Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Cornell, 2009)

Unpublished Images (with some notes about each)

Press Copy (Cornell’s words about the book, at length — shorter version below)

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.

Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City (Illinois, 2003).

Excerpt (at Amazon.com)

Press Copy (Illinois’ words about the book, reprinted below)

The only ethnography devoted to the practice of gambling , Gambling Life considers the stakes of social action in one community on the island of Crete. Backgammon cafes, card clubs, and hidden gambling rooms in the city of Chania provide the context for Thomas M. Malaby to examine the ways in which people confront uncertainty in their lives. He shows how the dynamics of gambling – risk, fate, uncertainty, and luck – are reflected in other aspects of gamblers’ lives from courtship and mortality to state bureaucracy and national identity. By moving beyond risk and fate as unexamined analytical categories, Malaby presents a new model for research concerning indeterminacy, seeing it as arising from stochastic, performative, and other sources. Gambling Life questions the longstanding valorization of order and pattern in the social sciences.