Are you an "avatar economicus"?

What makes the avatar tick? Is the avatar a rational being, a homo economicus, meaning, as explains Wikipedia, a rational, perfectly informed and self-interested actor who desires wealth, avoids unnecessary labor, and has the ability to make judgments towards those ends?
I thought this over when I listened to a presentation by Stephen Prentice, VP of Gartner, earlier this week.

I doubt that the concept of the homo economicus is very useful to analyze the behavior of avatars and their real life typists. My guess is that psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers have more insights to share. Desire and recognition by others may seem to be fuzzy concepts, but at the end of the day explain far better what really goes on in virtual worlds...

Since I started studying economics, I always have been fascinated by the underlying assumptions of economic theory, in particular by the assumptions regarding human behavior.
Allow me to return to Wikipedia and the definition of the homo economicus:

Homo economicus is a term used for an approximation or model of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for himself given available information about opportunities and other constraints, both natural and institutional, on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals.

Wikipedia notes rightly that this kind of "rationality" does not say that the individual's actual goals are "rational" in some larger ethical, social, or human sense, only that he tries to attain them at minimal cost.
This model of human behavior has certain advantages, most notably that it is rather easy to use in mathematical models.
As an economics student I terrorized my professors with critiques orginating from anthropology, psychoanalysis and thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and the writer/philosopher Georges Bataille. More about those guys in a moment.

Why this flashback to my youth? Blame it on Stephen Prentice, VP at Gartner, who delivered a keynote at the vBusiness Expo Conference this week. He underlined that virtual environments are all about the people, not the technology nor the physics. It are places where people actually interact, in real time, sharing a space, sharing presence.

Prentice mentioned repeatedly Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who conceptualized a hierarchy of human needs such as physiological and safety needs but also love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Lots of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are conceived by tech types, who are masters in creating endless technological possibilities, but the folks who eventually visit those worlds are not necessarily tech folks, but just people who want to communicate and eventually to belong to a group or community.

This made me muse about what avatars do in a world such as Second Life, which I know best. There is the creation of landscapes, buildings, clothes, objects and scripts, which is maybe the work of a minority, but enjoyed but all the other residents - without those creations, there simply would not be Second Life. But that is not the only content which is created.

The organization of formal and informal groups for instance is also a form of content creation, as is the endless production of texts, sometimes just chatting, sometimes elaborate argumentations about an endless variety of topics. There is the whole world of content creation around Second Life: the blogs, sites, the pictures, machinima and virtual television and show productions. Crucial for virtual worlds are the creation of events from music to discussion to dance.

All this represents an enormous amount of "labor". Is this labor the work of "rational, perfectly informed and self-interested actors who desire wealth, and avoid unnecessary labor"?

Of course, Second Life boasts an economy. Avatars can earn money in this economy. But only a minority actually does earn money there, and I guess many of those who do earn money - taking into account all the costs - could earn considerably more money if they invested the same time and effort in activities in the physical world.

So what makes the avatar tick? Prentice says "love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization". Maybe in other words, recognition can be an important factor to engage oneself in a virtual environment. In a society where we are all too often just being used as instruments to achieve goals by huge corporations, institutions and governments, the recognition by informal groups functioning at a more human scale can be very important.

I think that a very important aspect in this process is reciprocity. The social norm of reciprocity is the expectation that people will respond to each other in similar ways -- responding to gifts and kindnesses from others with similar benevolence of their own for instance. This is an important element of the gift economy.

Gifts however are often poisonous: they can imply a degree of dominance by the giver over the one who receives, like in development aid. Guys like Baudrillard and Bataille pointed this out, referring to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who described phenomena such as the potlatch, where groups try to dominate other groups by giving far more, eventually destroying goods in order to make their superiority obvious. (Avatar Nany Kayo pointed out to me in the Metanomics chat channel that the potlatch is in fact a beautiful ritual, about which a lot more is to say than the competition aspect mentioned by these European authors).

So when I think that the rational, sanitized model of human behavior as suggested by the homo/avatar economicus is not the best description of what goes on in virtual worlds, and that theories about reciprocity and gifts are far more interesting, I don't want to give a romantic vision of avatar relationships. Power, the struggle for recognition and even dominance are as much a fact of life in a gift dominated world as in a world supposedly inhabitated by the homo economicus.