It’s common for academics to bring early drafts to conferences, and to warn readers that the papers shouldn’t be quoted or cited, and that indeed the author may well change his mind. That said, this author’s note from Dan Hunter and Greg Lastowka on their paper Virtual Crimes is unusually robust:
Important Note: This is a very preliminary draft, reflecting certain unresolved and undisclosed disagreements between the two authors and subject to complete and unequivocal disclaimer by both. We warn you only once that Lord Nagafen WILL STRIKE YOU DEAD if you so much as think about citing this or using this as an account of what we think. Additionally, the authors expressly reserve the right to seek redress against any such offenders by the well-established common law procedures of torture, ordeal, and trial by combat
So I’m sitting here listening to people describing how they are building in all the ugliest features of existing intellectual property (IP) rights into various virtual worlds. The big advance the folks at There.com are touting is not that they’ve decided to use, or impose, a better set of rules but rather that they’ll allow player-designers to claim ownership for the virtual items they design. Of course, to enable and enforce a constellation of intellectual property rights, you need a means of tagging the IP rights status of every virtual item, so they’ve built-in a set of tags that go with every item that identify the IP rights assigned by the item’s creator.
The first obvious question, asked eloquently by Yale’s Yochai Benkler, is why on earth anyone would choose to reproduce (not to mention make more binding) all the most objectionable features of a near-pathological legal system? Why not try to build something that encourages sharing? I think part of the answer is that the colonizers of virtual spaces are doing what colonists usually do: bringing their intellectual baggage with them. Another part of the answer is that some of the designers see the tagging and enforcement of IP as part of their business model - it allows them to have and protect proprietary content, maybe to tax in-game transactions someday, and to have something to offer the owners of external IP rights who might otherwise get litigious. The designers’ answer was that they are enabling the Creative Commons licenses in addition to more traditional options, and that they expect most participants to pick those, so it will all/mostly come out alright in the end.
And then I had a Really Worrying Idea. The discourse here tends to discuss Virtual Worlds as either, 1) important new phenomena in themselves (socially or commercially); or 2) social spaces that may create new relationships that might spill over into the real world.
In the paper Caroline and I wrote, that I’ll be presenting later in the conference, we argue that there’s a third view, that the Virtual Worlds could be used as testbeds for legal rules. But what if our vision is too modest? What if the really significant vew is a fourth view, that the virtual worlds are (unintentional) testbeds for new technologies of tagging and control? After all, in real life people are testing and (secretly) deploying RFID systems that allow them to tag and trace consumer purchases. It’s only a matter of time before it’s technically feasible to track and trace everything we have.
So, now I have a dystopian vision to balance some of the enthusiasm here. Worryingly, I find it more plausible.
I’m not going to blog the conference if only because I don’t type fast enough. And I gather some other people may do so. But I’ll try to post some notes now and then.
Learned: The State of Play conference is a sell-out. In addition to the academic crowd there are lot of people involved in designing the games, or in the constellation of ancillary industries that are springing up around the games (e.g. designing stuff for the avatars, and selling it; or doing things which rely on the games or the game engines, like making movies or staging online art shows).
Learned: The level on enthusiasm among massively multiplayer online game-makers and users is as high as anything you could have found in the early days of the dot-com bubble. “This is our Woodstock” one of them told me earnestly. And the level of idealism is almost as high: many of the people designing games see themselves as enabling self-expression and creating spaces in which new social linkages and new spontaneous forms of bottom-up social organization. But there’s more of the social linkages than social organization.
Learned: In virtual worlds, the aphorism “the clothes make the man” is a lot more true than in real life.
Re-Learned: Game designers worry a lot about not discouraging the customers. This imposes massive constraints on their ability to address resource and skill inflation. And that can hurt the gameplay….
Learned: From the game designer perspective, the player-killers have much more stamina than the folks who try to settle and build something. The barbarians just don’t mind getting killed, and come back again and again (indeed, the barbarians get highly organized, form guilds or factions, and attack and re-attack, until civilization is destroyed). Even when the people who have taken the time to build something and created a community around are able to organize to defend it, they don’t have the staying power: the experience of having to fight all the time to preserve your tavern or your art gallery is juts too wearing on the soul, and eventually they give up.
Re-Learned: The level of legal sophistication among the people who build and code things is basically random. Some of the people doing some of the cutest things are going to have very high legal bills Real Soon Now.
Learned: Some Virtual Worlds are drifting in the direction of being Virtual Malls. There’s probably money in that, but may co-exist uneasily with the idealists.
There are things I learn from traveling, and things I re-learn.
Learned: MIA — never good at the best of times — has managed to get worse. In order to serve the herding needs of the security services, you now have to walk three times as far to get to low-numbered “C” gates … which is where the flights to NY leave from. It now feels even more like Laguardia at its worst.
Re-Learned: When we’re having lovely weather in Miami, the rest of the country, is having seriously crummy weather. Example: my flight to NY started its decent to JFK, only to abort rather suddenly. Seems the winds were gusting at 70 MPH, which is too much. So we got diverted to Baltimore to re-fuel before trying again.
Re-learned: NY streets are a lot cleaner than the NY of my childhood memories.
Learned: The conference hotel looks out onto the site of the World Trade Center. It’s even more depressing that I would have thought. It feels very odd to look down from the 52nd floor onto the small crowd milling about outside the fence.