The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse

by Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007
320 pp., illus. 19 b/w. Trade, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0262122948.


Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver


jfbarber@eaze.net





In 1992, Neal Stephenson imagined "the metaverse." His novel Snowcrash was set largely in this online world, entered via the Internet, a virtual place where users could conduct important parts of their lives, or experience other ones.

Stephenson was not the first to imagine lives lived in online environments. Award-winning science fiction author William Gibson developed the idea of "cyberspace" over the course of his so-called "Neuromancer trilogy: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). In 1981, Vernor Vinge, in his novella True Names, described "the Other Plane," a world inside a planet-wide computer network. Using computers, individuals entered the Other Plane, assumed avatars, and engaged in intrigue that eventually attracted negative government attention.

But Stephenson's metaverse was the first depiction of an online space where people engaged more fully, establishing lives, businesses, and presences that seemed every bit as real as those they experienced in front of the computer screen. Stephenson's fiction became reality with the establishment of online game environments and social worlds like The Sims Online. Here, players were able to establish residency and pursue any number of activities, many outside or contrary to society in the "meatworld."

Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, was there to cover the story and his virtual newspaper, Alphaville Herald, reported on the cyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that were, apparently, rife in the game. For his virtual journalism, Ludlow was banned from The Sims Online. The story landed on the front page of the real world The New York Times, and was also followed by the BBC, CNN, and other media outlets, all of whom called the banning censorship.

Ludlow relocated to Second Life, where his avatar, Urizenus Sklar, continued his muckraking as publisher of The Second Life Herald. Ludlow/Sklar investigated and wrote about the unknown aspects of the online culture of Second Life, lauded by many as the harbinger of a 3-D environment that provides a richer, more expressive interactive environment than today's Internet. He provided vivid portraits of the settlers, politicos, griefers, entrepreneurs, and con artists who were the early adapters of Second Life. He exposed the power struggles that defined the online politics in Second Life, as well as, like he had in The Sims Online, the underworlds of sex, crime, and other opportunistic endeavors that formed the foundation of this online community. For all his efforts, Urizenus Sklar was "murdered." Second Life administrators pulled the plug on Ludlow/Sklar, erasing his avatar and his newspaper.

The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse chronicles Sklar's "murder" and then proceeds to backtrack, providing a step-by-step account of how Ludlow/Sklar's muckracking efforts caused such a stir within Second Life.

Part investigative report, part memoir, part travelogue, The Second Life Herald details the larger forces behind the "murder" of Sklar and raises issues about still evolving rules and censorship in online environments where people gather, do business, and form relationships with as much complexity as anywhere in the real world. As a result, The Second Life Herald is an important book, especially for those who feel they understand online worlds after reading the breathless pronouncements of real-world, mainstream press touting the social, cultural, and commercial potential of online interactive environments. What is not apparent in these reports, but that The Second Life Herald makes quite clear, is how both the noble and tawdry aspects of virtual worlds are necessary for their existence and continued development, and how continued conflicts across the client-server divide will decide who writes the rules governing these new worlds.

Ludlow and Wallace (a freelance journalist with experience writing about virtual worlds and online games) conclude that developers of online, virtual worlds have little control over how people use (or abuse) content placed in those worlds. Users/players/interactors will not abide by the monolithic software rules established by unimaginative corporations. Instead, they will continue to agitate for, if not demand, more open source models for the rules that control their world.

In this, say Ludlow and Wallace, there is hope, both that evolving virtual worlds will realize their so richly imagined future potentials, and that Urizenus Sklar will not have "died" in vain.