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Virtual Worlds Are Trade Schools In Disguise
Second Life, Minecraft, Roblox Collectively Taught More People To Code Than America’s Top Universities Have
Almost all my Gen X peers had some lightbulb experience as a child with their first personal computer. Whether command line, or graphic design, or playing a game and wanting to know what made it work that way, the beige box transformed our lives. How fortunate to be born at a specific time and place and privilege!
Across generations there’s also a cohort who got pulled into technology by participatory virtual environments — from the earliest text-based environments to the successive user-editable immersion of Second Life, to Minecraft, and now Roblox. You don’t even have to squint too hard to see MySpace and Tumblr as 2D worlds, and the kids who designed background, templates and the like for those.
When I think about all this it’s not just nostalgia, it’s optimism. Software is the most powerful tool we have and while access is certainly not equal, it’s more available than the high walled professions that used to be drivers of social mobility. And so I still get wet eyed a bit when I hear stories of ‘coding changed my life,’ even more so when it happens to involved a product that I worked on personally.
Danilo Campos has a lovely post about his own ‘learn to code’ moment via Second Life (where I worked out of grad school). As builders we have choices in our products and Danilo talks about how the developer experience of Second Life was ultimately responsible for his career. The things he calls out, such as ‘co-created living documentation’ and ‘frictionless sharing’ should be aspirational in all of our designs. I’m going to quote some passages below, but you really should read the whole thing.
I have the career I do because eighteen years ago, by accident, I learned to code in Second Life.
What began for me as a series of experiments with scripted 3D assets evolved into my first business and my first software products. I made enough money selling content in Second Life to pay my real life rent, for months. With this experience in hand, I was prepared for the iPhone’s App Store indie developer revolution, which rocketed me to a career in Silicon…
