Alternate Universe

That communication potential also makes Second Life attractive as an educational and research tool. Architecture professor Terry Beaubois began teaching a Montana State University course in Second Life two years ago, remotely from his California home. Now at MSU full time, he meets with classes each week out of "University Island," a mock campus that his students designed and built, with classrooms, workshops and an oceanside gallery where they display their work. Rather than using paper sketches and cardboard models, they build interactive replicas of real buildings and neighborhood-development projects, adhering to proper structure, gravity and physics. The texture of these structures, though certainly animated, is detailed to the point where even a reporter can find herself lost in the arches and hallways of a virtual workshop.

The idea has caught on. Although Beaubois's colleagues questioned his decision to teach through what they called a "computer game," he's now head of MSU's Creative Research Lab and has the backing of the university's president (who has an avatar of his own). And more than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life. Students meet in virtual classrooms to discuss history and political science. Teachers give virtual presentations, and lead virtual field trips. Guest lecturers visit from all over the world.

At the University of California, Davis, psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees has set up virtual simulations to show students what happens in a schizophrenic episode. Students can walk through a replica of his psychiatric ward, analyzing terrifying voices and eerie laughs, and can even see simulated schizophrenic hallucinations. Many students find the images disturbing, but Second Life helps them comprehend the "lived experience" of patients who "constantly complain" that doctors don't understand them, says Yellowlees.

True to the unofficial Second Life mantra—by the people, for the people—patients themselves are utilizing that clinical potential, too. "Brigadoon," for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. Asperger's patients have trouble interacting socially and don't perceive things that should come naturally—how to introduce themselves or strike up a conversation, for instance. But in Second Life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life. One sufferer has re-created a favorite restaurant, where the group regularly meets. Gradually, they are leaving their private island to venture into the rest of Second Life, integrating into the larger community. "The one thing that really amazes me about Second Life is the way it empowers people," says John Lester, the former Harvard Medical School researcher who set up the group (and now works for Linden Lab). "It frees them from the role of the biological device."

Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing. Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people's getting more and more of their social activity online. "No matter how you beef it up with little icons or fancy colors, [virtual worlds] don't have the nuance of face-to-face interaction," says Oxford University's Susan Greenfield, who heads the U.K.'s Institute for the Future of the Mind. It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life's taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion—like "the 21st-century version of the novel," says Greenfield.

For diehard inhabitants, Second Life is a novel they won't put down soon. Elizabeth Ward, who suffers from reflex sympathetic dystrophy—a severe and chronic pain disorder that now keeps her at home—says "the interaction goes one step further than anything that could be achieved online." Ward, who lives with her husband, a software engineer, in Rhode Island, says her disability can make life "frustrating and lonely," but Second Life "has opened up another world." It's allowed her to continue working, to meet people, to visit her son, who lives in Nevada, and her best friend in India. She's gone sky diving, ice-skating—even played an eight-piece violin concerto with a group of mermaids under the sea. "I told my husband when I first started, 'I felt joy as I did when I was little, playing with paper dolls'," Ward explains. "But now the paper dolls are virtual and can interact with real people." Whether you think it's a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it's captivating the globe.

© 2007