CPU: Comparisons between the metaverse of “Snow Crash” and Second Life are inescapable and, as I understand it, encouraged by Linden. Did you set out to make Second Life like the metaverse?

PR: [Neal] Stephenson arguably put forth the most compelling vision of this, but even before him, numerous authors have also described similar parallel worlds, including Philip Dick, John Brunner in “Shockwave Rider,” Vernor Vinge in “True Names,” and, of course, William Gibson in his “Sprawl” novels. All that said, Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” has the closest practical resemblance to Second Life as it exists now: a parallel, immersive world which simulates an alternate universe, which thousands of people inhabit simultaneously for communication, play, and work, at various levels and variations of role-playing with their avatars.

CPU: The real world has built-in scaling problems: overpopulation, plague, natural resources, etc. Are there similar future dilemmas in Second Life?

PR: That’s a pretty profound metaphysical question. Do all worlds have limits? If so, is it important that they do? The ultimate limit even for the real world is always computation: atoms and how atoms work together. Those same limits actually exist in Second Life, like you can look at the real world’s limits as being sort of very complicated secondary effects of primary limits. The primary resource limit is matter, the material around you. And that actually works the same way in Second Life because it’s important that any digital world, to be tangible and appealing to us, have a couple of key aspects. The first-order one is that it be persistent and plastic, mutable, that we as humans are able to manipulate it. Then the second-order issues pertain to how things are expressive and meaningful and communicative for us. We can externalize thought by molding the world around us. One of the reasons why Second Life is so compelling and that it is going to continue to grow quite radically is because it offers an ability to do that. It offers a level of mutability that the real world simply doesn’t have. It theoretically does—you can organize atoms in a lot of different ways in the real world. But pragmatically, if you need a milling machine to organize them the way you’re thinking, there’s a big barrier there that most people aren’t going to get over. Second Life has this ability to be manipulated.

But the very fact, if you think about it, that the world itself can be continuously manipulated by people means that it has to be continuously simulated; because if I move something or change it, something has to help me make that change—a computer. What that means is that there is always a concept of scarce resource. There is continuous computation that has to be going on more or less uniformly in a digital world. It’s happening in the real world at the level of atomic physics, and it’s happening in Second Life at the level of simulation—the simulator machines. So we do actually have resources—land and primitives and scripts. You can only have so many scripts on a simulator, thousands, before the simulator just slows down and stops working and the world becomes immutable. There are limits.

So are there future dilemmas that Second Life will have to overcome? Well, Second Life has been designed so we can add computation or simulation, pick the word you like, to it as more and more people get into it. There will be times where people will be coming in at a rate faster than we’ll be able to add simulation, so there will be overcrowding in parts of Second Life, and I think that is going to be generally true even once there are millions of people in it. There will be competition for resources. There is tremendous competition for land today. You can see that statistically just by looking at regional land sales numbers.

CPU: I’m sure you could have designed the world with a sort of fourth dimension that let multiple people pile into the same 3D space, yes?

PR: Of course, but you still would be faced with that problem of computation. You could make an aircraft carrier-sized space in your closet. That’s fine, although I can address why that might be problematic with people. But one of the things that is so exciting about Second Life is that it takes a lot of the things we are trying to do with the Internet, and it makes them spatial. Intellectually we all kind of say, ‘Oh, no, I don’t need 3D. I don’t need a spatial environment to operate in.’ And in some sense, that’s true. But your typical person can’t even remember two file names in their My Documents folder. The point I always make to them is, now tell me about stuff in your kitchen, a place where, chances are, you actually spend less time than in and around that directory. You can actually describe thousands of discrete objects in your kitchen. And why is that? Why is it so easy for you to describe your kitchen to me? Because that’s how we remember. That’s how we associate in our minds. So with computers, there are analogies. The easiest way of doing things is to use a spatial environment because if that environment is immersive to you, you’ll relate to it in the same way that you do physical space. I’m not saying that everybody is going to do word processing in a place like Second Life, but what I am saying is that if you and I meet and have a conversation in Second Life rather than on the phone, you’ll find that your retention of the conversation is arguably somewhat better than it would be on the phone. The reason for this is a well-understood phenomenon where if you’re sitting in an unusual physical space and you’re having a conversation, there is a tendency to remember the conversation a bit better because it gets associated with a novel space, which is a sort of separation factor in your brain. We wanted Second Life to be explicitly spatial. Of course, there are incredible things you can do in Second Life, such as move your view around, look over somebody’s shoulder, fly, or move almost literally mountains with your hands, but there is still a basic spatial nature to it, and I think that is a very powerful thing.

CPU: There are probably people out there who look at Second Life and say, ‘Eh, it’s a game.’ Then there are probably people who say, ‘This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.’ So in your mind, do you say to yourself, ‘Eh, I made a game,’ or, ‘I’m the guy behind ‘let there be light.’’?

PR: You can probably guess which kind of guy I am. [laughs] Well, I’m not a gamer, first of all. I didn’t play games as a kid very much. I played Dungeons & Dragons five or six times in junior high, I’ve never been a super-social person, and I haven’t ever gotten into these LAN party games. There are many brilliant people who are part of Linden Lab, and several of those do have game design and engineering backgrounds. But I don’t. So my motivations for creating Second Life didn’t have anything to do with games. Second Life to me was an answer to a question and a problem and a passion that I had since I was a little kid, which was to want to make things and to be able to imagine the laws of physics being somewhat different in ways that made the world more interesting to people. As a little kid and also as an inventor (a kid who grew up making stuff), I always wanted to be able to make things and as a creative person kind of externalize my thoughts in a way that was more facile. I imagined myself sort of standing in the darkness and bringing things into existence around me as a way of building. And I couldn’t do that in the real world. I can think of cool gadgets way faster than I can build them with my hands. We’ve all had that feeling. So I wanted a place where you could just do that, where you could just take your brain and literally manipulate the world around you. And moreover, I always felt deeply that if you allowed a lot of people to do that together, you would get something that was kind of where we all want the world to go.

CPU: Do the economies of the real world and Second Life overlap? Are there cases where inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit in your virtual world spill over into the real world?

PR: Real-world economies and Second Life’s economy are in constant overlap. First of all, the in-world currency, or Linden Dollar (L$), can be exchanged at currency exchanges such as the LindeX for real U.S. dollars. Currently the exchange rate is L$252 for US$1. Many, many Residents have ‘real life’ jobs in Second Life and are making a ‘real life’ income by selling virtual goods and services. In fact, in October 2005, the GNP of Second Life was L$1,041,865,650, or US$4,134,387, and user-to-user transactions were L$695,425,923, or US$2,759,626. Last month, there were over 450 people who had made at least US$1,000 a month in Second Life.

Second Life is full of entrepreneurs, and we’re seeing experimentation on many different levels, from individuals starting dream businesses, fashion designers, newspapers, architects, and full-time scriptors, to Residents who have discerned a need and filled it, such as detective agencies, notary public, teaching, and charitable giving. Most recently, multiple Katrina benefits and the ACS’ Relay For Life were held in SL. Finally, because Linden Lab has given Residents IP rights over the content they create in-world, they have a real opportunity to take the content they’ve created in-world and make real-world dollars from it. Last year, a SL Resident, Kermitt Quirk, created a game called Tringo, a cross between Tetris and bingo, that took the world by storm. He licensed it to Donnerwood Media, a real-world media company, in early 2005, and I believe it’s appearing on Game Boy Advance right about now.

CPU: Tell us about your avatar and what it tells us about you.

PR: My avatar, ‘Philip Linden,’ is a guy with spiky hair, muscular, tattooed arms, and a black T-shirt emblazoned with bright red Rolling Stones-style lips. He has a tattoo that in Japanese means ‘forever young.’ I created him in a couple hours several years ago to test our avatar creation capabilities. I didn’t really give much thought to him. Nowadays, though, he has become such an icon and so nostalgic that I hesitate to change him. He looks pretty out of date compared to the amazing avatars in SL today.

CPU: I know you call the ‘look’ of Philip Linden ‘Cowboy Roy.’ If you were to update Cowboy Roy, what would you do and why?

PR: Gosh. You got me on the spot with that one. I won’t say what, but I’ve done little tiny changes to my avatar just to try to modernize it a little bit, ever so slowly so that no one would notice, but so I could get some of the cool stuff that people have in-world. I feel a bit out of date. Cowboy Roy is pretty anachronistic; is that the word?

CPU: You’re stuck in high waters.

PR: Totally. The other avatar I’ve always imagined creating was some sort of a Michelangelo Greek god. I think mythology emerged as a property of the rules of systems. In other words, our ancestors that lived in places where there was a huge dependency on nature would evolve mythologies that imbued nature with mythological powers. I’m saying this kind of jokingly, but I have to admit that like anyone, I’m kind of drawn to the idea that God is the code.

CPU: Meaning?

PR: What are the physical laws of the Internet? They are not human laws. We have observed that laws like ‘gambling is illegal’ are not meaningful on the Internet. Law is not broadly meaningful on the Internet. So what is the law, then, of the Internet? It’s HTTP. What you can do with that protocol, say SSL extensions, that’s the law, the physical law. Can you securely communicate over the Internet? Yes. So the law is that you can do that. It’s a capability, just like physics. Physics says that you can use electromagnetic radiation to send signals at a distance. Well, the fact that there’s a broadly accepted standard called SSL means that you can basically send cryptographically secure information over a long distance across a network. The code is the law, and the code is God. So people always say, ‘Are you guys gods?’ What I always say to that is, ‘no, but the code is.’ The most broadly accepted versions of the protocol are the physical laws and then by extension, depending on how religious you want to be, they are what we think of as God. So if you were to draw it to mythology, I think the Second World authors are most like the Greek and Roman gods. We’re imperfect. We sometimes disagree. Maybe very rarely we actually fight. And we have certain specializations. There’s a guy here named Andrew who was the first employee, and he’s like the god of weather because he’s a physicist and everybody knows that he worked on the fluid-dynamic systems that are behind the weather. So if anybody is going to twiddle around with the code, like if you want the code to change, if you want the character of physical law to change around how the wind blows, you should talk to Andrew because in a decentralized development environment Andrew might take care of you if you want something to change.

CPU: If I pray to him and sacrifice.

PR: Yeah, you pray to Andrew, and Andrew changes the weather. So anyway, if I was to do another avatar, I’d be like marble, like one of the Michelangelo slaves or something. I would appropriately fit the concept of an imperfect but inherently human and well-meaning—hopefully, on a good day—Greek god.

CPU: Speaking of weather and physics, what will the update to the Havok II engine mean for your world?

PR: SL has, from the beginning, had a physics engine. It is important because we so expect and enjoy physical behavior in the 3D world. It is a key to full immersion. Really, the ‘physics’ of SL today can broadly be thought of as weather, we use a fluid simulation to move the clouds and wind, and rigid-body collisions, things like bullets, avatars, or vehicles running into each other. Moving forward, looking at Havok II and beyond, we will focus on things like very detailed avatar interaction, such as proper collisions between bodies and their attached objects, like swords, and better simulation of vehicles and flexible or jointed objects.

CPU: Is it possible for a virtual world to be, in any sense, too real?

PR: Well, there are things that a virtual world can do which are starkly opposed to the kinds of reasons why we might work to create them in the first place. If you had to pee in Second Life—why? I mean, that would be illogical and counterproductive, against the sort of freedoms that we seek in doing these things.

CPU: So in trying to replicate the real world too closely, you obstruct what it is that you hope to achieve in the first place?

PR: Exactly. There are aspects of the real world that we are trying to get away from in doing these things, and if you simulate them, you’re actually going backward toward what we’re trying to move forward from. Our creation motivation, our seed for doing this, is the idea of creating a world that is in significant ways better than the physical world.

CPU: Do the physics underneath Second Life influence how the society evolves, particularly from a behavioral standpoint?

PR: That’s heavy. So . . . if the place is physically spatial, then the society evolves around locality and affinity in a way that is pretty powerful. Consider: In the real world, cities grew up around things like rivers or natural resources. London’s on a river. But when you actually look at London in microstructure, when you blow it up on a map and start studying it, what you see is what you see in Second Life. If you create an inherently physical space, you get affinity driving locality. The fact that you can see your neighbor means that you could desire to perhaps share something in common with your neighbors. So communities in Second Life tend to be physical communities, people living near each other who have common, say, aesthetic or behavioral interests. The world tends to construct itself and organize itself around affinity because adjacency is physically meaningful.

So that’s one way that physics, because it’s inherently structural, influences behavior. Now, when you get down to physical simulation, like Havok and stuff, that also structures the world. Like that fact that you can bump into people. Why is it that you have to be able to bump into people in Second Life? Why can't you just pass through everything? Well, because there is this appealing concept of privacy and of exclusion. Unless you can create a space that is at least to some extent private, there is something lost there. You want to at least minimally say what space is under your control vs. somebody else's control. It's an organizing principal. That means you have to simulate physics so that things, people included, run into each other. And when people can run into each other, there is a lot of interesting behavior to that. Take people's tendency to stand and not invade each other's space in Second Life. If you’ve been in there, you totally will see that. Because there’s this need for controlling the physical aspects of space, inevitably you have to be able to run into things, and that means that you get all these emotional results of running into things.

CPU: Where does the name Linden come from?

PR: The name Linden comes from the alley that I started the company in. Our first office was in an alley street in Hayes Valley. And the first hundred or so simulators that make up the world of Second Life were all named as the quirky little alley names in San Francisco. So you’ll see Natoma and all these now almost mythological spaces in Second Life. People in Second Life know what the original sims were. I have to admit I myself am not completely sure which machines we put on first. It is broadly argued that DaBoom was the first machine. Our second office is actually on DaBoom Alley. We also liked that Linden has a mythological context. It’s a tree. You can look it up.

CPU: Do schools exist in Second Life in the traditional kindergarten through college sense?

PR: Yes. First of all, if you want to build things in Second Life, you will need to go to school, and there are many people who offer you that sort of training, either as events or for a fee or whatever. So there’s a very rich concept of learning around just learning how the world works sufficiently for you to be really successful in it. In the conventional sense, there are now dozens of schools that are doing different things in Second Life. I just watched a video the other day from a woman who had used Second Life to do a Carl Sagan-style exploring-our-solar-system thing that was very cool. People are just starting to do things like teaching physics. If you think about it, it’s very easy to do the kinds of experiments that were so engaging and memorable in school but costly.

CPU: I love history, but I dropped Greek history at Portland State after three classes because it was so excruciatingly dull.

PR: Wouldn’t it be better to just wander around in ancient Greece? Or just be Greek for the whole quarter and live that way? You have to dress appropriately; you have to attend functions; you have to engage in debate. And that’s trivial to do in Second Life. And in fact, people have begun to engage in the recreation of historically accurate settings. I think that we have only months to wait to see some really successful examples of specific, directed teaching going on around that. We’re just trying to support a lot of colleges getting into Second Life now.

CPU: Really? Conventional colleges?

PR: Yeah, we’re more or less just overwhelmed with requests for that. If you go to secondlife.com/education and look for educators, it will tell you a little bit about it. There’s a program we have called Campus: Second Life, but basically we do things like bulk accounts and stuff for colleges that want them. We have a lot of things like anthropology and sociology going on in Second Life. There’s actually so much sociology study going on in Second Life that we have an ethics policy that says that you have to disclose, much like in the real world. You can’t just wander around doing experiments on people. You have to actually disclose that you’re a scientist or whatever.

CPU: What’s the most surprising experience you’ve ever had within Second Life?

PR: Wow. Well, nothing really jumps to mind, but I think that's because Second Life is so continuously unusual and surprising. But, yeah, I can remember one: There was a guy early on who figured out how to build immensely complicated things using scripting. We were just at that point where we were getting big enough that you didn't really know what was going on anymore, and I remember showing up at this one guy's land and standing there with him in the forest, and he said, ‘Let me show you something.' And I said, ‘OK, what are we going to do?' And he typed something like ‘modern.' And all of a sudden, his whole property reconfigured itself and things moved around and zoomed into position and resized themselves, and all of a sudden we were standing in a very cool modern building. And then he typed a few other sentences, and it would transform itself into another thing. Similarly, you'll be standing there in Second Life chatting with a bunch of people and a perfect military attack helicopter will just kind of come by, sounds and all, and you know it's this new thing that nobody's seen that somebody just built. It gives you this incredible sense of presence of that this is the real world. This is what I expect from the real world. That it has this kind of randomness and newness to it that people can do these things. And I've had moments where I was just sitting and talking to somebody and something will come by overhead, and I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m here. It all really worked.’

by William Van Winkle

William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family live outside Portland, Ore.