The Second life herald: the virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse

Abstract

When a virtual journalist for a virtual newspaper reporting on digital world of an online game lands on real-world front page of New York Times, it just might signal dawn of a new era. Virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from The Sims Online for being a bit too good at his job--for reporting in his virtual tabloid The Alphaville Herald on cyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that had become rife in game--and when Times, BBC, CNN, and other media outlets covered story, users all over Internet called banning censorship. Seeking a new virtual home, Ludlow moved Herald to another virtual world--the powerful online environment of Second Life--just as it was about explode onto international mediascape and usher in next iteration of Internet. In The Second Life Herald, Ludlow and his colleague Mark Wallace take us behind scenes of Herald as they report on emergence of a fascinating universe of virtual spaces that will become next generation of World Wide Web: a 3-D environment that provides richer, more expressive interactions than Web we know today. In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagined the Metaverse, a virtual space that we would enter via Internet and in which we would conduct important parts of our daily lives. According to Ludlow and Wallace, that future is coming sooner than we may think. They chronicle its chaotic, exhilarating, frightening birth, including issue that mainstream media often ignore: conflicts across client-server divide over who should write laws governing virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow at University of Michigan, is author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay in Metaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and editor of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, 1996). A freelance journalist, Mark Wallace has written widely on virtual worlds and online games for a variety of publications, including Wired and The New York Times. He is editor of leading metaverse blog 3pointD.com, and an author of Second Life: The Official Guide.