an infringement on the First Amendment right to free speech.[164]

As of May 2007, two such countries, Germany and Belgium, have launched a police investigation into age of consent-related offenses in Second Life (including both trading of non-virtual photography and involuntary virtual sexual activity with childlike avatars by means of virtual identity theft).[165][166] Linden Lab responded by issuing a statement that any "depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving minors" was a bannable offence.[167]

In France, a conservative family union, Familles de France, sued Linden Lab in June 2007, alleging that Second Life gave minors access to sexual content, including bondage, zoophilia and scatophilia, as well as gambling, and advertisements for alcohol, drugs or tobacco.[168] Linden Lab pointed out that the virtual world is not meant for children (people under the age of 18) because of the mature content and interactions within Second Life. However, minors aged between 13 and 17 can access Second Life, but they will be restricted to what they can see or do based on age.[169] The Second Life world is split into sections/worlds and each one is given a maturity rating similar to films: General, Moderate and Adult. Minors aged 13–17 can access areas with a General Rating only.[170]

Second Life Main Grid regions are rated either "General", "Moderate", or "Adult" (previously "PG", "Mature", or "Adult").[171] Builds, textures, actions, animations, chat, or businesses that are of an adult nature are regulated by the Second Life Terms of Service[172] to only occur in simulators with a Moderate or Adult rating. General rated sims exist as an alternative for residents who do not wish to reside in areas where adult-oriented activities and businesses are permitted.

Linden Lab has created an Adult rated "mainland" continent named Zindra in response to its other "mainland" continents being mostly General.[171]

Unauthorized copying of content

Second Life features a built-in digital rights management system that controls the movement of textures, sounds, scripts, and models with the Second Life servers at Linden Lab. At some point, though, this data must be sent to a user's computer to be displayed or played—an issue fundamental to any system attempting to apply restrictions to digital information.

In November 2006 controversy arose over a tool called CopyBot, developed as part of libsecondlife and was intended to allow users to legitimately back up their Second Life data. For a brief period, an unmodified CopyBot allowed any user to replicate SL items or avatars (although not scripts, which run only on the servers at Linden Lab). Later changes to the SecondLife protocols prevented unmodified copies of CopyBot from working. Nevertheless, the basic issue of users being able to duplicate content that is sent to them remains.

Residents who copy content belonging to other users face being banned from Second Life, but Linden Lab has so far never sued any of these users for copyright infringement; since the resident creators (and not Linden Lab) retain ownership of the rights, it is not clear whether Linden Lab would legally be able to do so. Linden Lab does, however, comply with DMCA takedown notices served to them against resident content; serving a DMCA Takedown Notice is the normal procedure recommended by Linden Lab for having copyrighted content illegally resold on Second Life.

Any user who uploads, publishes or submits any content keeps the intellectual property rights of that content, however both Linden Lab and other users gain their own rights from your content. Linden Lab receives a content license from anything a user uploads to the server. Section 7.3 of the Second Life terms of service states; "you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-license able, and transferable licence to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the content solely for the purpose of providing and promoting the service".

A user who uploads their content to a public area also gives a content licence to other users as well, which allows other users to replicate and record for use in Machinima (as outlined in section 7.4, Snapshot and Machinima Policy).[173]

Regardless of what rights and licences are given, Linden Lab takes no responsibility for the outcome of any dispute between users or the server regarding content. Section 10.2 states; "you release Linden Lab (and its officers, directors, shareholders, agents, subsidiaries, and employees) from claims, demands, losses, liabilities and damages (actual and consequential) of every kind nature, known and unknown, arising out of or in any way connected with any dispute you have or claim to have with one or more users, including whether or not Linden Lab becomes involved in any resolution or attempted resolution of the dispute". Section 10.3 repeats a similar passage but regarding the responsibility of Linden Lab during any data or technical fault.[173]

Litigation

Bragg v. Linden Lab

Main article: Bragg v. Linden Lab

In 2006, attorney Marc Bragg sued Linden Lab, claiming that it had illegally deprived him of access to his account[174] after he discovered a loophole in the online land auction system which allowed regions to be purchased at prices below reserve. Although most users and commentators believed that Bragg would have no chance of winning, a number of legal developments occurred as a result of the case, including a court ruling that parts of the Second Life Terms of Service were unenforceable, due to being an unconscionable contract of adhesion.[175] The case eventually ended with Bragg's virtual land and account being restored to him in a confidential out-of-court settlement.[176] Since the settlement created no legal precedent, it left users with confusion as to what legal rights they truly had with respect to their virtual land, items, and account. Many of Bragg's legal arguments rested on the claim—advertised on Linden Lab web site—that virtual land within Second Life could be "owned" by the purchasing user, which was removed shortly after the settlement.[177][178]

Eros, LLC and Grei v. Linden Lab

Eros, LLC and Shannon Grei brought forth a class action suit in US District Court in Northern California against Linden Research, Inc on September 15, 2009 (Case4:09-cv-04269-PJH). Court papers allege the defendants knowingly and profitably turned a blind eye to copyright and trademark violations within the Second Life service.[179][180]

Evans et al. v. Linden Lab

In 2010, a group of banned SL users filed suit against Linden Lab and CEO Philip Rosedale, in the same Pennsylvania Federal District Court that the Bragg case was adjudicated in, with the same judge, to deal with further land seizures and account suspensions by the Lab against various customers.[181] Due to the Terms of Service agreement changes since the Bragg case, defendants attorneys successfully argued to move the suit to federal court in California, where the case lingered for several years. The judge did rule that there was a basis to turn the litigation into a class action, and that there were two classes under which claimants could file claims. The primary class was those who suffered economic damages to their livelihoods, through loss of their business revenues in SL. The secondary class was those who suffered property losses from loss of land, money on hand, and virtual goods in avatar inventories.[182] In May 2013, attorney for defendants negotiated a settlement agreement with one of the lead attorneys that, in plain language, agreed to refund region setup fees for private island owners, pay land owners 2 Linden Dollars per square meter of virtual land, refund all L$ and USD amounts in the plaintiffs' accounts at the time of suspension, and allow the plaintiffs the option of either receiving $15US as compensation for loss of accounts and inventory virtual goods OR restoration of their accounts in order to sell their goods on the SL Marketplace.[183] The settlement agreement went to final hearing in March 2014, with an objection from claimant Mike Lorrey as to the vagueness of certain terms in the settlement as to which fees exactly would be refunded. With the resolution of that objection,[184] claimants who had filed claims prior to March 28, 2014, began to receive settlement money a few months later.

In popular culture

Since its debut in 2003, Second Life has been referred to by various popular culture media, including literature, television, film and music. In addition, various personalities in such media have themselves used or employed Second Life for both their own works and for private purposes.

In September 2006, former Governor of Virginia Mark Warner became the first politician to appear in a MMO when he gave a speech in Second Life.[185] Musicians followed suit, with Redzone being credited by Wired and Reuters as the first band to tour in Second Life in February 2007. Then, in June 2008, author Charles Stross held a conference in Second Life to promote an upcoming novel.[186] Second Life was also featured prominently, and used as a tool to locate a suspect, in the television show CSI: NY in 2007.[187] In the American sitcom The Office, Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) is known to play the game, most notably in the episode "Local Ad".[citation needed]

Research

 
Scuba diver in NOAA's virtual coral sanctuary located in SciLands.

Much of the published research conducted in Second Life is associated with education and learning. Unlike computer games, Second Life does not have a pre-defined purpose and allows for highly realistic enactment of real life activities online.[188] One such study tested the usefulness of SL as an action learning environment in a senior course for management information systems students.[188] Another presented a case study in which university students were tasked with building an interactive learning experience using SL as a platform. Both problem-based learning and constructionism acted as framing pedagogies for the task, with students working in teams to design and build a learning experience which could be possible in real life.[189]

Situated learning has also been examined in SL, in order to determine how the design and social dynamics of the virtual world support as well as constrain various types of learning.[190] The paper, "The future for (second) life and learning", published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, examines the potential of Second Life to further innovative learning techniques.[191] It notes trends within the SL innovation to date, including the provision of realistic settings, the exploitation of pleasant simulated environments for groups, and the links with other learning technologies. It also considers the creativity sparked by SL's potential to offer the illusion of 3-D ‘spaces’ and buildings, and points to infinite imaginative educational possibilities.[191]

 
HealthInfo Island provides tips on staying healthy to Second Life residents.

Second Life has also offered educational research potential within the medical and healthcare fields. Examples include in-world research facilities such as the Second Life Medical and Consumer Health Libraries (Healthinfo Island—funded by a grant from the US National Library of Medicine), and VNEC (Virtual Neurological Education Centre—developed at the University of Plymouth, UK).[192]

There have also been healthcare related studies done of SL residents.[193] Studies show that behaviors from virtual worlds can translate to the real world. One survey suggests that users are engaged in a range of health-related activities in SL which are potentially impacting real-life behaviors.[193]

Another focus of SL research has included the relationship of avatars or virtual personas to the 'real' or actual person. These studies have included research into social behavior and reported two main implications.[194] The first is that SL virtual selves shape users' offline attitudes and behavior. The research indicated that virtual lives and physical lives are not independent, and our appearances and actions have both online and offline consequences.[194] The second deals with experimental research and supports the idea that virtual environments, such as SL, can enable research programs in that people behave in a relatively natural spread of behavioral patterns.[194]

 
A realistic depiction of Earth as shown in the virtual world of Second Life at SciLands.

The SL avatar-self relationship was also studied via resident interviews, and various enactments of the avatar-self relationship were identified. The study concluded that SL residents enacted multiple avatar-self relationships and cycled through them in quick succession, suggesting that these avatar-self relationships might be shaped and activated strategically in order to achieve the desired educational, commercial, or therapeutic outcomes.[195]

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff describes the anthropological applications of studying Second Life and its userbase in Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Boellstorff explores the relationship between anonymity and community when everyone in a community belongs to varying degrees of anonymity, and how this feeds into the idea of digital collectivity. He also comments on the phenomenon of data becoming "part of social context" that has been observed both inside and outside of Second Life as surveillance becomes more integrated into everyday life. He stresses the difference between the concepts of anonymity and pseudonymity, identifying Second Life users as belonging to the latter group of people - though their avatars are not directly linked to their real identities and reputations, they have forged new ones in this online space, a unique effect of creating an online persona in the digital age.[34]

See also

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Further reading

  • Hillis, Ken. (2009) Online A Lot of the Time. Durham: Duke University Press (see Chapter 4).0
  • Kaplan Andreas M., Haenlein M. (2009) Consumer use and business potential of virtual worlds: The case of Second Life, International Journal on Media Management, 11(3).
  • Kaplan Andreas M., Haenlein M. (2009) The fairyland of Second Life: About virtual social worlds and how to use them, Business Horizons, 52(6).
  • Olsen, Per; Li Gang, Qin (2011). Second Life Love. A dialog between two partners in Second Life. New York: Lulu Press.
  • Martin, Neo; Second Life Fraud. Fraud and intellectual property protection in Second Life. New York: Public Journal
  • Robbins, Sarah, and Mark R. Bell. Second Life for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Pub., 2008. Print.
  • Rymaszewski, Michael. Second Life The Official Guide. Sybex Inc, 2008. Print.
  • Zerzan, John. Telos 141, Second-Best Life: Real Virtuality. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Winter 2007.
  • SK Alamgir Hossain, Abu Saleh Md Mahfujur Rahman, and Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, "Interpersonal haptic communication in second life", in Haptic Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE), 2010 IEEE International Symposium on, October 16–17, 2010, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, pp. 1 –4.
  • Taşçı, D., Dinçer, D. "The Creation Of Academic Consulting Environment in Virtual Worlds And An Assessment Of Challenges Faced By Learners in This Environment", Conference proceedings of "eLearning and Software for Education", 01, 2011, p. 290–296.

External links

  • Official website

January 26, 2023
second, life, this, article, about, virtual, community, other, uses, disambiguation, this, article, multiple, issues, please, help, improve, discuss, these, issues, talk, page, learn, when, remove, these, template, messages, this, article, needs, additional, c. This article is about the virtual community For other uses see Second Life disambiguation This article has multiple issues Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page Learn how and when to remove these template messages This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Second Life news newspapers books scholar JSTOR August 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message This article possibly contains original research Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations Statements consisting only of original research should be removed August 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message Learn how and when to remove this template message Second Life is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world Developed and owned by the San Francisco based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23 2003 it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users 1 Growth eventually stabilized and by the end of 2017 the active user count had declined to between 800 000 and 900 000 2 In many ways Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role playing games nevertheless Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game There is no manufactured conflict no set objective 3 Second Life ViewerDeveloper s Linden LabInitial releaseJune 23 2003 19 years ago 2003 06 23 Stable release6 6 7 576223 November 1 2022 2 months ago 2022 11 01 EngineHavok physics engine PlatformWindows macOS Linux development paused LicenseOpen sourceWebsitesecondlife wbr com Second Life ServerDeveloper s Linden LabInitial releaseJune 23 2003 19 years ago 2003 06 23 Stable release2022 11 11 576542 November 11 2022 2 months ago 2022 11 11 PlatformLinuxLicenseProprietaryWebsitesecondlife wbr com The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab s own client software or via alternative third party viewers 4 5 Second Life users also called residents create virtual representations of themselves called avatars and are able to interact with places objects and other avatars They can explore the world known as the grid meet other residents socialize participate in both individual and group activities build create shop and trade virtual property and services with one another The platform principally features 3D based user generated content Second Life also has its own virtual currency the Linden Dollar L which is exchangeable with real world currency 6 7 Second Life is intended for people ages 16 and over with the exception of 13 15 year old users who are restricted to the Second Life region of a sponsoring institution e g a school 8 9 Contents 1 History 2 Classification 3 Residents and avatars 4 Content 5 Economy 6 Technology 6 1 Client 6 2 Server 6 3 OpenSimulator 7 Applications 7 1 Arts 7 2 Competitive entertainment 7 3 Education 7 4 Embassies 7 5 Religion 7 6 Relationships 7 7 Science 7 8 Social network 7 9 Music streams 7 10 Work spaces 8 Notable events and influence 8 1 Ban of Woodbury University 8 2 The Alphaville Herald 8 3 2007 Virtual Riot 8 4 Marketing 8 5 Griefing and denial of service attacks 8 6 The Emerald client and in world logging scripts 9 Criticism and controversy 9 1 Regulation 9 2 Technical issues 9 3 Quality assurance 9 4 Frame rate 9 5 Congestion 9 6 Customer security 9 7 Fraud and intellectual property protection 9 8 OpenSpaces 9 9 Sex 9 10 Unauthorized copying of content 10 Litigation 10 1 Bragg v Linden Lab 10 2 Eros LLC and Grei v Linden Lab 10 3 Evans et al v Linden Lab 11 In popular culture 11 1 Research 12 See also 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External linksHistory Edit Philip Rosedale founder of Second Life Philip Rosedale formed Linden Lab in 1999 with the intention of developing computer hardware to allow people to become immersed in a virtual world In its earliest form the company struggled to produce a commercial version of the hardware known as The Rig which in prototype form was seen as a clunky steel contraption with computer monitors worn on shoulders 10 That vision changed into the software application Linden World in which people participated in task based games and socializing in a three dimensional online environment 11 That effort eventually transformed into the better known user centered Second Life 12 Although he was familiar with the metaverse of Neal Stephenson s novel Snow Crash Rosedale has said that his vision of virtual worlds predates that book and that he conducted early virtual world experiments during his college years at the University of California San Diego where he studied physics 13 Second Life began to receive significant media attention in 2005 and 2006 including a cover story in BusinessWeek magazine featuring the virtual world and Second Life avatar Anshe Chung 14 By that time Anshe Chung had become Second Life s poster child and symbol for the economic opportunities that the virtual world offers to its residents At the same time the service saw a period of exponential growth of its user base One of the principal developers Cory Ondrejka was forced to resign as chief technology officer in December 2007 with Rosedale citing irreconcilable differences in the way the company was run 15 Nevertheless the platform continued to grow rapidly and by January 2008 residents spent a total of 28 274 505 hours inworld and on average 38 000 residents were logged in at any moment The maximum concurrency number of avatars inworld recorded was set at 88 200 in the first quarter of 2009 16 Headquarters of Linden Lab creator of Second Life Second Life was honored at the Technology amp Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the development of online sites with user generated content in 2008 adding to the media attention Rosedale accepted the award 17 although he had announced plans to step down from his position as Linden Lab CEO and to become chairman of Linden Lab s board of directors instead in March 2008 18 Rosedale announced Mark Kingdon as the new CEO effective May 15 2008 19 In 2010 Kingdon was replaced by Rosedale who took over as interim CEO After four months Rosedale abruptly stepped down from the Interim CEO position It was announced in October 2010 that Bob Komin Linden Lab s chief financial officer and chief operating officer would take over the CEO job for the immediate future 20 With the platform s failure to continue its high rate of growth after 2009 Linden Lab announced layoffs of 30 of its workforce in 2010 21 Some 21 3 million accounts were registered by this point although the company did not make public any statistics regarding actual long term consistent usage and numbers of dormant accounts 22 Despite speculation as to the actual size of the user base Second Life continued as a commercial success In 2015 Second Life users cashed out approximately 60 000 000 60 million US dollars and Second Life had an estimated GDP of 500 000 000 500 million US dollars higher than some small countries 23 Recognizing improvements in computing power and particularly in computer graphics Linden Lab began work on a successor to Second Life a VR experience called Sansar launching a public beta in July 2017 Uptake was low and Linden Lab halted development in 2020 to focus their attention fully on Second Life The rights to Sansar s assets were sold to Wookey Search Technologies who are expected to continue development on the title without Linden Lab 24 Second Life the usage of which peaked in the first decade of the 21st century has been cited as the first example of the metaverse 25 a concept which has been taken up by other major corporations such as Facebook in 2021 As a notable precursor which retains a small and loyal following it provides several examples of virtual reality social issues and lessons learned 26 Classification Edit Landscape scenery from The Pilgrim s Dawn located in Second Life During a 2001 meeting with investors Rosedale noticed that the participants were particularly responsive to the collaborative creative potential of Second Life As a result the initial objective driven gaming focus of Second Life was shifted to a more user created community driven experience 27 Second Life s status as a virtual world a computer game or a talker is frequently debated who Unlike a traditional computer game Second Life does not have a designated objective nor traditional game play mechanics or rules It can also be argued that Second Life is a multi user virtual world because its virtual world facilitates interaction between multiple users As it does not have any stipulated goals it is irrelevant to talk about winning or losing in relation to Second Life Likewise unlike a traditional talker vague Second Life contains an extensive world that can be explored and interacted with and it can be used purely as a creative tool set if the user so chooses In March 2006 while speaking at Google TechTalks 28 Rosedale said So we don t see this as a game We see it as a platform Second Life used to offer two main grids one for adults 18 and one for teens In August 2010 Linden Lab closed the teen grid due to operating costs Since then users 16 and over can sign up for a free account 29 Other limited accounts are available for educators who use Second Life with younger students There are three activity based classifications called Ratings for sims in Second Life General formerly PG no extreme violence or nudity Moderate formerly Mature some violence swearing adult situations some nudity Adult may contain overt sexual activity nudity and violence Residents and avatars Edit Several avatars together There is no charge for creating a Second Life account or for making use of the world for any period of time Linden Lab reserves the right to charge for the creation of large numbers of multiple accounts for a single person 5 per household 2 per 24 hours 30 but at present does not do so A Premium membership US 11 99 monthly US 32 97 quarterly or US 99 annually extends access to an increased level of technical support and also pays an automatic stipend of L 300 week into the member s avatar account and after 45 days that resident will receive a L 700 bonus making it L 1 000 for that week This amount has decreased since the original stipend of L 500 which is still paid to older accounts Certain accounts created during an earlier period may receive L 400 This stipend if changed into USD means that the actual cost for the benefit of extended tech support for an annual payment of US 72 is only about US 14 depending on the currency exchange rates However the vast majority of casual users of Second Life do not upgrade beyond the free basic account Avatars may take any form users choose human animal vegetable mineral or a combination thereof or residents may choose to resemble themselves as they are in real life 31 They may choose even more abstract forms given that almost every aspect of an avatar is fully customizable Second Life Culture consists of many activities and behaviors that are also present in real life A single resident account may have only one avatar at a time although the appearance of this avatar can change between as many different forms as the Resident wishes Avatar forms like almost everything else in Second Life can be either created by the user or bought pre made A single person may also have multiple accounts and thus appear to be multiple Residents a person s multiple accounts are referred to as alts Riding bicycles is just one of many forms of transportation Avatars can travel via walking running vehicular access flying or teleportation Because Second Life is such a vast virtual world teleportation is used when avatars wish to travel instantly and efficiently Once they reach their destination they may travel in more conventional means at various speeds Avatars can communicate via local chat group chat global instant messaging known as IM and voice public private and group Chatting is used for localized public conversations between two or more avatars and is visible to any avatar within a given distance IMs are used for private conversations either between two avatars or among the members of a group or even between objects and avatars Unlike chatting IM communication does not depend on the participants being within a certain distance of each other As of version 1 18 1 2 2007 Aug 02 voice chat both local and IM was also available Instant messages may optionally be sent to a Resident s email when the Resident is logged off although message length is limited to 4096 bytes 32 Identities in Second Life can relate to the users personality or creating their own character It is based on their decisions on how to express themselves Most avatars are human but they can choose to be vampires or animals Sometimes what they choose does not relate to their offline selves 33 In Coming of Age in Second Life An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human anthropologist Tom Boellstorff notes that the interface of Second Life is designed with the purpose of disconnecting a player s virtual identity from their physical identity in mind 34 As of 2015 Second Life has made it possible to display one s legal name in the player s profile or as their screen name but when Boellstorff first published the book in 2008 users were required to select a last name from a pre determined list of options Boellstorff describes this mentality as being in direct contrast to the one held by other mainstream social media websites where anonymity is shunned and users are encouraged to make the link between their online and physical presence clear Content Edit Many different clothes created by users can be purchased in the Second Life metaverse The ability to create content and shape the Second Life world is one of the key features that separate this from online games Built into the software is a 3D modeling tool based on simple geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects There is also a procedural scripting language Linden Scripting Language which can be used to add interactivity to objects Sculpted prims sculpties 3D mesh textures for clothing or other objects animations and gestures can be created using external software and imported The Second Life terms of service provide that users retain copyright for any content they create and the server and client provide simple digital rights management DRM functions 8 35 36 However Linden Lab changed their terms of service in August 2013 to be able to use user generated content for any purpose 37 The new terms of service prevent users from using textures from third party texture services as some of them pointed out explicitly 38 Economy EditMain article Economy of Second Life An avatar in the virtual world Second Life User generated content in the virtual world Second Life Second Life has an internal economy and closed loop virtual token called the Linden dollar L L can be used to buy sell rent or trade land or goods and services with other users The Linden Dollar is a closed loop virtual token for use only within the Second Life platform Linden Dollars have no monetary value and are not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab A resident with a surplus of Linden Dollars earned via a Second Life business or experiential play can request to refund their Linden Dollar surplus to PayPal Linden Lab reports that the Second Life economy generated US 3 596 674 in economic activity during the month of September 2005 39 and in September 2006 Second Life was reported to have a GDP of 64 million 40 In 2009 the total size of the Second Life economy grew 65 to US 567 million about 25 of the entire U S virtual goods market Gross resident earnings are US 55 million in 2009 11 growth over 2008 41 In 2013 Linden Labs released an info graphic that showed that over 10 years 3 2 billion in transactions for virtual goods had exchanged between Second Life residents with an average of 1 2 million daily transactions 42 There is a high level of entrepreneurial activity in Second Life Residents of Second Life are able to create virtual objects and other content Second Life is unique in that users retain all the rights to their content which means they can use Second Life to distribute and sell their creations with 2 1 million items listed on its online marketplace 42 At its height circa 2006 hundreds of thousands of dollars were changing hands daily as residents created and sold a wide variety of virtual commodities Second Life also quickly became profitable due to the selling and renting of virtual real estate 2006 also saw Second Life s first real world millionaire Ailin Graef better known as Anshe Chung her avatar converted an initial investment of US 9 95 into over one million dollars over the course of two and a half years She built her fortune primarily by buying selling and renting virtual real estate 43 Major tech corporations have tried to use Second Life to market products or services to Second Life s tech savvy audience IBM for example purchased 12 islands within Second Life for virtual training and simulations of key business processes but has since moved on to other platforms due to maintaining costs 44 45 Others like musicians podcasters and news organizations including CNET Reuters NPR s The Infinite Mind and the BBC have all had a presence within Second Life 46 Car cruising near an airport Virtual goods include buildings vehicles devices of all kinds animations clothing skin hair jewelry flora and fauna and works of art Services include business management entertainment and custom content creation which can be broken up into the following six categories building texturing scripting animating art direction and the position of producer project funder L can be purchased using US dollars and other local currencies on the LindeX exchange provided by Linden Lab Customer USD wallets obtained from Linden Dollar sales on the Lindex are most commonly used to pay Second Life s own subscription and tier fees only a relatively small number of users earn enough profit to request a refund to PayPal According to figures published by Linden Lab about 64 000 users made a profit in Second Life in February 2009 of whom 38 524 made less than US 10 while 233 made more than US 5000 47 Profits are derived from selling virtual goods renting land and a broad range of services Technology Edit Male avatar in Desert Wilderness Second Life comprises the viewer also known as the client executing on the user s personal computer and several thousand servers operated by Linden Lab Client Edit Linden Lab provides official viewers for the operating systems Windows macOS and most distributions of Linux where the more known ChromeOS has been excluded so far The viewer renders 3D graphics using OpenGL technology The viewer source code was released under the GPL in 2007 48 49 and moved to the LGPL in 2010 50 There are now several mature third party viewer projects like Firestorm as the most popular one that contain features not available in the Linden Lab Official client target other platforms or cater to specialist amp accessibility needs 51 The main focus of third party development is exploring new ideas and working with Linden Lab to deliver new functionality 52 An independent project libopenmetaverse 53 offers a function library for interacting with Second Life servers libopenmetaverse has been used to create non graphic third party viewers There are several Alternate Viewers published by Linden Lab used for software testing by volunteers for early access to upcoming projects 54 Some of these clients only function on the beta grid consisting of a limited number of regions running various releases of unstable test server code Server Edit Winter landscape in Second Life Each full region an area of 256 256 meters in the Second Life grid runs on a single dedicated core of a multi core server Homestead regions share 3 regions per core and Openspace Regions share 4 regions per core running proprietary software on Debian Linux These servers run scripts in the region as well as providing communication between avatars and objects present in the region Every item in the Second Life universe is referred to as an asset This includes the shapes of basic 3D polygon objects formally known as Primitive Mesh commonly known as primitives or prims for short the digital images referred to as textures that decorate primitives digitized audio clips avatar shape and appearance avatar skin textures LSL scripts information written on notecards and so on Each asset is referenced with a universally unique identifier or UUID 55 Assets are stored on Isilon Systems storage clusters 56 comprising all data that has ever been created by anyone who has been in the Second Life world Infrequently used assets are offloaded to S3 bulk storage 57 As of December 2007 update the total storage was estimated to consume 100 terabytes of server capacity 58 The asset servers function independently of the region simulators though the region simulators act as a proxy for the client request object data from the asset servers when a new object loads into the simulator 59 Region simulators areas are commonly known as sims by residents Each server instance runs a physics simulation to manage the collisions and interactions of all objects in that region Objects can be nonphysical and non moving or actively physical and movable Complex shapes may be linked together in groups of up to 256 separate primitives Additionally each player s avatar is treated as a physical object so that it may interact with physical objects in the world As of 9 July 2014 update Second Life simulators use the Havok 2011 2 physics engine for all in world dynamics 60 This engine is capable of simulating thousands of physical objects at once 61 Linden Lab pursues the use of open standards technologies and uses free and open source software such as Apache MySQL Squid and Linux 62 The plan is to move everything to open standards by standardizing the Second Life protocol Cory Ondrejka former CTO 63 of Second Life stated in 2006 that a while after everything has been standardized both the client and the server will be released as free and open source software 64 In January 2021 Linden Labs completed the migration of all of its services and databases to AWS servers 65 OpenSimulator Edit Main article OpenSimulator In January 2007 OpenSimulator was founded as an open source simulator project The aim of this project is to develop a full open source server software for Second Life clients OpenSIM is BSD Licensed and it is written in C and can run under Mono environment From 2008 alternative grids began to emerge and many of these allow cross visits from other grids through the hypergrid protocol 66 using OpenSimulator Applications EditArts Edit Main article Arts in Second Life Virtual concert in Second Life Second Life residents express themselves creatively through virtual world adaptations of art exhibits live music 67 live theater 68 and machinima 69 as well as other art forms Competitive entertainment Edit A wide variety of recreational activities both competitive and non competitive take place on the Second Life Grid including both traditional sports 70 and video game like scenarios 71 Education Edit Main article Education in Second Life Demonstrating Second Life for audience in Brisbane Second Life is used as a platform for education by many institutions such as colleges universities libraries and government entities Since 2008 the University of San Martin de Porres of Peru 72 has been developing Second Life prototypes of Peruvian archeological buildings and training teachers for this new paradigm of education The West Virginia University WVU Department of Special Education has used Second Life widely in education and it provided teaching certification and certificates of degree in seven different distance education programs 73 WVU started a pilot program in the college s computer lab in spring 2011 Embassies Edit The Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Poland located virtually in Second Life The Maldives was the first country to open an embassy in Second Life 74 75 The Maldives embassy is located on Second Life s Diplomacy Island where visitors will be able to talk face to face with a computer generated ambassador about visas trade and other issues Diplomacy Island also hosts Diplomatic Museum and Diplomatic Academy The Island is established by DiploFoundation as part of the Virtual Diplomacy Project 76 In May 2007 77 Sweden became the second country to open an embassy in Second Life Run by the Swedish Institute the embassy serves to promote Sweden s image and culture rather than providing any real or virtual services 78 The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt stated on his blog that he hoped he would get an invitation to the grand opening 79 In September 2007 Publicis Group announced the project of creating a Serbia island as a part of a project Serbia Under Construction The project is officially supported by Ministry of Diaspora of Serbian Government It was stated that the island will feature the Nikola Tesla Museum the Guca Trumpet Festival and the Exit Festival 80 It was also planned on opening a virtual info terminals of Ministry of Diaspora 81 On Tuesday December 4 2007 Estonia became the third country to open an embassy in Second Life 82 83 In September 2007 Colombia and Serbia opened embassies 84 As of 2008 North Macedonia and the Philippines have opened embassies in the Diplomatic Island of Second Life 85 In 2008 Albania opened an embassy in the Nova Bay location SL Israel was inaugurated in January 2008 in an effort to showcase Israel to a global audience though without any connection to official Israeli diplomatic channels 86 In 2008 Malta opened an embassy on Second Life 87 Religion Edit The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life Religious organizations have also begun to open virtual meeting places within Second Life In early 2007 LifeChurch tv a Christian church headquartered in Edmond Oklahoma and with eleven campuses in the US created Experience Island and opened its twelfth campus in Second Life 88 In July 2007 an Anglican cathedral 89 was established in Second Life Mark Brown the head of the group that built the cathedral noted that there is an interest in what I call depth and a moving away from light fluffy Christianity 90 The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Second Life was established in 2006 Services have been held regularly making the FUUCSL Congregation one of the longest running active congregations in Second Life 91 The Egyptian owned news website Islam Online has purchased land in Second Life to allow Muslims and non Muslims alike to perform the ritual of Hajj in virtual reality form obtaining experience before actually making the pilgrimage to Mecca in person 92 Second Life also offers several groups that cater to the needs and interests of humanists atheists agnostics and freethinkers One of the most active groups is SL Humanism which has been holding weekly discussion meetings inside Second Life every Sunday since 2006 93 Relationships Edit Romantic relationships are common in Second Life including some couples who have married online 94 The social engagement offered by the online environment helps those who might be socially isolated In addition sex is often encountered 95 However to access the adult sections requires age verification 96 There are also large BDSM and Gorean communities 97 98 Second Life relationships have been taken from virtual online relationships into personal real world relationships Booperkit Moseley and Shukran Fahid were possibly the first couple to meet in Second Life and then marry in real life Booperkit travelled to the United States to meet Shukran and he returned to England with her after one week They married in 2006 had twin boys in 2009 and are still married Some couples meet online form friendships and eventually move to finding one another in the real world 99 Some even have their weddings on Second Life as well as in a real world setting 100 Relationships in virtual worlds have an added dimension compared to other social media because avatars give a feeling of proximity making the voyeur experience more intense than simply a textual encounter The complexities of those encounters depend on the engagement levels of the people behind the avatars whether they are engaging disassociatively entertainment only immersively as if the avatar was them or augmentatively meaning they engage for a real life purpose 101 Science Edit Second Life is used for scientific research collaboration and data visualization 102 Examples include SciLands American Chemical Society s ACS Island Genome Virginia Tech s SLATE and Nature Publishing Group s Elucian Islands Village Social network Edit Second Life can be a real time immersive social space for people including those with physical or mental disabilities that impair their first lives who often find comfort and security interacting through anonymous avatars Indeed some academics believe using Second Life might even help improve motor ability for people with Parkinson s disease 103 An example of how Second Life has been used by disabled people is Wheelies the widely publicised disability themed nightclub founded by Simon Stevens Music streams Edit ShoutCast and Icecast Internet radio stations can be streamed into a land parcel in Second Life Streaming codecs are currently MP3 as AAC and OGG are not currently supported There are internet radio providers that offer these services or select from a list compiled by Lindal Kidd and is updated whenever by whoever as there s no officiant for it At the time of this writing media on a prim MOAP is not a reliable enough way of displaying media and such sites listed work best with Parcel Media or Parcel Audio Work spaces Edit Fashion For Change fashion show held in Second Life in 2015 Second Life gives companies the option to create virtual workplaces to allow employees to virtually meet hold events practice any kind of corporate communications conduct training sessions in 3D immersive virtual learning environment simulate business processes and prototype new products In 2020 CEO of Second Life Ebbe Altberg announced a microsite for Second Life to serve as a space for digital meetings to take place amidst global social distancing self isolation and quarantine orders during the COVID 19 pandemic 104 Notable events and influence EditBan of Woodbury University Edit The controversial campus of Woodbury University s School of Media Culture and Design which was deleted in 2010 by Linden Lab Linden Lab has twice in 2007 and 2010 banned a California educational institution Woodbury University from having a representation within Second Life On April 20 2010 four simulators belonging to the university were deleted and the accounts of several students and professors terminated according to The Chronicle of Higher Education Edward Clift dean of the School of Media Culture and Design at Woodbury University told The Chronicle of Higher Education that their campus was a living breathing campus in Second Life including educational spaces designed mostly by students such as a mock representation of the former Soviet Union and a replica of the Berlin Wall According to Clift the virtual campus did not conform to what Linden Lab wanted a campus to be 105 106 107 The article in The Chronicle of Higher Education concluded with Meanwhile many people in Second Life expressed on blogs that they were glad to see the virtual campus go arguing that it had been a haven for troublemakers in the virtual world 106 The Alphaville Herald Edit Main article The Alphaville Herald In 2004 the newspaper The Alphaville Herald founded and edited by the philosopher Peter Ludlow migrated to Second Life and in the following years the newspaper played a prominent role in reporting on Second Life and in the public discussion of the game 108 The newspaper which was known as The Second Life Herald from 2004 to 2009 was later edited by the Internet pioneer Mark P McCahill According to scholars Constantinescu and Decu The Alphaville Herald was the first virtual free press pioneering mass communication in virtual worlds 109 2007 Virtual Riot Edit In January 2007 a virtual riot erupted between members of the French National Front FN who had established a virtual HQ on Second Life and anti racism activists including Second Life Left Unity a socialist and anti capitalist user group 110 111 112 113 Since then several small Internet based organizations have claimed some responsibility for instigating the riots 114 Marketing Edit Corporate marketers especially during the height of Second Life in the cultural zeitgeist of 2005 2010 have been accused of being overly credulous of the actual reach and influence of Second Life Journalists have theorized this might be partially due to blithely accepting total account statistics rather than harder to discern active player counts Reasons for account inflation can include in world systems which encourage the creation of bogus extra accounts such as traffic bots which simply remain stationary in a store causing the system to rank the store as popular because there are people there as well as simply idle and long inactive accounts 115 116 One article in Wired featured a marketer for Coca Cola who found Second Life to be essentially deserted when personally inspecting it yet still funded a marketing campaign there anyway from fear of missing out 117 118 Griefing and denial of service attacks Edit See also Griefer Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that harass other users or damage the system This included grey goo objects which infinitely reproduce eventually overwhelming the servers 119 orbiters which throw an avatar so far upwards they cannot get back down in a reasonable timeframe without teleporting cages which surround avatars preventing them from moving and similar tools Although combat between users is sanctioned in certain areas of the world these objects have been used to cause disruption in all areas Attacks on the grid itself such as Grey Goo are strictly forbidden anywhere on the grid It was possible to perpetrate denial of service attacks DoS on other users simply by scripting objects that spew screen filling characters from anywhere on the grid to another avatar s location thereby disabling a clear view to the virtual world Bugs in the client and server software were also exploited by griefers to kick users crash servers and revert content before being patched out 120 The Emerald client and in world logging scripts Edit The Emerald client was developed by a group of users based on Snowglobe an opensource fork of the Second Life client Several groups alleged that the Emerald viewer contained Trojan code which tracked user details and demographics in a way that the developers could later recover One of these groups was banned from Second Life by Linden Lab after publishing their discovery 121 Shortly afterward a member of the Emerald team was accused of a DDOS attack against another website In response Linden Lab revoked Emerald s third party viewer approval and permanently banned several of Emerald s developers 122 Due to what happened with Emerald Linden Lab instituted a new third party viewer policy 123 124 The support staff and one of the developers of the Emerald project who was not banned left to work on a new viewer project Phoenix using some of the Emerald codebase but without Off the Record Messaging nor any potentially malicious code 125 The Phoenix team are now the developers behind Firestorm Viewer a fork of Second Life s viewer 2 0 open source client 126 Criticism and controversy EditSecond Life has seen a number of controversies as well Issues range from the technical budgeting of server resources to moral pornography to legal legal position of the Linden Dollar Bragg v Linden Lab Security issues have also been a concern Regulation Edit In the past large portions of the Second Life economy consisted of businesses that are regulated or banned Changes to Second Life s terms of service in this regard have largely had the purpose of bringing activity within Second Life into compliance with various international laws even though the person running the business may be in full compliance with the law in their own country On July 26 2007 Linden Lab announced a ban on in world gambling due to federal and state regulations on Internet gambling that could affect Linden Lab if it was permitted to continue The ban was immediately met with in world protests 127 In August 2007 a 750 000 in world Linden Dollar bank or Ponzi scheme called Ginko Financial collapsed due to a bank run triggered by Linden Lab s ban on gambling 128 The aftershocks of this collapse caused severe liquidity problems for other virtual Linden Dollar banks which critics had long asserted were scams On Tuesday January 8 2008 Linden Lab announced the upcoming prohibition of payment of fixed interest on cash deposits in unregulated banking activities in world 129 All banks without real world charters closed or converted to virtual joint stock companies by January 22 2008 130 After the ban a few companies continue to offer non interest bearing deposit accounts to residents such as the e commerce site XStreet which had already adopted a zero interest policy 3 months before the Linden Lab interest ban Technical issues Edit Canoeing through the virtual world Second Life has suffered from difficulties related to system instability These include increased system latency and intermittent client crashes However some faults are caused by the system s use of an asset server cluster on which the actual data governing objects is stored separately from the areas of the world and the avatars that use those objects The communication between the main servers and the asset cluster appears to constitute a bottleneck which frequently causes problems 131 132 133 Typically when asset server downtime is announced users are advised not to build manipulate objects or engage in business leaving them with little to do but chat and generally reducing confidence in all businesses on the grid Another problem is inventory loss 134 135 136 in which items in a user s inventory including those which have been paid for can disappear without warning or permanently enter a state where they will fail to appear in world when requested giving an object missing from database error Linden Lab offers no compensation for items that are lost in this way although a policy change instituted in 2008 allows accounts to file support tickets when inventory loss occurs Many in world businesses will attempt to compensate for this or restore items although they are under no obligation to do so and not all are able to do so A recent change in how the company handles items which have lost their parent directory means that inventory loss is much less of a problem and resolves faster than in recent years Loss to recovery times have gone from months or never to hours or a day or two for the majority of users but inventory loss does still exist Second Life functions by streaming all data to the user live over the Internet with minimal local caching of frequently used data The user is expected to have a minimum of 300kbit s of Internet bandwidth for basic functionality Due to the proprietary communications protocols it is not possible to use a network proxy service to reduce network load when many people are all using the same location such as when used for group activities in a school or business Quality assurance Edit Criticism of quality assurance of Second Life states that Linden Lab focuses too much on bringing new features to the production environment instead of fixing long standing bugs that in the worst case cause financial loss for the users On April 30 2007 an open letter signed by over 3 000 137 users was sent to Linden Lab to protest the quality assurance process of the company 138 Linden Lab has responded to the open letter 139 Frame rate Edit Computer hardware and Internet connections capable of smoothly rendering high quality content in other MMOGs may perform poorly in Second Life resulting in low frame rates and unresponsive controls on even minimal graphical configurations The problem is especially prevalent when large numbers of avatars congregate in one area The problem is largely due to the fact that the world is entirely user created and the majority of content created by users is made without any sort of basic graphical optimization As a result objects with both unnecessarily high polygon counts and unnecessarily high resolution textures are prevalent It is not uncommon for users to have to download and use upwards of a dozen times the amount of resources than would actually be required for the equivalent visual result Certain areas have guidelines for script usage which helps reduce lag by reducing resources used server side but does nothing to alleviate the primary issue above Congestion Edit Fishing boat in Second Life A single region 65 536 m2 of land hosted on a single CPU is set to accommodate a limited number of Residents 40 on mainland regions up to 100 on private islands causing some popular locations such as teleportation points to become inaccessible at times It is possible for an area of land a Resident has paid for to become inaccessible because another area in the same region has exhausted the avatar limit Customer security Edit On September 8 2006 Linden Lab released a news bulletin that revealed their Second Life database had been compromised and customer information including encrypted passwords and users real names had likely been accessed 140 141 However it was later revealed that the hacker had in fact been focused on trying to cheat the in world money system 142 and their access to personal information was believed incidental although a full alert was still raised for safety s sake Fraud and intellectual property protection Edit Although Second Life s client and server incorporate digital rights management technology the visual data of an object must ultimately be sent to the client in order for it to be drawn thus unofficial third party clients can bypass them One such program CopyBot was developed in 2006 as a debugging tool to enable objects to be backed up but was immediately hijacked for use in copying objects additionally programs that generally attack client side processing of data such as GLIntercept can copy certain pieces of data Such use is prohibited under the Second Life TOS 143 and could be prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Linden Lab may ban a user who is observed using CopyBot or a similar client but it will not ban a user simply for uploading or even selling copied content in this case Linden Lab s enforcement of intellectual property law is limited to that required by the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA which used to require a regular mail DMCA complaint However since 2019 an electronic DMCA complaint form is also available 144 A few high profile businesses in Second Life have filed such lawsuits 145 146 147 148 149 excessive citations none of the cases filed to date have gone to trial and most have been dismissed pursuant to a settlement agreement reached between the parties 150 151 152 Another case where settlement and dismissal was gained may be found in the matter of Eros LLC v Linden Research Inc As of October 7 2010 the case was transferred to private mediation and the plaintiffs filed for dismissal of charges on March 15 2011 153 Most users in the world as paying private individuals are likewise effectively unprotected Common forms of fraud taking place in world include bogus investment and pyramid schemes fake or hacked vendors and failure to honor land rental agreements A group of virtual landowners online have filed a class action lawsuit against the company claiming the company broke the law when it rescinded their ownership rights The plaintiffs say a change in the terms of service forced them to either accept new terms that rescinded their virtual property ownership rights or else be locked out of the site 154 OpenSpaces Edit This section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed February 2018 Learn how and when to remove this template message Map over Bay City the largest virtual city of Second Life located on the continent of Sansara Linden Lab for a period offered Openspace regions to users regions which were purchased in packs of four with all four running on a single CPU core intended to be placed next to an existing region to create the effect of larger size The fee for 4 Openspaces was identical to that for a single private region However in March 2008 this rule was modified to permit Openspaces to be bought individually and placed elsewhere as well as increasing the prim load each one could handle Openspaces were made available for a US 415 downpayment plus a US 75 monthly fee In October 2008 Linden Lab announced that the Openspaces being used for this purpose were being misused there was in fact no technical throttle limiting their usage Linden Lab raised the monthly fee per Openspace to US 125 the same cost as half a region added an avatar limit of 20 and renamed it to Homestead A week after the initial announcement Linden Lab stated its intention to add technical limits A revised Openspace product with far fewer prims a no residency rule and costing the same monthly amount was announced In May 2009 Linden Lab announced they were grandfathering Openspace sims now rebranded as Homesteads after a protracted protest movement 155 caused a major amount of negative publicity and funded potential litigation 156 157 Sex Edit Some media attention has been given to sexual activity involving avatars with a childlike appearance 158 The United Kingdom 159 160 161 162 and Germany 163 are among the countries investigating new laws to combat simulated child pornography The USA has attempted to pass several laws forbidding simulated child pornography however each one has been struck down by the US Supreme Court as an infringement on the First Amendment right to free speech 164 As of May 2007 two such countries Germany and Belgium have launched a police investigation into age of consent related offenses in Second Life including both trading of non virtual photography and involuntary virtual sexual activity with childlike avatars by means of virtual identity theft 165 166 Linden Lab responded by issuing a statement that any depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving minors was a bannable offence 167 In France a conservative family union Familles de France sued Linden Lab in June 2007 alleging that Second Life gave minors access to sexual content including bondage zoophilia and scatophilia as well as gambling and advertisements for alcohol drugs or tobacco 168 Linden Lab pointed out that the virtual world is not meant for children people under the age of 18 because of the mature content and interactions within Second Life However minors aged between 13 and 17 can access Second Life but they will be restricted to what they can see or do based on age 169 The Second Life world is split into sections worlds and each one is given a maturity rating similar to films General Moderate and Adult Minors aged 13 17 can access areas with a General Rating only 170 Second Life Main Grid regions are rated either General Moderate or Adult previously PG Mature or Adult 171 Builds textures actions animations chat or businesses that are of an adult nature are regulated by the Second Life Terms of Service 172 to only occur in simulators with a Moderate or Adult rating General rated sims exist as an alternative for residents who do not wish to reside in areas where adult oriented activities and businesses are permitted Linden Lab has created an Adult rated mainland continent named Zindra in response to its other mainland continents being mostly General 171 Unauthorized copying of content Edit Second Life features a built in digital rights management system that controls the movement of textures sounds scripts and models with the Second Life servers at Linden Lab At some point though this data must be sent to a user s computer to be displayed or played an issue fundamental to any system attempting to apply restrictions to digital information In November 2006 controversy arose over a tool called CopyBot developed as part of libsecondlife and was intended to allow users to legitimately back up their Second Life data For a brief period an unmodified CopyBot allowed any user to replicate SL items or avatars although not scripts which run only on the servers at Linden Lab Later changes to the SecondLife protocols prevented unmodified copies of CopyBot from working Nevertheless the basic issue of users being able to duplicate content that is sent to them remains Residents who copy content belonging to other users face being banned from Second Life but Linden Lab has so far never sued any of these users for copyright infringement since the resident creators and not Linden Lab retain ownership of the rights it is not clear whether Linden Lab would legally be able to do so Linden Lab does however comply with DMCA takedown notices served to them against resident content serving a DMCA Takedown Notice is the normal procedure recommended by Linden Lab for having copyrighted content illegally resold on Second Life Any user who uploads publishes or submits any content keeps the intellectual property rights of that content however both Linden Lab and other users gain their own rights from your content Linden Lab receives a content license from anything a user uploads to the server Section 7 3 of the Second Life terms of service states you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non exclusive worldwide royalty free sub license able and transferable licence to use reproduce distribute prepare derivative works of display and perform the content solely for the purpose of providing and promoting the service A user who uploads their content to a public area also gives a content licence to other users as well which allows other users to replicate and record for use in Machinima as outlined in section 7 4 Snapshot and Machinima Policy 173 Regardless of what rights and licences are given Linden Lab takes no responsibility for the outcome of any dispute between users or the server regarding content Section 10 2 states you release Linden Lab and its officers directors shareholders agents subsidiaries and employees from claims demands losses liabilities and damages actual and consequential of every kind nature known and unknown arising out of or in any way connected with any dispute you have or claim to have with one or more users including whether or not Linden Lab becomes involved in any resolution or attempted resolution of the dispute Section 10 3 repeats a similar passage but regarding the responsibility of Linden Lab during any data or technical fault 173 Litigation EditBragg v Linden Lab Edit Main article Bragg v Linden Lab In 2006 attorney Marc Bragg sued Linden Lab claiming that it had illegally deprived him of access to his account 174 after he discovered a loophole in the online land auction system which allowed regions to be purchased at prices below reserve Although most users and commentators believed that Bragg would have no chance of winning a number of legal developments occurred as a result of the case including a court ruling that parts of the Second Life Terms of Service were unenforceable due to being an unconscionable contract of adhesion 175 The case eventually ended with Bragg s virtual land and account being restored to him in a confidential out of court settlement 176 Since the settlement created no legal precedent it left users with confusion as to what legal rights they truly had with respect to their virtual land items and account Many of Bragg s legal arguments rested on the claim advertised on Linden Lab web site that virtual land within Second Life could be owned by the purchasing user which was removed shortly after the settlement 177 178 Eros LLC and Grei v Linden Lab Edit Eros LLC and Shannon Grei brought forth a class action suit in US District Court in Northern California against Linden Research Inc on September 15 2009 Case4 09 cv 04269 PJH Court papers allege the defendants knowingly and profitably turned a blind eye to copyright and trademark violations within the Second Life service 179 180 Evans et al v Linden Lab Edit In 2010 a group of banned SL users filed suit against Linden Lab and CEO Philip Rosedale in the same Pennsylvania Federal District Court that the Bragg case was adjudicated in with the same judge to deal with further land seizures and account suspensions by the Lab against various customers 181 Due to the Terms of Service agreement changes since the Bragg case defendants attorneys successfully argued to move the suit to federal court in California where the case lingered for several years The judge did rule that there was a basis to turn the litigation into a class action and that there were two classes under which claimants could file claims The primary class was those who suffered economic damages to their livelihoods through loss of their business revenues in SL The secondary class was those who suffered property losses from loss of land money on hand and virtual goods in avatar inventories 182 In May 2013 attorney for defendants negotiated a settlement agreement with one of the lead attorneys that in plain language agreed to refund region setup fees for private island owners pay land owners 2 Linden Dollars per square meter of virtual land refund all L and USD amounts in the plaintiffs accounts at the time of suspension and allow the plaintiffs the option of either receiving 15US as compensation for loss of accounts and inventory virtual goods OR restoration of their accounts in order to sell their goods on the SL Marketplace 183 The settlement agreement went to final hearing in March 2014 with an objection from claimant Mike Lorrey as to the vagueness of certain terms in the settlement as to which fees exactly would be refunded With the resolution of that objection 184 claimants who had filed claims prior to March 28 2014 began to receive settlement money a few months later In popular culture EditSince its debut in 2003 Second Life has been referred to by various popular culture media including literature television film and music In addition various personalities in such media have themselves used or employed Second Life for both their own works and for private purposes In September 2006 former Governor of Virginia Mark Warner became the first politician to appear in a MMO when he gave a speech in Second Life 185 Musicians followed suit with Redzone being credited by Wired and Reuters as the first band to tour in Second Life in February 2007 Then in June 2008 author Charles Stross held a conference in Second Life to promote an upcoming novel 186 Second Life was also featured prominently and used as a tool to locate a suspect in the television show CSI NY in 2007 187 In the American sitcom The Office Dwight Schrute Rainn Wilson is known to play the game most notably in the episode Local Ad citation needed Research Edit Scuba diver in NOAA s virtual coral sanctuary located in SciLands Much of the published research conducted in Second Life is associated with education and learning Unlike computer games Second Life does not have a pre defined purpose and allows for highly realistic enactment of real life activities online 188 One such study tested the usefulness of SL as an action learning environment in a senior course for management information systems students 188 Another presented a case study in which university students were tasked with building an interactive learning experience using SL as a platform Both problem based learning and constructionism acted as framing pedagogies for the task with students working in teams to design and build a learning experience which could be possible in real life 189 Situated learning has also been examined in SL in order to determine how the design and social dynamics of the virtual world support as well as constrain various types of learning 190 The paper The future for second life and learning published in the British Journal of Educational Technology examines the potential of Second Life to further innovative learning techniques 191 It notes trends within the SL innovation to date including the provision of realistic settings the exploitation of pleasant simulated environments for groups and the links with other learning technologies It also considers the creativity sparked by SL s potential to offer the illusion of 3 D spaces and buildings and points to infinite imaginative educational possibilities 191 HealthInfo Island provides tips on staying healthy to Second Life residents Second Life has also offered educational research potential within the medical and healthcare fields Examples include in world research facilities such as the Second Life Medical and Consumer Health Libraries Healthinfo Island funded by a grant from the US National Library of Medicine and VNEC Virtual Neurological Education Centre developed at the University of Plymouth UK 192 There have also been healthcare related studies done of SL residents 193 Studies show that behaviors from virtual worlds can translate to the real world One survey suggests that users are engaged in a range of health related activities inSL which are potentially impacting real life behaviors 193 Another focus of SL research has included the relationship of avatars or virtual personas to the real or actual person These studies have included research into social behavior and reported two main implications 194 The first is that SL virtual selves shape users offline attitudes and behavior The research indicated that virtual lives and physical lives are not independent and our appearances and actions have both online and offline consequences 194 The second deals with experimental research and supports the idea that virtual environments such as SL can enable research programs in that people behave in a relatively natural spread of behavioral patterns 194 A realistic depiction of Earth as shown in the virtual world of Second Life at SciLands The SL avatar self relationship was also studied via resident interviews and various enactments of the avatar self relationship were identified The study concluded that SL residents enacted multiple avatar self relationships and cycled through them in quick succession suggesting that these avatar self relationships might be shaped and activated strategically in order to achieve the desired educational commercial or therapeutic outcomes 195 Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff describes the anthropological applications of studying Second Life and its userbase in Coming of Age in Second Life An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human Boellstorff explores the relationship between anonymity and community when everyone in a community belongs to varying degrees of anonymity and how this feeds into the idea of digital collectivity He also comments on the phenomenon of data becoming part of social context that has been observed both inside and outside of Second Life as surveillance becomes more integrated into everyday life He stresses the difference between the concepts of anonymity and pseudonymity identifying Second Life users as belonging to the latter group of people though their avatars are not directly linked to their real identities and reputations they have forged new ones in this online space a unique effect of creating an online persona in the digital age 34 See also EditCyberTown Libraries in virtual worlds Second Life libraries Simulated reality Social simulation game Virtual realityReferences Edit Infographic 10 Years of Second Life Linden Lab June 20 2013 Retrieved August 4 2014 Returning to Second Life Ars Technica October 23 2017 Retrieved January 18 2019 If Second Life isn t a game what is it Technology amp science Games On the Level NBC News December 3 2007 Retrieved August 1 2014 Download the free Second Life viewer Retrieved October 1 2014 Third Party Viewer Directory Second Life Wiki Retrieved October 1 2014 Second Life 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education Health Information amp Libraries Journal 24 4 233 245 doi 10 1111 j 1471 1842 2007 00733 x PMID 18005298 a b Beard L Wilson K Morra D Keelan J 2009 A survey of health related activities on second life Journal of Medical Internet Research 11 2 e17 doi 10 2196 jmir 1192 PMC 2762804 PMID 19632971 a b c Harris H Bailenson J N Nielsen A Yee N 2009 The evolution of social behavior over time in second life Presence Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 18 6 434 448 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 363 6225 doi 10 1162 pres 18 6 434 S2CID 1339472 Schultze U Leahy M N January 2009 The avatar self relationship enacting presence in second life Icis 2009 Proceedings Further reading EditHillis Ken 2009 Online A Lot of the Time Durham Duke University Press see Chapter 4 0 Kaplan Andreas M Haenlein M 2009 Consumer use and business potential of virtual worlds The case of Second Life International Journal on Media Management 11 3 Kaplan Andreas M Haenlein M 2009 The fairyland of Second Life About virtual social worlds and how to use them Business Horizons 52 6 Olsen Per Li Gang Qin 2011 Second Life Love A dialog between two partners in Second Life New York Lulu Press Martin Neo Second Life Fraud Fraud and intellectual property protection in Second Life New York Public Journal Robbins Sarah and Mark R Bell Second Life for Dummies Hoboken NJ Wiley Pub 2008 Print Rymaszewski Michael Second Life The Official Guide Sybex Inc 2008 Print Zerzan John Telos 141 Second Best Life Real Virtuality New York Telos Press Ltd Winter 2007 SK Alamgir Hossain Abu Saleh Md Mahfujur Rahman and Abdulmotaleb El Saddik Interpersonal haptic communication in second life in Haptic Audio Visual Environments and Games HAVE 2010 IEEE International Symposium on October 16 17 2010 Phoenix Arizona USA pp 1 4 Tasci D Dincer D The Creation Of Academic Consulting Environment in Virtual Worlds And An Assessment Of Challenges Faced By Learners in This Environment Conference proceedings of eLearning and Software for Education 01 2011 p 290 296 External links EditSecond Life at Wikipedia s sister projects Definitions from Wiktionary Media from Commons News from Wikinews Quotations from Wikiquote Texts from Wikisource Textbooks from Wikibooks Resources from Wikiversity Official website Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Second Life amp oldid 1134987714, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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