Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, by our own Thomas Malaby, has its official release today, and the timing couldn't be better. I'm writing from the midst of State of Play VI -- "The Conference on the Serious Study of Virtual Worlds" -- where Thomas's book will be feted this evening and where the mood, in general, is that of a not entirely unwelcome intellectual hangover. The hype surrounding Second Life (and the broader phenomenon of virtual worlds for which it's been so imperfect a proxy) has come and, finally, gone, and there's a sense that only now can we begin to dig beneath the shiny, first-pass questions that provoked the hype and get a deeper handle on what we've been talking about. This is a challenging, exciting project, and if the thoughtful, game-changing ethnography Thomas has produced is any indication, it's off to a promising start.
Yes, plenty of vital ethnographic work on virtual worlds precedes this book. But the critical move Thomas has made here is to shift the focus away from the inhabitants of virtual worlds and onto the people who design and, in the final analysis, control them. From the beginning of virtual world scholarship, the “gods” of these worlds — the MUD creators, the game companies, the people with their fingers on the on/off switch — have been definingly important yet curiously underexamined pieces of the ethnographic puzzle. In making Linden Lab and its employees his primary subject (rather than Second Life and its residents) Thomas both broadens our understanding of virtual worlds and illuminates a rich array of questions. Work, play, games, technocracy and its tools, all of these are shown — through the lens of the Linden workforce and its contradictory struggle to impose emergent behavior on Second Life — to be in a moment of critical historical flux. Making Virtual Worlds is the most enlightening portrait of the high-tech workplace since Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, and we are a lucky blog indeed to have its author among us.
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