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This, in its purest form, is the Second Life that blew the media’s mind: not an escape from or even an imitation of reality but an expansion of it, potentially suitable for almost any human purpose. But as Life 2.0 testifies, the Second Life that blew the media’s mind turns out not to be the Second Life its inhabitants have made. This Second Life—documented in the film’s three in-depth portraits of more or less typical users—is less transcendent but no less profound. And it’s something that can’t really be recognized without understanding Second Life to be precisely what we’ve so often been told it’s not: a game.

However serious the stakes in these pursuits, there is no escaping the element of play in all of them—of fantasy and make-believe—and the ways in which the dollhouse world of Second Life is uniquely suited to it.

He could have. But the common thread running through almost any configuration of Second Life stories would have been the same: Dressing up. Flirting. Philandering. Playing records. Playing house. Building castles and curiosities out of endlessly editable virtual objects (“like the building blocks you had as a kid,” one Life 2.0 protagonist tells us). Second Life as it is really lived doesn’t even gesture toward the broad utility its creators aimed for. It’s not the promise of the metaverse. It’s just a lot of people giving rein to one form or another of a basic human impulse: playing.