It all started with a Second Life

In the digital era, millions of games have been played on screens around the world, however, Second Life stands out as a particular case. Falling into the category of early Sandbox games, like Sims and Grand Theft Auto, with non-linear storytelling and emergent behavior, merging gamedesign with gameplay, Second Life was launched by Linden Lab company in 2003 as an on-line multimedia platform. Linden, is emphatic that their creation is not a game, but more like an open-ended experience (Kalning, 2007). The users create virtual representations of themselves (avatars), and they can explore the world: interact with places and objects, meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, and trade virtual property and services with one another. In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, it does not have a designated objective, nor traditional game play mechanics or rules. And what is more important: In a -seemingly- infinite space with 27,343 regions, and a total area of 1791 square kilometers, Linden does not create the content. The “residents” -that is the users- build everything (Kalning, 2007). 

In that sense, Second Life is considered as the first Metaverse, a term, was adopted from Neal Stephenson' novel “Snow Crash” (1992) envisioning a virtual urban environment, where users are represented as avatars, and the geographies and physicalities of the real world are modeled in networked digital space (Schroeder et al., 2001). Metaverse is broadly defined as a “a theoretical or emergent networked online space with digitally persistent environments that people inhabit, as avatars, for synchronous interactions and experiences, accessing the shared virtual space through virtual reality, augmented reality, game consoles, mobile devices, or conventional computers” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metaverse).