Home Design in Second Life

NYT: Home & Garden
August 9, 2007
A House That’s Just Unreal
By SETH KUGEL

FROM the roof deck of Sherman Ochs’s Mexican-style villa atop a breezy bluff, the entire island of Jalisco, population about 20, spreads out below. It is a picturesque place of palm trees, lush lawns and near-cloudless skies. And, of course, there are the perfect sands around the lagoon, where residents grind their perfect bodies together in an N.C.L., or Naked Conga Line. It is not exactly real, of course: Mr. Ochs is Don Ainsworth, a 57-year-old retired music teacher who lives in Ventura, Calif., and Jalisco is a sim (for simulator), a plot of land in Second Life, the virtual world introduced in 2003 by Linden Lab, a San Francisco company.

But it is not entirely fake, either. Life on Jalisco, where neighborly visits are frequent, resembles that in a real-world community. And many of the residents know who their neighbors are in real life, and sometimes converse with them over Internet telephone connections as they operate their avatars.

Second Life’s hundreds of thousands of users can teleport at will, transform into dragons and radically change their appearances with a few clicks. They have built cities, created clothing lines and programmed their avatars — the characters that represent them in the three-dimensional space of Second Life — to ride horses, dance and have sex. But in a land where residents can do nearly anything, many seem to be craving more mundane pursuits. After a few months of dancing the night away in clubs, sowing their virtual seed and role-playing as creatures from “The Lord of the Rings,” they are settling down: building virtual houses, planting gardens, shopping for furniture and electronics and decorating. They are getting serious about creating make-believe homes.

Linden Lab does not keep track of how many houses have been built across the more than 12,000 sims of Second Life, or how many of its regular users own and live in the houses, but the number is certainly in the thousands, according to Catherine Smith, a company spokeswoman. (It’s hard to know exactly how many users there are over all, since they can have multiple accounts, but Linden Lab records show that 8.6 million accounts have been created, of which 1.6 million have been active over the past two months, and that 20,000 to 50,000 users are online at any one time.) “Putting roots down is really important to a lot of people in Second Life,” Ms. Smith said.

For some, these online houses are Architectural Digest-style fantasies. In fact, Second Life (secondlife.com) has its own home design magazine, Prim Perfect, published by a member, which showcases some of the highest-end residences in the virtual world. But for many others, like most of the residents of Jalisco (which is named for the Mexican state), a home is above all a place to relax, entertain friends and experiment with décor.

It was June when Mr. Ainsworth’s affable avatar, who has shaggy blond hair and chest hair popping out of his permanently unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, decided to buy a “house” after months of hanging out. “I was just gallivanting around Second Life,” he said in an interview on his virtual roof in Jalisco with DonCamilo Rodenberger, this reporter’s avatar, who identified himself in interviews as a writer for The New York Times. “A place to call home didn’t really matter. But after a while, it seemed like a nice idea.”

Second Life offers all kinds of regions from which to chose, including the A’ksha Caves sim, a stark desert area with luxury housing owned by the megadeveloper Anshe Chung (the avatar of Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born businesswoman celebrated for making $1 million in real-life money from Second Life deals) and the Venice sim, based loosely on the real city, where a quick escape to rural Tuscany is just one geographically inaccurate sim away. (Islands like Jalisco comprise more than 9,000 sims, and thousands more sims are on a few mammoth continents.)

But Jalisco was the place for Mr. Ainsworth. He had long been friends with its developer, an often scantily dressed avatar named Rooby Begonia. “The community and the friends were the major selling points to me,” said Mr. Ainsworth, who said in the virtual chat that he spends four hours a night in Second Life instead of watching television. “It is friendly, classy people,” he added. “Most Second Life properties are real stale cookie-cutter. This place has style.”

In part, that’s because of strict zoning laws in the island’s “covenant,” which require that the Mexican theme be maintained in all building designs; in part it’s the personal attention lavished on the sim and its residents by Rooby, or rather her creator, Brenda Beach. Ms. Beach, 46, is an empty-nest homemaker from Issaquah, Wash., who spends four to eight hours a day in Second Life. In addition to developing the island — she paid Linden Lab $1,200 for control of it — she acts as its mayor and cruise director, enforcing the rules and corralling the locals into socializing. In many cases, she helps them build and decorate their houses, at no charge.

“I think the urge to have a home goes hand in hand with the desire for partnership and friendship,” Ms. Beach said. “We informally take turns at different people’s homes.”

It costs about 55,000 Linden dollars, or Lindens, the equivalent of $200, to buy the rights to a piece of land on Jalisco from Ms. Beach, and then the equivalent of something like $25 to $40 a month in Second Life’s version of maintenance fees, which help Ms. Beach pay her dues on the land to Linden Lab. (Lindens can be traded with United States dollars through online exchanges and even ATMs in Second Life; the rate, which fluctuates according to market forces, is currently around 275 Lindens to the dollar.)

In a telephone interview, Ms. Beach attributed part of the island’s pleasant ambience to its high prices. (A lot on another virtual island, Cheops, for example, costs less than $20 to buy and the same amount each month to maintain, and an apartment in Venice rents for the equivalent of about $2 a week.) The cost encourages people to participate in the community they’re paying for, she reasoned, and “keeps out people that don’t want to play the way we play.”


Luke Tchalenko for The New York Times
GARDEN OF DELIGHTS Hannah Hails, left, has a perpetually blooming garden as the avatar Mercedes Georgette, right.

Houses, on the other hand, are cheap, as are furnishings — a table, for example, might cost a real-world dollar or two, a rug a dime or a quarter. Mr. Ainsworth’s house, a prefabricated model that came with the land and was bought by Ms. Beach from Fisher Construction, a Second Life “building company,” cost only about 1,400 Lindens, a bit more than $5, to buy, and about $20 to furnish.

Mr. Ainsworth’s living room is spotless, decorated with Mission-style furniture from Town & Country Furnishings, a store in the largely commercial Doesburg sim; Mr. Ainsworth “built” the adobe fireplace himself, he said, in about an hour. (His real house in Ventura, he said, is decorated with “brass-and-glass stuff from the late ’80s.”)

But the most impressive part of the house is its outdoor space: three terraces, with a hot tub and a dance floor and bar. Like most dance floors in Second Life, Mr. Ainsworth’s has “dance balls,” floating orbs that users can click to make their avatars dance. There are no bad dancers in Second Life.

Some in Second Life choose to build homes and furniture from scratch, but it can be frustrating: users must spend hours practicing, and often take Second Life classes to master the skills needed to manipulate so-called primitive objects, or “prims” — the virtual world’s basic building blocks, which come in shapes like spheres, cones and cubes — into more complicated shapes, which they then combine into useful objects.

Although many people do learn those skills, the growing interest in Second Life has created a market for prefab houses like Mr. Ainsworth’s, built by virtual architects and developers. (There are dozens of groups of Second Life architects, with names like Real Life Architects in Second Life and the Society for Virtual Architecture.)

It has also given rise to a number of philosophical questions: since you don’t eat in Second Life, do you need a kitchen? Is a bathroom really necessary? Since you can teleport, do you need stairs? Since you don’t sleep, do you need a bedroom? Answers vary, but most opt for at least a bedroom (although not for sleeping).

For anyone with a modicum of taste, though, decorating a home is a breeze. Furniture, electronics, art and gardening stores abound, like the Mission Home store in the Tiltir sim, with its Craftsman-style furniture, and Classic Creations by Isabella, a showroom in the Caprera sim that carries rugs and living room sets. And shoppers are spared the inconvenience of driving and parking, since they can teleport to and from any store in a matter of seconds.

Once a resident is home, it’s easy to move furniture around and hang art on the walls. Other advantages of nesting in a virtual world: you can plant both tropical flowers and Arctic vegetation in your garden, and neither will die. And if you’re a hoarder, you can store an unlimited number of virtual beanbags, old movie posters, oak trees and pet ferrets, which take up no visible space when your inventory folder is closed.

Second Life homes do have at least one downside: the number of prims is limited. Every sim has a maximum of 15,000 manipulatable shapes, because of space constraints on the Linden Lab servers, so designing (or buying) furniture with the fewest prims possible — or with the ability to appear when residents enter a room and disappear once they leave, so that only one room is furnished at a time — becomes a priority.

Mr. Ainsworth’s house is still a work in progress — the bedroom walls are bare except for a single wall hanging — but his neighbors Earl Semaphore and Candy Flanagan (the avatars of Richard Lucas, a 54-year-old probation officer from Scotland, and Carmen Clasen, a 22-year-old college student from Blairsville, Ga., who lives in Germany) are well settled in theirs.

The two, who are married to other people in real life, met in a Second Life club, hit it off and were married six weeks later in a Second Life ceremony — a more or less common occurrence (as are Second Life marital spats and Second Life divorce) that often occurs with the knowledge and consent of real-life spouses. Ms. Clasen designed their house in what she calls Old Mexico style; it has a stable for two horses and an orange tree that drops cute-as-a-button fruit that rolls along the ground.

It is striking how often a Second Life process mirrors real life. Case in point: a couple trying to decide which of their old furniture to keep after being married. Mr. Lucas’s avatar, Earl, had lived in a small skybox — a floating house — 50 meters above the ground in the Hyaonmoo sim, and Ms. Clasen’s avatar, Candy, had lived on 5,000 square meters in the Sugulite sim.

“We just emptied our inventories onto the lawn” of the new house, Ms. Clasen said in an instant message. “Then I took all the pieces and put them together here.” Two wedding gifts — gauzy abstract paintings by Second Life artists — hang on either side of the door in the living room. The room is also furnished with stained-glass lamps, a couch programmed to allow the couple to snuggle and a music box that plays their song (“Freebird”).

Their real homes don’t even come close to their Second Life home, Mr. Lucas and Ms. Clasen both said. Mr. Lucas’s “typical Scottish house,” which he shares with his real wife, is “small by U.S. standards,” he said. Ms. Clasen and her husband live in an apartment building. “I like having a house of my own in Second Life,” she said. “My resources are practically unlimited, and I am able to build what I please and redecorate however I like.”

Perhaps because of the ease of redecorating in Second Life, interior designers are much harder to find than home builders or real estate developers.

“Not many people hire someone,” said Pauline Wooley, a part-time administrator at Oxford University, who publishes a Second Life design blog and magazine (both called Prim Perfect and accessible at primperfect.net), under the name of her avatar, Saffia Widdershins. “Most just think bed, chair, and go out and get what they can.”

Still, many Second Life furniture designers also dabble in decorating. A recent issue of Prim Perfect featured the Odaesan House, a grand mansion with an Arts-and-Crafts-style interior attributed to Troy Vogel, the avatar behind the Mission Home store. The issue also showed an elegant Venice apartment with a deep red sofa, zebra cushions and intricate wood paneling by Isabella Lazarno, of Classic Creations by Isabella.

Real-life designers, too, have found their way into Second Life. Thomas Wang, a Hawaii interior designer, began using it in 2004 as a place to build models for real-world projects, but has gone on to design many virtual projects through his avatar, Bill Stirling. His elaborately appointed cruise ship, the Galaxy, takes up three entire sims, and he is now designing the studios for S.L.C.N., the Second Life Cable Network.

Hannah Hails, a 31-year-old sales executive from Guildford, England, who is hoping to make a go of it as a Second Life interior designer, has posted classified advertisements for the decorating services of her avatar, Mercedes Georgette. “It’s something I have been interested in in real life,” she said. “But I’ve never had the opportunity to put it into full practice.”

For now, she’s working on her own 12-sided house, purchased from Creative Excellence, a prefab-house maker, and situated on 16,000 square meters in the Enchanted Paradise sim. A lone bedroom takes up its entire second floor, and most of the third floor is given over to a Moroccan-theme roof deck.

Much of her art — which, like much of her furniture, comes from the Second Life showrooms of Ramos Designs, a company that sells items as varied as houses, jewelry and a bar that doubles as an aquarium — hangs in a broad gallerylike hallway. In the kitchen, a board of cheese and crackers is more or less permanently on display on the center island. “I love cheese,” she said.

Her garden is really the highlight, with black-eyed Susans and foxgloves bought at the Heart Garden Center (which Ms. Hails said has “the best plants in the whole of Second Life”), and two cherry trees in perpetual bloom. There are also a pond with waterlilies, working swings, apple trees that lend themselves to climbing and a campfire area.

Her zeal for virtual home improvement is not matched in the real world. Soon, she and her husband will be painting their apartment. “I like the visualizing of it, but the physical undertaking of it is something I absolutely loathe,” she said. “On Second Life, it can happen in an instant.”

According to Ms. Wooley, the publisher of Prim Perfect, there is often little obvious relation between a person’s real and virtual homes, and the main real-world function of a Second Life house is as a tool for fantasy — albeit, in many cases, fantasy that doesn’t stray too far from reality.

“You have people who go for the castles, palaces, the fantastic,” she said. “But many, many people buy the rather nice suburban house that they can’t afford to live in in real life.”

Others look for other things. Of all the houses in Jalisco, Ms. Beach’s is probably the least fantastic, furnished with just a few chairs and a bed. She calls it “our hovel.”

Although her real-life husband, Prodipto Roy, is a tester of video games, he does not spend much time with her in the virtual realm. He tried out Second Life for a while, she said, but the nesting urge never got to him. “He didn’t enjoy it because there’s nothing to kill,” she said.

Instead, she shares her Jalisco home with Seth Schlegal, the avatar of Richard Siegel, a systems engineer in Auburn, Calif., who is her second Second Life husband. They met while she was still with her first Second Life husband and became fast friends, then married shortly after her “divorce.”

Their house is full of virtual raccoons, arising from a wifely practical joke. One night, when Ms. Beach was talking to Mr. Siegel by Internet phone while they were in Second Life, he complained that there were raccoons outside his real-life door. So later, she found a raccoon design at a popular Second Life business, Textures R Us, and infested the house, from the patio to the bedroom. “When he found them I thought he was going to die laughing,” she said.

For his part, Mr. Roy, like many real-life spouses of virtual bigamists, seems unworried by his wife’s extramarital marriages. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” he said. “You are a completely fictional person in Second Life.”