Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters:
Floundering with little user growth after its official launch in June 2003, Second Life finally hit escape velocity when it explicitly adopted an essential facet of the Metaverse: Integration with the real world economy.
Around the start of 2004, the company announced that the virtual world’s currency, Linden Dollars, could be bought and sold on the open market for real cash. And [Linden Lab CTO Cory] Ondrejka drove the effort to implement what was a revolutionary concept at the time: Enabling users to own the underlying intellectual property rights to anything they created with Second Life’s building tools.
“That was me on the phone with lawyers getting laughed at and the lawyers saying. ‘You can't do that.’" But Linden Lab did eventually do that, formulating a IP rights policy that YouTube and other user generated content platforms would come to adopt.
From this point onward, Second Life users could, and quickly did, create small businesses from their virtual world content. This in turn grew the world of Second Life in a way that greatly amplified Linden Lab’s own work on the platform.
“[A]t the point that we had like, 100,000 people [playing] and we kind of computed that,” Cory Ondrejka remembers. “Ten percent of the people were actually doing awesome things in the world. That'd be like having a 10,000 person company. Because when you're a 150 person company, a 10,000 person company is unimaginably large.”
Major press coverage of Second Life, often by tech reporters who were fans of Snow Crash themselves, began to take on gathering momentum into 2006, culminating in a feature story on the cover of BusinessWeek. Which only catapulted into even further coverage. Strikingly, most of this overwhelmingly positive media attention was organic, generated by reporters and media outlets themselves.
Next -- NBC's top TV show comes calling:
"It was kind of terrifying,” Catherine Smith, head of Linden Lab communications back then, recalls now. “I remember [a Linden Lab engineer] saying to me one time, 'Can you just please make the PR stop?' And I'm like, ‘Sorry, that train has left the station. I'm not pitching this anymore. They're all coming to us.’"
Charity Majors, an engineer who helped keep the glorious hairball of Second Life's complex backend operations running during its peak years, saw this rise of media attention play out in sharp spikes of new users.
"The main one that I remember was, of course, the episode of The Office.”
An entire subplot of "Local Ad" (Season 4, Episode 9) was devoted to Dwight and Jim’s nerdy explorations of Second Life. The show producers even interviewed Linden Lab staff while preparing the script, and so managed to perfectly capture in its dialog the fundamental dilemma of the virtual world’s identity:
Jim: You playing that game again?
Dwight [with serene confidence]: Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have points or scores. It doesn't have winners or losers.
Jim: Oh, it has losers.
Charity and other team members were in Linden Lab’s own office as the show aired, awaiting the deluge.
"And there was just a flood, a hoard of people logging on and everything was blinking red,” she says. “And we're just running around batting shit left and right. It was nuts.”
Interest in Second Life was now so fervent and sustained, and so global in scope, Charity remembers Linden’s engineering team collectively realizing over a team meal that the virtual world had effectively become too big to fail.
"One of the fun questions was, ‘If Second Life ever went completely down, do you think it would ever come back up? Because, the load profile of turning things back on is what's high." Were Second Life to go offline, in other words, it would be hit by an endless cascade of frantic users around the world all repeatedly trying to log back on, over-taxing the system in the process.
The virtual world was thriving, with a population roughly the size of San Francisco, and a total landmass approaching Los Angeles.
More about The Office episode from behind the show's scene here. Read the rest in my book:
Comments