Making virtual worlds : Linden Lab and Second Life / Thomas M. Malaby.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Malaby, Thomas M., 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Linden Lab (Firm).

Second Life (Game)--Social aspects.

Second Life (Game).

Shared virtual environments--Case studies.

Shared virtual environments.

Video games--Design--Social aspects--Case studies.

Video games.

Business anthropology--California--San Francisco--Case studies.

Business anthropology.

Corporate culture--California--San Francisco--Case studies.

Corporate culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (177 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created. Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions. Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Developer's-Eye View

1. The Product: Second Life, Capital, and the Possibility of Failure in a Virtual World

2. Tools of the Gods

3. Knowing the Gamer from the Game

4. The Birth of the Cool

5. Precarious Authority

Appendix A: The Tao of Linden

Appendix B: The Mission of Linden Lab

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801457753

0801457750

9780801458996

0801458994

OCLC:

726824199