Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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

About the Author

Tim Guest is a journalist and the bestselling author of My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru, about his childhood on communes around the world. Guest’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Scientist, and Vogue. He lives in London.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400065356
• ISBN-13: 978-1400065356
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #498,440 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars After all - one book on the theme with content, June 3, 2008

By	T. Struszka "onart.com - for artists and art... (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are tons of books about virtual worlds, especially about second life. All of the ones I have seen (before this one) were more or less instructionbooks for people who don't have a mind of their own to click around in a virtual environment and collect some basic information, or artefacts of self celebration of residing avatars.
This one is nothing like that. Guest focusses on his personal research and experience in these environments, for the biggest part in secondlife.com . He gives us an interesting and sometimes even touching account of the fact, that these worlds are populated by real humans and not by game characters. Even for me as a long year (but not veteran) player of this environment, the book had an enormous amount of new and fascinating facts on the history of SL, that usually would not get published, since Guest partly approached it from the underground and not from the shiny surface.
I regrett I never met him there...