by Nick Yee
Of course, virtual decadence is not the only use of Second Life. For example, Peter Yellowlees, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, created a simulation in which Second Life users could experience what it felt like to suffer from schizophrenia. But Rosedale’s description does accurately capture the most jarring aspect of Second Life as a whole: in a world where people can become and create anything they want, the overwhelming desire is to create a virtual Malibu on steroids. And this obsession with material decadence in a virtual world is probably the farthest you can be from Barlow’s “being in nothingness.”5
As we saw in the chapter on superstitions, personal space matters in cyberspace because we obey the rules we learn from the physical world. This social training is what makes it psychologically awkward to have a formal meeting with everyone standing even if our virtual bodies don’t get tired. We create virtual chairs because our physical bodies get tired from standing. And once we have virtual furniture, we need virtual room and houses to put all this furniture in. Instead of escaping from physical reality, virtual worlds have become a way for us to replicate physical reality.
In recent years, the commercial success and mainstream awareness of virtual worlds, and online games in particular, have spurred a broad interest in incorporating aspects of these virtual worlds into corporate work. One misconception I have repeatedly come across is that there is something magical about representing people and places in 3D—the notion that a virtual meeting room, classroom, or health fair is inherently engaging and fun. For nongamer businesspeople who see online games for the first time, the most immediate appeal is the 3D graphics. But the 3D is a red herring. After all, virtual chairs and virtual tables do not make work any more efficient or engaging. As we’ve seen, they may make things you take for granted in the physical world much more frustrating and time-consuming. And the first fundamental truth of virtual worlds is this: boring people are still boring when they are in 3D.
Three-dimensional avatars in online games have a hidden functionality that is not obvious to nongamers; they are actually designed to be inefficient. In golf, there is a reason why you’re not allowed to pick up the ball and walk over to the hole. There would be no game of golf if rules did not explicitly constrain your ability to move the ball. Whether it’s golf, Pac-Man, or chess, the obstruction creates the game. In World of Warcraft, players have to reach a certain level and accumulate a moderate amount of gold before they are able to purchase a mount that lets them move 60 percent faster. Characters have to manually walk to places to justify the mount being a reward. Forcing players to walk through a dungeon, instead of allowing them to teleport to a final battle at the boss chamber, is what creates danger and risk. The inefficiency is the game. In a virtual world designed for business interactions, this is the exact opposite of what users desire. You don’t want workers to waste time walking to virtual places or putting virtual folders in virtual filing cabinets. Virtual worlds have rules that influence how we live and work in them. And when we do not explicitly question these rules, unintended consequences enslave us.
The fact that having a virtual body leads to liabilities instead of liberation was made clear even in early online textual worlds. The popularity of MUDs in the 1980s led Pavel Curtis, a researcher at Xerox PARC, to experiment with using these textual worlds for work-oriented contexts. Instead of having the geography and rules fully defined at the start, Curtis’s variant allowed users to create their own content and modify the geography using a basic scripting language. There would be no overarching game rules or goals. Instead, users found a sandbox that they were free to expand as long as they followed basic ground rules. Curtis called these virtual worlds MOOs (MUD Object Oriented), and the first MOO, LambdaMOO, was created in the early 1990s. LambdaMOO was entirely textual. Users created descriptions for their characters, and other users could read these descriptions using the “look” command. Each room and every object in a room also had a textual description, again accessible with the “look” command. Other text commands allowed users to move around LambdaMOO and interact with other people and objects.6
The extensible sandbox nature of LambdaMOO allowed devious users to create scripts that subverted the ground rules. The Voodoo Doll is one such example. This script allowed a user to misattribute actions to other people as if they had typed out those actions themselves. Given that LambdaMOO was entirely textual, the Voodoo Doll, in effect, allowed a perpetrator to take control of another user’s character. Julian Dibbell’s 1993 article in the Village Voice, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” famously captured one particularly gruesome use of the Voodoo Doll. A character named Mr._Bungle joined a crowd mingling in the living room and began using the Voodoo Doll on several people in the group: “As if against her will, Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr._Bungle laughing evilly in the distance.” These violent and sexual acts continued for hours as both victims and bystanders watched helplessly. This violation of virtual bodies led the administrators of LambdaMOO to create a user ballot and petition system to enable democratic self-governance. Although LambdaMOO remains active and is now more than twenty years old, it is telling that this malicious act against virtual bodies remains the best-known story from this virtual world. Our virtual bodies powerfully influence how we create and govern.7
Breaking the Rules
In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier documents how technological decisions have a tendency to become entrenched and then, because of widespread dependencies, impossible to modify. A prime example is MIDI, a format created in the early 1980s to represent digital music. MIDI is behind almost all the music we hear around us—the synthetic beats and chords in popular music, cell phone ring tones and alarms, and so on—and has proven resistant to multiple attempts at reforming it in the ensuing decades. Lanier terms this process “lock-in”: “Lock-in, however, removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.”8
Lock-in puts up artificial blinders to how we see the world. The broad similarities in our contemporary virtual worlds and online games—users controlling one avatar in a geographical space that replicates physical navigation—distract us from the fact that we’re locked in to one slice of a much larger possibility space. And the hype around virtual conference rooms misses a crucial point: Are we simply replicating physical chairs and tables in virtual worlds as a bloated alternative to teleconferencing by video? And although telecommunication is a worthwhile goal, we shouldn’t allow it to subsume all other possibilities of virtual worlds. When we insist on replicating physical bodies and furniture, are we missing out on novel forms of work, collaboration, and play?
There is of course nothing wrong with having a digital body. After all, one good reason for relying on embodiment is that it provides a host of familiar and well-understood cues for social interaction—personal space, eye gaze, gestures, and so on. And familiar artifacts, such as virtual chairs and tables, create a well-understood context for social interactions. Thus, the chair at the head of the table has a social meaning that needs no elaborate explanation. And switching away from these familiar artifacts of embodiment might lead to confusion.
But it bears pointing out that the emergence of art, literacy, and science all hinged on finding alternative modes of representation. For example, music allows us to represent emotions, memories, and experiences in a novel way. Or, for example, our alphabet and writing system aren’t based on the human body, but writing and poetry allow us to think, create, share, and interact in new ways. Moreover, even if we did accept the premise that familiar metaphors easily provide structure and meaning, there are still many other metaphors that we are familiar with apart from human bodies. Would a brainstorming meeting be more naturally structured using a representation revolving around a plant with its familiar concepts of offshoots, branches, maturity, incubation, and cross-pollination? At first glance, this seems mor
e efficient than having virtual people putting up virtual Post-It notes on a virtual whiteboard. The virtual metaphor should change depending on the context and task.
A virtual world might also offer the possibility of serial embodiment. In this scenario, users have no default embodiment in the world but are free to take over or essentially possess other objects in the world, which grant them unique abilities. A person who likes to people-watch may possess a tree, blending into the environment but gaining heightened vision and hearing distances. Between embodiments, the user would be in ghost form. There is also no reason why we have to maintain a one-to-one relationship when it comes to virtual embodiment. Two or more users could possess the same object at the same time, with additional mechanics coming into play depending on whether they are able to collaborate with each other. In 2004, Blizzard announced a new playable race, the two-headed ogre, as an April Fool’s joke. While this particular description of the race was impractical to play, a two- or multiplayer tandem control mechanic could conceivably lead to novel and interesting forms of play.
The repeated use of the same game formulas in online games has made it increasingly difficult to see other possibilities. As we read in the historical overview of online games, Raph Koster has stated that the implemented features of online games have actually shrunk rather than grown over time. In that same blog post, Koster noted that “the fact that people can cite things like ‘big boss battles in a public zone’ or ‘really rich badge profiles and player stat tracking’ as truly differentiating features mostly speaks to how narrow the scope of the field has gotten in the public’s mind. This is like arguing over whether scalloped bracing in acoustic guitars is a defining characteristic for all of music.” Thus, even though Blizzard’s two-headed ogre idea was intended as a joke, the way it explicitly broke one of the core embodiment rules we’ve been locked into should have warranted more attention.9
In fact, imagining two heads is actually not that extreme, given that Lanier was experimenting with giving people eight arms in virtual reality in the 1980s. In these early explorations into putting people into virtual reality, graphical and code glitches were inevitable; sometimes digital bodies were warped or distorted. To Lanier’s surprise, however, “It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. . . . I played around with elongated limb segments, and strange limb placement. The most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster.” As with Barlow’s initial reactions to cyberspace, Lanier is interested in using virtual reality to transcend the limits of how the physical human body experiences the world. In contrast, as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, most virtual worlds have been relegated to replicating the physical—bodies, clothes, houses, and furniture.10
The hidden logic in technology narrows the spectrum of possibilities into a small, comfortable bandwidth. We forget that the status quo is just one of many possible outcomes and often simply the arbitrary result of historical accidents. While we focus on the seemingly endless opportunities afforded by our virtual bodies, we shouldn’t lose sight of the opportunities that our virtual bodies take away.
Current virtual worlds insist that each user has one avatar in the form of a human body and that these virtual bodies obey similar rules that govern the physical world—walking on two feet, not walking through walls, and so forth. As I’ve hinted at in this chapter, there are multiple ways to challenge this implicit orthodoxy. We could create virtual worlds in which users can control multiple avatars simultaneously, perhaps leaving avatars in automated idling behavior when switching among them. Instead of being virtual humans, I can imagine a virtual world in which players are different kinds of cells in a human body—the monsters are invading bacteria or viruses. Perhaps the virtual world is a rainforest ecosystem and players take on the role of different flora and fauna, trying to keep everything in balance. Or imagine a Benjamin Button world in which users start off in old avatars and get younger over time. What would it mean to raise a family and keep society running in such a world? I feel that virtual worlds offer us a chance to imagine the impossible, and we’re all just a little too comfortable being in human bodies.
There is of course a middle ground. We could keep human bodies in virtual worlds of houses and furniture but tweak the rules of reality. Imagine a brainstorming room that facilitated turn-taking between participants. Perhaps the people who talk too much have progressively darker shadows, or they grow bigger and start to dwarf the others, or the people who are quiet start to fade away. To avoid agreement bias based on authority or gender, we might randomize the appearance of the other avatars for each participant. If we’re stuck in virtual meeting rooms, we should at least take advantage of tools that would mitigate the inherent biases in group-based decision-making. I’m not suggesting that all these possibilities will be fruitful. But when we’re given the chance to do and become anything we want, I feel we owe it to ourselves to try.
CHAPTER 12 REFLECTIONS AND THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL WORLDS
In this book, I’ve focused on how online games often subvert the promises of freedom and escape. This is not to say that players never achieve transformative experiences. From the Daedalus Project surveys, two categories of players discuss finding escape and freedom in positive ways. The first group consists of those with physical disabilities.
Several years ago, I was working as a nurse on the graveyard shift at a local hospital. While repositioning a patient, I seriously injured my back (L4–5 disk). I’ve been disabled and unable to work since then. MMORPGs have allowed me to interact with people and feel more whole/able. . . . With online gaming I can meet people and have something of a social life even while isolated and pretty debilitated in “real life.” [Star Wars Galaxies, female, 46]
The second group comprises those who are struggling with issues of sexuality. Given the fear and uncertainty of coming out to friends and family, some players find a safe environment to explore and discuss their sexuality online.
In my family guild there was a female character who was quite flirtatious, mostly with the guys but every once in a while with the girls. . . . One day, after I mentioned having real-life ties to the gay community, this player confided in me that not only were they really male, but that they were a youngish gay male. He played a female to be able to flirt with the gender he preferred to flirt with. But, knowing the usual homophobia, he was careful to keep all relationships strictly online and banter. . . . I mentioned the GBLT guild on the other server to him and he cautiously made a female player there. Once he had a feel for the supportiveness of the GBLT guild, he promptly deleted the female character and played an openly gay male character on that server in the GBLT guild. I think he said it was the first time he had played a male character without being in fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. [City of Heroes, female, 40]
Responses like these, however, are uncommon in the Daedalus Project surveys as a whole. We have seen the social and psychological phenomena that have broad impact on virtual communities: how the operant conditioning that leads to superstitious behavior is something we’re all psychologically wired for, the way gold farming in online games has had a significant impact on the gaming landscape, and so forth. No doubt some players have found beneficial and transformative freedoms in online games, but I would argue that they are the exception.
There are three mutually nonexclusive trajectories that virtual worlds can take: they can replicate reality, influence reality, or reimagine reality. Let me describe the possibilities of these different trajectories.
Replicating Reality
For all their dragons and magic, fantasy worlds actually aren’t all that different from reality. One trajectory for virtual worlds is that they continue to perpetuate, reinforce, and produce social norms. Along with TV shows, movies, and magazines, virtual worlds become just another place where boys and girls learn what men and women are supposed to be. Virtual worlds create an appealing but illusory ut
opia, fooling us into thinking that ethnicity and global inequities no longer matter. They promise to transform us while preserving the status quo.
Oddly, the preservation of social norms has a silver lining. Social norms allow virtual worlds to be used to simulate and understand human behavior. The unintentional spread of a virulent in-game plague in World of Warcraft has prompted medical researchers to wonder if virtual worlds can be used to model and study epidemics. And Edward Castronova has argued that virtual worlds are “the modern equivalent to supercolliders for social scientists. . . . Virtual worlds allow for societal level research with no harm to humans, large numbers of experiments and participants, and make long term and panel studies possible.” Indeed, the ability to collect longitudinal and detailed behavioral data from millions of people around the world has significant scientific potentials.1
Influencing Reality
Whether it’s the avatar you’re given, a doppelgänger of you, or the rules of the game, virtual worlds give us unparalleled tools for changing how we think and behave. Instead of providing an escape, virtual worlds can be used to influence how people behave offline. In this ironic trajectory, virtual worlds come to control reality. How we are influenced depends on the intentions of the manipulators. Virtual worlds may become a great way for retailers to make money from us. Our behavioral profiles in consuming entertainment reveal our material desires, allowing advertisers to target us more precisely. And for those who do not initially have such material desires, a doppelgänger might convince them that they need to buy something after all.
