Magazine

The 2008 Politics Online Conference in Washington, D.C., featured a presentation on “Design Outreach in Virtual Worlds” by Sue Singer, a project manager for Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Singer’s audience of middle-aged political campaign managers and entrepreneurs settled into the talk by slouching into their chairs with their BlackBerrys, checking e-mail and the exit polls of the Ohio Democratic Primary. Then Singer cleared her throat and dropped a bomb of statistics on the unprepared audience.

“Second Life, physically, is seven times the size of our nation’s capital. We have over 13 million registered citizens, and we attract millions more in business investments and advertisement.”

In the context of money, users, advertisers, and — most relevant to this audience — voters, the word “millions” snapped them to attention. Singer spoke of virtual town halls, where politicians could reach new audiences: “It’s all created by users. By CEOs who build conference rooms and even architects who construct interpretations of real cities.” For the rest of the talk, the audience salivated at the thought of getting in on the action.

Philip Rosedale, a 30-year-old chief technology officer at online media provider RealNetworks, conceived Second Life in 1999 while attending a decidedly different kind of conference: Burning Man, the Black Rock City desert festival of self-expression and hallucinogenic drug use. The liberated experience, and an acquired taste for Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, catalyzed Rosedale’s desire to create an online, self-determining, new world — “A place where people could be whateverthey wanted to be,” Rosedale said in an interview with USA Today.

That same year, Rosedale left his job, moved to San Francisco, and started the company Linden Research (currently known as Linden Lab).