Seven Days in a Second LIfe
Somewhere between playing and dreaming
Paolo Pedercini
Film stills from Waking Life by Richard Linklater ©20th Century Fox
My second life begins inside an elegant art-nouveau style metal structure. Gradually the landscape fleshes out, with hills, trees, and buildings in the distance. At the centre of the screen, with his back to me, is my alter ego. Outside the building, grouped around a skilfully animated fountain, is a knot of rather odd characters. Some look human, others look like something out of a manga cartoon, others have animal heads and seem to be performing strange dances, suspended in mid-air. In one corner of the screen their dialogues start appearing in text form. They are talking about people I don’t know and using mysterious terms and abbreviations. I start feeling pretty confused.
In Second Life it is relatively easy to build areas that others can visit. But this is completely different from creating areas with a social value. Venues for events, for meeting people, talking…
I have just entered Second Life, a video game which enables thousands of people to interact simultaneously in the same virtual world. These games are also known as “persistent worlds” because they consist in a single, continuous session of play which is constantly being reworked by the feverish activity of the participants: parallel realities that develop and change even when you are not connected, a world where your character (an avatar) can exist for days on end, with its own bank account of virtual money, as well as possessions and property.
Second Life is big news because of the enormous scope it gives players, particularly when it comes to designing virtual objects. Everything around my avatar, from the buildings to the complex interactive objects, including clothes and animations, has been created by other inhabitants of this virtual world, using tools inside the game itself.
I take to the air to admire the skyline: unsightly shopping centres and lavish skyscrapers, covering a radius of a few miles.
Away from the crowded public areas, Second Life is not exactly teeming with life. This is one inevitable aspect of living without earthly limits: housing is not used to provide shelter from the elements and is mostly uninhabited, and shops only sell decorative items and function automatically. As everyone can fly or teleport, the streets are deserted.
I heard that a group of inhabitants with a passion for town-planning got together to request the removal of flying powers. They maintained that personal flight power detracted from the social opportunities afforded by street life, and launched a campaign with pretend signposts humourously ordering people to keep their feet on the ground.
It was a losing battle, of course, but it does highlight the main problem of virtual cities: most of the space is just not used. You always feel like you’re in the middle of a sculpture exhibition or abandonned film set. As there are no flows of people and goods, no key geographic hubs are created. Urban conglomerates are fragmented, buildings scattered around randomly. And obviously there is no such thing as a town plan, as all citizens are free to build what they want on the plot they purchase when they subscribe.
I land in a clumsy reproduction of a Venetian canal, and begin to realise that theme parks are far from a rarity here: in another area a community of French players has recreated the Montmartre district to perfection, and there is also a detailed reconstruction of the set of Blade Runner.
“In Second Life it is relatively easy to build areas that others can visit. But this is completely different from creating areas with a social value. Venues for events, for meeting people, talking… “
I am chatting to Gwyneth Llewelyn, one of the most active members of Second Life.
Together with a small group of people she is engaged in an ambitious virtual city project called Neualtenburg
Neualtenburg is modelled on an old Bavarian village. There is a town hall with a clock tower, a council chamber, a square which hosts the Oktoberfest every year and obviously a large cathedral.
“The name Neualtenburg literally means ‘new old city’, and it is an explicitly post-modern work”, explains Ulrika Zugzwang, the creator of the original project. “It was set up for a competition run inside the game. After the award ceremony I was supposed to free up the plot but many of the citizens liked the Bavarian village so much they actually decided to buy the plot and use it as a base for a genuine community”.
The need to split the rent and the desire to manage the urban development of the land together, maintaining a certain style, inevitably called for the implementation of collective decision-making practices.
A senate gathers on a weekly basis, and there are regular elections to appoint a mayor: an exemplary case of grassroots self government and creative freedom. But it does set you wondering whether this design-based democracy stems from a sense of frustration with real world politics.
