Author: Tim Guest
Publisher: Hutchinson
Price: £12.99
Isbn: 9780091796570

Tim Guest’s My Life in Orange was about being raised in a Rajneesh ashram, to his mother an idealistic experiment in communal living, but one which left him feeling lonely and lost.

Here, he maps the strange metaverse of Second Life, where people, in Ballard’s phrase, “abandon reality for virtual worlds, like they once abandoned old Europe” and swap the anomie of postmodern society for a confected digital utopia.

Philip Linden (né Rosedale – like Rajneesh adherents, employees of Linden Labs, which created Second Life, are renamed), suggested that something was real only if you would change it and own it. Well, you can hang out in the virtual fashion boutiques or drag in the virtual personal shoppers to sharpen up your image, or call in the interior and landscape designers to gussie up your surroundings, and you can buy chunks of virtual real estate, so it must be real…

Twenty-five to 30 million people – more than passed through US immigration at Ellis Island throughout the 20th century, as Guest notes – regularly log on to virtual worlds. AlphaWorld kicked off in 1995. By 2001, EverQuest – ‘EverCrack’ to users of this virtual Skinner’s box – had half a million players and a per capita GNP greater than India or China. (Guest struggled to survive there as a rat-catcher; others made out like bandits as arbitrageurs, traders and fraudulent ‘estate agents’.) South Korea’s Lineage has over four million players (plus identity theft, sweatshop labourers, genocides and various other plagues of real life), and World of Warcraft has 5.5 million players and has featured in a South Park episode. The monthly charges paid by these millions have ensured that virtual world revenues are rapidly catching up with Hollywood’s and will shortly surpass them.

By the end of 2006, Second Life had well over 2.3m citizens, many of them – like Guest – immigrants from different worlds. Guest was in debt, lonely, depressed, drowning in paperwork, and Second Life offered community and consolation to him and many others. It liberated Wilde Cunningham, the composite character created by a group of cerebral palsy sufferers (a genuinely moving tale), and – because communication is textual, though audio may be in the pipeline – levelled the playing field for deaf citizens.

Romance blossoms rapidly in the absence of irksome real life jobs, mortgages and kids. (The morning after Guest slipped out of a dinner party and into Second Life, his real girlfriend asked him if he had a virtual one.) Second Life offers “a chance to recreate – and thus relate to – whatever is missing”. Jung described alcoholism as a low-level search for God; virtual worlds, says Guest, are a low-level search for each other. Guest was not alone in preferring Second Life to real life; one in 10 citizens spends at least 80 hours per week in their alter egos. But there was trouble in paradise.

Hippy love beads ended up being sold in Woolworths, and consumerism has stuck its oar into Second Life’s previously sheltered waters. Reuters and Business Week have bureaux to cover the business stories (virtual book fairs, mall openings and car showrooms), there are branding and advertising agencies, property magnates’ spanking new skyscrapers block once idyllic views, virtual casinos get torched. Politics and sex have also moved in: Le Pen opened an office, John Edwards’s virtual presidential campaign was disrupted by ‘griefers’ (virtual hooligans or pranksters, depending on your point of view); virtual escort agencies are flourishing (though sex is more convincing if you have bought a set of genitalia), and teledildonics is starting to make intercourse more ‘real’.

Guest has mixed feelings about Second Life after writing the book. Rosedale/Linden hoped that the virtual world would reduce conflict in the real world, that virtual travel would broaden the real mind. The US Army, however, has commissioned a half-scale virtual globe to practise warfare, and the Chinese Government is monitoring virtual worlds to ensure dissidents cannot congregate as they used to in the far reaches of World of Warcraft. Guest notes that Second Life is a digital Panopticon – all citizens’ moves are capable of being tracked, making it more invasive than the real world’s massive but patchy CCTV surveillance.

More worrying, though, is the fact that the average avatar consumes more power than, for instance, the average Brazilian. Avatars don’t have bodies, but they do leave carbon footprints.

All in all, a fascinating look at a parallel universe.