Why Virtual Worlds Matter

In Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, Thomas Malaby addresses why virtual worlds matter, with a critical eye to the connection between the “real world” of Linden Lab and the “virtual world” it has created called Second Life. Malaby seeks out in this ethnographic account the processes that govern both worlds, the affordances they provide to their human agents (or “users,” respectively), and how games are employed to engage nonvertical models of bureaucratic institutional organization that are anathema to the ideals of the 1960s out of which the internet, and ultimately virtual worlds, emerged. One of the chief methods Malaby identifies for establishing order and governance within both the virtual world of Second Life and that of its maker, Linden Lab, involves the transition from traditionally executed norms and cultural rules for the workplace (negotiated through traditional media) to the use of what has been called “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge 2006). Institutionally, this meant the turn from memos, face-to-face meetings, and other traditional vertical, “top-down” bureaucratic methods of communication at Linden Lab to a software product called Jira, which is “designed to help a group of people keep track of the development of a software product and allows for the relatively straightforward coding of further tools that can be layered onto its software to make use of the information it tracks” (Malaby 2009:68). Individually, this meant the use of “games,” or elements of contingency and indeterminacy, to negotiate new media platforms used to convey the tasks and strategies necessary to create the virtual world, which itself is a kind of game. “Games,” says Malaby, “are socially constructed by a shared commitment to their legitimacy as contrived spaces where indeterminate outcomes can unfold” (p. 85). This injects an intentionally irrational element of unpredictability into the business of Linden Lab. He describes Linden Lab during his time there as constantly teetering between success and failure. This irrationality (in the Weberian sense) and unpredictability,