3pointD.com

As some readers of this blog know, I am also the editor of the Second Life Herald, an online newspaper covering events in the virtual world of Second Life. The paper was originally founded back in October 2003 as the Alphaville Herald (on the Alphaville server of The Sims Online) by University of Michigan philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, who soon found himself on the front page of The New York Times. (Peter and I recently co-wrote a book about his adventures in TSO and our continuing work on the Herald in Second Life, which should be out next spring.)

Peter always maintained (and I share this view) that though it was reporting an life in an online game, the Herald was covering issues that would be more and more important to everyone’s real lives as online and offline life became more and more integrated. A couple of recent stories have made this point quite eloquently, the latest being another case of bullying via MySpace. The Herald, it seems, was as spot on as we like to think it was.

In this case, a 16-year-old girl was dismayed to find that someone had started a MySpace page under her name and filled it with phony and embarrassing information. In TSO, this would have been known as “cloning.” One way to try to ruin a player’s reputation in the game was to create a character that looked almost exactly like the target player. Even the name can be made close enough to be confusing to some (Archetict for Architect, for instance). The clone then goes around griefing other players or just generally being rude. The bad rep, at least in part, sticks to the original player. The Herald story I just linked is from April 2004. And now we’re seeing exactly the same thing on MySpace.

One of the criticisms that’s always been levelled at the Herald is that it takes these things too seriously. “It’s only a game,” is the constant rejoinder whenever we call into question the things that go on in these virtual spaces and how they are managed by the companies that run them. (That’s the title of our book, in fact.) But, as we’ve maintained all along, it is not in fact only a game. These places are models for the kind of society we’ll live in, in the not-too-distant future. They’re worth paying attention to — close attention, since much of what happens in them has a direct bearing on the way we will live. The Herald has been writing about this stuff for two and a half years (and I’ve written a lot about the culture of online games for more traditional publications), but the broader public is only just now beginning to come around to the fact that there’s something important going on. And it’s more important than just the fact that you can make money on pixelated products or safely get your fantasy on. It’s that the societies that are developing in these places point the way toward the societies of the future, whether online or off. To a great extent, if you want to know how we will live tomorrow, look at the way we live now in a place like Second Life. That idea may sound absurd, especially coming from the editor of a virtual tabloid, but remember: we’ve been right so far.