Thomas Malaby’s Malaby show on Metanomics provided insight into how Linden Lab, during a period of rapid growth and change, was driven by approaches and philosophies taken from game environments, and an almost “accidental” stumbling into success. Malaby discussed how Linden Lab seemed, during the time of his study in 2005/2006, to be an environment of rapid change and a sort of ‘disorganized order’.

While Malaby’s study was of a Linden Lab that perhaps doesn’t exist in the same form – there have been significant changes since his study, including a new “chief” at the helm in Mark Kingdon, it’s interesting to wonder whether the cultural and processes that drove the Lab are still, in some ways at least, still active. Do you think that the Lab has significantly changed? What has changed? Is the Lab still governed by ‘controlled chaotic creativity’? Have their values changed, and how does this influence what Second Life is today?

Here are a few select quotes from Malaby’s appearance:

On Second Life as a Game:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: How would you use that definition to answer whether Second Life is indeed a game?

THOMAS MALABY: Yeah, I would say that Second Life, at the end of the day, I would say it is game like, very importantly game like, but not necessarily a game. Perhaps the best way to answer the question is just to consider for a moment how game like our lives are generally. It’s certainly a metaphor that many people have reached for over the years, including some of the most distinguished social theorists the 20th century saw, people like Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. They talked about life as game like. What was that?

Well, we can start to observe that, that life is unpredictable in a bunch of different ways. We have random events, just purely random events that impact our lives. We have the guesses that we have to make about what people know around us and what they think, a kind of informational game that’s part of life. We have a challenge to perform in our everyday lives, to set about to not look stupid, to be effective, to be competent. All of those things are part of the unpredictabilities of our experience and they’re part of what makes it possible even for our experience to be meaningful.

Now let’s think about games for a minute. Games, even to think about offline games for a minute, very interestingly incorporate all of these forms of unpredictability into their structure, into their design. The pure randomness of our lives is the same kind of unpredictability as what tumbling dice, a well shuffled deck of cards or a spinner on a board do for a game. That performative challenge that life confronts us with is not a different kind of unpredictability at the end of the day, from that to performing in a sport, to make a shot in basketball. The informational unpredictability of our lives, the guesses we have to make about other people’s points of view is not very different from how poker controls the visibility of resources and sets up a situation in which you have to make such guesses. So games are not so very different from our lives, even to start with, when we look at them in a productive way.

And then what happened when we had computers come along, and we had computer games come to be created, which, itself, I think, was probably a very difficult thing to begin to be able to do. It became possible to create games that have all of these kinds of unpredictabilities and then in a far more complex array, but yet they were still games. They still had established and shared game objectives. That’s an important piece of what makes a game a game.

But then you can almost say, “Well, what is Second Life?” And you say Second Life is a computer game, but with the shared and established objectives removed. It has all of the other elements in it. It has the performative unpredictability, the challenge to not mistakenly toggle off your flying while you’re moving across a Sim and exhibit that rather embarrassing flailing animation as you tumble to the ground. It’s got the guesses that we have to make about other people because it’s a social environment, and the software makes certain information available to us but not others. It has the randomness as well. Certainly lag is the prime example of that.

So it’s an environment that owes an enormous amount to game design and then computer game design, to make a world that is much more like our everyday experience, and it was the path of games to get there. That is something maybe we’re not used to thinking about because we’re used to thinking of games as so very different and so very set apart from our everyday experience, but I come from a point of view that holds that what makes games compelling is, in fact, how they share so much with the rest of our lives, rest of our experience.

On Technology, Tools, Lack of Government, and the Whole Earth:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You have an extended discussion about Stuart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and the new communalism, as it’s called in the book From Counterculture to Cyberspace. So I’m old enough, I must admit, to remember the Whole Earth Catalogue, and it was very interesting to me to see that you see some very close parallels between Linden Lab and Stuart Brand’s founding of the Whole Earth Catalogue. So I guess, first, for our younger viewers out there, can you summarize what the Whole Earth Catalogue was, and then just tie it to Linden Lab?

THOMAS MALABY: Sure. And much of this piece of the book owes a great deal to Fred Turner’s excellent book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which I highly recommend, where he talks about Stuart Brand and many of the people around him, Ken Kesey and the like. In relation to a kind of post World War II moment in the United States, the United States comes out of World War II with a kind of confidence on the world stage, with an increased emphasis on technology. But one of the interesting things, and it even goes back to the Manhattan Project and to the radiation lab at MIT, is a new style of work, a new set of ideas about collaboration, the ability to be creative as necessitating a lack of hierarchy.

The Manhattan Project was military and industrial and academic people coming together to try and innovate in a way that could not be bureaucratically kind of mandated. They had to find new ways to do that. And what Fred Turner does a wonderful tracing is how, in the kind of echo of that, in the aftermath of that, you had people like Norbert Wiener who talked about complex technical systems as connected to the people who used them as socio technical systems. Almost really the ancestor of our current idea of a gamer is this notion of an individual and really underscore “individual” interacting with technology, seeking to master and able to accomplish tremendous things, able to express themselves.

Well, Stuart Brand and that group, in the Whole Earth Catalogue, emphasized technology to an enormous degree. The subtitle of the Whole Earth Catalogue was Access to Tools. And the fundamental ideals that informed this piece of the counterculture in the ’60s were a few things. One was a great distrust of vertical institutions, a great distrust of the Military or industry and all the rest. But also a great faith in technology, an enormous faith in technology. So what you have from that is a great desire to avoid any institutional governance, any traditional top down governance, and also a drive to increase access to technology.

And, when you sort of put those things together, you end up with something basically like an ideology that has this faith in technology, that has this distrust in institutions, but what is more, believes that, if you just make universally accessible powerful technology, then these people who have access to it, acting again as individuals looking to express themselves creatively, will, in aggregate, just like the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market, generate social goods. That’s the conviction. That’s the idea of the Whole Earth Catalogue, that we don’t need in government—we don’t need any plan. We don’t need anyone in charge. We don’t need any policy. We need access to tools, and everyone will create from them, and good things will happen.

On the Wisdom of Crowds:

THOMAS MALABY: And one of the things that comes out of those arguments is it becomes very important when actually the rubber meets the road and you’re trying to run a company like Linden Lab, the devil is in the detail of what is the mechanism. All right. So now we all believe, we have a conviction that this kind of collective wisdom is what should guide our company. It will be a better guide to our company than any charismatic CEO, than any traditional bureaucratic structure. That was the idea at the time. But what’s the mechanism? How can you possibly tap into that collective wisdom in a reliable way? So those books were kind of in the background there. And then what you saw frequently around Linden Lab, not just for themselves, but also for Second Life, were attempts to contrive, through technology, often game like systems that would incent participation so that the people participating in them would each generate certain kinds of results and outcomes, and that, in aggregate, those results and outcomes would divine, they would reveal what the collective wisdom was.

The best example is the chess ranking algorithm, and I use it frequently, but it’s too perfect to avoid. They had recently moved from an older system of organizing their work called Achievements and Objectives to putting all of the tasks that everyone in the company was doing into JIRA, their software management development tool. And, of course, actually not all tasks could be in JIRA, but that’s probable a conversation for another day. But the mandate was that all would be in JIRA. So then this has thousands of tasks in JIRA. Well, this strikes Rosedale as an opportunity to take advantage. You’ve got technology, and everyone has access to it. This is a chance to find a mechanism through which we can actually tap into the wisdom of crowds.

So they tried voting on tasks. So the idea was, all these tasks are there, why don’t people vote on the ones they think are the most important. But it’s very revealing that a straight ahead vote was not acceptable around Linden Lab. It created too many social effects. Again, think back to that notion of the individual with access to technology seeking to master that technology. That particular notion of a gamer, really. The social lobbying, vote lobbying and talking up your task to get votes, that struck them as really distasteful. That’s not what they wanted. They didn’t want the social. They wanted the aggregate individual. So they programmed a chess ranking algorithm behind the scenes.

There’s a web page that all employees were told to go to, and it would bring up two tasks for you, two tasks from these thousands of JIRA tasks, and you would pick which one you thought was more important, and you were effectively picking the winner of a chess game between these tests. So then, in aggregate, because of the way the chess ranking algorithm works and it’s famous for it, it would, after a bunch of people doing this ten times a day for several days, it would generate an emergent ranking of what the most important tasks were, the most important, the least important for the company. At least that was the theory. But it wasn’t legitimate.

When you looked at the list, when you saw what was on the top, it didn’t ring true socially so it was abandoned, and other attempts were made. But that’s the way they were trying to govern themselves because all of these other more familiar forms of governance were unavailable to them because they were subscribing to that particular set of ideas. So the Surowiecki and the Malone were very much a part of the foundation of that.

A full transcript of the show is available on SlideShare.