San Diego Reader

As you read this, 40,000 people in the world are "in-world." This doesn't mean that these people have left our world, the real world. It means that their real bodies are sitting in front of personal computers, and their consciousnesses have embodied an "avatar" who is in another place, in another life. In "Second Life." In their second lives, these people's avatars might be playing games, meeting other people's avatars, listening to music, dancing, reading things, inventing things, teaching classes, buying and selling services and things, sitting around, exploring, discussing business, and even engaging in virtual sexual activities.

Sound creepy?

It might be creepy. But it's also "the next wave of the Internet," "a platform for learning," "an online playground," "a virtual environment," and "a new opportunity to make a whole lot of money" -- depending upon whom you ask.

According to San Francisco-based Linden Labs, the company that created it, "Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its Residents."

There's No Difference between My Real Life and My Second Life

One of those residents, Jopsy Pendragon, has long pointy ears that wiggle. He wears hippie clothes and floppy hair, and best of all, he sports a set of removable, multicolored, fully operational dragon wings. The wings are just for show, though, since everyone where Jopsy's from can fly, and also teleport.

Pendragon is an ageless, tall, thin, blond, barefoot elfin lampmaker and lighting-effects creator in the Teal region of Second Life. His particle laboratory there is famous. If you Google the name "Jopsy Pendragon," you get around 400 hits. He's got a video on YouTube. His real person writes a blog.

Pendragon's real person, John P. Crane, is a six-foot-tall, 230-pound, 40-year-old redheaded blue-eyed information technology specialist who lives in Hillcrest and works for a small biotech company in La Jolla.

Crane not only tosses around terms like "VRML" -- which stands for virtual reality modeling language -- he's fluent in it.

"I made Jopsy Pendragon from scratch," Crane tells me. "Pretty much everything except the hair, which I bought from somebody, because I'm terrible at making hair."

Crane doesn't look the part of your average computer geek. For one thing, his clothes and his own hair, and even his condo, are all quite clean. The walls of his living room are hung with bright, abstract artwork that Crane painted himself. As he chats with me, he sits down, turns on his computer, jogs his mouse and clicks it a few times, and there we are, in the castlelike home area of the famous Jopsy Pendragon.

On the screen of Crane's personal computer, Second Life has all the trappings of a good modern video game. Everyone's motions are robotic and herky-jerky, the trees and buildings shine bright and plastic and fantastical, and everything appears realistic enough, if you don't stare at it for too long.

But Jopsy Pendragon doesn't have a gun to shoot or a car to drive; he's got nowhere to go and no enemy to kill; and as far as I can tell, he doesn't have a mission or assignment to carry out. He's just there.

"Meet Jopsy Pendragon," John P. Crane says. "He's my avatar."

In Hindu religion, an avatar was the incarnation of a deity in human form. Nowadays, the word suggests an abstract manifestation or embodiment, as in the sentence, "Approaching the year 2008, Second Life is the most advanced avatar of virtual reality."

Avatars in Second Life have got the life. They can't drown, won't age, don't have to eat (although they can), can't get hurt, don't have to go to the bathroom (although they can). No avatar is born anatomically correct (although -- get this! -- they can have genitalia built for them). Basically, avatars are ideal versions of us. Like pixelated angels or something.

And we are their creators.

Crane started visiting Second Life back near its beginning, in January 2004. He'd heard about the three-dimensional digital world from a friend in L.A. who shares an interest in virtual worlds.

Crane tells me that the earliest interactive computer platforms were bulletin-board systems. You dialed in on your modem to a single phone line, and you left messages, and someone else would call in later and add a few messages of their own. The boards got a little more complicated in the early '80s, with a couple of phone lines, and within a year or two, there was simultaneous text chat where people could type to each other.

The first color graphics (2-D, some even drawn in perspective) and on-screen characters date to the mid-'80s, and point-and-click was invented in 1987.

In 1989, James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon University invented TinyMUD, an online arrangement of virtual places where users could go and create content for other people to explore. TinyMUD was a big step forward, because it was user created, and the virtual situations would change as the users chose to change them.

Crane himself created a version of TinyMUD, called DragonMUD, by taking the source code, inventing a theme, and inviting players. For a long while, DragonMUD was Crane's main thing on the Internet. The game helped him meet people from all over, including someone who worked at Qualcomm and who helped him get a job there. Crane ended up working at Qualcomm for over eight years.

Throughout the '90s, computer gaming continued to develop, with increasingly realistic graphics, 3-D technologies, and stereo sound.

But discerning computer experts like Crane weren't satisfied. "Even by 2003," he says, "most of the stuff out there in virtual reality was just really flat. It looked artificial, it was slow, clunky, and was really hard to use. But then my friend came down to visit, and we went into the Apple Store in Fashion Valley, and he pulled down the Second Life client right there in the store, and he started running it. So we went in and looked at things and poked around, and I thought it looked pretty cool. I agreed to sign up. At the time, it was a pay service; it cost $10 to sign up. But they've done away with that. Now it's free."

Second Life's parent company, Linden Labs, was founded by Philip Rosedale, 39, in 1999. The site opened to the public in 2003.

So, Second Life is a virtual world and it's free to join. But why would you join? Why would you want to go into a virtual world?

"The hardest thing about Second Life is finding what you're into," Crane says, and he seems to be half-agreeing with me. "You have to bring in a lot of who you are, to find something you enjoy doing. Most people will look around, buy a few things, go to a club, dance a little, and that's about it."

But, Crane says, for some people, there's a whole lot more to Second Life. "If anybody has any degree of programming experience whatsoever, then picking up Second Life is really easy. And people who haven't done any programming can get so into this that they actually learn how. The scripts are pretty basic."

Crane persists, "It's like filling out a tax form, almost. It's trying to figure out what values to put in what blanks to make sure it all looks the way you want it to."

Jopsy Pendragon has been standing around, unattended, preternaturally patient, facing away from us and waiting there on Crane's computer screen while we've been chatting. But as Crane decides to show me an example of coding and scripting, Pendragon's broad-shouldered and dragon-winged form is eclipsed by onscreen windows known as "editing widgets."

As I look on, Crane opens a widget full of fundamental shapes, called "prims," clicks on a box prim, spreads it out, elongates it, and then adds a second, triangular prim, which he places on top of the elongated box. Deft with his clicking mouse, Crane uses subsequent widgets to color in the parts, hollow out the composite prim, and texturize it. He's quick at this, and within a minute, Pendragon is bathing in the light of a homemade virtual lamp.

The funny thing is, there's no real need for lamps in Second Life. If you want light, you click on a command that says "force sun," and you make it noontime. If you want more light still, you turn up the resolution on your computer. But Crane's lamps are beautiful, and they're also necessary if you want to authenticate a city streetscape. So lots of people buy them. That's right. They buy them. With real, first-life money.

The currency in Second Life, or "in-world," as they say, is Linden dollars. The variable exchange rate for Lindens is about L$168 to one U.S. dollar. Jopsy Pendragon's lamps average a few hundred Lindens apiece, or just a couple of U.S. dollars.

Which is to say that many residents of Second Life are making money -- both Lindens and Benjamins. One person even used his avatar to invent a computer game, called Slingo, which the person subsequently sold for millions to Nintendo. Most Second Lifers are making small amounts of money in small transactions, a dollar here, a dollar there. But those numbers do add up. In the past 24 hours, over $1 million has been spent on clothes, hair, "real" estate, and goodness knows what other in-world items.

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