A PIECE OF PLACE

Modeling the Digital on the Real in Second Life

C. ONDREJKA

Linden Lab, USA

Abstract.

Digital worlds exist as synthetic models and have no need for the constraints of the real world. This freedom allows digital worlds a vast design space of representationalchoices, ranging from near correspondence to the real world to complete abstraction. Thedigital world

Second Life

was designed to allow its residents enormous creative freedom andto be as broadly appealing as possible.

Second Life

chose to mirror the real world in manyimportant aspects in order to provide a place that felt familiar and comfortable, whilegranting freedoms not possible in the real world. This Article will cover the environment of

Second Life

, the reasons for the choice and the challenges that arose.

1. Choices

Digital worlds have been imagined in many forms, from the “lines of light” of Gibson’scyberspace (1984) to the real world of Stephenson’s “Street” (1996). Freed from the limitationsof real-world geometry and physics, digital worlds can choose any topological, representationalor physical rules that they want. The forty-odd years of networked gaming and digital worldsindicate that many options were explored (Koster 2002), from early examples that used text andhyperlinked worlds through space simulations with graphics and physics, all the way to

Second Life

’s simulation of real world rigid body dynamics, fluid flow and visual appearance.Launched in 2003,

Second Life

is a digital world unlike any other. It was designed to allowresidents to control nearly every aspect of their world. From the shape of their avatars to thedesign of their homes, from how they spend their time to what types of affinity groups they form;

Second Life

’s design was focused on fostering creativity and self-expression in order to create avibrant and dynamic world full of interesting content. One of the most important sets of decisions involved the design and presentation of the world itself. Built upon a unique grid andstreaming architecture (Rosedale and Ondrejka 2003),

Second Life

’s technology is uniquelysuited to the requirements of user creation.These requirements were to make the world user-created while still maximally interesting andapproachable for new users, to foster community and to scale smoothly with population growth.A digital world that mirrored the real world was chosen because it provided the best solutions tothese diverse requirements. Before delving into the requirements, some background on

Second Life

is needed.

A PIECE OF PLACE

2. The World of

Second Life

is a continuous and persistent world that attempts to model the surface of an Earth-like world in a reasonably life-like way. The sun rises and sets, objects fall under the effect of gravity, trees and grass blow in the wind and clouds form and drift.

Second Life

runs on a grid of computers with each one simulating approximately 16 acres of land and the airspace above that land. The computers are also running a full rigid-body physicalsimulation of the all of all the objects on and over the land, a simplified solution of the Navier-Stokes equations to simulate the motion of the wind and streaming routines to send all the dataneeded to view the world to anyone who is connected (Rosedale and Ondrejka 2003). Eachcomputer is edge-connected to up to 4 other machines, allowing objects and visibility toseamlessly cross between machines, resulting in a perceptually continuous space. One could, for example, choose to travel across the entire world (Au 2004).This trip would take you some time, as the world of

Second Life

is already large and iscurrently growing at a rate of 300 - 500 acres per month. The current world is show in Figure 1.

Figure 1

. The world of

Second Life

on June 4, 2004

Each of the grey-outlined squares represented in Figure 1 is a single computer. Currentlyapproaching 200 machines,

Second Life

covers over 3,000 acres of space. This topology allowsnew land to be added easily as required by population growth.In addition to the land, nearly a million independent primitives are also being simulated by thesystem. Primitives are the building blocks of

Second Life

and allow residents to create anythingthat they imagine. Using a constructive solid geometry approach (Ondrejka 2003), residentscreate collaboratively in world, in real time.Residents of

Second Life

participate in a wide variety of activities, from building homes andholding parties to entrepreneurial activities of all kinds. Multiple universities have sprung up in

C. ONDREJKA

order to educate the population about the world. Several groups are raising virtual currency inorder to auction it for real-world currency and then make donations to non-profit groups (VERTU2004 and Lindens for Life 2004). Residents currently engage in hundreds of thousands of player-to-player transactions per month, generate over US$40,000 in real-world wealth per monththrough the auction of virtual currency and spend tens or hundreds of US$ per month in order toown virtual real estate within

Second Life.

Armed with an understanding of

Second Life

, it istime to delve into the reasons for modelling it on the real world.

3. Like the Real World, Only Better

So why model a digital world on the real world? Given the enormous computing power of the

Second Life

grid, virtually anything would have been possible. However, the goal of a user-created world made it clear that modelling on the real world – with improvements – made themost sense.

3.1 THE NEED FOR USER-CREATED CONTENT

Residents of digital worlds consume content at an incredible rate. With the rising costs of contentdevelopment, developers have turned to several options to reduce these costs. Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games solve this problem by limiting the rate of progress throughthe game, but this approach doesn’t apply to a more generalized digital world. Instead,

Second Life

utilizes the incredibly energy and creativity of its residents by making creation a fun andintegrated part of the experience. This constant generation of new content keeps the worlddynamic and fresh and helps to retain residents over long periods of time.More importantly, as user create and learn from each other, the overall quality of contentcreated in world increases. New users learn better approaches to building, get to play with ever-improving gadgets, can wear the latest fashions and ultimately pass on their knowledge to thenext batch of new residents.

3.2 THE MOTIVATIONS OF PLACE

While user-created content provides a solution to content generation, providing context andmotivation is critical for producing content that is appealing to both the creator and to others.While economic factors provide one source – and have been discussed elsewhere (Ondrejka2003) – the real-world sense of place is another important source.Residents entering

Second Life

have a great deal of experience in the real world and artisticand narrative forms derived from it. While exceptions exist (Gibson 1984), even speculativefiction and movies tends to owe more to the real world than to more abstract forms. Place hasmeaning. Up and down has meaning. Most people look more or less human. By providing adigital world that allows its residents to build upon this massive well of cultural knowledge,

Second Life

offers enough familiarity to not baffle new residents and creators. It can still bechallenging, as the multiple digital universities indicate, but it is sufficiently familiar to allow newusers to incorporate themselves into the community.The real world also provides a rich source of entrepreneurial ideas. There are certainly business proposals that don’t have real-world analogues, but residents’ freedom to leverage thevast range of real-world business allows those residents who choose economic motivations toengage in a fluid, rapid evolution of ideas. These residents can then further borrow from the realworld, because they understand that location, customer traffic and advertising all apply within