Amusing 'Second Lives' deserves a look

It'll still be cool to visit New York City after we live almost entirely in online, virtual worlds, promises the chief executive of the company behind the virtual world called Second Life -- "but in the same way that it's cool to go see the Mayan ruins."

The first virtual worlds were started for computer game fans wanting to act out sword-and-sorcery fantasies with each other, but in recent years, a trickle of business and government clients has begun to explore Second Life as a convenient "place" to hold meetings and training exercises. As newcomers have logged on, the population of users has roughly doubled every year, with the total number of virtual world users now estimated to be as high as 30 million.

"Second Lives," by British journalist Tim Guest, is more or less a complete recap of the oddball stories that have emerged as video games and online worlds such as Second Life blur or bounce against the real world. In one chapter, the members of Duran Duran fret over which designer should handle their virtual clothes for an online appearance. In another, a soldier talks about how real-world firefights remind him of playing the Tom Clancy video game Ghost Recon. Players fall in love and marry each other in the game, though they have not met in the real world.

Don't be afraid of the upcoming virtual revolution, Guest urges. By his argument, the world we inhabit is already virtual, and has been for a long time. After all, isn't recorded music just a technologically assisted attempt to replicate the experience of hearing musicians in person?

Well, maybe. Depends on how you look at it. As Guest leads the tour, he tends to draw parallels between the real world and the virtual one that sometimes seem overblown. Guest suggests that people who pay monthly subscriptions to participate in "massively multiplayer" games, are, in fact, a new type of population deserving of admiration for their adventurous spirit, guided by dissatisfaction with the real world. "We hadn't just chosen to live in virtual worlds," Guest writes; "we had also been driven there, in the same way American colonists were driven to leave Europe."

In some passages of this amusing book, a reader's eyes might start to cramp from the involuntary eye-rolling induced by the characters Guest turns up, such as a tough-talking virtual thug (a customer-care representative in real life), who sets out to build a version of the Mafia in Second Life. Organized crime, as practiced by the crowd Guest runs with briefly, is modeled after the real-world counterparts: sports betting, virtual escorts and the occasional "hit."

The reader who doesn't already have a high-ranking game character in World of Warcraft is bound to wonder, as Guest does himself, "Who had the time to lead two lives? I barely had time to live one." Sure enough, the most powerful player in the online realm of one Korean game tells Guest he is completely exhausted by the dual demands of restaurant management (his real-world job) and kingdom management (his virtual-world job).

Yet, this virtual king, a man in his 30s, has never had a real-world girlfriend. There's just too much responsibility. Whew. As one user asks in the book, when does Third Life come out so that we can escape our second one?