Terra Nova

Pointy heads invade NPR

NPR's Science Friday featured an hour on virtual worlds and research 8/31/07.

The podcast is up at: http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/510221/14106215/npr_14106215.mp3

TNingo score of 2, and a good time had by all, even if I didn't realize it was afternoon and we all evaded the poor 21-year old's question to talk about things we hadn't gotten in earlier.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Aug/hour2_083107.html

Attitudes to RMT

At State of Play V in Singapore, Joshua Fairfield and I had one of our regular arcane discussions about the various merits or otherwise of real-money trading (essentially, the conflict between financial capital and gaming capital in these environments).

That's not what this post is about.

What this post is about is our different perceptions of the extent of RMT in today's virtual worlds, in particular WoW.

In Josh's experience (Horde, PvP server), RMT was endemic, being treated by the players as little worse than driving 10% over the speed limit in real life. Sure, if you went 50% over the speed limit you'd expect to be punished, but if you were pulled up for being 10% over you'd feel aggrieved.

In my experience (Alliance, PvE server), RMT was rare, being treated by the players as the equivalent of driving 10% over the alcohol limit in real life. Even if you were 1% over the limit, you'd expect to be punished if caught.

Are we both right? Or are we both seeing what we want to see? Are game-style virtual worlds going through some kind of paradigm shift, in which RMT is regarded as part and parcel of playing them, or is resolve stiffening? Is what people say about RMT in public at odds with what they do in practice? What might their reasons be?

Remember, I'm not asking whether RMT is good or bad, I'm asking which way the tide is flowing (and, if you like, why).

Richard

How Much Time Do Second Life Users Spend In-World?

According to this Wall Street Journal article about a Second Life user whose real-life wife isn't too pleased about his in-world marriage, "a typical 'gamer' spends 20 to 40 hours a week in a virtual world."  First off, I love that the word gamer is in quotes. Do we really exist? Who knows!  Second, that number sounds sensationalist-ically high to me.  When I said so a few weeks back over on my blog, a reader reminded me about Nick Yee's actual research on the subject. According to Nick, the average amount of time an MMO player spends in-world is indeed around 20 hours a week. Where The Wall Street Journal got 20 to 40, the world will never know.

Still, even 20 seems surprisingly high for Second Life.  Call me old fashion (or just call me not an MMORPG player), but when I hear 20 hours all I can think is, "That's half a work week!"  So I wrote to Nick to ask him how he went about collecting his data, to see if maybe his numbers had been skewed toward a certain type of players. Here's what Nick wrote back:

"Data on hours played has always been from self-selected surveys on MMO players, so there is an issue where we don't really know for sure whether we are severely undersampling very casual players. One potential upside is that I keep a mailing list, so I ping players who may become casual over time and I do have players responding to the surveys who say they play between 0-1 hours a week. This is in fact one of those questions that we may never have a good answer to even with server-side data. For example, whenever we look at server-side data, the question becomes how we define an active player? Is it someone who logs in at least once a week, once a month, or once a year? And how do we differentiate players who stay logged on and aren't playing from those that are in fact playing all those hours, or the players who share accounts (i.e., gold farmers)."

All good points I hadn't thought about.  Nick too said he thought 20 to 40 sounded "way too high" for Second Life.  I know that, whenever I'm in-world, I feel like I'm surrounded by mostly new users. I can't imagine that that sort of fast turn around would be upping the numbers either...

Well, how many hours a week are you spending in Second Life?

Game Over, well not quite

As this month of guest blogging comes to an end culminating in me reaching the ripe old age of forty I have the phrase "Game Over man" from Aliens ringing in my ears. It did remind me of some things I have observed about the whole notion of a game being over from seeing my kids start to take in interest in my games consoles.

The most unusual point is that the 4 year old looks at games with no sentimental baggage, nor with any desire to win in the old fashioned sense. This manifests itself in some very quirky ways and has got me wondering where the limit is in educating a new game player about the social norms that apply just as we educate them with everyday social skills and rules.

To my daughter "Game Over" is viewed as a reward and the cause of much enjoyment.

My wife loves playing Zuma on the 360. Zuma is a 'Tetris' style puzzle game involving a forever growing chain of coloured marbles. You fire new marbles into the spiralling chain and remove groups of three or more of the same colour. When she was pregnant with predlet 2.0 it became one of those things that she did all the time to relax.

Now the four year old wanted to have a go with "mummy's game", but the mechanics and speed required would have appeared at first sight to be unrewarding for her. Instead though she started firing marbles in any direction at top speed until the chain filled up and all the marbles swirl down a pixelated plug hole with a suitable musical fanfare. She had decided that that was the aim of the game, to do that as quickly as possible and clear the level. For us spectating it was actually very annoying. You get used to the rules and the game and watching someone just ignore that and turn it on its head, but still get a kick out of it, is like a phone ringing out unanswered. You can learn to let go of that irritation and just relax, it is only a game after all. With a single player game like that I am guessing we can assume that its all right, you can do what you want with it? Use it like any toy, break the rules, use imagination. What happens when sharing the game or toy with others?

Kids get taught to share and play nicely, learning to blend with people and not upset them. So in a joint game of something that requires the rules to be followed in order for the game to continue where should the line be drawn? Should any line be drawn?

In a park on a slide if a child blocks the slide as that is the game they want to play they are breaking the rules, or social norms of the slide. They will be told by a responsible adult to play nicely and move. How and when do we get to help our kids learn to play nicely with others online or in multiplayer games?

I dont think any of this is a problem, but it is interesting to consider that many people, who have never been gamers, may not regard game etiquette as anything worth considering.

Of course in all this my daughter threw me a curve ball, well actually a golf ball. She had a go on Wii golf and without any explanation swung the golf club and played the first hole on par. As the game had blended with a physical game that she had seen, the mechanics and rules took over.  So it may be just the abstact games that we have no existing mental model for that are more fun to subvert?

Finally she wanted to play the Skate demo I had on the 360. She asked how it worked, but really was not interested in the rules. She grabbed the joypad and started moving and pressing things. She took the spirit of skateboarding and exploration and just got on with it. Just skating across the park, swooshing around bowls was reward enough as she had been told she was too young for a real skateboard. So just as I get to drive fast cars, fly planes, shoot things that I cannot do in real life she was now part of that escapism too.

In all of this it was clear that she was generating her own content. Whether to keep for herself or to share with others (in this case "look at this dad"). For all the continued discussion about the bad side of videogames this was someone able to just enjoy the gaming experience gain some new skills, live out a dream and just have some fun.

Whilst metaverses based on game technology get dead serious when they are your job, games can still be games. There are there to be enjoyed.

So to conclude. I dont think I need to force the rules of the game on my kids. Making them aware of them, making sure they dont hurt or offend others is important, but they are just they to be enjoyed at whatever depth or in whatever context they want to. That sounds like a good plan right?

The Image of the Undercity

Lately I've been doing some amateur dabbling in theories of space.  One interesting book I'm reading is Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City.  According to the Lynch, our cities should not be understood as facts about arrangements of bricks and metal, but as a shared social constructs, collectively read and navigated by inhabitants.   In the minds of their residents, cities are mentally modeled around important landmarks that function as connecting passages and allow the creation of heuristically functional (though perhaps factually faulty) cognitive maps.  (De Certeau would add that in daily life, we read and write cities as we traverse them,  drawing and inscribing new meaning with each navigation.)

Though Lynch's books praises the virtues of "legible" cities, he acknowledges in the first chapter that, where the stakes are low and the boundary limits of a space are understood, there can be pleasures to being lost.  Being lost, when time allows, can be enjoyable as a puzzle, tantalizing the reader with an unrecognized pattern.  Another qualification he provides to the goal of legibility is that cities are (and should be) living and decentralized art forms.  A static city is dead.  Prefiguring de Certeau, Lynch explains that citizens do (and must) have the ability to erase and fill in the content of city spaces.

So I've been wondering a bit about how our mental construction of real cities might carry over to the structure of virtual worlds.  As we've noted here before, there are important reasons why virtual architecture need not, and perhaps ought not, look like real architectures.  But generally it does, making the similarities and dissimilarities worth thinking about for students of the virtual.

Given my interest in the topic, I was happy today to find Nicolas Nova linking to this paper by Georgia Leigh McGregor on the topic of Architecture, Space and Gameplay in World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2.  McGregor understands the nature of the problem: "As artificial and abstract human constructs, all aspects of videogame worlds (even landscape) can be read as a built environment. Videogame worlds are architectural."  The article leads off by citing to Aarseth on the primacy of space in video games and de Certeau on practice.  The topic of the paper is the comparison of architecture in World of Warcraft with Battle for Middle Earth II. 

While the main take-away of the comparison should come as no surprise to readers here (MMOG architecture is much more spatial that RTS architecture), the paper provides a nice explanation of exactly how and why that is so.  E.g., here's a paragraph that sums up how WoW's space mimics architecture:

World of Warcraft privileges architecture as a spatial experience. It is concerned with the ability to move through space, constructing architecture as a series of solids and voids. When we interact with the architecture we are alternately channelled and impeded. The architecture encompasses us, organizing our activities into discrete zones and structuring the way in which we move between activities. In Ironforge I go to the auction house to sell things, the bank to deposit items for storage and the inn to buy food. This is a spatial architecture that mimics the ways in which we use architecture as containers for specific purposes in the real world. The architecture has what architects call program, so that Ironforge can be divided into circulation space and activity space. This is space that works on a personal level, an intimate experience, where we guide our avatar through the intricacies of the game world looking through their eyes.

And the author, at one point, notes that how legibility plays an important part in WoW's architectural structure:

Wayfinding in the locales of World of Warcraft becomes an important part of gameplay where distinctive landmarks and differentiation in locales act as signposts that direct the player. In addition the diversity of ecology in both games helps to provide difference and retain interest in what might otherwise been seen as repetitive play.

Also, the author notes how various spatial regions emphasize and de-emphasize legibility for the purpose of improving the game experience:

It is worth noting that within any area of greater architectural density in which a number of important player related activities take place, such as the Undead capital of the Undercity, there are directions available from non-player characters. Conversely some of the most activity rich combat nodes, such as the quest laden Blackrock Depths increase the wayfinding challenge through spatial complexity and by not providing maps (a challenge met by players with add-on maps, quest walkthroughs and guided dungeon runs).

I highly recommend the paper -- link -- and you might also check out Nicolas Nova's thoughts.

In addition to pointing to some reading, here are some questions for discussion for those so inclined.  In WoW (or in any other MMO), are there places where you get lost where you'd prefer to have a mental map?  Are there places where your mental map is too clear and you'd prefer to get lost more often?  Which spaces are too big and which are too small?  Is it right that virtual ecological diversity is simply "chrome" that masks repetitive game play -- or does that create a false dichotomy?

In short, what are your thoughts on how well virtual architectural space (in games or UGC worlds) is handled?

Update Aug 31 '07:  Nic points to this Gamasutra essay by Ernest Adams that's quite on point.

Update II Aug 31 '07:  And thanks to Mike Schramm of WoW Insider for kind words & linkage! His thoughts here.

Symbols along the garden path

Earlier this week I was mesmerized by "Secrets of the Stately Garden," an ITV (UK, Channel 4) history/archeology feature.  True, 18th century English gardens had a penchant for classical design, but what I found fascinating was Tony Robinson's  presented thesis that these gardens could serve as canvases upon which their designers fashioned messages to clever readers.  Messages that we find hard to comprehend whilst on our 21st century walkabout...

The RadioTimes described this special Time Team documentary fairly typically:

...In this one-off programme... a grand tour around some of our finest stately gardens, where he visits extraordinary grottoes and fanciful follies, and uncovers sexy secrets concealed in apparently classical designs. He starts at Prior Park garden near Bath, where a two-year project is underway to reinstate Alexander Pope's Wilderness and the 18th century Serpentine Lake and Cascade. But he also travels to the breathtaking Hadrian's Garden near Rome, the inspiration for so much that we see in the "traditional" English garden.

My sense as a mere observer is that these reviews tended to unfairly rely upon some of the racier allusions (The Guardian emphasized this quote: "a shocking world of subversion, weird science and sexual intrigue").  Yet also discussed were political and moral (vice and virtue) themes as code within these gardens.

I am trying to think if there is any comparable example in virtual worlds where messages are puzzled into the backdrop after the backdrop has been cast.  To scope this a bit:

1.) I don't mean "easter-eggs" where a developer (traditionally) or a user (user-created content) creates a narrow portal into some otherness;

2.) I also don't mean "sloganeering"  - e.g. corpse graffiti, arranging consumables or cans (as in UO or Eve Online, respectively) to spell words, etc.

3.) User-created content (e.g. Second Life) presents an interesting challenge - i.e. should a virtualized political campaign be considered on par with a politicized English garden?

I'll leave (3.) to the Second Lifers (et al) to decide, but I am hoping for examples of where messages and symbols have become integrated within the fabric of that world.   Think organic and gardens. If you can think of an example, let me then ask, has the message then improved or distracted your journey?

Goldilocks and the Three EULAs

Many TN readers know that I have been interested in developing a virtual world platform (Worlds For Study) that can be used to study regulation.  To get an idea of what I mean, consider the following experiment in a game like World of Warcraft or Entropia, except with a business focus (hostile takeovers, but no dungeon raids; I think of it as World of Bizcraft):

• Create two virtual worlds that are identical except for one regulatory feature (such as consumption taxes instead of income taxes).  After months of play, how would the worlds ultimately differ in terms of wealth creation, income inequality, or whatever other features interest you?

There are obviously many hurdles in succeeding in this ambitious project (as pointed out by the excellent comments to these posts), but also tremendous educational side benefits.  Today, I want to focus on one particular issue:  Can one craft an End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) that gives players few enough property rights to allow the world developer to impose their own inworld regulations, while still protecting property rights enough that players have strong incentives to pursue profit?

The EULA can't protect user's rights too much.  Despite criticisms that Linden Lab’s terms of service don’t protect residents property rights sufficiently, it is actually the strength of such protections that allows the regulators to intrude.  Legal scholars (see Camp or Lederman ) can argue that Second Life residents have clear enough interest in their virtual goods to justify taxing the sale of virtual items for Lindens, or even the exchange of one virtual good for another (like virtual clothing for virtual land).  Similar arguments make it hard to keep SEC and state banking regulators out of the Second Life financial sector, because one can argue that this virtual institutions are actually stock exchanges and banks.   

Arguments for inworld taxation and regulation of World of Warcraft are much weaker, because WoW’s terms of service don’t permit real-money trade of inworld assets.  As a result, it is hard to argue that receiving a powerful weapon, or even inworld currency (gold) provides something of taxable value, or that creating a financial scam actually costs anyone money.

So here is the Goldilocks problem:   The methods of experimental economics require that studies of financial regulation provide real incentives for participants, so that we know their economic motivations (they aren’t pursuing extraneous and unknown goals).  So a world with such a goal would require a EULA that protects residents property rights.  However, such property rights might, my definition, also be strong enough to cause the intervention of real world regulatory authorities—effectively eliminating the possibility of conducting the “what if regulation were different” experiment.  All worlds would have the same (real world) regulation.

So, is it possible to craft terms of service that are strong enough to allow for clear economic incentives for participants (necessary for valid research),  while simultaneously being weak enough to keep real-world regulators at bay? 

Does it make a difference that the game would have an explicit educational or research objective?  This can matter in other circumstances.  As I learned by working with Cornell’s legal counsel some years ago, I can legally have participants pay an entrance fee to play poker in my laboratory, as long as my goal is education or research and I am not making any profit.  The latter feature is actually the most important one, but the educational/research goal would make it easier to get a letter from the district attorney guaranteeing safe harbor.  Maybe the lofty purpose of the virtual world enterprise I am proposing now would at least make it easy to get a letter of no action, as the Iowa Electronic Market did to run what would otherwise be considered a futures market under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Sustain That Brand

State of Play V, from immaculate Singapore, kicked off this morning with a panel on "Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds." As I write I'm listening as the panel wraps up, with the panelists -- all involved in business development companies that focus to some extent on virtual worlds -- taking questions from the audience. But continuing to resonate in my mind is a phrase that panel participant Ken Brady of Centric used in his remarks to characterize what businesses should aim for in virtual worlds moving forward: "sustainable branding." This idea was echoed by the others on the panel as the discussion progressed, and to me this should prompt us to continue to think about the current era of virtual worlds as one that is beginning to be defined less by the relationship between their makers and their users (as individuals or nascent groups), and more by the expansion (one might even say colonization) of them by both emergent and pre-existing institutions.

    My mind reeled at the collision of memes from greenspeak and marketing that "sustainable branding" contains, and down that road probably lies an illuminating deconstruction on its own, but on a more practical note it became clear that for the panelists this idea captured the nuts and bolts dilemma that faces commercial institutions as they enter virtual worlds: how to maintain control over their brands while tapping into the innovation that virtual world users can provide. In the panelists' remarks, especially in not only Ken's but also those by Ted Tagani of Millions of Us and Bret Treasure of Inside this World, this tension between control and creativity was a constant refrain, and with a very optimistic tenor; there seemed to be little doubt that a "balance" could be achieved, and Coca-Cola's efforts through Millions of Us in Second Life were held up as a model for how companies could be "flexible" about the use of their brand in a way that would serve their interests.

    So there was little in the way of a critical dimension in this discussion, so maybe we could develop that here. Do we really think that this balance will be one that will be a happy fit of cultural creation and business interests? I've no doubt whose interests will, on the whole, be served in the aftermath of any confrontation between these institutions and users; after all, the third and all-important party here is another institution: the virtual world maker. As I've blogged about before in different ways, we have every reason to be concerned about how established interests will find ways to maintain their position in virtual worlds, and today's panel left me in a Marxian mood -- it seems that, as usual, there is little reason to bet against the powers that be.

EverQuest to Integrate Card Game With MMO

While the idea of trading card tie-ins is not new, Rory Starks, one of the designers and artists of Arden,  reports that Sony will make a trading card game that is played from within the MMO. There are some new issues. Rory's analysis:

**** BEGIN QUOTE***
EverQuest: Legends of Norrath: Oathbound: The Trading Card Game
Rory Starks

During the Fan Faire MMO event a couple of weeks ago, SOE president John Smedley revealed a new trading card game based on the Everquest franchise – "Legends of Norrath: Oathbound".  At first glance, this news was not too entirely exciting considering that EQ fans can play the EverQuest pen-and-paper RPG, various spinoff games, and they can even light up their cigarettes with EQ-emblazoned Zippo lighters (provided they have the requisite skills in fire crafting).  On the other hand, what was interesting about this announcement was that Smedley revealed that the game is online-only and played from within EverQuest 1 and 2.  Players can purchase cards and construct decks inside the two games and then challenge other players to a game.  There will eventually be a standalone client so that players can even play the game outside of the two EQ titles (and without having to have a subscription). 

Starks continues:

CONTINUE QUOTE**********************************
Despite the term "Trading Card Game" being thrown around in the press release, it is not entirely clear to what extent players will be able to trade cards.  In his interview with Smedley, Michael Zenke of MMOG Nation asked if players would be able to trade cards.  Smedley responded by saying "No" and that SOE wanted to stop gold sellers from getting involved in the card game.  This contrasts with the information given on the official Legends of Norrath website where it gives specific guidelines with regard to trading: 

*You can get packs and promo cards from global drops in both EverQuest and EverQuest II
*You can trade any individual Legend of Norrath card or pack in the LON client.
*You can trade any UNREDEEMED Loot card in the LON client.
*You can trade any UNREDEEMED Legends of Norrath item (pack/promo) that you get as a drop on the broker equivalent in EQII/EQ.
*You CANNOT trade any redeemed or /claimed loot item.   
(taken from http://legendsofnorrath.station.sony.com/faq.vm) 

If we are to believe the information on the website, then it certainly is possible for players to trade cards.  Pardon me if I am mistaken, but this doesn't seem like a viable solution to stop RMT – if that is something SOE is truly interested in stopping.  Trading is an integral part of these types of games, but is there a way to curb online auction sales of the cards?  More importantly, is it necessarily a bad thing if players sell the cards outside of the client? 

Trading aside, "Legends of Norrath" sounds like a very fun and exciting addition to the EverQuest series.  Casual players who aren't entirely interested in grinding to high-level content will have a new game to play with their friends.  Although there are certainly mini games available in other MMOs, this new TCG for EverQuest could pave the way for other big name games to offer similar services.

Interview with John Smedley on MMOG Nation: http://www.mmognation.com/2007/08/03/john-smedley-interview-on-legends-of-norrath/
Legends of Norrath Official Website:  http://legendsofnorrath.station.sony.com/index.vm

END QUOTE ***********************

We don’t want the mess cleaned up

It looks like I’ll be on BBC Radio 4 tonight debating with Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, the question of whether Virtual Worlds replace the messiness of real life relationships with sanitized virtual ones.

I thought I would use TN as a jotter for how I was thinking about replying.

If you are reading this Baroness Greenfield – welcome to TerraNova, and I mean that is so many ways.

The BBC have kindly sent me an MP3 of the segment, you can now  download load it here.

The debate is centered on a number of quotes from Baroness Greenfield in today’s Daily Telegraph (a UK ‘broadsheet’ i.e. serious, newspaper) called: Virtual worlds 'could replace real relationships'

On Second Life: "People who dismiss it as a game will be in for a rude awakening […]. This will have a huge impact on society.”

Agreed, dismissing something as a game often misunderstands the thing in question and the nature of game. Of course Second Life is not a game thought there are many playful uses of it and games that occur using it.

I think the fact of TerraNova is testament to the fact that a lot of us thing that Virtual Worlds will have a large impact on society.

"Offering people the chance to have a permanent soap opera going on, in which they can participate, will be even more pervasive than reality TV such as Big Brother. […] This is the ultimate in that you can be involved, you can interact, but still you are hiding behind an avatar.”

This is not quite what Second Life is. Virtual Worlds are things that require active engagement in a different way from traditional or even non-traditional media. Whether this will be pervasive depends on what we mean by pervasive – an issue is that Second Life and other virtual worlds take a degree of commitment and effort that things like Soap operas do not, thus it is not clear that either people will have the time or desire to engage to this degree. Lastly Virtual Worlds offer a class of please that is different from rather than the same but more than, other media.

The idea of ‘hiding’ makes a lot of presumptions about use of avatars and is normative about them. Some people hide, so do not, many offer more disclosure due to hyper-personal effect than they do face to face, so in one sense are more naked online.

“Baroness Greenfield wondered whether people who inhabited virtual worlds would come to regard real-life sexual relationships with some queasiness.”

Some people may, this is not to say that there is a causual relationship, nor that other people might not at all be impacted and that still others might find who new areas of sex they want to explore. Personally I’ve met a lot more in the latter class, though this is probably a self selecting group as ‘yay I’m having more cool sex’ is more likely to be told to me than ‘boo, I just don’t like any of that nasty squishy fluidy stuff’”

"Could it be that in the future they will say, 'A real relationship! Urgh, how horrible,' " she said. "The messiness and squalor of the real world, and the real-time element, might be offset by the more sanitised, two-dimensional reality of Second Life.”

Again, starting of simple and dichotomous – the idea of ‘real’ here begs the question of where we are putting the norm. Also, and I think this is key, there is an assumption about practice that probably TL Taylor has best demolished, that on the whole Virtual World relationship are ones that add to rather than replace physical world ones – Dmitri too has done primary research on this.

It’s interesting though that Second Life is admitted to be ‘real’ but only “two dimensional”.

"It scares me in one way, and fascinates me in another, in wondering where it will take people. What impact does having a false identity have on your real identity?"

Again with both the norm and presumption of use, if we define online identity as ‘false’ which I guess is inline with ‘hiding’ (here I was say we are operating under the ‘virtual as false’ metaphor identified by Ryan) then we are question begging again.

Also I did not think that anyone seriously considered the idea of a singular ‘real’ identity at least in respect of social interactions. Not only are virtual identities facets of our identity, as Prof Bartle has argued, expression within the context of a MMO can be a way of developing aspects of identity.

Anyone else have thought as to why Baroness Greenfield might have a stronger argument that it seem to appear, or any positive points about virtual worlds that the some what influential Radio 4 audience should hear about?

Augmented Mixed Reality - Real to virtual and back again

Augmented Reality has been around as a concept for a long time. It has very often been described in images of the future as enhancing the real world with additional layers of digitially created information.  As more people are becoming aware of virtual worlds and seeking to build within them they, in general, start with trying to recreate some element of Real Life. This may be representations of themselves as avatars, existing buildings and offices they frequent. real world metaphors such as chairs, tables, presentation screens. This is something I have observed as the willingness to engage with virtual worlds has extended past gamers and early adopters. The representation is focussed on the boundaries of the environment being used and on how to manipulate the building tools to create that vision, crafting for that environment.

We are seeing more uses of things from the real world crossing over into the non-game metaverse environments. e.g. tennis ball trajectories and scores from Wimbledon into Second Life.

Is this augmented mixed reality? Are we creating Augmented Reality for virtual worlds? Is there a continuous circle feeding real things and virtual things into representations of one another?

This circle of real to virtual and back again has become increasingly easy to demonstrate.

I have been impressed recently with things like ARTag. The simplicity by which we were able to explore Augmenting Real and Virtual means scope for many ideas to be tried out. With companies like fabjectory making the virtual objects into real objects on a commercial level we are able to glimpse a local fabrication future. Creating elements of what you need as physical objects when you need them from virtual resources has quite a future I think. Many of these things have existed before but not with the ease of access to the general population.

The ability to render information and data either in multiple ways with multiple transformations and augmentations seems very exciting. We seem to have many of the pieces of the puzzle available and commercially available. We have mobile phones, with colour screens, video cameras, GPS, wi-fi/3g connectivity. We do not have to solely rely on underlying programming interfaces, we are able to use other devices to instrument and understand a physical environment, such as cameras and GPS locations and many other types of real world sensor.

Taking real world properties and enhancing a real world experience with those has been done. From cave paintings on a wall to speedometers in cars we have been able to express things about the world to enhance our view.

Headsup displays and projections of additional information have been used in a military context and some high end car manufacturers. Taking information and representing it to augment reality.

The Wimbledon Second Life project was in part an extension of an idea to determine what was needed to rebuild the live experience in a virtual world from the technical data available. This extended the experience in a virtual world to people, who were not able to be at the live event. This is a the reason the championships website exists too Projecting forward it is possible to imagine re-rendering a sports event from the data captured using virtual world and game technology. Television does for us already, except is it not something that individual users have control over, it is a rerendering of a live event. Choosing from multiple TV camera angles goes some way to providing control for the viewer, but a complete photo-realistic virtual rendition powered by real life events does not seem that far fetched.

Considering how to completely recreate an event, re-render and provide additional information to those in a virtual world is a sliding scale of detail, more data, more pixels, more people. The fidelity of experience technically and socially both starting to increase as more effort is applied and as a market grows that expects a richer experience.

This gives us with some more options to consider. If you are at the real world event, and there is more to add to your experience we should look to enhance the real. using sporting events as the example we already see things like the Hawkeye ball trajectory replay rendered on a big TV screen for the crowd to experience. That is physical data turned virtual and then reinjected in the real world again. The same data is used on the web and in the virtual world. It is however just television, the same view for all the people at the venue. Someone in the crowd could have had a wireless laptop open accessed the web page or the virtual world and watched the replay, just as I tend to have the F1 live timing website open at home when watching the grand prix on the television.

During the Wimbledon fortnight I experienced an unusual mix of virtual and real life. Firstly there was the technology, we had the data and we had a virtual build. The data is about matches, about points in the game of tennis. Everthing is geared around the things that happen in playing the point in real life. We took some of that data that we use on the website and we pushed it into a virtual world to show points and ball trajectories. I was physically at Wimbledon with my collegues in the media bunker to meet our visiting corporate customers and I was also was present at the Wimbledon virtual venue to meet, greet and discuss.

I was augmenting the data in the virtual world with some personal experience and descriptions of atmosphere and explaining behind the scenes things in live context. I did realize that in trying to recreate the event we did not yet have the additional elements from the real world that added to the social experience, because up until now there had been no need to instrument them. We did not know which chair a player sat on during a break, or that someone was lying on the floor suffering from cramp. Those sort of atmosphere elements are the ones that add to the experience as opposed to reporting the data facts.

It is much easier to augment the real event with the overlay of data about the match than it is to overlay the atmosphere onto the virtual. Ok, so TV works, it shows the pictures, sounds and overlays tv graphics. At the event people can start to use commonly available technology to enhance their experience, mobiles, tv screens etc. It does work as it is today for sporting events, but there is always room for improvement.

One of the web trends is for mashups. People provide data and services, other people combine them in ways that make sense for them. That tends to be software based, e.g. maps with geotagged photos. Are we heading for a more sensory mashup set of concepts. Mixing the real and virtual in all sorts of ways?

Will we see things like slateit emerge for the real world as well as the virtual world?

Metaverses have opened up 3d, live online interaction and use of game style technology to a whole group of people who have never been near any of this. It is these people, who are not burdended with the pureness of gaming environments, or who do not use digital environments for escapism that start to ask the questions about integration. How does this technology help my business? How does this social change alter my customer service? How can I get my existing business working in a virtual world? How can my virtual world presences fit into my existing business. Can I make my brand experience seemless across all channels?

Helping people understand that a metaverse does not have to be a stand alone channel, just as real life and web do not have to be stand alone channels sounds like the next big challenge. They are not just games and they are also not just stand alone.

Lonely, social, or just messed up?

Within about 10 minutes of each other, I read two news reports offering opposing implications on the social impact of virtual spaces. First,* Alexandra Alter of the Wall Street Journal reports on how some Second Life players are ruining their real life relationships by spending too much time in SL (Forget for the moment that the RL relationship in question didn't sound overly solid to begin with. Move along, these are not the droids you are looking for). Next, GamesIndustry.biz reports the abstract version of Mark Griffith's latest research on MMO players, namely that they are very social. (Forget for the moment that Prof. Griffith offers a lengthy and nuanced series of papers on the grey areas of play, sociability and compulsive use. Don't look at the man behind the curtain.)

The upshot?

Newspapers like to cultivate drama. Maybe they're just meta-guilds, eh? A more in-depth review of each case will tell you that SL probably isn't the problem in the WSJ couple's marriage, and that Griffiths isn't exactly saying we all need to solve Putnam's social capital crisis by jumping into EQ2.

Still, in that grey area between the two extremes there's interesting room for speculation and exploration. Would the WSJ couple's marriage have floundered anyway? I'm intrigued by the fact that the reporter never questioned that, making this a technology/virtual world story and not a relationship story.

Or, is there something intrinsically different about this hobby that makes it different from, say, a trip to the local bar or softball league to hang out with friends? In other words, we get the now familiar question I run into a lot in research: simple one-for-one displacement, or something totally new? Without the option of diving away from his life and into SL, would the husband have gone on with his life and marriage? And, would it have been a life of quiet desperation, or marital bliss?

*Thanks for the link, Jesse.

What would you do if you were AI?

Continuing some themes from several prior posts, we find John Tierney of the New York Times presenting Nick Bostrom's argument that life is just a sim created by a higher being. Link.  Tierney says he's convinced and adds:

[I]f owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

Hmm.  I suppose that would mean our leaders may be higher order aliens in disguise? (Paging Dr. Who.) 

Continuing his ruminations, Tierney solves the problem of evil and suffering:

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

Though I've said similar things about fun and simulation and I get the logic, I really hope Tierney speaks in jest.  Yet he claims to be more convinced than Bostrom that Bostrom is correct:

In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

Bostrom, otoh, says he's got a "gut feeling" that there is a 20 percent chance he's correct. (He's got a very well-calibrated gut, btw, mine generally doesn't provide gradations quite that fine.) 

But whatever -- given that Bostrom, the source of all this fun, looks to his gut for answers, I don't think there's much need to debate whether he's right or wrong about this.  Instead, I'd like to ask the readers to assume that Bostrom is right.  Assume you're just AI being observed in a model or game -- so then what?

The article has some thoughts on this but I'd be interested in hearing what our readers might do differently if they found they were simulations living in a simulated reality -- and why.  Would you do anything differently?  Here's one response from Robin Hanson:

...all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.

Do you agree?  (Her His advice seems applicable to the motion picture industry too, btw -- coincidence?)

Tierney provides these links for further reading:

• Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 53:211, 2003.  
• How to Live In A Simulation. Robin Hanson, Journal of Evolution and Technology, September, 2001. (Source of the quote above.)
  
• The Matrix as Metaphysics. David J. Chalmers, Matrix site.  
• Historical Simulations - Motivational, Ethical and Legal Issues." Peter S. Jenkins, Journal of Futures Studies, 11:1, 2006.  
• Simulation-argument.com. Nick Bostrom.

p.s. Pretty much the same thread from Adam Kolber on Prawfsblawg.

Here come the regulators....everybody duck!

This morning I had a very interesting talk with Dan Miller, Senior Economist at the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress.  Dan has previously talked about the taxability of virtual wealth, on a panel at State of Play, and to reporters. Now the JEC is trying to stay ahead of the issue by laying out the arguments against real-world regulatory intervention by the IRS and others (like the SEC)—before regulatory bodies take official steps (like issuing regulations or interpretations) that are difficult to reverse.

My hope with this post is to spark comments that would help the JEC identify the most persuasive arguments for and against keeping regulators out of the innards of virtual worlds. I know Dan will see your comments, because he told me that he views Terra Nova as required daily reading—some comfort to those who have read arguments that TN is no longer relevant.)

Here are a few of my own observations:

First, according to Dan, issues of particular concern to governments are the taxability of virtual world wealth and the possibility of money laundering.  I believe both of these are best dealt with at the bright-line interface between virtual and real worlds:  the exchange of inworld currency for dollars, Euros or true digital currency.  The transfer of inworld to real-world currency is like a narrow pinhole connecting real and virtual worlds, and that is where to set up the auditors.  After all, virtual worlds are vast, confusing places, and I don’t think anyone looks forward to reading or writing private letter rulings on the appropriate cost-recovery schedules for investment in  warhammers and beds with built-in animations. 

I see little reason to have regulatory intervention inside VWs to combat terrorism or organized crime….it is hard to see anyone accepting Lindens for an AK-47 or a mafia hit.  I see more sense in saying that income earned in a world like Second Life is taxable….after all, it is possible to have tax liability for goods and services received, as in barter or game shows.  However, if I win a car on a game show, it is indisputably my car.  But land in Second Life really still belongs to Linden Lab, so I don’t think residents ownership is secure enough….until they actually convert their wealth into assets that aren’t subject to arbitrary confiscation or nonperformance by Linden Lab. 

I wonder how far one could push the common notion of virtual worlds as “other lands.”  Under US law, corporations operating businesses outside the US don’t typically pay taxes on overseas profits until they repatriate their earnings.  Analogous reasoning would suggest that US taxpayers aren’t subject to tax on their virtual world profits until they repatriate by converting into currency of value in the real world.  Too much of a stretch?

Finally, how about the question of whether businesses operating within virtual worlds should be subject to real world regulations governing banking, exchanges, commodities and futures contracts….or even antitrust laws (Anshe Chung, watch out!).  In addition to arguments emphasizing that VWs are games (whatever that means), or are somehow so different as to make traditional regulation inappropriate, let me add this one:  Virtual worlds have the promise to allow laboratories for testing the effectiveness of any number of regulatory and policy actions.  Does eliminating a capital gains tax actually increase investment?  Are insider trading rules good for investors?  If regulators will leave these worlds alone, we can find out!

Seriously, the hotel has a great pool

In a week's time I'll be lounging by a pool in Singapore, drinking three or four insanely alcoholic drinks in preparation for State of Play V.

I'll be thinking about the dinner that I'm about to have, that will be followed by Glenn Thomas's film "Ideal World".  I'll be wondering which of the following two day's panels I will enjoy the most, and which of the workshops I'll attend.  I'll be thinking about the dinner the following evening at the Zoo, and the subsequent Night Safari.  I'll be wondering whether Doug Thomas will, in fact, be mistaken for a large primate and not allowed out of the grounds, even if he is going to be interviewing John Seely Brown.  Oh, and I'll be thinking about chili crab. 

I may ask where you and your friends are.  I suspect that many of you will be there.  And you will be thinking of chili crab too, and so we'll make a plan to head out and get some.

Can't wait.

CFP: Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR): Special Issue on Virtual Worlds

[From Marc Fetscherin, Editor of the Special Issue]

Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR): Special Issue on Virtual Worlds

CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue on Virtual Worlds
Submissions due: November 1, 2007
Scheduled Publication date: August 2008

Overview:
The emergence of virtual worlds and Web 3.D change the way of doing business. Web 3.D is the synonym for Internet-based virtual worlds, where people can create own 3-D *virtual* personalities. Virtual Worlds such as Second Life and others are undergoing an evolution similar to that of the Internet in the mid nineties and might impact profoundly the way people cooperate, communicate, collaborate, and conduct business. The recent entering of companies such as Toyota, American Apparel, Nissan, or Adidas indicate the upcoming role of this platform for the next generation of conducting electronic business. This call for papers is intended to cover a wide range of business and research topics that fall within the broad description of activities, challenges, opportunities, applications, innovations and implications associated with Virtual Worlds as the emerging new online business landscape.

Purpose of the Special Issue:
The purpose of this special issue is to encourage discussion and communication of important research issues that underpin Virtual Worlds as an important aspect of e-commerce and to showcase interesting and significant research work in this critical area. Specifically this issues is focusing on business and legal issues of doing business in Virtual Worlds. Of particular relevance to the described focus are papers about business models, marketing, promotion, pricing, customer integration, consumer behavior, legal, cultural and cross-cultural research. The issue, however, will not be restricted to these topics; rather, it welcomes reports of theoretical or empirical research that examines pertinent business issues related to Virtual Worlds e-commerce. This special issue will be of interest to researchers, governments, small and large businesses, marketing and PR companies among others.

List of possible topics are:
* Product Development and Testing in Virtual Worlds
* Image, Branding, Advertising in Virtual Worlds
* Marketing in Virtual World
* Avatar-based Marketing
* Promotion of Virtual Goods in Virtual Worlds
* Pricing of Virtual Goods in Virtual Worlds
* Selling, Cross-Selling Real and Virtual Worlds
* Business Planning for Non-profits in Virtual Worlds
* Fundraising and Virtual Worlds
* Convergence of Real and Virtual Worlds
* Customer Integration and Virtual Worlds
* Technology, Business, Strategy in Virtual Worlds
* Financial Systems, Investments, Currency Exchange Real and Virtual Worlds
* Emerging Media Presence in Virtual Worlds
* Consumer Behavior, Consumer Acceptance and Virtual Worlds
* Trust, Cross-Cultural Studies and Virtual Worlds
* Intellectual Property, Copyright, Trademarks and Virtual Worlds

Submission of Manustcript:
JECR publishes original empirical research, theoretical and methodological articles, evaluative and integrative reviews, field research, business surveys, and application papers of interest to a general readership. A submission based on a paper appearing elsewhere (such as conference proceedings or newsletters) must have major value-added extensions to the earlier version. For conference papers, it should have at least 30% new material. The submitted manuscripts should follow the format as suggested in the Submission Guideline found in the journal website: http://www.csulb.edu/journals/jecr/s_guide.htm. Of particular note is that the manuscript should be prepared in Microsoft Word format. The names, affiliations, and contact information (i.e., phone, fax, email addresses) of all authors should be provided only on the cover page. The submitted paper will undergo a double-blind review. Contributing authors may be asked to serve as reviewers for the special issue. Authors may submit completed manuscripts electronically at any time prior to November 1st 2007 deadline. Manuscripts and questions send to mfetscherin@rollins.edu.

Guest Editor
Marc Fetscherin, Ph.D.
Rollins College
International Business Department
Winter Park, 32789, FL, USA
e-mail: mfetscherin@rollins.edu
Tel: +1 407 691 1759
Fax: +1 407 646 1566

Important Dates:
Deadline for Submission: November 1, 2007
Paper acceptance/rejection: January 15, 2008
Revised paper submission: March 15, 2008
Final acceptance following revisions: May 15, 2008
Publication Date: August 2008

To download the CFP, please visit this website:
http://www.csulb.edu/web/journals/jecr/issues/20083/cfp.pdf

Death to Snow Crash

Like a lot of other people, I read Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash back in the mid-1990s (along with other staples like Neuromancer and the still-applicable True Names). Like many, I was entranced by the idea of digital avatars with detailed facial expressions (something we were working on in 1995 and continue to today), and by the idea of  the ‘Metaverse’ – of having a digital home in a bustling virtual world that was somehow entirely immersive, that moved beyond visual and auditory to the kinesthetic. I was so taken with the idea as presented that I was willing to overlook its technical faults, and like so many others, dreamt of a huge all-inclusive world.

Many people continue to hold out hope for some Snow Crash analog as an all-encompassing virtual world: mostly this is discussed as the transfer of the Web to a VW, typically imagined in 3D, sometimes as a vision of something like Second Life (albeit more open, more interesting, with better performance, and maybe less of an emphasis on sex). This Snow Crash Metaverse is the online equivalent of the “flying cars” view of the today as seen from 1935. The latest installment in this vague, hand-waving exercise in techno-fantasy comes to us in the Business Week article, "Just Ahead: The Web As A Virtual World,” which enthusiastically describes the typical justifications for a 3D Web – buying jeans in 3D, walking from one web site to another, checking out a 3D virtual mall or hotel room, etc. – without more than a glance at the crippling issues and inefficiencies pipedreams like these present.

So it needs to be said: Death to Snow Crash. Death to the sugarplum visions of the 3D Web World that dance in our heads.  It’s time to move on.

Now I know Business Week is the mainstream media, writing for people who mostly don't spend their days up to their necks in virtual worlds.  I also know that there’s also a more informed group of people (some of them readers here) actively working on a ‘Metaverse Roadmap’ or toward a ‘3D Web,’ and that any criticism of this grand vision may seem like nothing more than curmudgeonly Ludditism. And it may well be that elements of 3D worlds will find their way onto the Web. But overall, I think the vision of the unified 3D-Web-Metaverse is one rooted in the past, not looking to the future.

If the ascendance of the Web and especially the changes brought by Web 2.0 sites, applications, and tools show us anything, they show us that the view of the Web as a singular thing is a mistaken continuation of an older centralized view. It also leads to the imposition of a set of inapplicable geographical constraints: information isn’t about place, and the Web doesn’t have a geography. We call this collection of online sites “the Web” for historical reasons, but it’s not really a web; it’s not even a unified thing like the virtual planet envisioned by Stephenson. Linking two html “pages” (another construct of convenience) does not create any form of geographical proximity. The Web may in fact be the least Euclidean, spatial, geographical construct ever made by humans.

Centralization isn’t the future; flexible decentralization is. Rather than trying to force-fit the Web into a Pangaea-like singular Metaverse (a huge sphere handed down from on high by the central authority of the ACM in Stephenson’s fictional world), we would do better to consider the future of many distributed worlds, some large and some small, some interactive 3D and some read-only 2D, and how they might combine into a mosaic of independent but potentially interrelated items, sites, and places. 

How do we get beyond the walled gardens of today’s virtual worlds? I don’t know. Yet. I’ve seen a few hints, but we have a long way to go. Maybe Vinge had it right with his archipelago of isolated but connected worlds in True Names; or maybe Gibson’s abstracted general cyberspace view giving way to internally more lavish worlds is more visionary and accurate. Or maybe – most likely – it’s something none of us have thought of yet.

But it’s not the “3D Web.” It’s not the Web as one big virtual world, or loading down typical web sites with the overhead of 3D spaces and expecting avatars to walk from one to another. The sooner we free ourselves from that fictional, limiting, inapplicable, 20^th Century concept (and stop promoting it in the mainstream media), the sooner we’ll have a good chance of inventing the future, rather than being stuck trying to re-invent a vision from the past.

A Hierarchy of Authoring Tools

I keep thinking about a single interesting sentence from a profile of Wikipedia in the NY Times magazine in early July, a prediction that the written word would continue to be Wikipedia's main focus even if pictures, sound or moving images could be appealing supplements to its information. I know that doesn't sound too profound: it's like predicting that human beings will continue to communicate with one another using language. But the point raised in the article is that writing works for Wikipedia  not just because it's what we're historically accustomed to as a medium for communicating information and knowledge, but because it remains a superior technology for the kind of collaboration that Wikipedia is built upon. It's the best authoring tool that we know of: supple, flexible, easily adapted to new purposes, relatively easy to teach to a very wide variety of author-users and widely distributed through the population as a result.

In virtual worlds, we've seen  some of the pitfalls with user-generated content (problems that have a parallel in Wikipedia). When users are given access to that layer of a virtual world, a few will attack the world as a whole, while others will look to ruin or damage the experience of other users. User-generated content as a whole is also often not quite as appealing or attractive as what authors with the full resources of a developer can create: open-source creativity sometimes generates broad but  subtly unsatisfying experiences.

But the biggest problem, it seems to me, is that the tools for authorship in virtual worlds  that we have available are the opposite of writing. Even the best are somewhat difficult to use and put enormous time barriers in between a creative vision and its satisfaction. This is one of the reasons that old fogeys like me who played pen-and-paper role-playing games before we ever typed "North" in a MUD sometimes feel a sense of lack in even the most sophisticated virtual-world environments. With notebooks, maps and a few manuals, a wide range of  pen-and-paper creators were able to author shared experiences that were richly imagined and highly adaptive. Mostly all they had to be able to do was imagine a world and the things within it, and then perform that world for others once they'd written down some notes about it.

Doing something similar  in the most "open" virtual world environments is a lot harder, or at least I find it to be so. Second Life gives me a lot of tools, but I feel like the learning curve and time demands involved in using them is very steep. Author-oriented non-persistent games like Neverwinter Nights have seemed  more demanding to me.

Maybe this is because writing is what I know how to do, all I know how to do, and for coders or artists, creating in Second Life or NWN  is child's play. But that's the point of writing again: the largest number of sub-creators can walk in that door, and so the combinatorial possibilities of creation through writing are vaster.

Creating author tools in game environments (whether massively multiplayer or otherwise) seems to me to be the hardest kind of programming there is, and possibly the least rewarding in a financial sense. So I have a question for developers, programmers, people who create objects and environments in Second Life or elsewhere. How would you rank the intrinsic difficulty of creating easy-to-use but powerful authoring tools or authoring platforms  in the following areas of virtual world design:

1) Quests (e.g., user-created tasks that include relevant text, scripted encounters or sequences, NPCs, and rewards, but that do not deform or change a persistent environment permanently)
2) Objects that are purely aesthetic or decorative
3) Objects that can alter or effect a persistent environment if used, that have scripts attached to them
4) Skins or clothing for avatars
5) New emotes or animations on established character models
6) Entirely new character models with unique animations
7) Unique and persistent embeddings of sound, pictures or moving images obtained from pre-existing external sources
8) Unique AI configurations  for particular  creatures or NPCs
9)  Sub-environments within a virtual world (e.g., the interior of a building, with all its objects, non-player inhabitants and so on)
10)  User-generated parameters for physical action within the virtual world (e.g., authoring tools that let users specify the local force of gravity)
11) Entire regions, areas or zones of a persistent virtual world

What I'm especially interested in here is how difficult it might be to create authoring tools that would require little specialized knowledge but that might allow players to go from a concept or idea to a finished feature without sharply limiting their choices to a small menu of objects or textures that the tool makes available. E.g., I understand that you could easily  allow almost anyone to reskin an avatar if you made a tool that had a pull-down menu that consisted of "blue, green or yellow"--but how difficult might it be to have a customization tool that had 500 color choices, or allowed people to easily upload textures from a wide variety of visual samples in a common file format.

Where there are existing author tools for these purposes in an existing virtual world (Second Life, again), are there plausible ways to make them either simpler or more powerful? Again, leaving aside the question of whether you actually want to do so, whether it's a good idea to do that? Also leaving aside intellectual property problems that follow on a number of these (e.g., whether an authoring tool that allows embedding of sound in a persistent world is going to lead to lots of copyright violations.)

IBM's Virtual Worlds Guidelines

Back in 2005, IBM published a set of  blogging guidelines for employees. The introduction said

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Net -- at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees' Internet access. We continue to advocate IBMers' responsible involvement today in this new, rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

In so many way, nothing has changed with the adoption of virtual worlds. Last month, IBM's virtual worlds guidelines pointed out that

IBM believes that virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments offer significant opportunity to our company, our clients and the world at large, as they evolve, grow in use and popularity, and become more integrated into many aspects of business and society. ... IBM encourages employees to explore responsibly and to further the development of such new spaces of relationship-building, learning and collaboration.

There has been a lot of press coverage of these guidelines. An Associated Press article was run pretty much everywhere (here's an example at TIME). Since people are often quick to assume that IBM is clamping down on its employees use of virtual worlds, and that's really not the case, I'd like to attempt to clarify a few things here and give even more of an insider's perspective than I previously did on Eightbar. It may be an interesting discussion for anyone thinking about whether companies need virtual worlds guidelines, why we bothered and what implications they have for employees using virtual worlds on their own time.

Question: Who wrote then?

These guidelines were not authored by a lawyer in a bunker in Armonk. In fact, they were written on a wiki over a few weeks by the IBMers already using virtual worlds. A similar process happened in 2005 with the blogging guidelines. This time around, the early adopters got to help set the company's statement on what it means to live and work on virtual worlds.

Question: Why are they needed? Isn't it all just common sense?

Most of it is indeed what any sensible person would expect. F'rinstance

"...virtual worlds are public, software-based, open societies in which having a dialogue is similar to having a discussion or meeting in a public place, such as a hotel lobby or an airport. You should operate on the assumption that all actions, communications and data can be seen, heard and recorded by anyone, including the service provider..."

is a pretty representative sample. And yes, this is pretty much stating the (hopefully) obvious. On the other hand, some parts are wide open to interpretation.

"IBMers should be thoughtful, collaborative and innovative in their participation in virtual world communities – including in deliberations over behavioral/social norms and rules of thumb."

and, on the subject of spanning multiple environments,

"just as we have developed informal systems of etiquette for current forms of multi-tasking – e.g., that guide whether it is acceptable to keep a laptop open and/or to instant-message with someone during a given meeting – we will need to evolve cultural norms about what kinds of “outside” actions are permissible when one is “in world”. These and many situations far more complex will call on IBMers to be both thoughtful and innovative, as we follow and are guided by our values and the Business Conduct Guidelines."

both leave plenty of room for individuals to use their own best judgement based on the existing business guidelines we sign up to.

Question: I can has freedoms?

The guidelines are pretty clear about what is expected from IBMers, but for me, this feels more like protection than restriction. Publishing them clarifies for all employees how our existing business conduct guidelines fit in the context of virtual worlds (exactly as the blogging guidelines already did, in a slightly different context).

They have another benefit too, as a reminder that we're taking this stuff seriously. We're probably long past the stage where anyone in IBM, at any level, could say "hang on, I don't think we should be using virtual worlds". The journey has been interesting, but the first big milestone for corporate adoption was probably when CEO himself appearing in Second Life. That was a big watershed for IBMers adopting virtual worlds (if the CEO can do it...) and publishing guidelines makes something acceptable at all levels. We're no longer a bunch of crazy risk-taking fools on the cutting edge of corporate culture, we're being subsumed into the mainstream. Jo Grant predicts that in the future this layer of guidelines for virtual worlds "will probably be folded into our normal business conduct guidelines" which seems like a pretty safe assumption. Long term, this all becomes business as usual.

Question: So  IBMers will be doing business in virtual worlds? What happens on your own time?

Of course. But exactly what that means depends on your definition of doing business. While it's fine to be open about your IBM affiliation, the guidelines are understandably clear on IBMers' avatars avoiding the impression of representing IBM. Just as with blogging, it's possible for something to work for a company without necessarily representing that company in the sense of expressing the opinions or making commitments on behalf of that company.

When I'm in a virtual world I'm quite open about who I am, including who I work for. Let's not even kid ourselves that the time of day or day of weeks makes a difference here; I'm never really off the clock. As with blogging, I'll do it in office hours, at home and at the weekend, but I'm still me and people still know I'm an IBMer. One key guideline (the one thing that is actually pretty much a rule), repeated frequently, is to be clear about the scope of what you say.

"You should not make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of IBM unless you are explicitly authorized to do so and have management approval and delegations."

Again, this is sensible. On my blog, I remind people that "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions" just in case they get confused between me as an IBMer and me being a voice of IBM. In truth, I'm rarely if ever the voice of IBM, but hopefully when I say something interesting or sensible, it reflects well on the company. Of course, if I say something stupid it reflects badly, but the company is safe in the knowledge that it was me saying it.

Question: Does this mean you'll be changing your avatar?

I dress as a short alien (albeit one in a suit) and Ian has a lovely Predator (e.g. Yautja) costume, offset by his real life leather jacket. In the context of meeting people in Second Life, even meeting potential clients, I've never had a problem or a moment's concern. I'll let Ian speak for himself, but I do know he sometimes drops into his "casual" look, which includes green spiky hair and custom eightball eyes. Either of which would potentially freak out an exec in the real world, but look just charming in the context of Second Life. It doesn't seem sensible to limit virtual worlds appearance to what you'd wear in the real world though. In fact, on the subject of appearance, the guidelines are pretty clear.

"Virtual worlds give you the ability to create the way in which you want to represent your digital persona visually.  This can be anything from a reasonable likeness of the actual person to a fictional creature.

It goes on to say that

Avatar customization, clothing and all aspects of appearance and behavior are among the forms of innovation in virtual worlds.  In general, your digital persona’s appearance is up to you.  When you are using your avatar or persona in association with IBM, however, your judgment in these matters should be shaped by the same general guidelines that apply to IBMers in physical environments – i.e., that your appearance be appropriate to the context of your activities.  You need to be especially sensitive to the appropriateness of your avatar or persona’s appearance when you are meeting with IBM clients or conducting IBM business."

I can't let this go without mentioning that Irving Wladawsky-Berger recently sat on a panel with 'El Presidente', Philip Rosedale, when he was asked a question about whether IBMers would be allowed dreadlocks in Second Life. In Irving's words:

"Before I could answer the question Philip Rosedale stepped in and said that one of the coolest avatars he has seen in Second Life is that of epredator, - aka Ian Hughes, -  one of our virtual world pioneers and evangelists."

Sythia Veil, who created the look, will hopefully be delighted. And since Torley once described me as "dapper", it seems we both get the Linden seal of approval. at least. :-)

So...

It's been an interesting couple of weeks, but I sense the discussion has only just begun. Jo Grant hosted a meeting last night in Second Life on this subject, which I sadly missed. Perhaps there will be another one soon though.

Omigod. This Is Completely Unreal.

According to a four-page article in today's New York Times, there's this 3D virtual site called Second Life where people can log on and make virtual houses. This one guy actually made a Mexican-style "villa", in a virtual "neighborhood." He says his virtual "neighbors" come over for visits with their "avatar", just like in the real world. Huh!