Two years ago, she moved across the country to be with him. Two weeks later, she met her now-boyfriend. Renetta Claven (her Avatar’s name, not her real name), now 26, joined when she was 16. It didn’t take long to discover that it’s relationships like these - whether love or friendship - that weave together the foundation of Second Life.
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Now, they’re taken their relationship offline and spend time together in the U.K. He came after her and they chatted - a rom-com meet-cute within a virtual world. “I landed on his head and he looked really cool and I looked really stupid and newbie, and I ran away,” Meri told me. They met in Second Life almost 12 years ago, when she teleported (the travel mode of choice) into an indie dance party. I met with Meri (who prefers to keep an air of anonymity - like most of those I spoke to) within Second Life, on the 1,024 square meter digital plot of property she shares with her partner Thom. I spoke to a few Second Lifers, like Meri, who continue to spend an hour or two of their day running around the virtual world, in search of the enigma that keeps Second Life pulsing. Maybe they joined because their first life is so great, they want a second one (à la Dwight from The Office). More recent numbers from 2018 show that number has dropped significantly, to around half a million active monthly users.īut in 2018, it was also piquing enough interest to (somewhat curiously) add nearly 350,000 new registrations monthly: people looking to make friends, or maybe just to troll. Linden Lab, the 2003 creator of the multiplayer world, declined to give me current numbers, but in 2013 Second Life reported more than one million monthly users. You'd be forgiven if you thought Second Life had met the same fate as other lost sites from the early aughts. When I explored, I ended up dancing at an ‘80s club called Big Daddy’s where the DJ played “Can’t Fight the Moonlight” and “I Love Rock & Roll. To put it briefly, Second Life is a virtual, online world where users create avatars which can travel to worlds and lands (called Sims), participate in role-playing games, create and sell products, and socialize with other Second Life residents. My second offense began when I referred to Second Life as a game, because for most people Second Life is not a “game” to “play.” I was only fortunate that Meri, who sat patiently waiting for the interview to begin while I ran around in front of her, was so gracious with me.
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The problem was, I didn’t know how to sit down on chairs, and I hadn’t mastered control of my avatar yet either. She’d offered me a seat, and now I was running around in the depths of the water, trying to find my way back out. I was here in Second Life to meet with Meri, who had invited me to this plot of land to speak with her, but I revealed my amateur status when I began the interview by falling off the dock and into the cove below.
On the screen of my overheated computer, I was staring at an endless horizon of sky and water and islands and small buildings, designed to look realistic but giving themselves away with too-sharp edges and unblended colors.
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