The awkward teenage years of an avatar, and other short stories

As I've delved deeper into the Second Life rabbit hole, I've been searching for good literature on the subject of virtual worlds and online interaction. With a userbase in the millions and countless articles written about it, I thought, surely Linden has a few intriguing books to complement its program?

Well, not so much.

Shopping for a Second Life book is almost like looking in the self help section of a book store: generic, drab how-to guides; get rich quick schemes; generalized backgrounders, some simple and some arcane in their technicality.

I think the reason why there are so few good books on Second Life is that, throughout the program's fledgling years, nobody really knew what to do with it. Is it purely a marketing tool? A place for geeky teenagers to hang out? A cyber-utopia or a skid mark on the information superhighway?

It'd be a little presumptuous to say that Second Life has answered those questions, but the fact that it has endured this long has got to count for something.

I was looking for something different. And today, another book caught my eye: (photo from Amazon.com)

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human seems like it could be one of the first books to break down exactly why people interact in virtual worlds. The author, Tom Boellstorff, is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and the editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist. Not too shabby!

Boellstorff recently organized an ethnographic symposium called "Cultures of Virtual Worlds," which was attended by a number of researches in Second Life, as well as one of my favorite bloggers, Linda Zimmer. In this book, Boellstorff confronts some similar issues as discussed in the seminar, such as:

• Why do people go through the effort to learn how to use Second Life to interact with people?
• What does social interaction in a virtual world tell us about human nature?
• How are concepts of identity and society shaped in Second Life?

I'm no anthropologist — I only took one term of anthropology throughout college — but this is a book I'm considering buying. The book represents the culmination of two years of "field work" within Second Life. It's written from the perspective of an anthropologist instead of a computer gamer or technology writer, which means it could offer a humanistic point of view on what has traditionally been examined almost exclusively from a scientific or business perspective.

And really, the human side of things — how people meet each other, get along and collaborate — is what really interests me about online environments like Second Life.

The only downside is that the book came out just a few days ago, and by the time I ordered a copy I'd barely have any time to apply it to my thesis. But even so, it's the sort of book I'd pick up and read for my own enjoyment.

After all, it's about time Whymog Troglodite learned the facts of virtual life and came of age.