Virtual Bakersfield in Second Life

"Funkerton Freelunch, why are you rezzing these rings?"

That phrase, which would have made no sense to me just a week ago, summarizes my new life as the landlord (and -- as I am learning, also security guard) of the newly purchased Virtual Bakersfield. [2/22/2007 update: since this was originally posted, we have moved Virtual Bako to this location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rekall/206/229/31/]

After just 3 hours of becoming owners, some obnoxious young punks nearby started throwing shiny gold rings all over our property. I flew over to one of the neighbors -- a nice guy named Alexin Bismark -- and he immediately knew who was responsible. We both reported the infraction to Governor Linden and within minutes the rings stopped "rezzing." I flew back to our shoreline and listened to the waves crash as my newly purchased seagull began to sing as it circled over the tropical fish in our little ocean.

Yes, you heard right. The Californian is experimenting with Second Life! Two days ago we purchased 8,192 square meters in the Maroon region, which is in an area similar to Central America on the Second Life grid. We join a small but growing number of "real life" businesses creating a virtual presence in the multi-user 3D world. We don't have any major objectives at this point other than to learn about virtual community, which shares much in common with our traditional community and social networking initiatives -- but takes it to an entirely new level in many regards.

Depending on which stats you believe, Second Life now has either 1 million or 2 million users (there is a little debate over that), with 75,000 of them logging in each day to spend 250,000 hours collectively. That's actually not that big compared to other more established interactive products, but creator Linden Labs claims it's growing at 23% month to month. And according to a former Linden Lab employee, Bakersfield ranks 14 in terms of U.S. cities with people who use Second Life. Since we already have a growing local audience of people who come to us to meet and connect, we feel like we need to be there, too.

The experience has been surreal to say the least. Over the next few days I'll be posting photos and stories about how we found our land, what we've done with it so far and how we plan to use it. But the short version is: we are well on our way to creating a small facsimile of the best parts of Bakersfield, and also nearby Pismo Beach! Bakersfield residents regularly spend 2 hours traversing the mountain range between them and the California coast. In Virtual Bakersfield, it takes about 20 seconds.

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