A decade ago, dozens of media outlets and technologists discovered "The Next Internet." An original cyberspace science fiction fantasy had finally come to fruition as the world gained a second digitized reality. In a short period of time, countries established embassies, media companies opened bureaus, one of Earth’s biggest rock bands played a concert (sort of), political campaigns took to its streets, and people became real-world millionaires plying their skills in this new arena.
That much hyped "Next Internet?" You may remember it better by its official name—Second Life. For many modern Internet users, the platform has likely faded far, far from memory. But there’s no denying the cultural impact Second Life had during the brief height of its popularity.
Explaining Second Life today as a MMORG or a social media platform undersells things for the unfamiliar; Second Life became an entirely alternative online world for its users. And it wasn’t just the likes of Reuters and U2 lookalikes and Sweden embracing this platform. Second Life boasted 1.1 million active users at its peak roughly a decade ago. Even cultural behemoth Facebook only boasted 20 million at the time.
But unlike Facebook’s continuing rise, the grand vision of some Snow Crash-like immersive virtual metaverse as a de facto second layer for the human experience no longer exists. Actually, it never really did. I wrote extensively about Second Life in its early years and found it to be more successful (and less ambitious) than its critics and commentators advertised. And recently, I returned to it after more than five years away with a question in mind: if Second Life never became the metaverse of futurists’ dreams, what has it evolved into?
Believe it or not, the platform today enjoys a healthy community. Not only does it still exist, but if you ask Second Life's creators, the platform may be thriving. Ask its users, on the other hand, and the picture gets a bit hazier.
Commerce is king
Let’s start with the numbers. Second Life’s community today is—by one metric, at least—only a little smaller than it was in its heyday. According to Peter Gray, Second Life developer and Linden Lab’s senior director of global communications, Second Life’s monthly active user count today totals “between 800,000 and 900,000.”
Gray also says the platform remains a healthy, profitable business. That profit largely comes from virtual goods transactions within the Second Life community, and these virtual goods are at the heart of what Second Life has become.
Commerce was always part of Second Life's original pitch (money is obviously integral to our society, so any metaverse layered onto that society would have to prominently involve money, too). But this has taken a wide variety of forms today. For example, I spoke with Second Life user Daemon Blackflag, who creates virtual pet games on the platform. In his work, you get a glimpse of the promise of Second Life as a surreal, alternate reality. “Users actually breed the creatures together to try and make the rarest variants of them,” he explained. “They then trade the offspring around so that others can continue those ‘genetic lines’ as well.” He says the rarest virtual pets still sell for thousands of US dollars.
Linden Lab’s VP of product, Bjorn Laurin, shared another curious anecdote. He brought up those unboxing videos you see on YouTube. “My kids are watching them all the time; adults are watching them. Unbox the iPhone, unbox that,” he says. “Recently we’ve noticed that’s become huge in Second Life. People are buying things in the store and creating their own unboxing videos.”
Second Life has always appealed to users because of unique sci-fi oddities like that, and this organic community building still occurs. But there have been some growing challenges in 2017 that didn’t generate much concern back in 2007.
For example, creation of content has become much more competitive, because the addition of new technologies like mesh support have raised the production values, so to speak. A community member who goes by the name Myf expounded on this. “Once upon a time, it wasn't too difficult to be able to build say, a house, and have it look nearly as good as one you might buy in a store,” Myf tells Ars.
But now the tools are more sophisticated, and hobbyists and tinkerers have given way to more experienced professionals. “You can still do things the old way, but because the results are very obviously ‘old’ and less impressive than the current ways, you're disincentivized from doing so.”
There are frustrations on the shopping end, too. User Iki Akari is a fashion designer. Like other Second Life merchants I talked with, she said things have changed a lot over the past 10 years as far as commerce goes. Previously, most shopping took place in in-game stores, some of which were discovered through good old-fashioned foot traffic.
Curiously, something like the Amazonification of retail seems to have happened to Second Life, too. More and more, commerce is shifting to a Web-based transaction marketplace hosted by Linden Lab and away from the virtual brick and mortar storefronts. The exceptions are big shopping events, which are in some sense Second Life analogues to Amazon Prime day, Black Friday, trade fairs, or seasonal Steam sales.
“As a designer I also preferred the old method of selling primarily from my main store rather than having deadlines and hosting new items at events,” says Iki Akari. “Mainly because a lot of things can go wrong and events tend to lag customers heavily. From a Marketing standpoint, it's also hard for new stores to spread brand awareness when they are being immediately compared to pre-established brands in an event-type environment.”
This is part of a larger issue that today’s Second Life citizens are struggling with just like their real-world counterparts: discovery and navigation have become hard in 2017.
Iki Akari says that 10 years ago, “People would walk around and see what Second Life had to offer. Shopping was done primarily in ‘main stores,’ and the ability to meet other people exploring was a lot more easy than it is now.” Now, she says people buy their own land and stay in their own territory. It has become a more isolated experience.
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