Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life

摘要

Thomas Malaby begins his ethnographic study of the online game-design company Linden Lab with a telling scene. He describes himself standing in the company's dimly lit "lab" space, mesmerized by a detailed drawing of a rocky and still-uninhabited island invented by the company's designers. Rendered in aerial perspective and segmented by equidistant lines of a Cartesian grid, the image, Malaby writes, with its "god's eye perspective" and posted in a setting of glowing lights and digital cultivation, is not merely the product of design, but of "creation in the larger sense" (p. 1). Based on interviews and fieldwork Malaby conducted during a year spent with Linden Lab's production team starting in 2004, Malaby draws his readers into the inner workings of the company behind the uniquely successful Second Life virtual-world environment.