Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life

by Thomas Malaby

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created. Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"―as the Linden Lab employees call themselves―found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions. Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2009

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the book was too meta for my taste.

Some sections were informative for any start-up engineering culture, though.

"On the surface, Linden Lab strove to have an organizational structure that resisted vertical authority to the point of denying its existence almost entirely, for the reasons already mentioned. ... In some respects, what I found was almost a perfect reversal of what Kidder discovered in one department of the company he studied in Soul of a New Machine. Where Kidder found disorder masquerading as order, I saw in Linden lab order beneath a claim to disorder."

The transformation from weekly A&Os (achievements and objectives) to JIRA voting to JIRA issue-in-issue Elo ranking ... interesting.

This comment by a Linden summarized most of the Second Life paradox:
"There are two opposing motivations: (1) We are a tool, a platform. We are plastic: users mold us as they feel. They should be able to put the damn sun wherever they want. (2) We are a simulation of the real world. Things happen naturally, and the residents build their lives around universal truths and natural cycles. We build by day we party by night. Trying to satisfy both of these motivations is the problem, I think."

A common problem at software companies, would've been interested to dive into this more...
"While many developers recognized this power imbalance and sought to compensate for it by being on the whole approachable as well as sensitive to the nuances of the requests made of them, the fact remained that they, and only they, could tinker "under the hood"..."

[Brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just read through this very quickly ( it's short ) Au's book is much better. Did have a brief interesting bit about contingent games

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't have strong opinions on this. It's worth checking out as a companion piece to Boellstorf and Au, if you want to explore different perspectives within Linden Lab.