Second Life History – Ciaran Laval

Before looking forward to Second Life’s twelfth birthday celebrations, I think it’s an opportune time to look back. Play funky music, close your eyes, and come with me on a journey back in time ….

Ever want to build a cathedral? Underwater? Change your clothes, your face, your whole body? Fly? You can’t do any of that stuff in real life, but you can do it all and more in Second Life, a startlingly lifelike 3-D virtual world now evolving on the Internet. Unlike other shared online adventures, Second Life isn’t about slaying monsters or zapping aliens. It’s about building things, meeting people and expressing yourself. Even if you already have a life, you may want to get a second one.

The above comes from Time back in 2002 regarding what they considered to be one of that year’s best inventions.

Meanwhile, back in 2004, The Houston Chronicle were telling us :

In the hands of the futurist, the virtual world’s combination of social anonymity and endless digital possibility becomes a conduit for mankind’s basest desires, the triumph of machine over man and a stern warning about technology run amok.

Well, the future is now, and it’s considerably more urbane than anyone expected.

Second Life, a massively multiplayer online PC game, brings us one step closer to a true virtual existence. Even calling it a game is a stretch: Games require an object — a purpose — and Second Life’s purpose is as enigmatic as that of real life.

It’s hard to overstate how genre-busting Second Life is.

That article makes for a fascinating read by the way. Articles such as the above can be found by typing a URL such as :

https://secondlife.com/news/archive/?year=2002

Changing the year at the end will give you news for a different year. Alas a lot of the old articles lead to dead ends, although with a bit of jiggery pokery on The Wayback Machine, you may be able to retrieve them.

Another good source for Second Life history is the old old forum archive. There we can find that in 2004, Robin Linden was informing people that Second Life was up for an award :

Second Life has been nominated as a finalist for Online Game of the Year by Gaming Industry News. Full voting is now open, and GIN readers will be choosing the winners over the next month.

If you want to vote for Second Life, just visit Game Industry News. You have to be subscriber, but subscriptions are free. Every subscriber gets one vote.

That’s interesting not just because Second Life was up for an award, it’s also interesting because Game Industry News had a subscription model back then, albeit a free one.

Continue reading “Primitar 1.0, James Miller Taxi Company, It’s Second Life History Time”

Second Life is already older than ten, but the forthcoming tenth birthday celebrations will mark the tenth anniversary of Second Life moving out of closed beta. Taking a look at the old forum archives, one can see that Second Life was a very different place than it is today, but some issues, have been here all along and some new features, are actually similar to old features.

Back in the early days the term resident wasn’t in popular usage, the term was “Lifers” ….. I’m glad they got out of that habit! Residents were also given incentives to build places for people to have something to do, with an appeal from Hanley Linden on behalf of the public works project:

“Second Life is seeking a few imaginative residents to help design, construct and test sports sites for team vs. team competition. We’ll pay for the land and objects. If the resulting game is successful we will reward you with a huge Linden cash bonus.”

The billing model was very different, with incentives for people prepared to live near each other and a tax on objects, as explained by Hunter Linden:

“Previous to this release, the taxation scheme for objects was that each shape received a fixed charge of L$3/week regardless of size or position within the world.

With this release, the per shape charge will be variable, based on the size of the shape and its height above ground. Small objects or those near ground level will generally enjoy reduced taxes, while large objects or those high in the air will be taxed more.

For example, under the old scheme, a default shape created near the ground would be assessed L$3/week, whereas under the new plan, it would be assessed L$1/week. Similarly, a maximally scaled (10 meters) box raised to 20 meters above ground would be assessed L$3/week under the old scheme, but charged over L$30/week under the new plan.”

Hmm, in some ways we’re heading back in this direction because the new mesh accounting system for objects makes more complicated shapes more costly in terms of land impact. Hunter also talked of land taxes:

“Land taxes now have a discount awarded for land located close to other land owners. The discount is based on the percentage of resident-owned land near the center of the chosen parcel, and can reach as high as 50% (this number will be subject to tuning during the beta). In other words, if you buy a plot which is completely surrounded by neighbors, it could be as much as 50% cheaper to buy and maintain than a plot sitting alone in the countryside.”

Yes a very different model there but one designed to make people grasp the fact that this was a shared experience. Stipends were at L1k a week, although the system was complicated by limits on how much people could go into debt via taxes and there had been an issue with people hoarding their Linden Dollars.

There’s an early chat log from a town hall meeting, where the main focus seems to be on sims designed for fighting. Also, note that whomever copied that chat log was a friend of Governor Linden, as Governor Linden comes online during it!

Then as the official opening got closer, Philip Linden posted an FAQ, with a long time favourite of Second Life users over these last ten years being a concern:

Will there be too much ‘lag’ as a result of launch / lots of new users?

Hopefully not. We’ve been substantially reducing lag and increasing simulator performance with incremental releases, and have many more improvements in the works. Additionally, we will be adding simulators so that the number of members/simulator remains roughly constant.

We’re still talking about lag but there have been many imrovements over the years.

Continue reading “Second Life – The Early Days”