The celebration of Second Life's 20th anniversary isn't over. Now available on Kindle for $9.99, I've just released a special new edition of The Making of Second Life, featuring a new foreword and afterword, and selected images. Get it here.
Making a Metaverse That Matters is in many ways a sequel to my 2008 book, and is just as much about the community of Second Life, as the early creator of the virtual world at Linden Lab. So I have a special offer for readers of the new book:
Share a photo of you or a friend holding a copy of Making a Metaverse That Matters on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Flickr, Plurk, or Bluesky, and tag me in it ("SLHamlet", "wjamesau", or "Hamlet Au"). If you're among the first 50 to do so, I'll get in touch to send you a free copy of Making of Second Life!
Thanks of course to Philip Rosedale for the lovely cover blurb and Gogo of Juicy Bomb for creating the new cover.
Read an excerpt below, featuring the inside story of the naming of Second Life from its early incarnation as Linden World. Creation of the new name was led by now-famed venture capitalist Hunter Walk, with insights from early Internet community pioneer Howard Rheingold.
The next challenge was making Linden World a commercially viable product, and much of that task went to Hunter Walk, a business developer who’d just left Mattel, and prior to that, had been a production coordinator with the Conan O’Brien show. Walk became one of the few early staffers to leave Linden Lab of his own volition—to take a prominent position with Google. (Also among the other early Linden staff: Aaron “Phoenix” Brashears, a burly programmer with a walrus mustache and a penchant for leather, who worked the phone bank for the San Francisco Sex Educator hotline in his off hours; Ryan Downe, an elaborately tattooed musician with an acclaimed run as a pop star on Elton John’s record label; James Cook, a wry, button-down programmer with a medical degree who often practiced medicine at a clinic over the weekend.)
The management was pretty sure they didn’t want to launch as Linden World, and Walk’s goal was to find a better name that distinguished itself from the competition.
“A lot of the game worlds were verbs which described what you’d be doing,” as he recalls it now. “You know… ever-questing! Or place names—Ultima, but online!” Linden was working with a branding agency to create the world’s eye-in-hand logo, but remained stymied on what to actually call the place. Ever the Californian fabulist, Rosedale wanted a name that suggested a mystical dreamworld—Sensarra, for example.
Walk balked. “Using the world was already so unapproachable and was gonna be for so long, why put up another barrier, a strange name that people didn’t understand? And secondarily, because of everyone bringing their different ideas to it, I wanted the name to be a vessel that people could fill themselves, that would be evocative of the promise of the world, and then put that responsibility upon the user to fill the promise. So I didn’t want to describe what they would find when they got there. I wanted to describe what it could be to them.”
After brainstorming on a fitness center treadmill, he had it, or something close enough.
“I came back the next day with ‘Life Two’, thinking about the Milton Bradley game, Game of Life,” he says. “That evolved into Second Life.” That provoked immediate pushback from other staffers: “That’s really easy for people to say, ‘Ha ha, you need a second life because you don’t have a first life,’” Walk recalls them arguing. (So far this prediction, it should be said, has proved utterly on target.)
Still, Hunter held his ground. “I said, ‘You know what, let’s take those slings and arrows. It’s such a strong notion, it’s such an idea, everybody wants a second life.’” He pointed to the growing ubiquity of alternate identities and little personalized icons, in e-mail and instant messaging software, on blogs, growing seemingly everywhere on the Net. “You see more and more people with avatars and screen names,” he told them. “I think if we hit our stride we can sell this. It won’t be geeky. It’ll be ‘Of course, why wouldn’t you want one?’ Because it doesn’t have to be better or worse, it doesn’t mean your first one is lame or great, it just means it’s different, and you can be somebody different, and do something different.” (At the same time, the name also had enough metaphysical connotations to satisfy Rosedale.)
It also offered a second chance at virtual community, an ideal promulgated by tech visionary Howard Rheingold in the early 90s—but an ideal that had waned in the crush of the Net’s first commercial boom. Rheingold was brought in as an early consultant to Linden Lab, and perceived its potential to build on themes he’d first identified.
“In addition to the sense of embodiment that avatars afford,” Rheingold remembers now, “the most interesting and potentially fruitful aspect of SL has to do with the capability to create, manipulate, navigate, and share simulations.”
As I later learned, Rheingold’s insights indirectly led to my joining Linden Lab for a time. “I think it may have been when Robin first visited me to demonstrate SL,” he says, “and it seemed to me to be a great opportunity to document the social life of a community from the very first.”
Much more here. And find out Hunter thinks about the name Second Life in my new book!
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