Geek Gestalt

For anyone familiar with The Sims Online, the poorly-received virtual world launched by Electronic Arts in 2002, take note: EA is relaunching it under a new name and for a new price: free.

Born as The Sims Online, it will now be called EA Land.

On Monday, Electronic Arts announced 'EA Land,' the latest iteration of 'The Sims Online,' an online version of its massive hit, 'The Sims.' However, 'The Sims Online' never achieved much success and became overshadowed by other online virtual worlds with economies.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

This is a rather momentous move by EA, since it means it is bringing back from the dead--at least as far as perception goes--a game that, while it never really got off the ground, was extremely important in the overall development curve of 3D social virtual worlds with economies.

And while TSO, as it came to be known, never got the massive audiences of its single-player antecedent, The Sims--which came out of nowhere to become the best-selling PC game of all time--it did usher in and initiate a lot of people to virtual worlds.

In fact, there are, to this day, whole communities of people in Second Life and There.com that began in TSO.

Note: My wife now works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

One of the major reasons why TSO never took off is that it really didn't give players very much opportunity to create their own content. And that was particularly frustrating to many players, because The Sims creator Will Wright had promised that TSO would offer open content creation.

But now, according to EA, EA Land will allow players to make their own things.

"Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely," EA wrote in a note to former TSO subscribers, "but in EA Land, you can see and buy the customizations of the other players."

That means, of course, that there will continue to be--as there was in TSO--a functioning economy. But because players will be able to make more content, that economy could, in theory, have more complexity and depth than that of TSO.

It's probably too early to tell how EA Land will do, but I do have to say that it's unfortunate EA couldn't come up with a better name.

My guess is that EA Land will have a hard time making too much of a dent in the virtual world space. That's partly because it is hard to see exactly where it fits into the mix. Second Life is well established, though it does not have a huge audience; There.com also has a substantial audience; and then there are the kids' virtual worlds, such as Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and the like.

But you never know. Perhaps the biggest question will be how much marketing effort EA puts into EA Land. If it allows the game to exist on its own without a lot of backing from corporate, then it may wither away with as much fanfare as it arrived. But if EA gets behind it full force, it could be something some day.

If you've followed virtual worlds at all over the last four years, the name Urizenus Sklar will probably mean something to you.

Uri, as he was known, was the muckraking journalist who founded the Alphaville Herald, a blog that reported on, among other things, the seedy underbelly of Electronic Arts' disappointing virtual world, The Sims Online.

Second Life Herald, the new book from Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, is a deep chronicle of the early days of two of the most influential virtual worlds, The Sims Online and Second Life.

(Credit: MIT Press)

In late 2003, he was banned from TSO by EA for what the company called terms of service violations, but which was widely seen as retaliation for Uri's critical coverage of EA and its approach to specific in-world issues. Smelling a free-speech issue, media the world over picked up the story.

Soon after, Uri, also known as University of Michigan philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, migrated to Second Life and eventually changed the name of the blog--which still exists--to the Second Life Herald. After awhile, though, he decided he needed a partner, and joined forces with Mark Wallace, a freelance journalist. The two continued the tradition of uncovering great scoops, and the blog quickly became one of the most important sources of SL news.

Now, Ludlow and Wallace have published a book, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, that I think is an indispensable look at the early days of two of the most important modern virtual worlds.

More than anything, the book reveals the philosophical underpinnings of the so-called metaverse, looking in depth at the ways in which the communities in TSO and Second Life developed and how they interacted with the publishers behind the two virtual worlds.

In both cases, Ludlow and Wallace argue that the publishers fell far short of responsible governance, often because of what they see as capricious decision making and enforcement of rules. Yet in the case of Second Life, at least, their eyes are open with wonder at the possibilities of an open-ended, 3D, social world in which users can do almost anything they can imagine.

But the disconnect between what they see as technological magic and corporate wishy-washiness led to intractable problems with Second Life that they think will ultimately pull it down.

Regardless, the book is a fascinating look at the early development of both SL and TSO and an explanation for why what went on in those two worlds means something to larger society and to the future of online communities.

Though by both Ludlow and Wallace, it's pretty clear that the book is largely seen through the former's eyes. That's particularly true because, though the title is The Second Life Herald, the book doesn't really dive in to SL until more than two-thirds of the way through.

And despite the crucial importance of TSO in the overall history of virtual worlds, the decision to focus so much of the book on it--and on the history of the Alphaville Herald--is unfortunate, in my view.

It's not that readers shouldn't care about what went on in TSO. But given that the book was published in the fall of 2007, a time when so much attention is being focused on Second Life, it would have been nice if the book had given readers a great deal more of the history of SL, particularly because that history is not being told elsewhere.

It is possible that the decision was made to focus more on TSO because another book, Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, will be published in February. But I doubt it.

In fact, The Second Life Herald, which was published by MIT Press, almost never happened. It was originally titled Only a Game and was to be published in April 2006 by O'Reilly. But for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, O'Reilly dropped the project. It's a shame, too, because the rush of attention on Second Life picked up shortly thereafter and the book would have been perfectly situated.

And while the MIT Press version of the book has been updated to some extent, it is clear upon reading both versions--I have an advance reading copy of the O'Reilly book--that the final published manuscript didn't change that much in the 18 months it was delayed.

And that's too bad, because the end result is that it feels a little dated. There are, for instance, almost no references to anything that has happened in SL in the last year, with just a short chapter at the end dealing with any recent history.

Still, the book is largely about early history, and in that regard, it is a triumph. Readers unfamiliar with those heady days of TSO and SL will come away with a better appreciation for what the earliest adopters went through and what those travails mean for today's users.

And in the end, I would judge that Ludlow and Wallace have succeeded at helping to answer the charge put forth by so many critics of social virtual worlds that "there is nothing to do." Indeed there is. But to discover it, you must dive in.