Hi Beam!

I've been exploring the fascinating world of Second Life for a while now. This blog will contain whatever thoughts and observations about Second Life that I may have.

Who am I? My avatar name is Beam Ray. I'm from the Netherlands. I've been exploring virtual worlds for a long time now; my first encounter with those text-based virtual worlds called muds was in 1991. That was in fact my first encounter with the internet, though I didn't know anything about the internet at the time, I just knew I was connected to some computer in Sweden and talking to Americans on it.

Muds came in two broad types: game muds and social muds. Games like World of Warcraft are the descendants of game muds: you run around in some typically fantasy world, slay monsters, learn magic and slay guilds. One interesting thing about many of the game muds at the time is that the content was provided by those who had played the game before. In order to become a wizard, you needed to gain a certain amount of experience points in the game. You could then extend the mud for the players by writing scripts and programs. This made these muds ever-evolving and also frequently chaotic mediums.

Other muds were social. Having initially only encountered game muds and having worked hard to become a wizard on one, it was rather odd to discover that in a mud like the famous LambdaMOO you could extend and program the environment right away. But, but... being able to program right away? That's just wrong! The difference was that these were not primarily games, but social. The environment wasn't so much a game as a "software toy". Social interaction was primary, the environment was there to support it. It makes sense to me to base social interactions in something that is a bit like a real world, with virtual spaces, objects and bodies. Humans are made to fit in such worlds, so we fit the environment to fit ourselves.

As some of us mudders were dreaming of at the time in the early 90s, muds made it to the mainstream in a major way. It took a long time. The first step was the mainstreaming of the internet itself. After that, the essential ingredient to make muds more mainstream was to add nice 3d graphics. The high-powered special effects of games were merged with the fun of playing games together in a persistent world. There are many different game muds, World of Warcraft most prominently. Of course these days we've mostly discarded that cute little term "mud" and are using the unwieldy acronym MMORPG instead.

Where were the social muds? For some reason it took a while longer for them to reach mass appeal. I imagine because the challenge of creating a large user modifiable 3d environment is a lot harder still than creating a game environment. Linden Lab took up that challenge. So while it took a while longer, we now have social muds too, such as Second Life. The differences between social and game muds are even more extreme than in the past: game muds are professionally run and player-created content is rare to absent. The companies in control want to maintain a strict quality control of the game. No random individuals adding new monsters to the game, or pots of gold, completely unbalancing it. In contrast a social mud environment like Second Life, by adding visuals and sound besides text and scripting, not to mention a whole economic system based on micro-payments, has opened up whole new dimensions of creativity and commerce.

People do interesting and sometimes strange things in this new environment. The challenges of operating such an environment are also extensive. There is a lot to observe for this old-time mudder. I hope some of you will enjoy my perspective.