We’re putting it out right now that we’re a little afraid of Second Life and we’ve never played it (or any role-playing game–ever), so we felt a little stupid when talking to Wagner James Au, Second Life Journalist. We found him extremely polite about our luddite-like ways as he spelled it out for us; who’s playing, who’s not playing, and why everyone will be playing in the future. We suppose though, that’s what an investigative journalist is supposed to do, go where we don’t really want to go and bring back information and pictures.

These days, it’s hard not to revert to nostalgia. Sure, some days you love the complexity of the world, the internet and all these new gadgets, but other days. . . you just want to crawl into a hole and play Super Mario Bros. 1 over and over again. That’s sort of how we felt about Second Life for a while. Like it was one more computer trend we didn’t ask for or need, and like, role-playing games have traditionally been left to the geeks anyways. . . Dungeons and Dragons being anything more than a joke just sounds wrong.

But it’s hard to ignore all those people in Korea, or the what? NINE MILLION PEOPLE playing World of WarCraft right now. . . this is something that might very well be important, especially when you consider that Second Life is a game with real-world applications. It’s a game that could become an important tool for business, and we’re not just talking advertising, we’re talking board meetings, lectures, and corporate training. We’re talking about games like Second Life being more important than the internet. . .

WRITING ABOUT VIRTUAL WORLDS FOR THE REAL WORLD

The Vulture: Where are you located?

Wagner James Au: San Francisco, California. . . where are you?

V: Philadelphia, PA. . . So let’s just get started, what exactly is an embedded Second Life Journalist?

WJA: The embedded role happened between 2003 and 6, when I was contracted by Linden Lab to be their embedded journalist. Originally I was going to write about the world, they were thinking for Salon, which I would write for a lot at that time, or Wired. While they were showing me the technology, they thought maybe I could write for them, write a journal or something. I said yeah. I was really fascinated even then-even though it was just an idea-so they brought me in for three years, but I left in February 2006 to write a book about it.

V: A book? So, you’re writing that right now?

WJA: I should be finished with writing it fairly soon.

V: But, you still cover Second Life?

WJA: Yeah. I still cover it on an independent basis. It’s actually for Federated Media, John Batel’s company, they do my ads. So it’s still professional, I still make a living off of it, I just don’t do it directly with Linden Lab right now.

V: That kind of makes the reporting even better then doesn’t it?

WJA: It hasn’t really changed the way I write things. When I was with Linden Lab they gave me a lot of freedom to write what I wanted to write about. So, leaving them, the only real difference is, I make less money doing it.

V: It seems like there’s a genre of journalists writing about games and internet media, how did it happen that that became your niche?

WJA: It took awhile before I could do it on a full-time basis, but I started in the early 90s. I started doing some small freelance writing for Wired Magazine and some other tech magazines and I started doing some regular stuff for Salon. I knew some of the editors there, right when Salon was beginning in the mid-nineties.

I did other pop-culture sort of articles for them, but in the mid-nineties I started writing about games, and at that point, I was thinking of games as an emerging new art form in media. I felt they weren’t really being written about that way, so I thought I’d start.

AND, LIKE, A BEAM OF LIGHT COMES OUT OF YOUR HAND

V: What kinds of things do you see evolving on games like Second Life?

WJA: There’s something fairly amazing every time I go in there. The degree of evolution is pretty much in all varieties, so it’s not only what people are doing with the user creation tools. . .

V: User creation tools?

WJA: There are building tools in SL. . . have you ever been to SL before?

V: No, it sort of scares me, I think the idea of it is sort of awesome though. . .

WJA: You should give it a try. The creation tools, this is really what distinguishes SL from any other online world. It’s the ability to build 3D content immediately, dynamically and collaboratively. Your character, which is called an avatar, stretches his/her hand out and like, a beam of light appears from the hand and all of a sudden objects appear. Then you can add shapes to them, add textures, give them gravity and then you can link them with other objects, which are called prims, for primitives.

Anything you see in SL, if you look on my blog, all of those cities, clothes, everything was created from these building blocks.

V: Wow, so you actually buy land on SL, then build everything on it yourself?

WJA: Yeah. There are some areas called sandboxes, which are free build areas, so you don’t even have to own land. That’s where a lot of the top content creators get discovered. They’re actually just college kids that have a free account and they’re building things on the sandboxes that are really amazing.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS

V: So a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading on SL concentrates on the fact that there’s real-life money to be made, and virtual sex to be had. Are there any other reasons to hang out in SL?

WJA: It’s everything you would see in life, in a big city, plus all the other fantastic things that you can’t do in real life. So, you go in and you’ll see nightclubs, live music is really popular because you can stream audio. There are a lot of musicians who make a lot of their living by collecting tips in Linden Dollars, which can be converted into cash, there are contests and parties. There are a lot of role-playing areas where it’s sort of a game within SL. A lot of people treat SL as a game, but it’s really a virtual world platform, so you can do anything you want. You can go in there and have parties, and have sex if you wanna and all that.

There’s a lot of people who have created games within Second Life. There are these really beautiful kind of cyber-punk, fantasy-tinged, like, robot-spider-babe role-playing games. There’s actually a program called Linden Script Language that you can create games in.

Now there are a lot of companies coming in, trying to use Second Life for marketing, but some companies are actually using the program for corporate meetings or training. I was just looking at Wired online and they were pitching this guy who just figured out how to hook up the Wiii controller to SL, so you can use it for corporate training online because you’ll be able to move objects around in Second Life.

There are Universities that have started to teach classes online in SL. Harvard has an island and they actually broadcast lectures from their island.

GAMES THAT TAKE OVER THE WORLD

V: So basically, you see games like this becoming really important to our culture and us finding really practical uses for them?

WJA: Yeah. As more practical uses come into SL, and worlds like it, then they will start supplanting the web and people will use worlds like SL instead of the web. A perfect example of this is the Korean site CyWorld. It has an online component, you can create an avatar and chat and hang out with other people as your avatar, it also has a social-network function, like facebook or myspace, so you can have friends. You can invite these friends into your virtual living room to hang out, and there’s also a stream of real-world news that comes into the world. The amount of Koreans that use this, is 90% under 30. So basically that’s the web for them.

If you look at the activity patterns of young adults, they are into these online worlds hugely, like World of WarCraft, which gets a lot of the press. But there are actually several worlds that are almost as big. . . like there’s one called Habbo Hotel. . .

V: I just know World of WarCraft because that’s been around forever, but these other games have been around as well?

WJA: They have been, but they aren’t strictly games in the traditional geek sense of, you know, killing orcs. They’ve kind of been undercover because of that. I think there’s a bias in the game industry to make games that they’re familiar with like World of WarCraft, which is basically Dungeons and Dragons.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT IS NOT LIKE DUCK HUNT

V: I’m sorry, so this is a like a shoot ‘em up? Like Duck Hunt?

WJA: It’s called a role-playing game. You have a character that you improve by killing things and getting stuff. Role-playing games have been around since 1976.

V: As a card game? Or a computer game?

WJA: It started as a table-top game that you play in the basement with a bunch of other geeks, but then there were computer versions of it that started appearing in the late 70s. It got bigger and bigger until finally World of WarCraft has 9 million people playing it. The format of these games really hasn’t changes since 1975.

V: So is SL more like The Sims?

WJA: Sims is a single player game. They tried to spin off an online version called Sims online, but it did not do very well, it actually bombed. The Sims was huge, and that recreated a realistic human experience. . . so it overcame the geek boundary and more regular-type of computer users got into it, especially like, women and girls. Which is also true of Second Life.

WOMEN AND GIRLS

V: It seems like there are a lot of women and girls on SL. . .

WJA: Well, Second Life is adults only, so it’s 18 and over, but usage based it’s 43% women right now. In comparison, World of WarCraft is 15% women. What’s really interesting about SL is that the top most successful players, and also the content creators who are actually making a living off of it, are almost all women. Women in their 30s and 40s, a lot of whom are housewives and stuff.

V: Do you think that’s a time issue? Housewives have more time to sit at the computer everyday?

WJA: That’s part of it. What seems to be the case though is that women are better than men, generally, at socializing and creating communities. A lot of these women, too, have skills that are untapped until they use them in Second Life.

A YOUTUBED SL ADVENTURE EXPLAINED

WJA: Second Life is like being in a world of legos on acid. You can build anything and then people can come along and build it with you, so it’s kind of like free-form jazz music. It gets weirder and weirder as it goes along, for instance this You Tube video:

These people created an apartment house that looks like it’s from the 50s, only it’s gigantic. So when you go in your avatar looks two inches tall, so you’re looking up from the linoleum floor at the ironing board and the ironing board is like a tower and the oven is gigantic. . . As I was exploring this apartment house, two guys came along and they were Transformers. So they were Transformers shooting up the place until they got tired of that and one of them turned into a giant house-fly. He became a house-fly and then he started dancing to the reggae music that was being streamed into the living room, then he got into a WWII plane and started to pilot that.

So the fly is flying a WWII plane and I started to follow him. . . it got weirder and weirder and that’s sort of what happens. . .

New World Notes, Jame’s blog

Make Love Not WarCraft