Listen: Inside The Infamous Second Life Episode from The Office -- And the Disastrous "Dwight Schrute Echo Chamber" That Followed

Office Ladies is a podcast from Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey recounting their behind-the-scenes memories as ensemble stars in the beloved TV series, and their latest episode (stream above) delves into the "Local Ad" episode from 2007 -- or as New World Notes readers might refer to it, "the one with Second Life". (Starting at around 9:24, but of course listen to the whole thing.)

From my own behind-the-scenes memory, I recall that the show's writers called Linden Lab for fact-checking purposes -- which is probably why they wrote Dwight basically reciting the company's official messaging at the time: "Second Life is not a game. It's a multi-user virtual environment, it doesn't have points or scores, it doesn't have winners or losers."

But as it turns out, the Office team worked even deeper with Linden Lab on the episode beyond just the writing: 

Fischer reached out to producer Kent Zbornak (aka Kent-a-pedia) for the details. "Kent reached out to the developers of Second Life, Clear Inc., and Linden Labs, and we entered into a license agreement with them," Fischer explained. "They ended up creating all of the avatars and animation for us. Kent had to send pictures of John and Rainn over to those guys, and they drew out little avatars of them based on Jason and Greg's direction. And that's how they made it." 

Fans of Second Life were likely pumped to see the virtual world appear on the show, but Second Life employees were thrilled as well.

"We got a letter, Angela, from Cyn Skyberg," Fischer said. "And listen to this: 'I worked at Second Life when this episode came out and we were so excited. I was the head of customer service at the time and I got all our team together virtually to watch the episode. Second Life was and is a crazy place and so much really nutzo stuff happened in there. This was a big highlight for all of us.'" 

More from Mashable, which thoughtfully extracted the podcasts's Second Life bits here. 

I don't know if The Office team knows this, but the episode went on to help crystallize a major conflict within Linden Lab itself, which at the time was pushing for an IPO -- and as part of that effort, was trying to re-frame Second Life as not being a game, but as a development platform. Even though roughly 95% of the userbase play it as an Adult-rated Sims/Minecraft-type sandbox construction game. (Something I wish Jenna Fischer had been told, seeing as she's a fan of The Sims.)

So as Linden Lab suggested how Dwight should describe Second Life, the company itself was spending millions and millions to try and make Second Life actually resemble Dwight's vision -- which led, a few years later, to a massive layoff in the company. It was, as I wrote back then in 2010, a result of "The Dwight Schrute Echo Chamber":

Dwight is using Second Life to recreate a real world work environment, a remarkably wacky goal. But then again, how different is that from all the companies which recreate their corporate campuses in Second Life, or educators their university campuses, but can't quite explain who this benefits, beyond the relatively small number of people who are already Second Life enthusiasts?

IBM, it's been said, has 10,000 employees who regularly meet in Second Life. Which seems impressive, until you realize that IBM has almost 400,000 employees, 390,000 of whom don't.

So Dwight Schrute's attitude to Second Life is this: Adamant denial (despite all evidence to the contary) that SL is a primarily a game and entertainment platform, and a reflexive insistence (despite little evidence to the affirmative) that Second Life is best used for real world work.

The Dwight Schrute Echo Chamber are all the people in Linden Lab and in the company's orbit who've repeated Dwight's mantra in various forms, until it seemed obviously true, and that a sizable market for real world applications of SL already existed. (As opposed to what it more likely is: a very interesting but numerically small niche.) This flawed assumption is probably why Linden Lab has devoted so much money, labor, and time attempting to turn SL into a platform for real world businesses and organizations.

The echo chamber persists to this day, and in the end, Dwight got his way: Second Life is now owned by a massive holding company, listed beneath a cloud-based oil and gas software company, as if it's more or less a Dunder Mifflin of startups.

Comments

[Pulsar]

Eventually Linden Lab also jeopardized the "Sims/Minecraft-type sandbox construction game" part. It used to be fun to build your own home inworld, wall by wall. Nowadays, instead, you usually purchase an already made one and the furniture, and you place them around. Imagine if to play The Sims or Minecraft you had to learn to use a professional 3D modeling software, otherwise you couldn't create anything nice enough.
SL has become so unfriendly to inworld construction and creativity, that many merchants don't bother to mention the mod permissions in their vendors anymore, as typically they aren't modifiable, and usually for no rational reason.
In your 2010 article you wrote: "in the next couple years, what really matters is making Second Life fun". Instead of making SL funnier, Linden Lab may have made it looking it prettier, but they raised the bar so much, that they made that kind of fun accessible to only an handful of people. And even for those, the construction "fun" happens in Blender or Maya, not in SL.

[Pulsar]

Dwight Schrute's attitude to Second Life may have fueled extra drama too, as some people took SL as real life a bit too seriously (especially outside the education niche, but educational games do exist anyway). Instead "SL is for fun" is probably one of the most sane approaches to the virtual world.
It's pretty likely that SL would have had a larger and more positive user-base by now, if it were more focused on fun and it encouraged a more relaxed attitude.
Also anime and furries, that are generally ok in SL, are frowned upon by some people, even outside roleplay places that require special settings, although they are around SL since the early days, and they aren't necessarily meant to be adult content (on the contrary, I know some woman that uses those avatars to be annoyed less by creepy guys who take SL as a real life dating website).

And if you look at VRChat and Neos growth vs Sansar flop, it looks like the history has repeated itself again.

[Wagner James Au]

It's really wild, I don't quite understand the resistance to calling Second Life a game, even among the few people who use it for other reasons. Especially educators! Minecraft has always described itself as a game, and yet the education edition used to teach programming etc. to kids has been downloaded 50 million times.

[Pulsar]

Good point about Minecraft Education Edition! And learning through play / gaming is quite a thing.
In this magazine published by UNESCO
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372386/PDF/265758mul.pdf.multi.nameddest=372386
they quote the game designer Chris Crawford:
«Games are the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of approval of natural selection. The question: Can games have educational value? is absurd. Game-playing is a vital educational function for any creature capable of learning.»

Games like Minecraft, Roblox and Kerbal Space programs are mentioned:
«One of the advantages of digital project-based learning is that it is much easier to set up multidisciplinary projects than in real life. Kerbal Space Program is a good example. It is a space simulation in which the player impersonates the director of a space programme operated by small humanoid aliens, the Kerbals. He/She has to build rockets, rovers and all sorts of vehicles to explore the solar system. The game gives him/her missions such as escaping the atmosphere, reaching a stable orbit, landing on an asteroid, creating space stations, etc. While the simulation of reality is not perfect, the developers have paid special attention to reproduce the actual laws of physics as accurately as possible (as accurately as playable, in fact). While playing the game, the player will learn, literally, rocket science.»