Another Perfect World

Tonight in the UK we were treated to what I can only describe as an extremely well produced documentary on virtual worlds. Generally you know how it goes, virtual world documentary makes everyone look like a complete and utter geek but this one, this took a completely different angle and was made from the premise of virtual worlds being here, not going away anytime soon so let's see how they're developing and the challenges they face.

Another perfect world by Jorien van Nes and Femke Wolting treated virtual worlds with respect, from a Second Life standpoint Philip Rosedale, Stroker Serpentine and Urizenus Sklar were heavily featured as they gave views on everything from how virtual worlds develop, governments, cyber crime and of course sex.

However this wasn't just about Second Life, World of Warcraft, Eve-Online, Metaplace, uWorld and Lineage were all heavily featured.

The documentary started with the back of Philip's head and then found his face as Philip talked of how offices will not be such a centre of attention in years to come because of the expansion of virtual worlds, how he felt Second Life would look like New York when he first envisaged how it would develop and how he simply wanted it to be whatever it turned out to be without many rules.

We were then introduced to Stroker, the documentary revealed he was a former plumber and he used the tag line "From pliars to pixels". Then we got into the economy issues and this will have piqued the interest of people. There were claims that Second Life is generating seventy million bucks in revenue, Stroker himself admitted to having a six figure income, these sort of figures make people sit up in their seats.

Disappointed World of Warcraft gold farmers from China were also featured, you could sense their frustration at Blizzard's clampdown although one of them was talking about how someone had been offering hacked accounts for sale. They see it as an exchange of money for gold, which it is, but Blizzard see it as not being in spirit with the world they created.

However in terms of how virtual worlds grow there was an important point made about Lineage, a square was built in the world and avatars gathered there to trade goods, but the creators didn't like this and tried to put barriers in the way and yet avatars continued to trade goods. This was a good example of how many facets of virtual worlds are actually outside the control of the creators.

As for general use of virtual worlds, Urizenus Sklar was rather scathing of Nissan's appearance in Second Life, pointing out that it was a bit idiotic to replicate cars, they should have replicated flying saucers. I'm not sure I agree with him there at all, cars have a place in Second Life.

Then the discussion moved onto cyber crime and here there were some very diverse and interesting viewpoints. Lineage, which sounds extremely scary, has had issues with people attacking each other with knives outside the virtual world. Taking such issues outside of the world has meant that a cyber crime department has been formed by Police in Seoul. Lineage's headquarters are also heavily secured, their hands off approach to people getting scammed or feeling they had a raw deal inworld led to people wanting to have a word with the creators at their offices! Heck even with pitchforks at the ready us Second Life users aren't that annoyed.

Instead, as Stroker exemplified, the RL law of the land can be applied and Stroker talked of his legal fight to stop illegal copies of his products being sold. Stroker stopped short of being too critical of Linden Lab over the issue but you could certainly sense his disappointment, both Stroker and Urizenus felt that the offending player should have been permabanned whereas Philip feels that the community will eventually evolve to allow inworld courts to be formed to deal with issues. I don't think that Philip meant that an inworld court should deal with content theft, but that virtual worlds may one day evolve to such a point that inworld courts have power, more on this later.

Raph Koster whilst talking about Metaplace but also avatar rights in general talked of how he'd written a declaration of avatar rights, Raph really does feel that as little interference as is needed should be made. The tricky question of whether it was acceptable for a racist world to be created was answered skillfully with Raph basically saying people need to obey the law, but interestingly Raph sees the TOS of Metaplace as a declaration of rights and this model is provided for other people to create virtual worlds and use this declaration of rights for their own users.

Raph's approach is either very noble or very naive. I'd like to think it's the former but as Lineage and to a degree Second Life have found out, users can be a bit more demanding with the game gods than the game gods would like.

The cases of unintended but interesting developments were again demonstrated by Lineage when they talked of how the "Harry Potter Alliance" had been involved in a war against the most powerful players who owned the castles and were basically seen as dictators, players from thirty servers apparently descended on these areas to fight what they perceived as unfairness. These Lineage players scare me somewhat, I must admit!

Then we came to another issue, Eve-Online has an elected government known as the Council of Stellar management. They have no power, but they have government. This is an interesting angle and I'll be interested to see if anything comes of it, of course if there's a government there are likely to be rebels.

Would such concepts as government and courts work within Second Life? I'm really not convinced they would but we'll never know until people form their own and we see how it works. I'm sure there have been attempts at local governance, every island owner really has some sort of governance, largely via the covenant but an elected government I'm not familiar with.

People will often want to turn to the Lindens when they feel they've been ripped off, this explains why fraud categories were added to abuse reports. Whether Second Life ever develops to such a stage that the Lindens can back away from such issues is another matter but that will be part of the development cycle of virtual worlds.

Urizenus made an observation that I very much agreed with, that such governments have to rise organically, no doing favours for friends or hampering enemies from the game gods.

Will virtual worlds replace much of RL activity, will we embrace them more? Certainly, although Philip feels things like wind will take years to be able to be replicated in virtual worlds, Raph Koster feels that the real world is too real for us to give too much of it up.

There were so many interesting points raised by this documentary but I think I've waffled on enough already, if you can view Channel 4 on demand you can watch the documentary at the link below and make your own mind up:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/another-perfect-world/catch-up#2924948