A Virtual Scoop
Most times, I do my reporting in a crisp white suit, in tribute to Tom Wolfe. In the war zones, I’ll look more like Hunter S. Thompson, with aviator sunglasses and a Colt .45. In those guises, I’ve reported on an anti-tax protest replete with tea crates and dancing rats; I’ve pushed past the placards of an anti-capitalist demonstration on an island owned by a British ad agency; I’ve interviewed sex workers and Catholic priests, socialist utopians and midget warmongers. And even though none of us really exist -- except as data bits on a few servers in San Francisco -- it’s still the best reporting gig I’ve ever had. And unless I miss my guess, I’ve stumbled on the scoop of the decade.
Last June, the creators of Second Life, a massively multi-user online world (or MMO), offered me the oddest assignment in my eight years as a freelance writer. They wanted me to join their virtual community, not as a fellow resident but as an embedded journalist. The closest thing we have to the computer-created universe depicted in the movie “The Matrix,” MMOs are persistent, self-contained Internet worlds that people across the globe simultaneously inhabit, via alter egos called avatars (from the Sanskrit for “incarnation”). The fantasy games Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies are two of the biggest in North America, with nearly 700,000 users between them.
If you’ve ever played the Tomb Raider video games, with their third-person, “over-the-shoulder” view of the action, you get the visual style of the typical MMO. Using mouse and keyboard, players (or “residents,” in the Second Life lingo) maneuver their avatars through a lush 3-D landscape, typing chat messages to other users. Unlike most MMOs, Second Life encourages its subscribers to literally help build the world with the construction and programming tools provided for them. A vast, untamed continent of mountains, meadows and lakes has been rapidly transformed into cities, suburbs and fantasy resorts. The effect is so vivid users say they are “in-world,” not simply online.
For many users, the ability to look over the shoulder of your virtual self unlocks a realm where anything seems possible. They’re happy just to treat this world as a risk-free platform for lucid dreaming. Together, they are crafting a collectively experienced, collectively told narrative of conflict and adventure. But that’s the central tension of Second Life: While some residents yearn for escape, others look for ways to bring the real world with them.
At the start, I assumed my role would be more or less “advertorial,” an indirect means of promoting Second Life. (And, in full disclosure, it is that, in the broadest sense.) I figured I would mostly interview game geeks and flirtatious socializers -- the typical denizens of the virtual world -- and write innocuous profiles of residents whose avatars “married” each other.
But I began my beat just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down, and the real-world conflict spurred a brutal culture war among the residents. At the time, the regions where player-versus-player combat is allowed were separated from the rest of the continent by an imposing, Berlin-style wall. On one side were the residents who enjoyed combat-oriented mayhem, and they tended to support the war in Iraq (many were veterans or active-duty military); on the wall’s opposite side were a loose contingent of antiwar advocates, many of them artists and dreamers who use Second Life as a creative palette. In the weeks after George W. Bush’s ill-timed aircraft carrier victory speech, that wall, where the war gamers had erected a sign enjoining everyone to “Support President Bush and the Troops,” was now papered over with posters depicting Bush as a turtle. Even more politically divisive posters followed. And then the shooting started.
As in most MMOs, people can “die” in combat zones, though here it’s no more than a momentary disorientation while you await virtual resurrection. The effect is a bit like having a house guest switch off the radio or TV in the middle of your favorite program. So when the in-game gunplay erupted over Iraq, it seemed like each side was trying to jostle the other out of its worldview -- cutting off the opposition’s NPR broadcast, as it were, while the other side tried to kill the Fox News feed.
Most residents resented the intrusion of ideological conflict, which threatened their nascent communities and imaginative projects. The game “gives us all a freedom beyond nationality or birth, or conventional perceptions of resources or wealth,” one resident told me. “Real-world politics simply don’t matter there.” Fortunately for me, life’s tensions keep finding a way of breaking in; for instance, the upcoming election has inspired an in-world billboard-advertising barrage. “A virtual world acts as a kind of funhouse mirror room when it comes to our off-line culture,” said a partisan in the war of the wall. “Distorted or otherwise, this world only reflects our off-line world.”
The potential of online worlds to be genuine microcosms depends on how widespread they eventually become. If U.S. trend lines follow the Asian market, the games could soon be as pervasive as instant messaging, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. (Already, an estimated one in 12 South Koreans play an MMO called Lineage.) Some people are more ambitious in their futurism and believe that the medium will become the next generation of the Web, when people grow tired of navigating a two-dimensional Internet. If that point comes, how we live in online worlds may become as important as how we live in the world we still optimistically call real.
In a limited sense, this is already happening. Several third-party commerce sites exchange Linden Dollars, the official currency residents use for goods and services (the exchange rate in U.S. dollars is roughly 200:1). Some residents make substantial incomes from this trade, turning the sales of virtual real estate or haute couture into Internet revenue streams.
Meanwhile, my blog’s tracking software tells me that more than a few readers arrived at it from Google searches. Seeking to learn more facts about “Viennese opera ball” or “dreadnoughts,” they instead find these things in a place that exists only digitally. Like the fanciful encyclopedia from Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the very act of documenting an alternate world infects our own reality with its values, its conflicts, its folk tales.
Someday the online world will feel as normal -- and as strange, exciting and fraught -- as the real world outside. When that happens, reporters won’t think twice about covering that parallel universe. And I’ll just be one more journalist among many, chasing down leads in the electric half-light.
