A Virtual Scoop
A reporter finds himself embedded in a parallel world.
By Wagner James Au
Wagner James Au has written for Wired and Salon. His blog, New World
Notes, can be found at secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/.
August 8, 2004
OAKLAND — 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 gamesEverquest 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.