Second Life celebrated its fifth birthday in late June , although it has only started to garner the majority of its registered audience in the past couple years. Though a toddler in human years, the virtual world has already been around long enough to make a significant impact in many careers and in the way people interact worldwide.

Don Heider, who has been researching Second Life for three-and-a-half years for his forthcoming book Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds (Release Date: September), originally stumbled across Second Life in the Austin-American Statesman while on faculty at The University of Texas.

“As a social scientist, it blew my mind,” Heider said. “It’s like the world’s biggest Petri dish…a very interesting social experiment.

“There’s no goal, there’s no game. It just exists to create and socialize…Any social scientist would like to put 100 random people on an island and see what they’d do, and this is what (Second Life ) was.”

Wagner James Au , whose Second Life alter ego is Hamlet Linden , also studies many of the sociological aspects of the virtual world. The co-author of Second Life: The Official Guide blogged for Linden Labs and freelanced stories for other publications from SL ’s early days until he left L.L. in Feb. 2006. Though he has been busy working independently on the Making of… novel (See: last Everywhere post ) since then, Au said he typically spends “anywhere from a few hours to 20 hours” a week logged into Second Life .

“From a social engineering standpoint, you can rate people, either through their behavior or their avatar behavior,” Au said. “Instead of going around killing orcs, you just go around being yourself.

“It’s always been a job for me, the most fun writing time I’ve ever had, but what made me stay was the unlimited amount of creativity that people are allowed to bring into the world. Also, the way people rip off each other’s creativity and feed off each other.”

Darren Barefoot , a Vancouver-based blogger/marketing entrepreneur currently living in Malta, founded a Second Life satirical site called Get A First Life . Though his parody sounds somewhat condescending, the longtime technology writer is an admirer of the pioneering technology and format that Second Life uses.

“The enticing thing for me was everything was built by the users,” Barefoot, who has followed Second Life since shortly after its launch, said.

However, Barefoot, an admitted gaming connoisseur, hasn’t found the Second Life experience entertaining enough to make himself a regular of the virtual world.

“I have tried it twice,” Barefoot said. “Like some other online games, the first time you get it, it’s like a virus; I was inoculated against it.”

Part of the reason Barefoot has lost interest while using Second Life is that there are no objectives.

“Anyone can play a game like World of Warcraft . It’s superbly fun to play. I haven’t found that (level of fun) in Second Life yet.”

L.A.-based Andres-Luis Martinez, founder of Hollywood blog Glitterfish.com , shares Barefoot’s interest in objective-based gaming and subsequent ennui towards using the Second Life format. He registered a year ago and spent “no more than half an hour” playing Second Life after downloading all the software.

“I couldn’t really figure it out,” Martinez said. “It was difficult. I didn’t feel like talking to other people. It was hard to get into for me. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do once I got there.”

Martinez said he lost interest shortly after creating his character and landing on the “orientation island” where first-time users are introduced to game controls and walk around until they are comfortable entering the real Second Life community.

“I guess just the learning curve of figuring out what I was supposed to be doing or where I was supposed to go or how I was supposed to meet people was too hard. I lost interest because it didn’t have that much appeal in the first place and it was too hard to figure out so I just quit.”