Inside Second Life

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In the real world, Philip Rosedale is a thirty-eight-year-old with California Ken Doll good looks -- peppery hair and bright blue eyes, faded jeans and a loose beige sweater. He sits at the Fog City Diner, a tiny shiny restaurant off the Embarcadero in San Francisco. But when he makes pronouncements about the other world, which is often, he leans forward, drops his voice to a biblical whisper, and widens his stare. "Once we have enough computing power," he says, "we can remake the world using simulation."

There are certain things you will only do in reality. Like eat tuna tartare, says Rosedale, who digs into a plate of the pink stuff in front of him. But just about everything else will happen in virtual reality. "The only thing I say to people who yearn for an earlier time," says Rosedale, "is that you're not going to have an opportunity to hide from this phenomenon."

Rosedale is the creator of Second Life, the virtual world that's garnering the most excitement online since the launch of the World Wide Web. Once you download and boot-up the free program, Second Life makes going online more like a computer game. Instead of surfing Web pages, you create an animated character -- an avatar -- which you use to explore three-dimensional lands, from seaside towns to industrial Goth discos. Everything "in-world" is created by you and your fellow Second Life residents using built-in tools. The result is a place to wander, socialize, build, shop and screw.

Weird as it sounds, there's real money involved: To purchase stuff in Second Life you spend fake currency called Linden Dollars that has actual economic value. A slim-cut American Apparel shirt for your avatar costs around 250 Linden Dollars, or roughly one U.S. dollar. Residents now exchange about $1.8 million per week for digital cash -- a number that's growing up to twenty percent a month. Fifteen million people have paid a visit, and there are up to 28,000 logged on at a given moment. Over the past year, the total amount of time that Second Life residents spent in the world has gone from about 2.6 million to more than 15 million hours per month.

A lot of people, big and small, think Second Life is the future of the Net. Corporations from Sony to Sears to Mercedes-Benz maintain stores inside. Artists including Jay-Z and Ben Folds have performed live in avatar form. Mia Farrow held a rally on Darfur. A John Edwards volunteer set-up a presidential campaign headquarters (later trashed with Marxist slogans by Republican vandals). Harvard Law School offers "classes" inside. The Swedish government has an office in-world, as does the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. As Reuben Steiger, head of Millions of Us, a social media agency that has brought clients including Warner Brothers, General Motors and Intel into Second Life, says, "Last year's MySpace page is this year's avatar."

In terms of square miles, Second Life is now about the same size as New York City -- and growing. You don't walk very far inside -- for smaller distances, you fly, and for longer trips, you teleport. The lifeblood of its virtual economy is real estate: In order to build, you have to shell out cash for the land beneath you. The Lab charges $1,675 for your own island plus a $295 monthly maintenance fee, or you might rent land for 75 Linden Dollars or so from one of Second Life's many real estate barons. You can pay out of your real-life bank account, or try to earn money within Second Life: Some sellers pawn virtual designer jeans and stiletto heels in Midnight City, a mall. Others work bars and nightclubs, where tiny Barbarellas service you for Linden cash. Most of the cybersex is of the standard hot chat variety, though industrious johns augment their avatars with cartoon cock-and-balls. Keyboard shortcuts control the bump n' grind. The going rates for a prostitute named "Bliss Nephilim" are as follows: about 800 Linden Dollars for a half hour of "one on one," 1,000 for "role play," and a cool 300 for fifteen minutes of avatar oral.