This is the first part of a three-part post that examines potential aspects of a future Virtual Web experience. Part 1: Reshaping the ego for the Virtual Web makes the case for the essentials of self and a review of the current phenomena of the Social Web to conjecture what might take shape and work well in any virtual successor. Part 2: Virtual druthers: social union of games and Web discusses asset management and offers final a list of 15 salient aspects and why I feel each is something to be considered for a successful offering. Part 3: Virtual contenders is a list of some of the major virtual words, current and future, and how I feel they stack up against the former arguments.
I think if one were to boil it down to essentials, I would consider the cornerstone features of the existing Social Web to be ego, anonymity, and identification; yes, the last two are contradictory. If correct in this assessment, then many of the current crop of virtual worlds are lacking in one or more aspects.
Ego
Ego or the extension of self, I feel, is the most important consideration. Avatar creation and use as the foundation of the virtual experience is a given. But it seems that some existing purveyors of virtual worlds fail to realize the significance of the avatar, feeling that the function and use of the virtual space is paramount and what engages a user most. Many as well fail to realize that there are other aspects of self beyond the embodiment of an avatar. I think in the years to come, in the process of weeding that will decide which virtual worlds persist and which die, that a failure to engage our egos will be the significant cause of most failures.
Why do I think this? I would ask you, where have many of the recent most popular innovations in the current Web 2.0 changes taken place? Not just in the filtered personalized web experience crafted to our own tastes and needs, but in the expression of a more social Web. One sees this extension of self into the heretofore anonymous Web via mechanisms like blogs, wikis, YouTube, Myspace, Flickr, Facebook. What social experiments like Second Life, and even social games like World of Warcraft or Everquest, show us is that a significant amount of energy, time, and money can and will be expended on the personalization and embellishment of personal projection. When you couple the growth phenomena of the social aspects of the Web conjoined with the energies invested in avatar and personal space embellishment, any solution that ignores the emotional and social appeal of ego extension in virtual realms will fail to engage. Yes, such virtual worlds might be useful; they might allow for activities such as business, games, and education, yet they will fail to register on an emotional level if they lack the ability to project and maintain aspects of self. I pose that any such will fail to become the virtual equivalent of the existing Web.
People might maintain that the cited are merely examples of well-crafted activity spaces. That it is indeed the function or activity of the space that counts most. That is partly correct. As we shall see in Part 3, the lack of engaging activities is another failure of some virtual vendors. If not corrected, any space, virtual or not, that fails to engage enough users to achieve a critical mass to make it stand out amongst its competitors will ultimately fail. And, as shown by the rapidly changing lineup of leaders in the Social Web, users are quite willing and likely to abandon one purveyor for another who does the job better in their eyes. There is no loyalty to an activity. But there is loyalty to one's self and one’s community, including the virtual.
The bulk of people engaged in the spaces that comprise the Social Web and virtual worlds are drawn to the activities that these places provide. When we consider that education, business, and socialization are just activities, as much as any that can take place inside of MMO games, then we can define activity itself as the definition of both the Social Web and virtual space. Success is defined by use and subscription fees and is a result of how well the vendor provided for the needs of the users to participate in the activity. But, once again, there is no loyalty to an activity. As we have seen in chat clients, the ongoing battle between Myspace and Facebook, and with more and more MMO games coming up to challenge the market dominance and revenue of World of Warcraft, that activity itself can be outdone.
The resistance to change for users of such spaces does not come along the merits of activities but on how much of one's personal and perceived social network stays, or migrates to the new space. Consider MMO games, which are more like other virtual worlds; then add in the investment and emotional bond to one’s avatar self – nonexistent for some, but highly important for others. Both of these factors provide a sort of social glue that brings traction to the space, beyond the merits of its activity. Challenging activity spaces must bring either a much better mechanism for the activity function, or offer attractive new features to create a lot of initial interest. Since these spaces are mostly proprietary, there are no guarantees that one's existing social network will also make a conversion and very little likelihood that any avatar investment will survive the transition. And though some users do participate in multiple spaces along the same kind of activity, hoping to preserve as well as adapt, given a finite amount of time, there is usually a favorite that wins out in the end.
These transitions are very expensive. Users are faced with some sacrifice of themselves, either social contacts who are unwilling to migrate, or their own avatar investment. Businesses must constantly try to reshape their offerings to attract or retain users, or ascertain who to partner with. Process improvements are found but the energy expenditure, wasted efforts, and social dissatisfaction that results are the reason why there will be pressure to transform what are likely to be initial virtual world empires into a comprehensive virtual solution akin to the Web.
The single factor most unique to virtual worlds is the abstraction of ego into visible forms. The use of icons in forums and movies on video share sites in the current Social Web is a hint that our desire to present a form to the world at large is ever-most. Virtual world vendors who embrace and understand this need for self expression will have clear advantages over their competitors. They will enjoy a form of associative loyalty possibly, probably I would say, more powerful than the social glue provided by personal networks. Persistence and the time it takes to craft those visible forms of ego create by their very nature an investment in the space. More choices, more variety, implies more time, and hence more association with those forms, with more implied loyalty therefore to the space that houses them. Though activity will be the draw that brings the crowds, it will be the permutations and persistence of ego, as well as social networks, that will help retain them. We have already seen this in current MMO games; there is no reason not to expect the same from other virtual worlds.
When I speak of persistence of ego, I’m actually referring to two abstracts of oneself: space (static) and avatar (dynamic). Personal virtual space, be it a house, a castle, a starship, are analogous to blogs, online photo albums, and Myspace pages. Commercial virtual spaces, stores, kiosks, and vending machines have the same relation to commercial web sites with less of their actual use currently, due to lack of mechanisms and security concerns. So to say that a future virtual world should maintain persistent space is simply to ask one to rethink existing Web spaces in three-dimensional terms. Comparing Web and virtual spaces, each type of presence can have visitors; each demonstrates something about the owner in its design and contents; each can be the instigator of social or business contact and therefore contains the potential to drive interaction or commerce; each seeks to engage. The leap to understanding this concept is not hard to reach. It's only left to ask if the purveyor of the virtual world feels that that a mechanism to offer and maintain personal space is worth the overhead of maintenance and creation. I suggest that they should consider such worthwhile, if any of the success of the Social Web is valid. Where virtual worlds surpass existing Web 2.0 mechanisms is in the level of immersion.
The projection of self into a definable form is new to virtual worlds and does not have a correlation to the existing Web. Heretofore, we interacted directly with the Web via point, click and URL. Now, in virtual terms, we must craft a visible intermediary, an avatar, that represents us. On the one hand, this can be incredibly freeing in that we can rethink ourselves and present ourselves, not as how we might seem, but how we wish to be seen as. The importance of this projection to how others interact with us is not lost on anyone who has spent significant time in a world like Second Life, one that allows for infinite avatar permutation. However, most other worlds, as can be seen in Part 3, offer only limited options when crafting a concept of self. For this reason, though they might succeed on other levels of entertainment, security or ease of use, and might enjoy initial success, they will ultimately be susceptible to being supplanted by a later offering that connects more personally with the user. Furthermore, none of these worlds as yet offers the ability to translate in any way avatar, space, or any form of virtual self-expression over to another offering. They are each closed systems vying for dominance and yet unable or unwilling to register that the ultimate best use, like the current Web, is the ability to interlink and travel everywhere, in a form of one's own choosing.
Anonymity and identification
Virtual worlds present some significant challenges and differences in how we engage each other. Perception is everything, at least at first. Avatars can and will be as like or unlike to ourselves as we wish, limited only to the choices inherent in the creation system offered by the space vendor. Sometimes these choices are only offered at onset upon creation of the avatar, aspects being fixed, partly or in whole, thereafter. In other systems, they are exchangeable at will for any form anytime. A person might be represented as a single avatar or have multiple representations. The summation is that we can never be sure of whom we are dealing with when engaged with another person’s avatar. We can only see them as they wish to be seen, just as they see us for how we wish to be seen, something very new and very powerful for the virtual experience that separates it from other forms of interaction that have come before.
But as freeing as this is to some, it can be extremely frustrating to others. Harping back to that point of being social animals, we have evolved to using the appearance of others to help us understand how to engage each other. It's in the very nature of our personal dealings, whether we understand or acknowledge it or not. Studies have been shown where people tend to react to avatars as if their own avatar and the others were in fact real, using the same visual cues they would have in real life. Aspects of gender, age, attractiveness, height, or weight all carry preconceptions. But there is no guarantee any longer that any such appearances have any true foundation with the person behind the masque. Right or wrong, true or misconceived, many people feel that ethnicity, clothing, hairstyle, expressions and body language might offer them clues to such things as culture, class, nationality, or orientation and might use such clues to govern their interchanges. In the virtual setting, some of these are either missing or boiled down to very limited animations. Just as has often occurred when misreading the intention behind written text, devoid of the body cues that embellished the meaning, there is frustration and apprehension that a misreading will lead to a misunderstanding, or that one is never free to fully express oneself fully given the lack of verification and a potential for deception.
And, aside for some virtual words built around an activity or activity theme, the two most current being social and gaming, where appearance is taken in context, there is a challenge and affront to some when it comes to dealing with the more outrageous or fantastical forms that people choose to adopt. For example, except for worlds such as Club Penguin where such are the norm, some people find that interacting with an animal avatar is just too silly or disconcerting. There might be cultural issues as well. As shown in Mary Chase's play, not everyone has Elwood P. Dowd's capacity to accept and interact with a six-foot tall anthropomorphic rabbit as an equal. Perhaps it is more with the issue of equality when examined in purely social settings – and having fantastic shapes just makes this more apparent. Or perhaps it is or is also the inability to know when to say what that people really have issue with. And in virtual worlds, there is a possibility of encountering many Harveys along the way.
For certain activities, such as business, and for legal considerations in both social and business dealings, anonymity is anathema. At some point, regardless of surface anonymity, there must be a way to effectively engage the real person's identification verification and payment mechanisms to both ensure payment as well as receipt of goods and services. That usually means a name, and address, and other identifiers along the way. And when such transactions fail, to know that there are ramifications and avenues of redress available to users, helps foster economic security. Go-betweens such as PayPal and vendors such as Linden Lab help insulate the identities from the transaction, but for real commerce and use to ensue, no one doubts that there must be a way to effectively engage parties directly.
In other situations, it is equally important to know the true nature of the person behind the avatar. If a virtual world is used as a distance-negating tool for meetings and negotiations, someone who thought he was dealing with an adult for a real world auto sale would be very disconcerted if he were to find out that the adult person he thought he was making a case to was actually a precocious seven year old, wasting his valuable time. Conversely, a young child who found a friend elsewhere in the world to share thoughts and personal confidences with might be shocked, as would their horrified parents, to find out that the child avatar on the other end was in reality an adult pedophile milking the child for information. So used are we to judging people in the context of how they appear, that there is a real danger for misuse beyond the extent of embarrassment.
These are all valid and compelling arguments, along with so many others, for the need for transparency. But there are others just as valid and compelling for the need for anonymity. Anonymity is one of the reasons why the Web and Social Web have seen such success to date. Anonymity allows for safe socialization and exploration. Many women for instance like the safer nature of virtual social interaction in going to new scenes and not having to deal with the repercussions of aggressive or unwanted attention; it has given them more control. People like to sometimes go shopping or check out trade shows without having to worry about being pestered in their real life with annoying offers. Children are finding that they can be team leaders in some activity spaces, even directing unknowing adults, something that would never happen in real world groups, and thus fostering confidence in their own abilities and leadership. People with disabilities can have others not focus on the first thing that comes to mind when seeing them in real life and can sometimes find more acceptance in online worlds where all looks are equal essentially. And for some activities, such as games and roleplaying, some people just like to keep that aspect of their lives private without perceived repercussions of others knowing that they cavort as an elf archer in a fantasy game some eves – all of which helps drive business for vendors of such.
Granted, there are serious negative aspects to these as well. Social stagnation, excessive distraction and dependence on virtual worlds, failure in general to engage the real world are all real concerns that people need address. But my issue is not to judge the validity and use of virtual worlds but to offer thoughts on how to best apply them. Change is a constant and all socially impacting technologies are going to require people to reassess their values and try to reapply these to the new challenges faced by work and interaction with these tools.
One of the ways we can and should think about how to best apply the uses of the virtual world in relation to anonymous versus identified/verified is to consider that any Virtual Web is just an extension of the Web, which itself is just an extension of the real world, encapsulated and drawn together by this new electronic phenomena. I'll make more of a case for this in Part 2, but appearance and identity should be thought of as two aspects, linked, but distinct. Just as we walk around the world dressed how we wish to be, our identities aren't (hopefully) demanded of us on every turn of the corner. But when we wish to engage our environment, say to purchase something or prove our qualifications to enter a space or engage an activity, then we must provide corroborating identification and means. The same is true of the Web. We are essentially anonymous and we can even represent ourselves as something other than the truth to some extent, but when presented with the need to function, we must present the validated means of access or payment. And function is the key word here. The function of engaging a virtual space in a social or social activity context is not the same as conducting business. They are two distinct uses of a virtual space. And when such a space contains both or all types of activity, such as a projected Virtual Web, then it must allow for all uses of that space.
Therefore, when conducting business or verification for access, I argue that there should be mechanisms for validating an identity that would not be tied to displayed name or surface appearance of an avatar. There is just no need for it. Validation, identity, payment, should all be "subcutaneous" aspects of an avatar account, accessible when needed, but unseen and inaccessible to others when not. It’s not much different than my changing clothes (going to a costume party or fishing even) but always carrying my wallet. Or in a Web sense, just shopping the Web but when I see something that strikes my fancy, I either have my credit card or I make use of the handy PayPal button. Until that point, they shouldn't know or care who I am (sorry to the marketing folks but I’m on the side of anonymity) until the point that I decide to buy.
The most likely aspect I see is that, unless a governing body, like the Web 3D Consortium, is able to shepherd all venues to a universal and interchangeable linked standard, that there will likely be many successful but mutually exclusive virtual worlds, each governed around an activity or set of activities. If there is to be a future encompassing Virtual Web, it will be more likely drawn from the most successful aspects of these offerings. Or, less likely, it will be a single offering that has captured the market. I'll examine some of these in Part 3. The sooner we can see the realization of a universal Virtual Web, the sooner we can realize the advantages that such a space will engender, as well as confront the challenges that it will bring. I'll go over the 15 core aspects that I would like to see included in Part 2.
I think if one were to boil it down to essentials, I would consider the cornerstone features of the existing Social Web to be ego, anonymity, and identification; yes, the last two are contradictory. If correct in this assessment, then many of the current crop of virtual worlds are lacking in one or more aspects.
Ego
Ego or the extension of self, I feel, is the most important consideration. Avatar creation and use as the foundation of the virtual experience is a given. But it seems that some existing purveyors of virtual worlds fail to realize the significance of the avatar, feeling that the function and use of the virtual space is paramount and what engages a user most. Many as well fail to realize that there are other aspects of self beyond the embodiment of an avatar. I think in the years to come, in the process of weeding that will decide which virtual worlds persist and which die, that a failure to engage our egos will be the significant cause of most failures.
Why do I think this? I would ask you, where have many of the recent most popular innovations in the current Web 2.0 changes taken place? Not just in the filtered personalized web experience crafted to our own tastes and needs, but in the expression of a more social Web. One sees this extension of self into the heretofore anonymous Web via mechanisms like blogs, wikis, YouTube, Myspace, Flickr, Facebook. What social experiments like Second Life, and even social games like World of Warcraft or Everquest, show us is that a significant amount of energy, time, and money can and will be expended on the personalization and embellishment of personal projection. When you couple the growth phenomena of the social aspects of the Web conjoined with the energies invested in avatar and personal space embellishment, any solution that ignores the emotional and social appeal of ego extension in virtual realms will fail to engage. Yes, such virtual worlds might be useful; they might allow for activities such as business, games, and education, yet they will fail to register on an emotional level if they lack the ability to project and maintain aspects of self. I pose that any such will fail to become the virtual equivalent of the existing Web.
People might maintain that the cited are merely examples of well-crafted activity spaces. That it is indeed the function or activity of the space that counts most. That is partly correct. As we shall see in Part 3, the lack of engaging activities is another failure of some virtual vendors. If not corrected, any space, virtual or not, that fails to engage enough users to achieve a critical mass to make it stand out amongst its competitors will ultimately fail. And, as shown by the rapidly changing lineup of leaders in the Social Web, users are quite willing and likely to abandon one purveyor for another who does the job better in their eyes. There is no loyalty to an activity. But there is loyalty to one's self and one’s community, including the virtual.
The bulk of people engaged in the spaces that comprise the Social Web and virtual worlds are drawn to the activities that these places provide. When we consider that education, business, and socialization are just activities, as much as any that can take place inside of MMO games, then we can define activity itself as the definition of both the Social Web and virtual space. Success is defined by use and subscription fees and is a result of how well the vendor provided for the needs of the users to participate in the activity. But, once again, there is no loyalty to an activity. As we have seen in chat clients, the ongoing battle between Myspace and Facebook, and with more and more MMO games coming up to challenge the market dominance and revenue of World of Warcraft, that activity itself can be outdone.
The resistance to change for users of such spaces does not come along the merits of activities but on how much of one's personal and perceived social network stays, or migrates to the new space. Consider MMO games, which are more like other virtual worlds; then add in the investment and emotional bond to one’s avatar self – nonexistent for some, but highly important for others. Both of these factors provide a sort of social glue that brings traction to the space, beyond the merits of its activity. Challenging activity spaces must bring either a much better mechanism for the activity function, or offer attractive new features to create a lot of initial interest. Since these spaces are mostly proprietary, there are no guarantees that one's existing social network will also make a conversion and very little likelihood that any avatar investment will survive the transition. And though some users do participate in multiple spaces along the same kind of activity, hoping to preserve as well as adapt, given a finite amount of time, there is usually a favorite that wins out in the end.
These transitions are very expensive. Users are faced with some sacrifice of themselves, either social contacts who are unwilling to migrate, or their own avatar investment. Businesses must constantly try to reshape their offerings to attract or retain users, or ascertain who to partner with. Process improvements are found but the energy expenditure, wasted efforts, and social dissatisfaction that results are the reason why there will be pressure to transform what are likely to be initial virtual world empires into a comprehensive virtual solution akin to the Web.
The single factor most unique to virtual worlds is the abstraction of ego into visible forms. The use of icons in forums and movies on video share sites in the current Social Web is a hint that our desire to present a form to the world at large is ever-most. Virtual world vendors who embrace and understand this need for self expression will have clear advantages over their competitors. They will enjoy a form of associative loyalty possibly, probably I would say, more powerful than the social glue provided by personal networks. Persistence and the time it takes to craft those visible forms of ego create by their very nature an investment in the space. More choices, more variety, implies more time, and hence more association with those forms, with more implied loyalty therefore to the space that houses them. Though activity will be the draw that brings the crowds, it will be the permutations and persistence of ego, as well as social networks, that will help retain them. We have already seen this in current MMO games; there is no reason not to expect the same from other virtual worlds.
When I speak of persistence of ego, I’m actually referring to two abstracts of oneself: space (static) and avatar (dynamic). Personal virtual space, be it a house, a castle, a starship, are analogous to blogs, online photo albums, and Myspace pages. Commercial virtual spaces, stores, kiosks, and vending machines have the same relation to commercial web sites with less of their actual use currently, due to lack of mechanisms and security concerns. So to say that a future virtual world should maintain persistent space is simply to ask one to rethink existing Web spaces in three-dimensional terms. Comparing Web and virtual spaces, each type of presence can have visitors; each demonstrates something about the owner in its design and contents; each can be the instigator of social or business contact and therefore contains the potential to drive interaction or commerce; each seeks to engage. The leap to understanding this concept is not hard to reach. It's only left to ask if the purveyor of the virtual world feels that that a mechanism to offer and maintain personal space is worth the overhead of maintenance and creation. I suggest that they should consider such worthwhile, if any of the success of the Social Web is valid. Where virtual worlds surpass existing Web 2.0 mechanisms is in the level of immersion.
The projection of self into a definable form is new to virtual worlds and does not have a correlation to the existing Web. Heretofore, we interacted directly with the Web via point, click and URL. Now, in virtual terms, we must craft a visible intermediary, an avatar, that represents us. On the one hand, this can be incredibly freeing in that we can rethink ourselves and present ourselves, not as how we might seem, but how we wish to be seen as. The importance of this projection to how others interact with us is not lost on anyone who has spent significant time in a world like Second Life, one that allows for infinite avatar permutation. However, most other worlds, as can be seen in Part 3, offer only limited options when crafting a concept of self. For this reason, though they might succeed on other levels of entertainment, security or ease of use, and might enjoy initial success, they will ultimately be susceptible to being supplanted by a later offering that connects more personally with the user. Furthermore, none of these worlds as yet offers the ability to translate in any way avatar, space, or any form of virtual self-expression over to another offering. They are each closed systems vying for dominance and yet unable or unwilling to register that the ultimate best use, like the current Web, is the ability to interlink and travel everywhere, in a form of one's own choosing.
Anonymity and identification
Virtual worlds present some significant challenges and differences in how we engage each other. Perception is everything, at least at first. Avatars can and will be as like or unlike to ourselves as we wish, limited only to the choices inherent in the creation system offered by the space vendor. Sometimes these choices are only offered at onset upon creation of the avatar, aspects being fixed, partly or in whole, thereafter. In other systems, they are exchangeable at will for any form anytime. A person might be represented as a single avatar or have multiple representations. The summation is that we can never be sure of whom we are dealing with when engaged with another person’s avatar. We can only see them as they wish to be seen, just as they see us for how we wish to be seen, something very new and very powerful for the virtual experience that separates it from other forms of interaction that have come before.
But as freeing as this is to some, it can be extremely frustrating to others. Harping back to that point of being social animals, we have evolved to using the appearance of others to help us understand how to engage each other. It's in the very nature of our personal dealings, whether we understand or acknowledge it or not. Studies have been shown where people tend to react to avatars as if their own avatar and the others were in fact real, using the same visual cues they would have in real life. Aspects of gender, age, attractiveness, height, or weight all carry preconceptions. But there is no guarantee any longer that any such appearances have any true foundation with the person behind the masque. Right or wrong, true or misconceived, many people feel that ethnicity, clothing, hairstyle, expressions and body language might offer them clues to such things as culture, class, nationality, or orientation and might use such clues to govern their interchanges. In the virtual setting, some of these are either missing or boiled down to very limited animations. Just as has often occurred when misreading the intention behind written text, devoid of the body cues that embellished the meaning, there is frustration and apprehension that a misreading will lead to a misunderstanding, or that one is never free to fully express oneself fully given the lack of verification and a potential for deception.
And, aside for some virtual words built around an activity or activity theme, the two most current being social and gaming, where appearance is taken in context, there is a challenge and affront to some when it comes to dealing with the more outrageous or fantastical forms that people choose to adopt. For example, except for worlds such as Club Penguin where such are the norm, some people find that interacting with an animal avatar is just too silly or disconcerting. There might be cultural issues as well. As shown in Mary Chase's play, not everyone has Elwood P. Dowd's capacity to accept and interact with a six-foot tall anthropomorphic rabbit as an equal. Perhaps it is more with the issue of equality when examined in purely social settings – and having fantastic shapes just makes this more apparent. Or perhaps it is or is also the inability to know when to say what that people really have issue with. And in virtual worlds, there is a possibility of encountering many Harveys along the way.
For certain activities, such as business, and for legal considerations in both social and business dealings, anonymity is anathema. At some point, regardless of surface anonymity, there must be a way to effectively engage the real person's identification verification and payment mechanisms to both ensure payment as well as receipt of goods and services. That usually means a name, and address, and other identifiers along the way. And when such transactions fail, to know that there are ramifications and avenues of redress available to users, helps foster economic security. Go-betweens such as PayPal and vendors such as Linden Lab help insulate the identities from the transaction, but for real commerce and use to ensue, no one doubts that there must be a way to effectively engage parties directly.
In other situations, it is equally important to know the true nature of the person behind the avatar. If a virtual world is used as a distance-negating tool for meetings and negotiations, someone who thought he was dealing with an adult for a real world auto sale would be very disconcerted if he were to find out that the adult person he thought he was making a case to was actually a precocious seven year old, wasting his valuable time. Conversely, a young child who found a friend elsewhere in the world to share thoughts and personal confidences with might be shocked, as would their horrified parents, to find out that the child avatar on the other end was in reality an adult pedophile milking the child for information. So used are we to judging people in the context of how they appear, that there is a real danger for misuse beyond the extent of embarrassment.
These are all valid and compelling arguments, along with so many others, for the need for transparency. But there are others just as valid and compelling for the need for anonymity. Anonymity is one of the reasons why the Web and Social Web have seen such success to date. Anonymity allows for safe socialization and exploration. Many women for instance like the safer nature of virtual social interaction in going to new scenes and not having to deal with the repercussions of aggressive or unwanted attention; it has given them more control. People like to sometimes go shopping or check out trade shows without having to worry about being pestered in their real life with annoying offers. Children are finding that they can be team leaders in some activity spaces, even directing unknowing adults, something that would never happen in real world groups, and thus fostering confidence in their own abilities and leadership. People with disabilities can have others not focus on the first thing that comes to mind when seeing them in real life and can sometimes find more acceptance in online worlds where all looks are equal essentially. And for some activities, such as games and roleplaying, some people just like to keep that aspect of their lives private without perceived repercussions of others knowing that they cavort as an elf archer in a fantasy game some eves – all of which helps drive business for vendors of such.
Granted, there are serious negative aspects to these as well. Social stagnation, excessive distraction and dependence on virtual worlds, failure in general to engage the real world are all real concerns that people need address. But my issue is not to judge the validity and use of virtual worlds but to offer thoughts on how to best apply them. Change is a constant and all socially impacting technologies are going to require people to reassess their values and try to reapply these to the new challenges faced by work and interaction with these tools.
One of the ways we can and should think about how to best apply the uses of the virtual world in relation to anonymous versus identified/verified is to consider that any Virtual Web is just an extension of the Web, which itself is just an extension of the real world, encapsulated and drawn together by this new electronic phenomena. I'll make more of a case for this in Part 2, but appearance and identity should be thought of as two aspects, linked, but distinct. Just as we walk around the world dressed how we wish to be, our identities aren't (hopefully) demanded of us on every turn of the corner. But when we wish to engage our environment, say to purchase something or prove our qualifications to enter a space or engage an activity, then we must provide corroborating identification and means. The same is true of the Web. We are essentially anonymous and we can even represent ourselves as something other than the truth to some extent, but when presented with the need to function, we must present the validated means of access or payment. And function is the key word here. The function of engaging a virtual space in a social or social activity context is not the same as conducting business. They are two distinct uses of a virtual space. And when such a space contains both or all types of activity, such as a projected Virtual Web, then it must allow for all uses of that space.
Therefore, when conducting business or verification for access, I argue that there should be mechanisms for validating an identity that would not be tied to displayed name or surface appearance of an avatar. There is just no need for it. Validation, identity, payment, should all be "subcutaneous" aspects of an avatar account, accessible when needed, but unseen and inaccessible to others when not. It’s not much different than my changing clothes (going to a costume party or fishing even) but always carrying my wallet. Or in a Web sense, just shopping the Web but when I see something that strikes my fancy, I either have my credit card or I make use of the handy PayPal button. Until that point, they shouldn't know or care who I am (sorry to the marketing folks but I’m on the side of anonymity) until the point that I decide to buy.
The most likely aspect I see is that, unless a governing body, like the Web 3D Consortium, is able to shepherd all venues to a universal and interchangeable linked standard, that there will likely be many successful but mutually exclusive virtual worlds, each governed around an activity or set of activities. If there is to be a future encompassing Virtual Web, it will be more likely drawn from the most successful aspects of these offerings. Or, less likely, it will be a single offering that has captured the market. I'll examine some of these in Part 3. The sooner we can see the realization of a universal Virtual Web, the sooner we can realize the advantages that such a space will engender, as well as confront the challenges that it will bring. I'll go over the 15 core aspects that I would like to see included in Part 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment