Take This Quiz to Find Out How Much You Know About the History of Second Life

Take this quiz by Canary Beck to find out how much you know about the history of Second Life. I only got 82%, even though I actually, you know, wrote a book about the making of Second Life. To prepare for the test, there is, as Canary herself points out, a history of Second Life in Second Life - a year-by-year, first-person, walking tour of the would-be metaverse (made by a guy named Sniper Siemens), which you can visit for a short time by copy/pasting this place in the SL viewer of your choice:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA17/26/237/22

I definitely flaked on at least a couple questions, though in my defense, some others are not strictly accurate or open to interpretation. For instance, here's a hint for one of them from my book, which might (or might not!) totally throw you off in this quiz:

But the ability to create wasn’t initially the central focus to Linden World; the developers were more interested in creating a game from their destructive avatars and rock-eating birds. That changed at an early Linden Lab board meeting with Mitch Kapor and other investors. At that point, Kapor was really investing in Rosedale the man, in hopes that something marketable would emerge from what was still so much warehouse tinkering. As Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka spoke to their financial backers, a projector displayed a live video feed of Linden World, projected on the wall. Other Linden staffers were in-world, running a demonstration that the investors could watch. A few of them were using the building tools the staff used to create content. And as it went on, the investor’s eyes drifted away from the meeting, and to the screen. On it, one Linden staffer was building a giant, evil snowman—and another staffer was busy creating a mass of little snowmen, gathered around their titan Frosty, to worship him. This, everyone realized, was what made their world unique. Not an artificial ecosystem, or grenade-strewn destruction. To build and see the results instantaneously; to share the act of creation with others; to riff off their work, and make it larger than its individual components; to be in a collectively shared collaboration with people from all over the world. That was the uniqueness that they had stumbled upon, without quite planning it; that was the key feature that would distinguish Second Life from everything else on the market.

So as I remember, it was Doug and Ian Linden, not Cory and Philip, building the actual snowmen. Anyway, that's very much a quibble, because this is an excellent quiz: Go here to take it, and share your results in Comments below.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

I got 84%, but yeah, some of that was just dumb luck reading into the questions.

[shirc desantis]

77 I hide my head in my paws in shame...

[Mondy Bristol]

77% not bad seeing as I just went ahead blind without reading any more and somehow one of my questions I got right was marked wrong! Oo

[Iggy]

I got 77 too. Look up, shirc! That's either a C+ or B- in my classes.

[Han Held]

Reposting my comment from there, here:
The OpenSimulator project was founded in January 2007 by Darren Guard (also known as MW), who, like so many other people, saw the potential for an open source 3d Virtual Environments server that could be used for many different applications. Also like many others, Darren had watched many other attempts at open source virtual world servers fail, often due to the massive task of writing both a server and a client at the same time.
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/History

2007. NOT 2008.

I'm also positive that the resident surname came out in late 2010, not 2009 (I spend 2010 making alts and all of them up to Dec 2010 had surnames): http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/12/second-lifes-new-naming-policy.html

[Adec]

I got 71% ..and was pretty impressed :)

[Canary Beck]

@Han Held, reposting my reply comment to yours here too :)

Thank you for spotting that. Both dates are incorrect and I’ve made changes to the quiz.

The actual wording should read “Open Grid Public Beta” not “Open Sim”, which is different, and indeed started in 2007. “The Open Grid Public Beta program is a Linden Lab sponsored opportunity for developers to make their virtual worlds interoperate with Second Life. Virtual world interoperability is enabled through the Open Grid Protocol, under development by the Architecture Working Group of Second Life residents.” which began after the first successfully tested teleport in 2008. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Grid_Public_Beta

I got my date from this erroneous placard at the exhibition:
[Image showing Open Sim created in 2008 in my comment here http://canarybeck.com/2015/02/08/take-the-second-life-history-quiz/#comment-19372

You are also correct about Resident names. Upon further research I found “In 2010, Second Life changed from registering new accounts with a “first name” and “last name” to a single-word username If you registered your account after mid-2010, you created a unique, single-word username; for example: mortimer1980, or jsmith57. When you log in to Second Life, you simply enter the username you selected when you registered.” http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Usernames-and-display-names/ta-p/700173

And I got this date from this erroneous placard at the exhibition:

[Image showing date for avatar surname change in my comment here: http://canarybeck.com/2015/02/08/take-the-second-life-history-quiz/#comment-19372

The lesson: don’t trust placards written by little green eggmen!!!

[salahzar stenvaag]

81 % :)

[Sniper Siemens]

I apologize for two serious mistakes I made during transcription IW.
I wanted to write open grid but I wrote open sim .. sorry and I was wrong to write the date for new avatar surname. 2010 not 2009
I had the exact date but I was wrong to write it and then rez IW

I apologize again for the error and thanks to Hamlet for this post.

Good Second Life to all

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Also, the book in question was less about Second Life and more about the Sims Online, with a final chapter or two lightly touching on how some TSO refugees jumped to SL, so... not actually surprised at Hamlet's less-than-perfect score. ;)

[Carl Metropolitan]

I got 90%, but I'm also faily sure a few of the questions were wrong, so who knows what my "real" score would have been; possibly lower. I loved the quiz nonetheless.

I think I will contact the creator and ask if I can use some of her questions for the SL category of my weekly "A Trivial Entertainment" show at Caledon Oxbridge!