Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds

By Tim Guest

We’ve always dreamed of perfect places: Eden, heaven, Utopia. Imagine gambling without loss, love without heartbreak, sex without exposure, experience without risk. Welcome to the fascinating world of online virtual reality, the land of invented places and populations that is entered and inhabited every week by nearly fifty million people worldwide. Each participant creates a virtual body, works at virtual jobs, and makes virtual friends and family. In Second Lives, Tim Guest, an internationally acclaimed young journalist, takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass as he investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the twenty-first century.

From Second Life to EverQuest and beyond, here are the computer-generated environments and characters that can easily become more engrossing and fulfilling than earthly existence. With the click of a mouse you can select eye color, face shape, height–you can even give yourself wings. Your character, or avatar, can build houses, make and sell works of art, earn money, get married and divorced.

In this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Guest meets people who found meaningful love and friendship despite never having met in person, catches up with the companies that have used virtual worlds to make big money, investigates the U.S. military’s massive online global model that trains soldiers to fight anyone anywhere, and travels all the way to gaming-crazed Korea to get a taste for just how big this phenomenon really is.

At first glance, these new computer-generated places seem free from trouble and sorrow. But Guest examines the dark side of this technology too, including the online criminals who plague imaginary worlds, from cyber mafiosos and prostitutes to real hackers and terrorists. It seems that one cannot escape greed, corruption, and human weakness–even inside a computer screen.
Are these virtual worlds a way to enhance life or to escape it? Guest explores this question personally as he lets himself be transported into myriad parallel universes. By turns provocative, inspiring, and disturbing, Second Lives is a crucial book for this millennium. After all, real life is so twentieth century.

Advance praise for Second Lives
“Tim Guest is a young writer with the literary goods. My Life in Orange, his hit memoir of growing up in a commune, looked at his past; his riveting new book, Second Lives, looks at our future: the world of virtual reality and the spellbound people who inhabit it. The book is some kind of revelation–by turns compelling, chilling, and illuminating. Curious, intelligent, offbeat, and artful, Guest is at the beginning of a big career.”
——John Lahr, senior drama critic, The New Yorker, author of
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton

Praise from England for Second Lives
“An anthropological adventure but also Guest’s personal voyage . . . a fascinating portrait of rainbow landscapes and their inhabitants.”
–Time Out London

“Rich and colourful . . . an important mapping of a new social frontier.”
–The Guardian

“Remarkably timely.”
–The Sunday Telegraph

“Astonishing.”
–The Sunday Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9781588366726

Reviews for Second Lives

[furriebarry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tim Guest starts of on a very interesting note looking at the impact Second Life has had on the life of a group of people with Cerebal Palsey. Unfortunately from that point onwards he seems to have become rather more enamoured with spending his time in game rather than writing his book. Too much time is taken up with Tim Guest's personal issues and obsession and the book sometimes retreats to the quality of a blog. There is insight here and some commentary but if he had stuck to his original plan and lived up to the promise of the first chapters then this could have been so much more. Patchy.

[jfkliev · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I found this book last month as I took a stroll down the "new book" shelf here at Providence College library. As I'm very curious to learn what makes Second Lifers tick, I dove right in and hoped to be enlightened. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. The author has some very interesting insights and experiences, but tells them in such a convoluted way that I gave up after about 60 pages. Opinions and events are sometimes expressed multiple times, to the point where I thought perhaps I had already read the pages I was currently on! I did very much appreciate the story of the folks at the group home in Massachusetts, who collectively controll a Second Life avatar, and who where overjoyed to conquer their real-life physical handicaps via virtual reality. However, I felt so confused by this already-confusing world that I ditched this book and am now reading "The Unofficial Tourists' Guide to Second Life" by Paul Carr and Graham Pond. I am still baffled on the Second Life mentality, but at least the "Unofficial Guide" is easier to follow.

[lewispike · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is the journey of meatspace avatar Tim Guest into Second Life, and through that into WoW, Lineage II etc. It is a mixture of his first and second lives, and some of the people he meets through SL and other virtual spaces.I felt obscurely let down, and definitely confused about the details from his first life - in one chapter he is splitting up with his RL gf, in the next he's shopping for furniture first in RL then in SL with his gf - new one? old one, and the chronology is off?