Zoning? In a Virtual World?

The past two posts have sketched out the cases for and against regulation. On one hand we need regulation in virtual worlds to provide the orderly and predictable environments in which commerce and education can be pursued. On the other hand, regulation seriously inhibits the potential of virtual worlds as a medium of self expression and exploration. Can these two conflicting potentials of virtual worlds both be achieved? Or will one have to give way to the other?

I think they can both be achieved via virtual world segmentation or in more common terms zoning. Zoning can be achieved fairly easily. Each simulator or virtual location should have a set of attributes associated with it indicating its regulations. For example, it may require visitors to be over a certain age and may require user authentication. Another simulator may allow anonymity but require visitors to adhere to role playing rules. Anonymity may require some refinement. For example it is one thing to be anonymous to the land owner and another thing to be anonymous to the other visitors.

It may take some time to get a standard set of attributes that simulations will set, but careful zoning takes careful planning. Further, if the zoning attributes are selected carefully it will be possible to group simulators into parallel virtual worlds. These parallel worlds might emphasize commerce, education, tourism, art, socializing, self expression, or any other thematic attributes.

In addition, each avatar would have similar attributes. These may include age, anonymity, credit worthiness, and social or moral restrictions. Again, these attributes would have to be carefully thought out. And just like today where vendors target certain market segments, virtual world developers would target a specific segment of the visitor population.

This attribution would allow a wide range of opportunities for sef expression while preventing someone from inadvertently landing up in an undesirable neighborhood. At the same time it would allow land owners to restrict undesirable visitors. If this all sounds a little too confining, don't forget that you can always have multiple avatars, some well documented and some anonymous. So, it seems to me, that it solves the problem of reguation. Hey, maybe we should start doing this in RL as well.

The Business Cost of Anonymity

Many people, including myself, have seen the potential of Second Life technology to be the next generation of the web, or the 3D web. At some point in the future we will look back at the two dimensional, point and click, web pages of today and wonder how we ever got buy with them, much as we would look at command line interfaces today and wonder how we ever managed to work with them. But, alas, this dream of the 3D web has been slow to materialize. Numerous vendors have come in to Second Life only to find disappointing results. In fact, there have been numerous news stories about vendors pulling out of Second Life due to disappointing results.

There are numerous reasons for this and I don't want to place too much of the blame on anonymity. But it is a factor both practically and symbolically. From a practical perspective, people who are doing business want to know who they are doing business with. Granted you can buy a product from a store without having to know much about the vendor or the product developer. However, if you wish to hire an application developer, an attorney or a councilor, it make a lot more difference. If you are going to try to get a degree at a virtual university or rent a conference center for an important meeting, you want to know who you are dealing with. And anonymity makes this difficult if not impossible. Dealing with anonymous vendors feels a lot like buying something from a guy on a street corner who has various products hidden in his raincoat. And as long as Second Life chooses to support anonymity, it will not achieve its potential as a 3D web.

However, a large issue is the symbolic implications of anonymity. Is Second Life a shady place where people get to live out there fantasies and do things they would be embarrassed for their friends to know about? Or is Second Life a well lit place where people go to conduct business? This is to say, is it the sleazy side of town where sneak to in order to indulge their secret longings or is it the local family mall?

I should say, in fairness, that I have no problem with people indulging their secret longings. I have no problem with personal expressiveness no matter how strange it may seem to others. I just think there is a time and a place for everything, and having an adult movie store next to a kids ice cream parlor would never fly in real life and doesn't work very well in Second Life either.

Next time we turn to the issue of avatar attachment. If people experience the world through their avatars, do we need to be concerned with how we treat avatars, or do they just need to get a real life?

The Down Side of Anonymity

If people are anonymous in Second Life, then how do you know who you are dealing with? How do you stop thirteen year old boys from coming on and harassing everyone at a Welcome Area? How do you stop sexual predators from seeking out vulnerable victims? How can you develop a friendship, perhaps even a romantic relationship with someone about whom you know nothing?
In the story of Cyrano de Bergerac a woman falls in love with a man through his letters without regard to his looks. It is a romantic reflection on what really matters in love. It is the character of the person not the person's looks.
Of course, Cyrano's flaw is that he has a big nose. But, what if his flaw was that he was a well spoken sexual predator or a serial killer? Would that matter? Of course it would. And while anonymity protects innocent people from recriminations regarding there personal expressions, it also protect maladjusted, sociopathic people from being discovered.
As hard as it is to believe, there are people who will engage in relationships solely for the purpose of upsetting the other person. It is hard to believe that somebody could be that badly bent. But anonymity protect the bent along with the normal. And often the normal suffer at the hands of the bent.

But, putting personal risks aside, there is a whole other cost to anonymity. And that is the business cost.

Anonymity in Virtual Worlds

Anonymity in a virtual world means that a person can appear as an avatar without any connection to the real person. Currently, in Second Life, users have a wide variety of options regarding the amount of anonymity they would like to have. Each avatar has a profile accessible to other avatars where they can provide information. In fact, there is a section in the profile titled 1st Life where they can provide information regarding who the are in real life. But, in fact, almost no one provides any information there. There is also a web page tab where you can provide a link to your web page. However, most people leave that blank or provide a link to a YouTube video of their favorite band. Clearly, most people like the anonymity the Second Life provides.

There are good reasons for enjoying this anonymity. If you don't like your height, weight, gender, looks, race, age or social class, you can try being some thing else in Second Life. If you wish to experiment with bisexuality or master/slave relationships, you can do so without fear of reprisals. And, as some friends have commented to me, if you screw up your relationships, you can create a new avatar and start over. Anonymity provides a great deal of personal, expressive and creative freedom. Second Life would simply not be the same without it. Any yet, as with everything there is also a down side to anonymity. And that will be the topic of the next post.

considers the trade off between a person's right to privacy as they conduct themselves in a virtual world and that person's responsibility to be who they claim to be.

Certainly anonymity allows a person to be things or to do things in a virtual world that they may not do in the real world. This freedom of self expression may be important but must be weighed against the impacts that these behaviors have on other people.