How Second Life Works

New Second Life users select their avatars from generic male and female templates (residents and their avatars don't necessarily share the same gender). Although a resident could use an unmodified template, everyone else would know that he or she was a newb — a new user who doesn't know how things work. Most residents customize their avatars a little before leaving Learning Island.

One important factor in avatar customization is the inventory. The inventory holds hair, skin, objects, animations and body parts and has an infinite capacity. A user can open his or her inventory and choose to put on or remove items, like clothing or hairstyles. Residents can add to an avatar's inventory at any time, creating a practically limitless number of avatar customization options.

They can change their avatars' appearance as often as they like. Nothing in Second Life is permanent — if a user decides his or her avatar should evolve from a hulking brute to a half-cat half-girl creature, he or she can make the changes at any time.

A resident can also right click his or her mouse on the avatar, which pulls up a pie-shaped menu. One of the menu choices is appearance, which allows a user to adjust the way his or her avatar looks. For example, if the user wants to modify the avatar's hairstyle, he or she might use the tool's slide bars to make the hairstyle longer or shorter. Even with this level of control, the user can only adjust what is already there. If he or she wanted a completely new hairstyle, the user would have to either design it or buy it from another resident.

Some residents create special skin textures for avatars ranging from realistic skin and hair to fantasy-inspired scales or feathers. Users can find dozens of residents who sell and trade clothing, skin and even body parts in Second Life. Savvy residents can customize their avatars by creating their own clothes and skins in a graphics program and importing the file into Second Life.

Avatar customization is just one way residents can tweak their Second Life experiences. Users can also build objects within Second Life using simple in-world tools and menus. By creating and linking together basic prim structures, users can create more complex objects. They can also use the Linden Scripting Language, a programming language similar to Java, to give objects specific properties. For example, a skilled user could create a puppy dog that follows him or her everywhere. Residents make objects for different reasons — some do it to bolster the theme of a particular area or avatar design, others build objects just for fun.

Residents can even build houses and other buildings. Some use programs like AutoCAD to design their structures before importing them into Second Life. Others purchase building designs from other residents. Buildings can be extremely realistic or defy real-world physics.

Second Life's capacity for customization is extensive. The world inside Second Life doesn't just foster user-generated content, it depends upon it. By encouraging user innovation and participation, Second Life has created a loyal community of enthusiastic residents.

In the next section, we'll learn about the navigation, communication and interaction systems in Second Life.

Second Life's controls can be a little intimidating for new users. Its interface includes several menus, buttons and keyboard shortcuts. Many users find the learning curve too steep and quickly give up — in 2009 only about 10 percent of all users who made accounts ever bothered to return after their first visit [source: New Scientist].

Avatars can get around Second Life by walking, flying or teleporting to their destination. Residents make their avatars walk around by using the arrow keys. Pushing the up-arrow key makes the avatar walk forward, for example. Moving the mouse changes the position of the avatar's head, making it look around.

At the bottom of the resident's screen are several buttons, including the fly button. Clicking on this button will launch the resident's avatar into the air, allowing him or her to fly around like Superman. Flying lets avatars navigate over water or avoid other obstacles they might encounter on the ground.

Teleporting is the fastest method of travel in Second Life. Residents can teleport their avatars by opening up the map function. A window appears with the map of Second Life, and the resident simply double-clicks on a destination to teleport there. Some locations may have restrictions, such as an island reserved for private use by another resident. In these cases, the avatar teleports as close to the location as possible without violating access restrictions. Without permission, the avatar can't enter restricted areas — the resident would have to ask the area's owner for an invitation.

Residents can also choose a few different ways to communicate with other users. They can opt to use the Voice feature, which allows residents with microphones to talk to one another live. Residents can also use a chat box, which opens a window in which users can type messages. Chat box conversations are broadcast to everyone in the immediate area, so for more private conversations, residents can instant message another user.

Pie-shaped menus include options that allow residents to interact with other users or objects. Right clicking on objects pulls up the menu, displaying a list of things the resident can do. Another way you can interact is to use gestures. Gestures are animations that can convey a mood or simulate an action. Second Life includes a tool that lets you design your own gestures, or you can get them by buying them or trading with another resident.

In the next section, we'll learn about the engine running Second Life and what kind of computer equipment you'll need to explore the community.

Second Life uses the Havok physics engine. This software simulates real physics within a virtual environment. The physics engine determines how avatars and objects behave within the virtual world, including collision detection (the engine tells the software when two items are touching and how each should react), vehicle dynamics and what animations look like.

Residents can hear and view streaming audio and video inside Second Life. Second Life supports audio in MPEG and Ogg Vorbis formats. Residents can choose to display video on specific surfaces in the land they own. To do this, they designate the surface's texture as a media surface. If any other surface within that resident's land has the same texture, it will also display the streaming video. Since this can cause confusion, residents should make sure the surface they choose has a unique texture within their land.

Second Life is compatible both with PCs and Mac computers. Minimum technical requirements for the PC include:

The Mac requirements include the cable or DSL connection, the same amount of computer memory and graphics card requirements as the PC, and:

Next, we'll take an even closer look at creating objects in Second Life.

Absolutely every object, building and flying car you see in Second Life was created by a Resident. The basics of object creation are easy, but it takes a lot of practice and some serious scripting capabilities to make the really impressive stuff. Fortunately, there's a designated place in Second Life for you to practice these skills: the sandbox. The sandbox is a public space where residents practice building different objects.

You can open the object creation tool three ways:

When you open the object creation tool, the default window is "create," indicated by a magic wand symbol. At the top of the window is a list of the 15 prims — basic shapes like cubes, cones and tubes — available to Second Life users. A seasoned builder knows how to stretch, cut, link and multiply these prims to create everything from a hotel to a Ferrari.

Here are some of the basic building options:

With just these simple tools and key controls, you can make almost any stationary object in Second Life. But if you want to bring your creations to life — give them movement and interactivity — you'll have to learn the Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL is most similar to the C programming language and Java. There are many websites and online tutorials for learning basic and advanced LSL scripts. You can even find a few at the Second Life forums.

To attach a script to a Second Life object, click on the "scripts" tab in the edit menu and click "new script." Within the script editor is a pull-down menu with dozens of common scripting commands. Although, without a basic understanding of LSL, you can't just piece together a working script with those commands.

One of the cool things about Second Life is that you retain intellectual property rights for every object you create in-world. With those rights, you can choose to allow other people to edit your objects or not. You can also assign a price tag to an object and sell it on the Second Life marketplace, which we'll learn more about later.

In the next section, we'll take a closer look at Second Life residents.

Linden Lab listed the population of Second Life at more than 10,500,000 residents as of October 2007. That figure sounds impressive, but it's important to keep a couple of mitigating factors in mind. First, Linden Lab allows users to create more than one account, so some of the 10,500,000 residents are duplicates. Second, the virtual world has a high churn rate, meaning most visitors only log on once and then abandon the program. In 2007, some observers marked the churn rate as high as 90 percent, meaning only 10 percent of all the people who visit Second Life came back after the first visit [source: New Scientist].

By its 15th anniversary in 2018, Second Life reached some 57 million subscribers but most of those weren't active. In fact, only between 500,000 and 600,000 subscribers regularly logged in, and around 150,000 users accounted for 90 percent of logged-in time. Linden Lab no longer releases stats on its users, so these were from other sources.

One unifying trait all residents share is that by creating an account in Second Life they agree to obey Linden Lab's terms of service (TOS). Linden Lab designed the TOS to help protect itself and honest residents from malicious users. Users should read the TOS carefully, particularly if they want to participate in Second Life's economy. The TOS makes it clear that Linden Lab has the right to wipe out a user's inventory, including any in-game currency he or she might have. The company also makes it clear that users can't hold Linden Lab responsible for incidents that delete user information.

Along with the Terms of Service, Linden Lab requires all users to follow the Community Standards. Community Standards list several kinds of behavior which could result in a users' suspension or banishment from Second Life if he or she violates them. They are:

Linden Lab has employees in Second Life who can respond to situations, but the company mainly relies on users to report misbehaving residents. For most first offenders, Linden Lab will issue a warning. However, for repeat offenders, Linden Lab may suspend or revoke the user's membership. Offenders could lose all their items and money in the game, and as the Terms of Service make clear, Linden Lab would not have to refund their money.

Second Life's economy is based off a unit of virtual currency called the Linden dollar. Residents can go to a currency exchange service to convert U.S. dollars into Linden currency, and vice versa. The official exchange service is called LindeX. The exchange rate fluctuates, just like real currencies.

In October 2007, the exchange rate was about 267 Linden dollars for every U.S. dollar. In August 2021, you could exchange a U.S. dollar for 320 Linden dollars. (To put it another way, one Linden dollar was worth $0.0031.) Most transactions within the game world use Linden dollars.

In May 2020, Linden Lab announced that U.S. dollar transactions would be handled by Tilia, Inc. Although it may seem that someone else has come in to handle Second Life's economy, it's really the other way around. Tilia is a part of Linden Lab and now operates virtual economies for other online environments as well. As of August 2021, Upland and Sansar both use Tilia technology in their online worlds in addition to as Second Life. Sansar, a virtual reality world, was originally developed by Linden Lab but sold to Wookey Projects in March 2020.

Resident Ailin Graef became the first person to become a real millionaire through transactions in Second Life in 2006. Graef made her fortune by dealing in real estate, becoming what some residents call a land baron. She bought land in Second Life from Linden Lab, developed it using creative and stylish themes, then rented or sold the land back to other residents

Not all purchases use Linden dollars — land sales and auctions usually require real cash. If you want to buy your own land in Second Life, for example, you'll need to put down $349 for a set-up fee and pay $229 per month for maintenance. This will buy a 65,536 square meter island (an entire region). For this fee, you get to choose the island's terrain and location. You can pick up a homestead for $149 set-up fee and $109 monthly maintenance. A homestead will allow 5,000 prims and no more than 20 avatars at a time, but the full region allows up to 20,000 prims and up to 100 avatars at a time.

Your land use fee pays for renting space on a server. The monthly premium membership fee entitles a resident to 1,024 square meters of land at no additional charge. As a user purchases more land, the land use fee increases.

As of August 2021, the land use fee ranged from $4 per month for ownership of up to 512 square meters of additional land to $175 per month for up to 65,356 square meters of land. Linden Lab bases the land use fee off the maximum amount of land a resident owns during each 30-day billing cycle.

In the next section, we'll look at how organizations and events in the real world are crossing over into Second Life.

Some people believe that the future of the internet is in 3D virtual worlds like Second Life, where users will navigate through creative landscapes in search of information and entertainment. As a result, some organizations jumped into Second Life hoping to get in on the ground floor before the community's popularity explodes. More than 100 companies and organizations had online presences in Second Life. Many owned islands and host events like press conferences or concerts. Others use Second Life to promote charitable organizations or political philosophies. Some companies created a space in Second Life with no clear strategy on what to do with it, which usually backfires — no one wants to go to a location that's just a big advertisement.

Other companies try to avoid that mistake. Coca-Cola, for example, held a competition in which residents submitted designs for a virtual vending machine. The winner of the competition appeared in a video about designing a Second Life object. By creating interactive content, Coke avoided the pitfall of jumping into Second Life without contributing to the world's content.

Other companies use similar strategies. In 2006, Reebok let users design shoes for their avatars, then order a custom-made copy of the shoes for themselves to wear in real life [source: Siklos]. Starwood Hotels used Second Life to test building and room designs, taking suggestions from residents and incorporating them into real building plans. Some companies have even used Second Life as a recruitment tool, seeking out residents who are particularly adept at creating user-generated content [source: Benner].

While companies continue to experiment with an online presence in Second Life, a few internet security experts caution that the virtual world isn't the safest environment in which to conduct business. They point out that griefers can find ways to listen in on confidential conversations or sabotage a company's Second Life location. Most companies only use Second Life as a marketing tool rather than for remote meetings. Some companies are creating virtual environments of their own in order to avoid the security dangers in Second Life.

The COVID-19 pandemic boosted Second Life's economy by 30 to 40 percent, according to a Linden Lab representative. However, it was one of many online communities to which people flocked during the lockdown. Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," an online experience based on the Animal Crossing franchise launched in 2001, became a hit when millions used the platform as a social retreat. Fortnite, Minecraft, Among Us and Roblox were also popular among younger players.

Although the hype about Second Life has died down, the service continues with a dedicated subscriber base. As online personalities such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promise a coming "metaverse," Second Life, now an established online destination nearing its 20th anniversary, stand to benefit as people embrace opportunities to meet and spend time together.