Does Second Life Have Nine Lives? (newsfactor)

- newsfactor -

Second Life nearly lost its life this weekend. The popular online world, in which users portray themselves as on-screen characters called avatars and buy and sell fake land and buildings for real money, was struck by a worm called "grey goo." The evil goo surrounded on-screen objects with spinning gold rings.

When users tried to play with the rings, the added load on Second Life's servers caused the game to grind to a halt. A wave of user complaints forced the game's owner, Linden Lab of San Francisco, to shut it down for a good scrubbing over the weekend.

Fake World, Real Money

Second Life is an artifact of the digital age. Its makers call it "shared 3D entertainment," an online world that was founded in 1999 with nothing inside it except for a few rules of play. Gamers, who can join Second Life for free, were then left to populate it, designing their avatars and adding their own buildings, or buying them from others.

What Second Life's users build, buy, or sell remains in the system, so it grows over time in the same way a city in the real world does. But this world is growing fast: According to Linden Lab, which runs the system from a San Francisco data center, Second Life is mushrooming at a monthly rate of nearly 40%.

And its users are spending money -- real money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can change hands in one day in Second Life, with users forking over credit cards and using PayPal accounts for everything from new digital clothes for their avatars to facetime with real-world business consultants who can help them tweak their storefronts within the 3D system.

Where's Neo?

If this sounds a bit like the Matrix -- the mega-grossing movie in which Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a programmer-savior bent on destroying a computer-based world that enslaved the human race -- that's because it is.

Of course, there's one exception: Second Lifers are willing participants. Not only do they give their time gladly to the system, but quite a few make money at it, too. For instance, users can pool their online cash to build 3D amusement parks, then charge other users admission to enter them. Even companies from Adidas to Reuters have lined up to figure out new ways to sell their wares in Second Life's pixel-based world.

And that means that Second Life, despite this weekend's meltdown, might have nine lives after all.