It's the middle of the night and I'm standing in an empty, starlit field in the virtual world of Second Life. In the distance is a low-polygon-count shopping mall. But at my feet, there's only pixelated grassland - a simple green texture that repeats to the edges of the computer screen.
Just hours ago, a lavish mansion stood here. It was a custom job built for a player known as BallerMoMo King, whose blinged-out avatar carries a diamond-studded cane and is never without his posse of bodyguards and harem of "MoMo hos." Baller is one of Second Life's most notorious gangsters, famous for hiring talented residents to script weapons that can bounce an avatar across the gamespace and bombs that produce enough smoke and fire to occasionally crash a server. It seems Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, has had enough. The MoMo mansion - and Baller's account - has been erased.
"LINDENS CRACK DOWN ON BALLERMOMO'S CREW," blasted the headline I wrote for The Second Life Herald that morning. Iéam what you might call a virtual foreign correspondent. As my avatar, Walker Spaight, I report on events in Second Life and other massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, The Sims Online, and Project Entropia, 3-D worlds inhabited by thousands of players. The Second Life Herald has a virtual office tower in Second Life, but readers know my work through www.secondlifeherald.com.
Peter Ludlow, a philosophy and linguistics professor at the University of Michigan, started the paper as the Alphaville Herald back in October 2003. The original mission was to cover life in The Sims Online. But when Sims maker Electronic Arts got wind of Ludlow's eyebrow-raising reports on con games and cyberprostitution, the company kicked him out. Relaunched in Second Life, the paper continues its mission of examining the legal, social, and economic dynamics of virtual worlds. We answer the questions readers want to know: Does Second Life's largest land baron pay taxes on the $100,000 she's reportedly earned in the virtual real estate business? (She does.) How many players subscribe to the service that pipes dirty pictures straight to your spaceship in EVE Online? (Thousands.) Did Linden Lab employees conspire to exile a resident just because they didn't like him? (Evidence suggests they did.)
Second Life is an ideal beat. Launched in June 2003, the game is unique in that nearly all its content is created by residents using powerful building and scripting tools provided by Linden Lab. As a result, Second Life's development has been unpredictable and often downright strange - a perfect recipe for great stories. We once wrote about a real-life Native American who keeps his tribe's heritage alive in the authentic village he built in the game. I've covered nightclub openings, investment banks, and a privately established socialist microstate.
Just like any community newspaper, the Herald has a duty to serve its readers. Roaming an unremarkable neighborhood one night, I met a woman who said that she and her online boyfriend were being harassed by their neighbors. When I published my account of the nearby complex of gleaming mech suits, autoturrets, and other war machines trained on whoever happened to cross their sights, an organized vigilante group soon ran the offenders off.
One of my favorite stories started when Iérecruited a sexy female avatar named Diamond Hope - controlled by a perfectly modest single mother of three - to become one of the Herald's Post 6 Grrrls. Post 6 Grrrls is a recurring feature in which characters bare all for our readers. (The process involves a virtual photo shoot, complete with a photographer avatar.) Di's accompanying interview caught the eye of Second Life citizen Unmitigated Gall, who couldn't resist getting in touch with her. Months later, the pair married in a small real-world ceremony. Now that's a human interest story.
Mark Wallace (walkering@gmail.com) is coauthor of Only a Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much. His first world writing has appeared in GQ, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Walker Spaight covers crime bosses, sex scandals, and corporate malfeasance in massively multiplayer online games for The Second Life Herald.
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