Her feet first hit the turf of the new virtual world on February 12th, 2004. As with everyone entering their Second Life, she was dropped from the sky. When Cyan discontinued support for Uru Live, the online section of the game, Berry, like many others, moved on to an alternative. She stuck with games produced by Cyan for the next six years, graduating to Uru, their MMO adventure game. A friend introduced Berry to Riven when she bought a second-hand Apple Macintosh she was initially wary, telling the friend, “I don’t think I like those sorts of things.” She finished the game within three weeks. Both were developed by Cyan Worlds, at the time simply called Cyan. At one point in our conversation she has to ask her son to keep the noise down.īerry became a stay-at-home mom after the birth of her first son and started gaming in 1998, playing Riven, a more puzzle-centric sequel to Myst, a popular adventure game first released in 1993. In the background I can hear boxes being heaved back and forth, tape unspooling and being wrapped around packaged items. And though her Second Life avatar, Caliandris Pendragon, is cool and calm, I’ve caught her at a bad time. One of Second Life’s million-strong population is Fee Berry, a 55-year-old mother of three children who lives in Middlesex, a leafy suburb of London, England. Packing tape and pyrotechnics Packing tape and pyrotechnics I was one of them, and I found out that just because Second Life is no longer under the glare of the media’s spotlight, it doesn’t mean the culture inside the petri dish isn’t still growing. A million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Life is about. Far from it: this past June it celebrated its 10th birthday, and it is still a strong community. You might not have heard a peep about it since the halcyon days of 2006, but that doesn’t mean Second Life has gone away. Linden Lab doesn’t share historical user figures, but it says the population of Second Life has been relatively stable for a number of years.

Of course, stratospheric growth doesn’t continue forever, and when the universe’s expansion slowed and the novelty of people living parallel lives wore off, the media moved on.

Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop in Second Life, aiming to capitalize on the momentum it was building - and to play to the in-world consumer base, which at one point in 2006 boasted a GDP of $64 million. The BBC, (now Bloomberg) Businessweek, and NBC Nightly News all devoted time and coverage to the phenomenon.

In the mid-2000s, every self-respecting media outlet sent reporters to the Second Life world to cover the parallel-universe beat. For many, it was the future - our lives were going to be lived online, as avatars represented us in nightclubs, bedrooms, and banks made of pixels and code. It was the place where big brands moved in as neighbors and hawked you their wares online. Do you remember Second Life? Set up by developer Linden Lab in 2003, it was the faithful replication of our modern world where whoring, drinking, and fighting were acceptable.

Second life avatar