The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse

摘要

The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse is written by Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at University of Michigan, and Mark Wallace, a freelance journalist, but the former is perhaps better known to virtual words users as Urizenus Sklar (or simply 'Uri'), the muckraking virtual journalist who created the blogs Alphaville Herald and Second Life Herald.rnThe book - published in 2007 - focuses on the early days of two among the most influential Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) or virtual worlds: The Sims Online (TSO) by Electronic Arts and Second Life (SL) by Linden Lab, offering to the reader a very detailed and farseeing immersion into those 3D environments and the communities that flourished there or, in the case of SL, still flourish. It enlightens the philosophical and social underpinnings of the 'metaverse', digging in depth into how the relation existing between users and the community management policies developed by the two companies influenced the in-world communities' evolutionary paths.