Metaplace and Avatar Rights: How Policy Can Be a Source of Innovation

Raph Koster announced that Metaplace will use his heralded Avatar Bill of Rights as the foundation of the Terms of Service for Metaplace. And in so doing, Metaplace has put down another marker that will shape the experience, and thus discussion, over the evolution of virtual worlds.

Does the TOS Matter
The problem is that we're not generally in a position to parse the implications of a Terms Of Service agreement when we START a game or enter a world - we don't understand the mechanics of it all yet, we don't know whether we should care about property and IP rights because we don't know whether we'll even want to make stuff and sell it or own it. Or we don't know whether it's some kind of Wild West (as Mitch called the early phases of Second Life which means, um, a year ago) in which freedom of speech and cutting people up is the lingua franca or whether it's meant to be more perky, or polite, or like a high school dance over on There.com.

And it doesn't make a lot of difference anyways, because even if we KNEW how the whole thing was set up and we read "Making Your Second Life" or "Second Life for Entrepreneurs" or whatever, and we faxed the TOS to our lawyers, we also know, intuitively or by direct experience, that the TOS will only be as good as how it's enforced and interpreted. It's like jay walking - there might be a law against it but in one city you'll be thrown in jail and in another city it seems like part of the culture and the cops aren't about to interfere with our inalienable right to freely step into traffic.

Policy as Innovation
I recently commented that Second Life and Metaplace represent different (though overlapping) views of how the metaverse will unfold. You either view the Web from a world, or a world from the Web (OK, or a phone, or a digital billboard for all I know). That over-simplifies it, I know - because you can have mixed reality and alternate viewers with Second Life, and you can have "distinct" MMO destinations arise from Metaplace. But it's a philosophy of how the technology facilitates the expression of 3D space.

I extended the implication into the question of whether this meant we would stop seeing virtual worlds as places:

But it leaves a question: are virtual worlds places? Or will the technologies that enable 3D spaces become so ubiquitous that we’ll stop thinking of them as distinct places? Because in Raph’s view, the tools and technologies to create 3D artefacts, the system for managing your avatar and identity should be EXPRESSION-agnostic. In other words, we should have the tools for creating content and then be able to seamlessly publish that content to cell phones, browsers, Flash, separate clients - whatever, it’s not the viewer, it’s in the engine from which content is derived and creating standards and tools for expressing the content from that engine.

But in both cases - Second Life and Metaplace, the truly deep innovations arise (or will arise) because of the intersection of policy, protection, identity and economies.

As Hamlet so eloquently pointed out in the Making of Second Life - most of the innovations in SL didn't happen because the Lindens came up with some new gadget, but because they executed policy, or unintentionally introduced policy through technology, and the result was unexpected. Issues arose. Wars broke out. And I'm sorry, but wars don't break out because you have a 3D camera, they break out because of the sometimes subtle and sometimes monumental impact of how a world is managed, the tools you use to do that, the codes and policies you have in place to reference it, and the interpretation and execution of your enforcement models.

We're not at the cusp of being able to fly through a virtual sky here. This isn't the beginning of a new generation of casual games. Social technologies, games, augmented reality and virtual worlds are blending and blurring.

Deep innovation isn't arising because I've come up with a new way to render virtuality or because I've 'modularized the code', its arising because of how our concepts of sociality, personal identity, narrative, the nature of work, governance, privacy and protection are being challenged and changed. I don't believe that these changes are unique to virtual worlds, but I believe that virtual worlds give us insight ahead of other technologies on the impact, options, promise and peril of the road ahead.

With uniform rights as an avatar, I feel more secure in my search for that promise than I do in interpreting the fine print of someone's tossed-together, modularized TOS.

Read FULL POST