Second Life: Born on the Playa

Last week I ran across a review of the new book by long time offical Second Life blogger Wagner James Au titled The Making of Second Life. The review mentions how the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, got his first taste of SL on the playa at Burning Man:

"'So you'd lay on the pillows,' Rosedale recounts, eyes twinkling at the memory," Au writes, "'and you'd feel like an exotic Asian king, and you're looking out on the parched (desert); the line of sun starts at the edge of the rugs, and you see that hot desert, and you imagine you're Kublai Khan on a bender...They were just structures of the mind...It reinforced that idea that what we believe in or what we make of things is all that is real. It was unreal because everything was clearly made of found materials and was transitory. But it was real, because when you were there, it was real to you...It had this mystical quality that demolished the barriers between people.'"

Rosedale's epiphany? There was a magic going on out there in the desert--a way that people dealt with each other and laid down their disbelief--with which he wanted to imbue his virtual world.

I'm a big fan of playa epiphanies, and I've been a fan of Second Life for several years. The similarities were always apparent to me, but nice to know now that they are truly related by meme.