Stories and Ethics

Another important, but underused, role for stories is in the exploration of ethical issues, especially ethical issues arising from the use of new technologies. I wrote a number of papers many years ago on the role of stories in computer ethics. The premise behind that work was that traditional approaches to ethical analysis may not be adequate for the ethics of technology. A common approach to ethical analysis known as consequentialism attempts to determine the ethical quality of an act based upon its consequences. This seems perfectly reasonable. But what if you don’t know what the consequences may be? This is often the case with decisions about the appropriate use of new technology.

But all is not lost. We can often speculate on the possible consequences and evaluate our ethical options based on the possible consequences. And an important vehicle in exploring possible consequences is the use of stories. Stories allow us to explore possible outcomes and select the outcome that is most likely and/or most desirable.

In fact, I am teaching a class this Spring on exactly this topic. It is called Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. In the past, I have allowed a wide variety of emerging technologies as the focus for the stories. But, this Spring I am going to focus on the ethical issues that arise from Virtual Worlds such as Second Life and Video Games such as World of Warcraft. I think it will be both fun and enlightening.

I need to make one more point before closing this short piece. Notice how, in this notion of writing stories to explore the ethics of virtual worlds, several very different ideas are brought together. The idea includes ethics, writing, and virtual worlds – all themes in this blog. But the point is that almost any idea or any area of study or investigation relates, in some way, to every other idea, or area of study or investigation. And this is an important clue to how we advance our understanding of the world. Not every combination of ideas will produce an important insight. But most missing insights are just missing the right combination of ideas.

Some Thoughts on Blogging

I started this blog only ten days ago feeling very exposed and vulnerable. But, the only way you can learn about something like this is to try it. And so I did. Now I have a little more insight and thought I should offer some of my thoughts. I think blogging is a great idea and here is why.

First, consider a blog in which a person writes routinely but nobody ever reads it. It there any value in that? I think so. In fact, I think there is great value in writing a blog even if nobody every reads it. About a decade ago, I started a daily journal in which I would write every morning. My goal was to write around 500 – 1000 words a day. It was great writing practice and I think my writing is much stronger today as a result. But, there were further benefits beyond writing practice. Writing every morning sharpened my thinking and helped me organize my thoughts. So, I am also a much more organized and disciplined thinker today as a result. So writing everyday or even a couple times a week had merit.

You might ask, “what is the point in writing if nobody ever reads it?”. And, I have an answer to that. In fact, I will answer it with another question. “What is the point in expending energy if no work is actually done?” When we exercise we do not produce useful work. People living a century or more ago had to expend their energies to do work. Today, we don’t. And yet we still need the exercise to stay healthy and to stay in shape. So, we exercise. We expend seemingly pointless energy with no other goal than to stay in shape. Writing a journal or a blog that nobody reads is the same. You do it for the exercise. If you want to stay mentally in shape, or you want to maintain your ability to express yourself, then you need to write whether anyone reads it or no.

Next, consider a blog that people do read. Writing a blog that people actually read is like letting people watch you exercise. It adds the additional burden of being watched. What is the justification for the extra burden? I think the benefit of having a blog that people do read is that it provides a full length mirror for the things that go on in your head. Just as you might ask someone “how do I look in this suit?” or “does my new haircut look OK?”, you need to offer your thoughts to other people for validation. In days gone by, people might hang out in the general store, the barber shop, or even in a bar. They would offer their ideas to each other and get feedback. Today, we tend to hang out a lot less and have lost the environs for having our thoughts validated. That is where the blog comes in. I write my thoughts in the blog. You read them. If you have any reaction, you might tell me the next time you see me. You might send me an email. Or you might respond in the blog itself. Whatever the mechanism, the blog provides a vehicle for me to test out ideas and get feedback.

Finally, consider a blog, which is a compendium of your thoughts, that allows people who want to get to know you to catch up quickly. Suppose you meet somebody new and are on the verge of engaging in some interaction, social or professional, and want to get to know them better. One way would be to ask their friends. But, that can be rather hit or miss. Instead, if you go to their blog and read what they have written you may get far greater insight into who they are. In addition, you can challenge what you read in the blog. I would not do to say “I spoke to your friend Bob and he says you are unreliable.” However, it would be perfectly OK to say “You wrote in your blog that people rely too heavily on you. What did you mean by that?”

So, blogging seems to have some redeeming value and I guess I will keep doing it.

An Important Skill

The ability to create interesting characters is important even if you never plan to write a single line of fiction. I mentioned, in the last post, that this ability can be used in Second Life as well. I have dozens and dozens of unique characters that I have created as avatars in Second Life. This is great fun. It is good practice. And I have learned a great deal in the process. Where else, but in a virtual world, can you be some body else and see how some body else might experience the world. I have one character, for example, named Lowlife, who, as you might expect, comes from the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. His dress, boots, long hair, groups and profile comments all enhance his believability. The startling thing is that people talk to a guy named Lowlife in an entirely different way than they talk to a guy named Doctor. It is an extraordinary glimpse into the variety of experiences that different people have. If you find your way into Second Life, visit the third floor of Cosmos Academy and see a small subset of the many characters I have created.

However, this ability to create characters goes far beyond fiction and virtual worlds. You can also create characters in order to make a narrative argument. We saw a good example of this just recently in the presidential debates. "Joe the Plumber" was a fictional construct created to make a narrative argument about the effect of the two candidate's tax plans on the middle class. Unfortunately, for the McCain campaign, they were exposed because they tried to claim the fictional construct was real and the press exposed them. Had they just put him forth as an archetype character they may have gotten a lot more mileage out of it.

But, we can take this even further. You may want to sit down for this. YOU are a fictional construct also. People like to think they are 'real' or 'natural'. But, unless you are standing there naked and growling when you get hungry, you are a construct. We do not present ourselves to the world in our natural state. We construct persona and interact with the world through those constructed persona. What you decide to wear in the morning is part of that constructed persona. How you behave around friends is part of the image you are trying to create. The fact that you may behave differently around friends than you would around co-workers suggests that your construct is fairly complex. If you are not the person you want to be, or if you don't have enough friends, or if you are not interesting enough perhaps you need to work on the skill of creating interesting characters.

Creating Characters

I am going to switch gears today back to writing – specifically creating interesting characters. However, this ties in, in an interesting way, with virtual worlds. When you create an avatar in Second Life, you are, in effect, creating a fictional character. The benefit of virtual worlds over writing in this case, is that you get to test your character and debug it through interactions with other people. Try doing that in a novel. But, before I digress too far, let me get back to the topic of creating characters.

One of the most common questions asked of fiction writers, after the question - where do you get your story ideas - is – where do your characters come from? The simple answer is that they come from your imagination. But, that obvious answer is not satisfying to most people. In fact, it is not entirely true. First of all, you cannot get characters from your imagination until you have developed that capacity. So the answer really should be that characters come from your imagination once you have learned how to create them. No wonder it is an unsatisfying answer. We have gone from one unanswerable question – where do characters come from? ; to another seemingly unanswerable question – how do you develop that capacity? Actually, this second question is answerable.

People who study narrative arguments call that stuff laying around in your head, or more specifically in your imagination, fabula. It is the stuff from which you create characters, settings, and plots. So, the question now is reduced to the question of how to you develop the fabula needed to create a character. And this question we can answer more directly. You get the fabula needed to construct characters from one of two places. You can get it from either fictional characters or real characters. Fictional characters are found, as you might expect, in literature, movies, television and the like. Real characters are the people around you.

Went I wrote the Wentworth stories I used real people as characters and modified them to suit the needs of the story. And this brings us to the next step in creating characters. You begin with ideas and then you need to practice with them. You can't learn to cook without actually cooking. And you can't learn to create characters without actually attempting to create them.

"But," you might object, "why would I want to invest the time in learning to create characters if I am not planning to be a fiction writer?" And the answer is that the ability to create interesting characters has wide utility far beyond simply writing fiction. And we will get into that next time.

Second Life vs. World of Warcraft

Both Second Life and World of Warcraft are examples of virtual worlds, and yet they are very different experiences. We can see these two worlds as occupying different ends of the virtual world spectrum. Second Life, at one end, is open, organic and unstructured. It puts a lot of development tools in the hands of the user but not a lot of practical functionality. In fact, Second Life can be viewed more as a virtual world development platform than as a virtual world application. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, can easily be seen as an application. It is a largely closed system. It is fixed in functionality. It is highly structured. Comparing these virtual worlds to more familiar applications you could say that Second Life is like a development environment such as Microsoft's Visual C# although not nearly as sophisticated. World of Warcraft is more of an application such as Quickbooks. Well, enough about virtual worlds. Next time I will return to writing for a change of pace.

Social and Psychological Presence

In the last post, I defined a virtual world in terms of the technology used to implement it. I defined it as a shared, modifiable, persistent space made possible through the use of computer and network technology. In this entry, I would like to move away from the technological definition and define a virtual world in terms of the user's subjective experience.

Researchers in virtual reality use the term 'presence' to describe the feeling of being in a situation or environment that you are not really in. So, for example, if you donned a pair of virtual reality goggles and felt that you were in a different place, that would be an example of presence. But the goal of virtual reality is to create a sense of physical presence. The goal of a virtual world is to create a sense of psychological and social presence. So, I would define a virtual world as a place where the inhabitants have a sense of psychological and social presence not supported by physical reality. That is to say that you 'feel' like you are in a world with other people when you are not, in reality, in that world.

One of the key elements, I believe, in this feeling of presence is the use of an avatar who represents you. Through a phenomenon called avatar attachment, the user begins to experience the world through the avatar. If the avatar is insulted or treated badly, the user has an emotional reaction. And that reaction feels as real as if you were insulted or treated badly in real life. If your avatar makes friends with other avatars, you look forward to seeing them just as you would look forward to seeing your friends in real life. That is to say that through attachment to your avatar, you 'feel' as though the world is real even though it is not supported by physical reality.

So referring back to the previous post, a social interaction technology such as Facebook would not be considered a virtual world because the user does not have the experience of psychological or social presence. Second Life seems to be the exemplar virtual world but so does an online video game such as World of Warcraft. And, yet, these two virtual worlds are very different. In the next post, I will take of the differences between these two exemplars.

What is a Virtual World

We hear a lot about virtual worlds today as applications like Second Life become more popular. But, as with many evolving concepts, the meaning of the term 'virtual world' can be unclear and confusing. Let's begin with a simple definition, look at the elements of that definition and work up from that.

A virtual world is a shared, modifiable, persistent space made possible through the use of computer and network technology. The first criterion that the virtual world be shared says that a single user video game does not qualify as a virtual world no matter how rich the graphics are nor how complex the narrative may be. You have to have other users in there to interact with. And while it is not explicitly stated, you must interact with the other users in real time. So, if you friends could log in some kind of bot or scripted intelligent agent and then go off and take a nap, it probably would not qualify as a virtual world. There is something about the experience of interacting with other people that is central to the virtual world.

The second criterion is that the world be modifiable. That is,the users interact not only with each other but they interact with the world and change it and/or themselves in some non trivial way. A basic chat room would qualify as a shared space and would certainly meet the real time interaction requirement. But the chat room is not modifiable in any important way. So, it would not qualify as a virtual world. Now, if the chat room were modifiable, say users could define hot keys and write scripts to invoke based on those hot keys, then it may be considered a minimal virtual world.

Next, the changes made to the world must persist after the users logs off. So, let's say that some users entered a shared computer space for a meeting and interacted in real time through voice and text chat. But when the meeting was over, the space was wiped clean for the next user. This would not be considered a virtual world because the changes would not persist from one session to the next.

Finally, the virtual world must be supported by computer and network technology. A shared white board upon with users would write and draw and which would never be erased might qualify as a virtual world otherwise. But clearly the technological support adds some important element.

So, is this definition of a virtual world adequate? Not really. If this definition were adequate then social interaction technologies like Facebook would qualify as virtual worlds. Although Facebook is a wonderful technology, it does not seem to qualify as a virtual world. In the next entry, we will look further to find an adequate definition.

Virtual Worlds

I have spent an incredible amount of time over the past two years in a virtual world called Second Life. I am convinced that the next stage of our technological evolution lies in virtual worlds although I am not at all convinced that Second Life will be the product that makes it happen. The means by which this will occur is not at all clear to me at the moment. I can only see where we are likely to end up, not the path through which we will get there. Web technologies made the question “Where is the information located?” irrelevant. Information can be located anywhere in the world and we can access it via web technologies. Virtual world technologies will make the question “Where is the person located?” irrelevant. We will enter virtual worlds through our desktop computers, represented by an avatar and interact with the avatar representations of other people. Thing of all the things you do today where your location matters. You ‘go’ to work. You ‘go’ to class. You ‘go’ to a conference. You ‘go’ to a movie. You ‘go’ out on a date. Anything in which location matters will change with virtual worlds. Before the web came along, if you wanted to buy something, you were restricted to the products that were available in the stores within a reasonable driving distance. With web technologies, the entire world marketplace was opened up to anyone with a computer and internet access. That opened up a lot of possibilities. Today, the job you have, the classes you take and the people you interact with are limited largely by your location. Granted you can always move. But moving can be a big effort and once you move, you are once again restricted by the new location. With virtual world technologies, the entire world of possibilities is open up to anyone with a desktop computer and an internet connection. You could work with a group of people in California, attend classes in a European university, and hang out Australians. The problem of not finding the book you were looking for at your local bookstore went away with web technologies. The problem of not finding the right opportunities in your home town will go away with virtual world technologies.

Structuring a Blog

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to writing. The first, which I will call the "Zen" approach, encourages you to find your inner writer by practicing writing. The second, which I will call the "Technical" approach, encourages you to organize your thoughts and practice specific techniques for expressing them. Both have strengths and weaknesses which I will probably elaborate on at some point. However, for now, I am going to go with the Technical approach in this blog. I do this for two reasons. First the fact that these entries have labels suggests a need for structure. I would like to use meaningful labels to give the blog some sense of coherency. And, second, since I am new to this medium, I need to try different techniques to see what works. Since I chose the title Ranting and Reflecting, those will be two of my labels. I also like to write about writing, so Writing will be another. I am a professor in real life so I would think that some entries about a Professor's Life will leak in. And my areas are research are Virtual Worlds and Video Games. So those are likely topics as well. The question is - can I stick to a small set of topics or is this blog just going to wander around all over the place? I have no idea. I guess we will have to wait and see.

The Birth of the Online Novel

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried something like this. About a decade ago, long before anyone had ever heard of the word ‘blog’, I tried my hand at writing an electronic serial novel. I put together a list of about 40 or 50 email addresses of friends, colleagues and students. I promised them one chapter each week and promised to do my best to make it worth their time to read. I knew these people were busy and part of the challenge was to keep their attention. I did three things in my attempts to keep them reading. First, I kept the chapters short; around one thousand words. Second, I tried to end each chapter with a portentous statement that would keep them thinking about it until the next chapter came out. And, finally, I used many of the readers as characters in the story.

Telling people that you are going to write and send out weekly chapters of a detective story when you have never written a novel before is a bit of a high wire act without a net. But it worked. I learned a lot about writing. And, in the process, I wrote three full length detective novels. Later, I advanced the idea and put the chapters online on my website. I also used some budding web technologies like mouse over pop ups, to enhance the story. I was looking ahead to a new concept in writing – the online novel. But, alas, it was a little ahead of its time. It turns out that my readers looked forward to printing out the emailed chapters and reading them with their coffee. Reading from the screen was just not the same. I knew that someday the technology would advance so that it would be easier to read from a computer screen. And indeed, it has. But a decade ago, it just wasn’t there and I lost my readers. Sigh! Live and learn. If you would like to have a look at these stories, they are still online. Have a look at http://home.gwu.edu/~jartz/alter/wentworth/ . It is best to use Internet Explorer to look at them as I used some features that are not common to all browsers. If you would like to hear about some of my experiences in writing these stories, and some things I learned, check back on these blog pages.

First Try at Blogging

I wanted to try blogging but had no idea what to say. Normally, I am not at a loss for words. But those words are usually in some context. In a blog you can rant on about anything. "Ranting?", I thought, "That is a good name and I love to rant". So that should be part of it. "But, why," I asked myself, "would anyone want to read my rantings". I actually managed to come up with a few answers. If they agree with my rantings but are not as good at putting their thoughts into words, then they might like to read my rantings and just nod in agreement. OK, I am making progress. Also, I can be funny, at times, especially when ranting so people might like to read my ranting to get a chuckle. This isn't so hard. But do I really want to create a totally negative blog persona that rants on about everything. Well, this has worked for some people. But, it isn't really me. I do have the odd useful insight as well. And people may well want to read my useful insights. I have a knack for being able to reduce things to there essence and to put them into perspective. So that should be a part of my blog also. Hence, I came up with the name Ranting and Reflecting. I hope this works or I will have another thing to rant about.