'The Making of Second Life' by Wagner James Au and 'Second Lives' by Tim Guest

The Making of Second Life

Notes From the New World

Wagner James Au

Collins: 274 pp., $25.95

Second Lives

A Journey Through Virtual Worlds

Tim Guest

Random House: 280 pp., $25

FOR a brief and extraordinarily peculiar 10 minutes, I was a member of Second Life. Like all newbies, after downloading the hefty software, I was directed to an orientation area, where I chose an "in-world" name and an avatar. Stumbling through a garden where everyone was speaking Italian, I came upon a male avatar, who introduced himself, then asked my age. When I replied "33," without another word, he rose, turned his pixilated back and flew swiftly toward the horizon.

For those First Life inhabitants unaware that there's a digital alternative, Second Life is a vast, multi-user domain (MUD) available to anyone with an Internet connection. While most MUDs are games -- such as Sony's mighty EverQuest -- Second Life, as Wikipedia helpfully points out, "does not have points, scores, winners or losers, levels, an end-strategy, or most of the other characteristics of games."

Launched by Linden Lab, a San Francisco start-up, in 2003, Second Life boasts the motto "Your World. Your Imagination" and exists for "Residents" to explore and build upon, even open in-world businesses, while revealing as much of their real-life identities as they choose. In short, it's a social networking service, amped up into a metaverse -- a term swiped from sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson to describe virtual worlds.

Now,Wagner James Au, the first in-world journalist in Second Life, and memoirist Tim Guest, whose "My Life in Orange" recounted a childhood in a cult, have written books detailing the creation, experience and implications of virtual worlds -- Au's of Second Life in particular, and Guest's of a plethora of such worlds. Au's exploration of Second Life is less hard-hitting analysis than layman-friendly overview, alternately informative and speculative and occasionally breathless. ("Lost" fans may see a certain resemblance to the Dharma Initiative's orientation films.) "[I]f your computer depicts a roaring waterfall, and your avatar is inside it, you will, with enough concentration . . . feel a sense of vertigo, even feel a chill from the thundering flume nearby," Au writes.