Download Second Lives: A Journey through Virtual Worlds AudioBook Free
We’ve always imagined perfect places: Eden, heaven, Utopia. Imagine gaming without damage, 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 almost 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 the 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 may easily are more engrossing and fulfilling than earthly existence. While using click of any 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 artwork, make 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 firms that contain 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 completely to gaming-crazed Korea to get a taste for how big this phenomenon really is.
At first glance, these new computer-generated places appear free from trouble and sorrow. But Guest examines the dark side of the 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 screen.
Are these virtual worlds a way to enhance life or to escape it? Guest explores this question personally as he allows himself be transported into myriad parallel universes. By turns provocative, inspiring, and disturbing, Second Lives is an essential book because of this millennium. In the end, real life is so twentieth century.
Advance praise for Second Lives
“Tim Visitor is a writer with the literary goods. MY ENTIRE LIFE in Orange, his hit memoir of growing up in a commune, looked at his past; his riveting new book, Second Lives, talks about our future: the world of virtual reality and the spellbound people who inhabit it. The book is some type of revelation–by turns compelling, chilling, and illuminating. Curious, intelligent, offbeat, and artful, Guest reaches the start of a large 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 remarkable 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
