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Inside Linden Lab: An Ethnographic Study by Thomas Malaby

How does the culture INSIDE Linden Lab impact the culture of Second Life? How do the values and attitudes of the Lab translate into changes to how Second Life works? What is the “day in the life” of a Lab employee look like? What tools and cultural norms influence how people work together and operate?

Thomas Malaby went inside Linden Lab to conduct an ethnographic study and his findings provide a critical historic document and provide keen insight into where Second Life came from and provide hints of where it’s going. Where previous studies of Second Life have looked at “life on the Grid”, Thomas takes a peek behind the curtain at Linden Lab. His forthcoming book: Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life will be the principle topic of discussion on this episode of Metanomics.

From the description of Malaby’s book on Amazon.com:

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.

Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? “Lindens”-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.

Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a non-hierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

In the Spotlight with Culture Correspondent Bettina Tizzy
The role of the arts in Second Life and virtual worlds, and the content creators who are doing that which is Not Possible In Real Life is the focus of the show opening. Bettina Tizzy covers the arts through her wildly popular NPIRL blog, and will provide insight into how artists thrive (or not) in virtual worlds; the role of the patron/sponsor; and how arts and culture have valuable lessons for enterprise and organizations.

As a special treat, an exhibit of arts has been arranged at the Metanomics sim in Second Life, on and around the stage.

Transcript
Full transcript of this event is available on SlideShare.

Guest Biographies

Thomas Malaby

Thomas Malaby is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee-Wisconsin and an author at the Terra Nova collaborative weblog.

Thomas is a sociocultural anthropologist whose principal research interest is in the relationships among institutions, unpredictability, and technology. He tackles this intersection through research on games and game-like processes in social life. Other areas of interest include social theory, modernity and institutional legitimacy, and performance theory. His first book, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City (University of Illinois Press), explored human attitudes toward risk and chance through an examination of the practice of gambling in Crete.

Malaby’s book, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Cornell University Press), is an ethnographic examination of Linden Lab and its relationship to the virtual world it has created, Second Life, and is available May 2009.

Bettina Tizzy

Bettina is madly, wildy embracing the impossible made possible in virtual worlds. Bettina founded the working group “Not Possible IRL,” on July 4, 2007:
1) To identify, showcase and promote QUALITY content creation (art, architecture, fashion, landscaping) in virtual worlds that would not be possible in Real Life;
2) To seek and disseminate knowledge that empowers content creators; and
3) To advocate for better recognition and protection of the rights of content creators in virtual environments.

In October 2007, she founded a second group, “Impossible IRL,” in order to share NPIRL’s findings with a wider audience, but ImpIRLers have increasingly become both a source for information and inspiration. NPIRL’s membership is closed at 175 members (“Dunbar’s Number,” slightly stretched), and Impossible IRL has 2,400 members (in-world and web-based groups combined). Bettina rezzed in Second Life on January 26, 2007.