I, RealmStalker, being of sound mind...

Ted and I had a conversation last month in WoW that has stuck with me. We are all familiar by now with the explosion of exchange in virtual worlds, whether of the moral (gifts, reciprocity) or market varieties. But what about inheritance? In these worlds, that appear able to persist beyond not only the duration of our interest in them but also, perhaps,  our mortality, will there come a time when we want to find the right home for the valuable, but also particularly meaningful objects we have? But the possibilties don't stop there. Consider bequeathing an avatar...

Rather than the power-leveled, commodified items, characters, and currency for sale, let us consider for a moment what bequeathing an avatar might mean. We may find that to do so helps us think through some of the thorniest issues about both avatars and the nature of things of value in synthetic worlds.

The apparent nature of the avatar as both a representative, or even form, of the self, on one hand, and as a separable object, on the other, has provided a particularly intriguing duality for researchers. In Synthetic Worlds (2005, p. 110), for example, Ted considers the extent to which an avatar may not only represent a user in a world (to others and to the user herself), it can also come to bear a history, with specific experiences, objects, and credentials attached, irrevocably, to it. Thus, there are attributes which accumulate within the avatar itself, as an artifact, that cannot be transferred out of it.

I thought about this further in connection with a broader project of mine to  understand the various forms of capital that are created in virtual worlds: market, social, and cultural (you can find the full essay here). In the course of that, a connection to the ethnographic literature sprang to mind. The avatar bears a striking similarity to formalized, inheritable ritual roles, such as are passed down in the Tsimshian potlatch of the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest potlatch is famous, of course, as an example of the destruction of material wealth by a lineage ("house") in order to achieve status. But the most recent work on the Tsimshian (Roth, 2002) emphasizes their potlatch not as an occasion for the spectacular destruction of excess wealth, but rather as an event about the inheritance of "names", the ritual offices held by houses, and specifically individuals within them, which contain an extensive set of obligations and powers. They are represented materially by robes, blankets, and headdresses, and they are passed down only under the proper conditions, involving extensive material outlay, and this effort is itself risk-filled, subject to all the contingencies of any large-scale and involved social drama.

These names have the same dual characteristics as avatars: at times they are objectified (such as in the objects above, or when listed as part of the lineage’s property), while at other times  they are directly and inextricably associated with the unique capacities and idiosyncracies of the persons holding them at any given time. As Roth writes (2002, p. 132-133), “The dual nature of names as objects of wealth and as personages…corresponds to the dual nature of a structure of names as both a store of wealth and a social structure of individuals.”

While avatars are currently strongly associated with individuals and therefore do not (yet) index a social structure within synthetic worlds in anything but an embryonic way (through their association with guilds, most obviously), the dual principle which Roth notes applies nonetheless: avatars have characteristics of objects or property and characteristics of personas. Certain avatars, as powerful figures in guilds and the like, have acquired similar obligations and relations. Might we yet see the day when these avatars are transferred, with great ceremony, to other users as a matter of course within virtual worlds, as their original owners pass them along due to death or other life changes?

The French anthropologist Maurice Godelier has called inheritance and exchange the "twin foundations of society," the two primary means through which culture is transmitted through space and time. If we take seriously the notion that synthetic worlds are persistent, and that the things of value made within them are not limited to commodities, then the first "willed" avatar transfer can't be far away.

Actually, given how things normally work around here, I would ask: has this perhaps already happened?

References
Castronova, Edward. (2005). Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Roth, Christopher F. (2002). Goods, Names, and Selves: Rethinking the Tsimshian Potlatch. American Ethnologist. 29(1), 123-150.

Comments

[Mark]

1.

I don't know about MMORPGs, but within the realm of text MUD type games (and their more role play-centric brethern MUSHes) such transfers have already occured in the sense that on some thematic MUSHes (say, just for example, Harry Potter themed game) the "feature" or well-known characters are passed from owner to owner, usually bestowed on an individual player by the games administrators.

I realize that this isn't really *precisely* the same kind of social phenominon that you're describing here, but there are certain analogues in the sense that this persona (and all of his attendant social stature and in game abilities and powers) is passed or inhereted from player to player over time.

[Thomas Malaby]

2.

That example is definitely getting there, Mark. I'd be interested to hear more about the 'attendant social stature.' You mention 'in game abilities and powers.' Are parts of this stature social obligations? or social power (that is, the ascribed ability to tell others what to do)? If so, then I would also want to know whether there is any ceremony involved, since typically in society, powerful roles are not transferred without ritual.

[F. Catalan]

3.

The history of the Shadowclan Guild (www.shadowclan.org) might be somewhat interesting to this discussion.
With its origins in early UO, hundreds of players have played a dozen different games under the Shadowclan tag, but the guild traditions are kept and revived in every incarnation under the guidance of the Clan Helm and the quasi mythical Elders.
These two accounts of in game power struggles are not exactly "avatar inheritance" but are a nice example of the transmission of powerful roles through rituals:
http://www.shadowclan.org/catskills/history/history_warbosses.htm
http://www.shadowclan.org/catskills/history/history4.htm

[monkeysan]

4.

I think that the apparent 'duality' in present in the case of avatars is entirely the result of a category error that comes from using the term 'avatar' in two quite distinct ways.

First there is the notion of 'avatar' as simply the artifactual representation of the user. I've been laughed at before here for trying to get more philosophical rigorous here about what exactly that entails, but as a simple representation it has a domain that can be construed as narrow as 'what other users see' or as broadly as the entire representational scheme afforded a user by the client program (this includes inventory, stats, point of view, etc).

Second there is the notion of 'avatar' that is more closely aligned with what theatre arts refer to as 'character' or 'persona'. This notion of 'avatar' includes the actor as well as the mask. In the context of digital worlds, it is this notion of 'avatar' to which histories, achievments and the like attach.

Now you may think I'm just reiterating what Thomas already observed in his OP. To an extent that's true, but rather than exhibiting some kind of mysterious 'duality' inherent in avatars, I'm claiming that the 'duality' exists only insofar as we are using the same word, 'avatar', to represent two concepts that are actually quite distinct, easily separable, and they remain so across all the relevant 'capital' domains mentioned in the OP--market, social, cultural.

It's also pretty clear that the really interesting notion of 'avatar' for purposes of this discussion is the one that is similar to 'character' or ingame 'persona'. So, to what extent is this kind of avatar capable of being bequeathed? Well, in order to answer that, as with many things in virtual worlds, we need to go to a kind of Turing test: The extent to which an observer familiar with an avatar would be unable to discern whether that avatar had changed hands is the extent to which that avatar is inheritable.

This is actually not that radical an idea. It's basically what we mean when we talk about Brando's Bligh versus Gibson's, or Peck's Ahab versus Stewart's.

Finally, a note about Godelier's claim that 'inheritance' and 'exchange' are the primary means of cultural transmission. The only way this is actually true is if you loosen up the notion of 'exchange' so that it is so weak that the claim becomes a tautology. Since all forms of cultural transmission can be read to involve an 'exchange' of some kind--a parent telling a child of a local tabboo involves an exchange of the child's attention for the parent's proscription--Godelier's claim can be seen as trivially true. A similar argument exists for 'inheritance'. But these arguments capture their intended target at the expense of all explanatory power.

Indeed, most cultural transmission occurs among human brains, which are neither exchanged or inherited. Cultural artifacts in the world generally serve merely to record, instantiate, exemplify, or reiterate what members of a given culture have already acquired from other members of that culture.

[RedWolf]

5.

I'm pretty sure I've heard of a case where an MMORPG player died and his family asked for his login details, so they could tell his friends, and were refused because of privacy issues. I don't think you can really inherit an account since most MMORPGs have rules against account transfer.

[Chip Hinshaw]

6.

Can I have your stuff? ;-p

I work in IT in the financial markets and the concept of "unreal estate", virtual property, virtual markets/economies has actually captured the attention of my firm's owner. He actually had me develop a project plan for researching this "phenomenon" and investigating its potential (if any) for our industry. I even got to hire an intern to do the legwork (unfortunately, he wasn't keen on the idea of ME spending my days playing WoW). The project has been cut short due to the intern returning to school, but we hope to recommence in the summer. In any event, we learned a great deal (our intern actually did a great job -- a first for us) and although we can't see through the clouds right now it will be interesting to see where things might go.

[Prokofy Neva]

7.

An incredibly important feature of GOM, when it existed, was that it represented an off-world, independent site for the storage of game/world-related currency -- but not only currency, also information. So in theory, if I felt I was going to be banned, and the feds were closing in on me for some arbitrary and selective reason, I could cash out of SL, and leave and account, and a password, for my son, or a trusted colleague in SL or even some other world, to come and accept my wealth and put it on their avatar.

For some reason, LL is really squeamish about alts (they limit them very strictly) and about transfer of accounts (it is essentially forbidden under the TOS and can only be accomplished with special permission, it seems, because transferring your password is forbidden). It's not clear, really, what it means because many people routinely violate it just to run jobs and take care of properties and handle personal lives and businesses when partners are away and can't log on. People constantly log on as other people to pay rent, for example.

I find this heavy restriction of the passing or transfers of avs, and creation of mule avs or alt avs as hugely annoying and hobbling. I realize it was done to prevent "griefing" or probably more likely to establish RL-SL synchronicity and spread the "realifism" of SL further into the "serious games biz" and other businesses, but...it's a huge encroachment of the state on the individual's right to make property, value it, transfer it, etc. The inheritance laws of SL and other virtual worlds are worse than some of the most despotic regimes of the world that don't let women have inheritances, etc.

For some reason, possibly merely just to get as many accounts as possible, and because the world was more closed, the Sims Online company Maxis/Ea.com was for more liberal about this so it made for a far more interesting metaverse in this regard. In the dog-years of TSO, you might start, skill up, max out, load up with rares, and retire a sim and sell him on ebay. When I departed the shores of Alphaville for SL's Igbo, I sold one of my most-skilled and rare-loaded avs on ebay for something like $150 US so I could buy my first SL auction property. It was an awfully sad occasion I covered on my blog. I feel upset now and then to think of that av, with all his life experiences that are my own life experiences, existing as an outer shell covering up somebody else's life experiences. Still, to emigrate between the shores of games, I had to get some working capital, and therefore my sim's hard-won skills and rares like the Afghan dog had to be pressed into service.

By the same token, I'd never sell my main from TSO and keep him going and will always do so until they take the servers down. I think many people feel that way about their mains. Although I've seen people sell their mains on TSO, but then sometimes try to build in a stipulation, sometimes even insisting that if somebody buys the account on ebay, they have to go to Ea.com and get its name changed (which you can do for a small fee in TSO).

The worst thing is to think of the sims (avatars) in the 90-day ice box when you know they are going to let him melt, and you realize you just can't justify keeping him up, as it's too time-costly or money-costly. So there he lies in his sarcophagas, his rares surrounding him at his feet, his many skills and clothes and adventures and notecards and homes and vehicles surrounding him...lying in state as "you'd like to remember him", melting, melting. Sometimes with those games you can come back and get just the name, but he's forced to start with 0 again.

Even tho SL has no skills, it has other stuff: calling cards, landmarks, inventory, especialy the non-transfer/no copy type of inventory. Sl accounts still sell on ebay and get traded around no matter how much the Net Nannies try to invade this precious realm. People value things and they go on trading and valuing no matter how much the feds try to disrupt it. They value the business/trade-mark/sales potential of some avs with names, or they just value the looks, clothes, costumes, non-transferable inventory or name or whatever. Let them.

[Edward Castronova]

8.

I'd be interested in hearing from Lineage people about the Prince/Princess role there. Isn't that kind of character basically non-combat, but rather a figurehead? Could be passed from generation to generation.

There was a WoW practical joke about two-headed Ogre characters that would be run by multiple players. Given that guilds often have guild toons with shared passwords - I wonder about the idea of games being designed with guild toons in mind, personae that are communal. The passing of ultimate control of a famous shared toon would also probably end up being ceremonial.

****
I can't recommend Thomas' essay enough. Reminder: it's here.

[Thomas Malaby]

9.

monkeysan wrote:
the apparent 'duality' in present in the case of avatars is entirely the result of a category error that comes from using the term 'avatar' in two quite distinct ways.

I drew upon the Tsimshian example to avoid this reading. The point is that whatever our meditation on our analytical terms yields, this duality exists empirically, in the practice of people like the Tsimshian. They see 'names' as both objects and persona, and invoke one or the other reading depending upon contexts. We cannot be blinded to actual phenomena by holding fast to definitions of terms.

The extent to which an observer familiar with an avatar would be unable to discern whether that avatar had changed hands is the extent to which that avatar is inheritable.

But this test reveals nothing if we know that people in practice recognize both the artifact and persona aspects of certain kinds of things, like avatars or ritual names. The only reason giving pride of place in this test to the idea of eliding the distinction is if we believe that people cannot or do not want to hold these two readings simultaneously.

a note about Godelier's claim that 'inheritance' and 'exchange' are the primary means of cultural transmission. The only way this is actually true is if you loosen up the notion of 'exchange' so that it is so weak that the claim becomes a tautology. Since all forms of cultural transmission can be read to involve an 'exchange' of some kind--a parent telling a child of a local tabboo involves an exchange of the child's attention for the parent's proscription--Godelier's claim can be seen as trivially true.

But on the contrary this post (and the paper from which it is drawn) are built on the notion that we can and should make useful distinctions between different forms of exchange. If you'll forgive me, I haven't generalized exchange beyond the point of analytical usefulness, but you have ;-). That said, it's possible to point out that, for example, the difference between a gift and a commodity is impossible to establish definitively and exclusively--they clearly exist on a continuum. But just because analytical distinctions can be relative does not render them useless.

The point, again, is to start from social practice--what do people do? And people, on the whole, treat gift exchange differently than market exchange, which they treat differently than learning/inheritance. These forms of exchange accumulate into resources (capital) which they then draw upon to act. The fascinating thing that follows is that they are able, under certain circumstance, to parlay, or translate, these forms of capital one into the other. Until we understand the various forms all of these kinds of exchanges take in and across human domains like synthetic worlds, we will only have a reductionist (to market, to networks) account of what happens in them.

[Thomas Malaby]

10.

Thanks, Ted, for the kind words and pointer. :-)

[monkeysan]

11.

Thomas>I drew upon the Tsimshian example to avoid this reading. The point is that whatever our meditation on our analytical terms yields, this duality exists empirically, in the practice of people like the Tsimshian. They see 'names' as both objects and persona, and invoke one or the other reading depending upon contexts. We cannot be blinded to actual phenomena by holding fast to definitions of terms.

I don't disagree that the duality exists empirically with respect to the practice of the Tsimsihan and their concept of 'name'. What I do disagree with is the idea that Tsimsihan names and the term 'avatar' both possess that duality. In other words, I don't see that Tsimsihan names are sufficiently similar to support analogizing from one to the other.

Thomas>But this test reveals nothing if we know that people in practice recognize both the artifact and persona aspects of certain kinds of things, like avatars or ritual names.

This is circular reasoning. Precisely what's at issue is whether people really are recognizing two aspects of the same thing or whether they are using the same term to connote two different concepts, even, or particularly, if one concept 'contains' or subsumes the other. The test reveals exactly what we are trying to get at, namely what constitutes in practice the heritability of an 'avatar'. My claim is that the extent to which a persona is indistinguishable to an observer in the game world, regardless of who is 'pulling the strings', that persona is heritable. This includes both superficial features of an avatar, such as it's appearance, but most often rides on features that are associated with persona, e.g. behavior.

Thomas>If you'll forgive me, I haven't generalized exchange beyond the point of analytical usefulness, but you have ;-). That said, it's possible to point out that, for example, the difference between a gift and a commodity is impossible to establish definitively and exclusively--they clearly exist on a continuum. But just because analytical distinctions can be relative does not render them useless.

Absolutely not. But the point of my argument was simply to show that exchange and inheritance are not really the 'pillars of cultural transmission in societies' that the Godelier passage suggests. That they are fundamental to many kinds of cultural transmission is almost certainly true, but that truth does not hold for the broader realm of cultural transmission.

I'm not challenging your broader questions about inheritability; however, I think that the issues you are trying to get at are more clearly elucidated by recognizing that there are actually two distinct concepts in play that have unfortunately had the same label applied to them. Remember, 'avatar', unlike 'name' is a more a term of art rather than a folk primitive.

As a result, there is no background folk theory of 'avatar' on which to draw conclusions about practice and usage of the term. It's not that people have strongly dualistic intuitions about what an 'avatar' is; rather, most people simply do not have strong intuitions about precisely what 'avatar' refers to in the first place. This fact underscores the need to tease apart peoples intuitions about what it is they are 'exchanging' when they transfer control of an account to another.

[Thomas Malaby]

12.

I think we're actually pretty much agreed on these points, monkeysan, and the differences are more of approach and language then the substance. The OP is speculative, so it does not depend on there already existing a disposition toward the avatar analogous to how Tsimshian treat names. Instead, I'm trying to push us to think about whether we can recognize this practice emerging (which will almost certainly precede the rise of a label for it, 'avatar' or otherwise).

I disagree about the test, because such a test fails for the Tsimshian, and there's no reason to believe that if and when practices of avatar inheritance arise it wouldn't be similar to the Tsimshian disposition in many respects.

Re: Godelier--while Roth relies heavily upon him, and that's a good quote to round off the OP, my thinking and the paper are based on Bourdieu's ideas about material, social, and cultural capital, so that argument would be a different discussion.

The only other thing I would add is that instead of saying "two distinct concepts in play" I would say "three distinct practices in play." But then it's probably already clear that I give priority to practice over the concepts themselves.

[monkeysan]

13.

Edward>There was a WoW practical joke about two-headed Ogre characters that would be run by multiple players. Given that guilds often have guild toons with shared passwords - I wonder about the idea of games being designed with guild toons in mind, personae that are communal. The passing of ultimate control of a famous shared toon would also probably end up being ceremonial.

Please forgive the double post, but I think this is a great example, and I had to comment:

To the extent that a guild toon is simply used as a tool by its members, I'd say that it is very much like the passage of office from one member to another in a tribe. Think of it, as you suggest, in terms of the passing of a ritual role. There may even be aspects of behavior and persona that members using the tool are expected to adopt. If the toon is simply used as, say a healbot or a mule, the role is almost completely heritable. In general, the extent to which things performance expectations are not filled in by the community that shares the artifact will determine the degree to which the role is 'heritable'. If all that one is allowed to do when one dons the community toon is park it somewhere with some kind of 'buff all' script running, then it is essentially completely heritable. But if, on the other hand, the guild toon is one that members are allowed to use in an unbounded way, individual differences in personality, playstyle, etc. will creep in and heritability will be lessened.

To the extent that you can figure out who's 'behind the mask' you have several people using the same mask to build different characters. As I tried to point out earlier, the discussion becomes complicated by the unfortunate fact that we have applied 'avatar' to mean both the mask and the character (which also includes the mask as well as the persona).

[Thomas Malaby]

14.

there is no background folk theory of 'avatar' on which to draw conclusions about practice and usage of the term. It's not that people have strongly dualistic intuitions about what an 'avatar' is; rather, most people simply do not have strong intuitions about precisely what 'avatar' refers to in the first place.

Another way to illustrate my last point above is in the contrast between the reasoning here and mine. For me, whether the phenomenon I'm thinking about is happening for avatars has little or nothing to do with 'theories' about avatars, folk or otherwise, or even whether they have articulable intuitions about them. It has to do with whether practices are emerging that themselves constitute this dual disposition to what avatars (for lack of a better, more 'emic' term) are. It's an empirical question at that point, and worrying about whether the terms make it possible or impossible can only blind us to seeing it when it happens.

[monkeysan]

15.

I agree that it's an empirical question. And I agree that it would be unfortunate to allow terms to blind us to observing when these phenomena occur. That is precisely why I want to get clearer about what people take themselves to be doing when they practice the sort of exchanges you describe.

Whether this happens and how it happens has nothing to do with theories about the 'terms' themselves. There I also agree. My reference to the lack of folk theories about what 'avatar' refers to was not adduced to show anything about the phenomena we're interested in but to show that the term 'avatar' is not endentured to longheld cultural usage and is mostly a term of art. Therefore, there's no reason not to strive for clearer language that respects these dispositions rather than muddling them.

As a consequence, I simply am lobbying for the use of 'better' terms that allow us to more clearly distinguish among the dispositions you describe when they do occur in practice. I think doing so would go some way toward preventing us from being blinded to them rather than the other way round.

I'm not sure how my test fails for the Tsimshian case. As I understand it, what is being inherited with potlatches is a particular role within in a community. That is, I was under the impression that potlatches and the ritual surrounding them is meant to involve the transfer of a kind of coordination relationship between the owner of the 'name' and the resto of the community rather than representing the transfer of the personalities of previous holders.

[Warren Grant]

16.

Since you are bandying about references to the Coast Peoples, albeit ones way up north, I would add in a better example perhaps with reference to passing on an Avatar: Kwakiutl Dance Societies.

The right to dance a particular dance, portray a particular character etc, is an inherited aspect of Kwakiutl culture (although I *think* individuals can be adopted into a family and thus join the heritage). More than one individual can evidently perform a given dance, so its not as clean a comparison as you might want for the sake of example, but individual dances are held by the Societies and only available to their members.

An example Dance Society can be found here: Copper Maker Dancers. Calvin Hunt - and indeed the whole Hunt family - are extremely well known on the British Columbia coast. Tony Hunt is one of the premier West Coast Native Artists. One or another of the Hunt Family will be holding a Potlach sometime soon, as I know someone who is invited to it.

[Christopher F. Roth]

17.

This is Chris Roth himself. I'm glad to see that someone is reading my work, and I appreciate all of the comments here. I have to say that, for one thing, I agree with Malaby that even fuzzy or gradational or qualitative or shifting concepts can have utility when looking at things like this. It's anthropology, after all, not chemistry. More to the point, I think that Godelier's position on inheritance and exchange is useful up to a point but is not an absolute theory. One thing we need to do is move away from using terms like exchange and transference and retention and inheritance as absolute theoretical terms and deploy them with the understanding that whether, say, some object is conceived of as "moving" from one group to another is part of the conceptual structure in which valuation occurs, whereas whether something actually does physically move may be irrelevant to such a cultural construction of value. So these terms have to be used very flexibly, and there's no way to avoid some slippage between the way such terms are used in ethnographic description and the way they are used in theorizing, sometimes even in the same paragraph. As long as one realizes that that is what is happening, no harm is done, and perhaps even we can advance slowly towards more and more encapsulating theoretical metadiscourses.

As far as personhood is concerned, the key, touchstone source on this is Marcel Mauss's essay "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self" (1938), which crystallizes all of these issues. I draw on it heavily in my work.

Full disclosure: I know virtually (no pun intended) nothing about online gaming or role-playing games and am not picking up on a lot of the acronyms and terms used. I've just downloaded the "Parlaying Value" paper but haven't read it yet. Am I right that an avatar, in this sense, merely means a player's persona in a role-playing game? Is there a dimension to this I'm missing. From what I can see, there are indeed parallels with Northwest Coast name-titles, but more so for contemporary N.W.C. names than the precontact situation. I'll have to think more on this. Certainly the embeddedness in kinship networks is far more profound and necessary a condition for namedness on the N.W.C. than in these games, as far as I can see. You can't just bequeath a name-title to a friend.

I've been thinking about these issues a lot (personhood and so on) as I put the finishing touches on a book on the Tsimshian with a much expanded section on this.

At any rate, I'm glad to see the fine discussion here. Thanks, all.

Christopher F. Roth

[Lanky]

18.

Quote: Christopher F. Roth
"Am I right that an avatar, in this sense, merely means a player's persona in a role-playing game? Is there a dimension to this I'm missing."

The second dimension of avatar, as commonly defined, is an empyrical one which consists of hard data which determines:
a. what the avatar can and cannot do. Status, role, abilities.
b. what the avatar looks like
c. What virtual property or "items" the avatar possesses

It is these general properties and some others which form the "other" side of an online avatar, and give rise to the original question of whether both aspects of an avatar are transferrable.

Regards.
Lanky McLankerson

[Thomas Malaby]

19.

Chris Roth wrote:
As far as personhood is concerned, the key, touchstone source on this is Marcel Mauss's essay "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self" (1938), which crystallizes all of these issues. I draw on it heavily in my work.

Chris and I are now corresponding happily about these connections, but I wanted to highlight this comment from his post above in particular. Almost everything Marcel Mauss, a French anthropologist and student of Emile Durkheim, wrote can be recommended for its core insights into foundational aspects of human experience, and this essay is no exception. His writings about reciprocity (in translation, The Gift) and the body ("Techniques of the Body") are others that continue to inform thinking about human society, and all of them are particularly rewarding for examinations of the nature of digital life. Check them out if you have an interest in these issues and virtual worlds.