I am interested in landscape and new media and spent some time exploring and researching Second Life for this paper, written for a graduate seminar class at NSCAD University.

I am falling. It's my second time in, and I ended my last session somewhere in the sky above Sandbox Newcomb, attempting to see how high I could fly. Thin clouds drift around my avatar, or virtual self, and the ground below grows gradually more visible through a haze of grey fog. It isn't so much a fall as a slow drift downward, and eventually I come to a gentle stop still some distance above the ground. My avatar hovers patiently in place, floating in midair. I press the Page Down key to land.

I am standing in what purports to be a desert, a mottled brown and green plane that looked a little more convincing from a distance. Up close it is blurry, as if the texture map that contains its colour data has been stretched to its limits. In the distances between splotches of colour, I can almost discern a pixel grid. It is perfectly flat more often than not, more floor than earth, though I see a small drop in elevation to the south. This area looks largely uninhabited, and it takes a few minutes of wandering on foot before I come across any buildings. Even when I find one — a large, empty cube with one open wall and a pink checkered floor — there is no one around.

Second Life feels like a game at first, but less so the longer I wander around. The three-dimensional landscape looks familiar, its generic green and brown colour scheme a video game cliché. But it is too wide open — there are no obstacles, no bottomless pits or brick walls, no enemies hurling deadly projectiles with devious precision. The user interface, too, feels tacked on from some first-person shooter, a mess of layered menu bars and windows, a small radar map in the top right corner. But there's nothing on my radar but more green and brown, and far from being charged with some desperate quest, I find myself alone in a landscape as empty as a sheet of paper.

Land in Second Life is divided into large areas called simulators, or sims. Within each sim, land is often subdivided into small lots, which like almost everything else in Second Life can be bought and sold, typically in parcels of 512 square meters. The currency of the virtual world is the Linden Dollar, named after Second Life's developers, San Francisco-based Linden Research Inc. — commonly known in-world as Linden Lab, or The Lindens. Users are called residents, and are encouraged to not only create virtual identities and form relationships with other residents, but to establish a semipermanent presence in the virtual world through the purchase of land.

Like so many others, my avatar takes its first steps on Orientation Island, a small training area scattered with featureless grey avatars — a sign that a resident is new, or perhaps that its avatar is still loading, or rezzing. We are clumsy together, walking at first in straight lines or in circles, sitting down and standing repeatedly, littering the conversation window with interjections aimed at no one in particular. These are our virtual bodies at their most primitive: though born fully grown, capable of full control of our considerable motor skills (flying, it turns out, is as easy as pressing Page Up), our movements are laboured and graceless. The small cluttered island, neatly quartered into four training areas, is like a crib to contain our floundering bodies and the simple objects we quickly learn to interact with, and to build. When we are ready, we move on.

As I later learn, most land in Second Life does not remain empty for long. The area I first find myself in, upon teleporting from Orientation Island to the larger continent, turns out to be a small unused corner of a vast sim called Sandbox Newcomb. Sandboxes in Second Life are testing areas, large open-air workshops where users can build and test objects without worrying about disrupting other residents. Different sandboxes tolerate different degrees of experimentation, as becomes obvious when I come across a large billboard:

Warning! Sandbox parcel will be cleaned regularly. NO selling / advertising / shooting or gambling allowed. Simple scripts only! NO WEAPONS.

The Sandbox itself is a junkyard of playthings, prototypes, and half-built structures, all constructed using prims or primitive objects, with the user interface's built-in 3D modeller. In my immediate vicinity, having found my way out of my vacant corner, I count three cars, a spaceship, two large buildings suspended in space, a Coke machine, an upside-down armchair, a small army of large immobile penguins, and a unicorn. Attempting to interact with several objects proves fruitless; a car refuses to drive, I can't climb inside the spaceship, and the Coke machine seems to be out of order. Right-clicking the unicorn reveals that it has a scripted action called Cuddle, but despite my advances it stares at me blankly, mane and tail sparkling in a digital wind. Perhaps the objects are unfinished, or perhaps I don't have permission to use them. Everything built in Second Life comes with built-in copy protection; an object's creator decides whether to allow other users to copy or interact with it. With this system, Linden Lab's virtual world has developed its own sizeable market economy, sustained by artists and virtual entrepreneurs who design, sell, and rent everything from waterfront resorts to functioning replicas of the Millennium Falcon to custom avatar costumes, tattoos, and animated gestures. Linden Dollars, which users can purchase in-world using any major credit card, are also exchangeable for real world cash, and the currency currently floats at about 250 Linden Dollars to the U.S. Dollar. A basic membership in Second Life requires only an e-mail address, but to own land requires a premium membership with a monthly payment; users without land are essentially homeless, perpetual tourists.

I am a tourist, and an ill-equipped one at that. Besides having a basic account and no Linden Dollars, my Dell's graphics card barely meets the minimum requirements to run the Second Life software, and to reduce lag and loading time I've adjusted the graphics options to as low as they can go. Even so, the world loads painfully slowly, particularly when I am near numerous large objects, and my PC buzzes like a single-engine plane in protest. Flying over a seemingly empty field, I spot a small table with a chessboard; I land nearby for a closer look, only to have an entire gazebo rez around me: tiled marble floor, glass roof, potted plants and all. It turns out to be one end of a much larger garden, and at the other end I discover more than a dozen people standing in a group, speaking Spanish. I wonder now how much of the seemingly vacant landscape I've flown over is actually developed. Large structures show up on the map, but smaller objects are easy to miss due to my digital nearsightedness.

Sight in Second Life is a strange thing. I view the world not from my avatar's eyes, but from a floating virtual camera that tags along a few metres behind its head. This too is a convention adopted from other 3D worlds. As opposed to the first-person perspective of some 3D games, it gives the player a wider view of their immediate surroundings, as well as a greater familiarity with their avatar's physical appearance. Left to its own devices the virtual camera follows doggedly behind my avatar, but I'm also able to take control, swinging around to close in on my avatar's face, zooming out to view more of my surroundings, or peering around as if through my avatar's eyes. This is called a dynamic camera system, and is particularly noticeable when, for example, I somehow end up with an obstacle between my floating 'eye' and my avatar, as inevitably happens in close quarters. One of the earliest examples of this kind of camera system is in Nintendo's Mario 64 (1996), where the player's floating viewpoint is personified as a small flying character holding a camera and following Mario around. No such explanation is necessary in Second Life, as the dynamic camera system has become common in certain types of 3D games over the past ten years. It is useful, but adds a certain distance to the roleplay; am I intended to imagine myself as my avatar, or is the character a kind of puppet who responds to my commands? The first scenario is implied by the title, Second Life, and has been reinforced for years in games such as Mario 64 (the player is thought of as Mario, not the character filming Mario). There is a particularly acute sense of disconnection, though, when my avatar slips out of sight, or for some reason won't do what I want to do. Or what I want it to do.

Being able to view one's avatar at all times suits Second Life particularly well; there is great enthusiasm in the virtual world for avatar customization, and much of the satisfaction of becoming a giant dragon or wearing a custom-designed animated outfit would be lost if it wasn't on view at all times. The four initial areas of tutorial on Orientation Island are labelled Movement, Search, Communicate, and Appearance, which indicates the primary importance placed on customizing one's avatar. The Second Life engine allows an incredible variety of possible avatars, and users take great pride in designing (or purchasing) bodies, clothes, and accessories for themselves. As usual, Shakespeare said it first: all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are, quite literally, players. The experience of spending time in Second Life is not unlike directing and acting out a television show starring yourself. I am encouraged to be whatever I imagine, to find or create desirable surroundings, and to make friends and form relationships (and increasingly do business) on whatever terms I desire. All along, the camera follows attentively. The emphasis on appearance and creating visually convincing virtual environments is a fundamental part of the Second Life world. I came across one block of run-down brick buildings complete with graffiti, rusted metal fences, and even a dumpster object in a back alley, filled with virtual trash. In another area, a large billboard advertising "Land For Sale" had been designed complete with an elaborate wooden structure propping it up; it could just as easily have been a two-dimensional rectangle floating in midair. At the same time, it is not uncommon to find buildings suspended in space or on floating platforms (which is not so odd when you consider that residents can fly). Most objects sold and traded in Second Life have no functional value; virtual shoes don't protect your virtual feet, and even working vehicles are basically useless when everyone can teleport. Indeed, Second Life's economy seems to consist largely of the creation and sale of stage props.

Advertisements, of course, are one type of virtual object which is perfectly functional, and Second Life is naturally full of billboards, flashing signs, and interactive exhibits advertising both real-world and virtual businesses. Of course, any sign can also act as a virtual vending machine. As there are no natural resources, land seems to be valued primarily as a salable commodity and increasingly as advertising space. Second Life has relatively few roads (since everyone can teleport and fly), and so without a clear direction to point at many ads take the form of large rotating blocks, or aim themselves in odd directions such as straight up, to attract the attention of avatars flying overhead (not that this is unheard of in real life).

Virtual reality remains a thin curtain, and it is easy to find places where even the surface illusion is transparent. Wandering to the edge of any continent reveals a perfectly vertical cliff, and at its edges the landscape reveals itself to be thinner than paper, two-dimensional. Here the fragile underbelly of the world can be seen, and it is as flat as a fallen house of cards. Trees, scattered illogically around otherwise empty landscapes, often consist of two sprites that intersect like a cardboard model, producing the barest illusion of three-dimensionality. It is possible to walk straight through most of them, as if they were merely projections. I had an interesting conversation with one of the first residents I spoke to in Second Life, a certain C. Helvetic. We were standing on the shore of Sandbox Newcomb, which doesn't usually have a shore; a large sim-sized lake stretched before us, perfectly square and as empty as an abandoned storefront window. "It's sad," he mused, "there's supposed to be another sim here, but it crashed." I mention I like the water, which beneath this stunning sky (I've just discovered the menu option World → Force Sun → Sunset) is admittedly scenic even to my low-res virtual eyes. "It's just what the software renders when there's nothing there," he explains. "But yes, it's pretty." I ask Helvetic if the map wraps around its edges, and he explains that the world is flat: "They'll keep building on the X and Y indefinitely." I ask about cities.

"You were born yesterday," he says suddenly. I've only been in Second Life for an hour, long enough to find my way off Orientation Island and to the edge of the sandbox. But I suppose the clock must have passed midnight as I wandered Sandbox Newcomb, and my profile indicates that I started yesterday.

"How does it feel to be born yesterday?"

I don't reply. I hold Page Up and my avatar sails straight up, until I can't see the sand or the water anymore. I zoom the camera out and my avatar grows smaller, a tiny dot, the only object on the screen. There are clouds between it and the camera. I click Quit. I pour a glass of water from the jug in the fridge.