One of the most direct influences for Second Life and programs like it, according to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, is the concept of a “metaverse”, an idea pioneered by “cyberpunk” author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash that describes a “user-defined world of general use where people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.”

Don Heider , associate dean and associate professor of the College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, thinks that chat rooms from the Internet’s early days played an even bigger role in the development of programs like Second Life than video games.

“In terms of the way graphics and avatars move, games like World of Warcraft were more directly influential,” Heider said, “but early in the history of the Internet, people would log onto the Internet and use MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain, or Dimension) as gathering places to talk about things like Dungeons and Dragons.

“(These were) multi-participant bulletin board chat rooms where people would come together and interact that just used text but described their environments in such a detailed and complex way. I think these chat rooms probably played more of an influential factor, set more of a historic precedent than any of the current MMO RPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games).”

However, the evolution of video games also played a large role as well, especially since many of the technological-social concepts in Snow Crash were not practically applicable upon the book’s release in 1992. Around this time, computer game series such as SimCity (The Sims series) and Civilization were starting to gain popularity for their strategic PC simulations of urban and anthropological development. Early role-playing video games, such as the Final Fantasy series , were also evolving.

Fast forward to 2006, when Second Life ’s popularity started coming into its own: MMO RPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest were firmly established as revenue staples of the gaming community, the city-building simulations initiated by SimCity had evolved into The Sims Online life simulation series (a format similar to Second Life ), and Internet-reliant, social interaction tools such as Myspace, Facebook and Skype were revolutionizing the way that humans network and communicate.

In many ways, a concept like Second Life was the logical next step, in that its own functional media convergence combined many of the cutting-edge graphic gameplay interaction of the MMO RPG’s with the social networking/communicative potential of MUDs, Myspace and Facebook. “A chat room with physics,” as Heider called it.

While Heider has downplayed the infrastructural influence of video games on Second Life (in part because it’s not a game, per se), SL embedded journalist and author of the recently released The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World book, Wagner James Au , disagrees.

“Those (video games) are all kinds of inspirations, in part,” Au said. “There are a lot of similarities in the user control of the environment. A lot of the developers at Linden Labs were (previously) either gamers or people from the gaming industry.”