Seven years in Tibet. I mean SL.

Maybe this is a little early, I don’t know, but each year around the start of September, I like to mark the anniversary of my initiation into Second Life with a little retrospective of my years in the metaverse. Sometime in the next couple of weeks (I can’t remember the specific date), my account turns seven. That’s right, since September 2003, I’ve been rezzing, cutting, sizing, tilting, tapering, twisting, hollowing, dimpling, rotating, moving, linking, and texturing. As a result, I have an inventory full of hundreds — if not thousands — of virtual objects by Cubey Terra. Some became the products that you find at Abbotts Aerodrome, some became Abbotts Aerodrome itself, but most sit unfinished and mostly forgotten in the mess that is my Inventory.

It seems to me that my inventory list is like an archeological record of my years in SL. It’s sorted chronologically, where it’s sorted at all, and so as I browse down the list of nearly twenty thousand accumulated items, it’s like excavating deeper into my past.

The oldest objects in the oldest folders reveal a record of how I spent my first couple of months. There’s my Star Trek folder, where I made Kirk-era Starfleet uniforms, a working phaser, and a tricorder that makes a tricordery sound, but doesn’t actually scan. About as old is my folder full of noobish avatars that I created for Jeff Linden’s “Avatar of the Week” contest. Yes, there was a time when various Lindens actually organized and conducted events at places like the former Stage 4 in what’s now the Ahern/Dore Welcome Area. The Lindens quickly realized that approach wasn’t scaleable, so they started paying regular residents to take that task.

That’s why, near my “Star Trek” folder, I have a folder full of stages, lighting, and props that I used for my own events. A couple of months in, I built a theatre and began my “Bad Poetry Contests”. Yes, oldbies, I still have your bad poetry on file. I’ll pull out selected verses to embarrass people another time.

After I tired of the poetry slams, my inventory began to fill with something new. Hoverpods — hovering, sleek vehicles that hugged the terrain — like my “Squiddy” hoverpod. They aren’t my oldest vehicles, certainly, but they were the first ones to use actual SL vehicle physics, which hadn’t been available previously.

Besides the vehicles, theatre parts, and assorted newbie builds, artifacts from that era are mostly run-of-the-mill objects that anyone with any sense would have deleted long ago to recycle their bits for better uses. I see the Linden beach ball and party hat, which were once party toys, but since have been made into symbols of replicator objects, though these are the originals. I have the parrot, of course, and the hand lamp.

They represent a simpler time when user numbers were so small that it was possible to recognize everyone’s name. You could log in and create a random build in the Morris sandbox and think that it was worth keeping, like my giant meat grinder full of pink flamingos, zebras, and parrots. (The reknowned SL sculptor, Starax, in his Morris-dwelling days, encouraged me to do that one.)

Things changed, of course. Objects became productized, as they say in business, and our Linden dollar balance became worth more than just a ranking in the “Richest Avatar” list. Was it then that SL transformed from a casually creative community of artists and geeks into an economy? When did we mutate from hobbyists into part-time businesses?

When I dig down to the foundational layers of my inventory, I need to ask if something fundamental to the wonder of Second Life has been buried under the escalating efforts of creators-turned-businesspeople. For newbies now, their folders fill not with their own creations, but with polished, professional-looking products — the work of full-time content creators. The barrier to creating something new and unique — something that truly stands out — has become almost insurmountably high. The new user is now faced with over seven years of accumulated products that have evolved from clumsy primitives to refined sculptures.

Somewhere in Second Life, however, is still that spark of creativity. For example, every weekend, Pirate Air goes for a weekend group flight. They pick a destination and fly across the map en masse. Maybe the next level of creativity won’t be from filling inventory folders with objects, but from creating experiences like the group flights. Or Squeebee’s Mystery Science Theatre events. Or the snail races. Or live musical performances. Or countless other events that happen daily. I’ve been in SL seven years, but I guess I’ll have to stick around longer to see where Second Life will end up.

Now I’ll close the archeological record again until next year, except maybe to pull out the occasional exploding penguin. Best newbie build ever.