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A whole new world

Critics told Philip Rosedale that people wouldn't pay real money for virtual products. Yeah, they were kind of wrong about that.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published November 10, 2006

It takes an intelligent designer to create a virtual world so compelling nearly a million people want to visit, many paying real money to buy houses there and roam for hours through its confines.

In this case, the designer's name is Philip Rosedale, and the world is Second Life, run by Rosedale's brainchild Linden Lab. Some excerpts from a recent interview:

How does one decide to build a virtual world?

As a kid, I was always modifying the world around me, like growing up I did electronics from like the fourth grade, and I was pretty comfortable with power tools and making things ... I always felt that using computers to digitally simulate a world, to simulate the physics of reality was the ultimate thing you wanted to use computers for. And if you could use networking - obviously one computer couldn't do that well, but a lot of computers could. ... I left RealNetworks (in 1999) and started working on it at the very moment I thought it was possible.

Did you envision Second Life as a marketplace?

In the board meetings, people were like, "Philip, nobody is going to want to spend real money, dollars on any of this virtual stuff yet." So that was why when we launched we were like ... we'll establish tokens of value that people can exchange. ... But I was surprised ... people were willing to pay for virtual beach houses, in dollars, right from day one.

Were you surprised by the amount of sex in Second Life?

There's no way to enable Second Life to be what it wants to be and restrict somebody's ability to do one thing or another. Because everything in the creative process is so interrelated.

But did it surprise you?

There's so much happening in Second Life that statistically it becomes difficult to say (how much sex there is). You can't really say how much people are selling one service or one good.

You don't track it or monitor it in any way?

No, because there's no "it." When I pay you money directly, as for a service transaction. ... We don't know why. It's not something we can look at.

What else draws people to Second Life?

Identity. ... If you went to Australia, you could be a new you. The thing about Second Life is, it's a pretty potent offering that way, right?

[Last modified November 9, 2006, 23:40:18]