The Second Life Herald: Chapter One

The Second Life Herald is a book I wrote for MIT Press ca. 2006 with philosophy professor Peter Ludlow about his eponymous virtual newspaper, which had landed him on the front page of The New York Times. The book recently went out of print, but you can download the first chapter below.

The book tells the story of a crusading online journalist and his virtual news outlet, the Second Life Herald (originally known as the Alphaville Herald). It's a story about censorship and corporate control, about virtual murder, and about questions of who should govern the online spaces in which so many of our social interactions take place. We wrote it just on the cusp of the explosion of social media that took place starting in 2007 with the launch of Twitter and the opening of Facebook and release of the iPhone around the same time, and there's a lot there that foreshadows issues we're all still coming to grips with today (and a lot that overstates or just gets things plain wrong, of course).

I've been thinking of it lately in the context of tabletop roleplaying games because what the book is ultimately about is what we've taken to calling bleed, or, as the quite brilliant games academic Sarah Lynne Bowman puts it, "the spillover between player and character."  It's a fun read, our book (if I do say so myself), with a lot of stories about virtual crime and virtual sex and virtual parties and other virtual things. But are they really virtual? Are all things that take place in those contexts happening only to the "characters" within the gamespace? Or are they actually real experiences that the player is having as well? You can ask this about a virtual world or video game, but you can just as well ask it about a larp or a TTRPG. In some ways it's a question we're asking about play itself. 

You can read a few of these questions in the excerpt below. I'm interested to explore more of these questions in the context of TTRPGs. Stay tuned. And feel free to drop your own questions — or answers — below.