OHHWW BANNED!

THAT used to happen more to me back in the old days – being at some place and WHAM someone bans you, over a misunderstanding, or a mistake, or just plain for being there. That is a very central feature of Second Life and nearly after five years of Second Life it can still hit you like a mallet. The place? One of those high-exposure porn places. The person? One Mystie Heart. The reason? I offered her (for free) some stairs, I wanted to help her!. She misinterpreted and thought I was spamming her for sales.

Those things happen.

It’s not important really, and I will probably have forgotten about it by tomorrow.  Well, maybe the day after, since I recommended the TBR to over a dozen friends, most of them people from 2005, 2006 and thereabouts, yanno, “real people”. But I find myself irate, very annoyed.

So what does that mean for virtual realities like Second Life in general? Well, a lot. The business model and entire philosophy of Second Life is based on land ownership, absolute governance and the right to ban. A land owner has complete control and can exert that on a whim. You can be in SL, build up a livelyhood, friends or intimate relationships that are in large part dependant on visiting a specific place (and develop an attachment to that place) and then the owner can revoke that right on some impulse and you will never receive any explanation.

Many beginners in Second Life have experienced this and were left dazed. It is the prime cause for drama and irritation, even fueds that last for months or years. Being in SL means having places you go to – take that away and you as a player are left locked out. For new players this can be a reason to leave SL.

Now fast forward a few decades and imagine how big these worlds could become.  Second Life right now is functionally rather small – an old avatar like mind involves over 10K  of “possession” (and I throw away a lot). I know avies with over 100K of possessions. Though most possessions are just duplicate registries for mass items, many items are unique or tweaked. Such an old avvie could involve over 100Mb of data. A sim involves between 10 and 50 Mb of data, which is about 15000 discrete objects or shapes over an area the size of a soccer field. World of warcraft is not much different, but a bit bigger in some areas and much smaller in others.

Take a high end graphics example such as Crysis, which may serve as the growth model for high-end mass-user virtual realities five years from now. This would be a reality much more detailed, more more emotionally involving and with more “story” than what SL currently entails. Imagine a full island along the philosophy of Crysis, through which you connect through a gigabit connection. That could be no more than five years away if you live in a big, affluent city.  Imagine a property owner managing such an estate, creating a complex story, interactivity, animations, socializing. You can create worlds that are pretty compelling, if not addictive.  People will be driven to really want certain things, commensurate with the talent of their land host. And the land host might wake up one day with PMS and say, sod off, I dont like the color of your hair.

The business model of Second Life is not something that is set as a standard for the future of all MMORPGs, but it is likely to be a strong hint of what’s in store. WoW does not have this model of freedom, and disallows individual expression. Eve allows a tiny bit more in some areas but a whole lot less in others – in Eve you don’t even have a proper avatar (yet). But it looks like “Blue Mars” will adopt the SL philosophy of owning land and creating a wide range of goods by end users. Again, a lot of opportunity of random wielding of power by individials, who can affect your emotional state as a user on a whim.

There is a legendary example of this mechanic, and it stems from Eve Online.

And that brings me to the nature of evil. In Eve and in the real world, much of the exlusion that goes on is a function of scarcity of goods. I would call this the Viking factor – if someone has something you want, you can use force to take it – something ranging from gold to livestock to cattle and (more recently) oil.

But in the virtual, the premium scarce good is attention. Mystie Heart runs a place that in Second Life and in doing so she is bothered endlessly, nonstop by people asking for stuff, asking for help, pestering her with questions, making advantage of her – andsoforth. Run across someone like that and you end up with indiscriminate tendencies towards dictatorship.

Last month I learned something about the potential of people to manage other people – The maximum of a network working together is about five or so people managed by a manager, and a maximum of one or two layers of depth of hands-on management. In the real world we can use contracts and laws and payment and punishment to enforce conformity. In the virtual that is very hard to sustain, and it does place a maximum on the capacity to delegate, and a very significant tax on person accessibility. Add to that you will have to run virtual busineses  through a keyboard (I am pretty sure Mystie won’t use voice) and a small window (a screen) and you have a horribly tight window to explain, use charisma, wield authority or conduct business. This leaves the effective maximum stable organization in Second Life very small, with a depth of one or two (barely any middle management likely) and an attention width of no more than five or so avies per person. An organization (or club) in second life becomes effectively more ruthless or unwieldy over 30 persons, especially if money or strong emotional interdependency is involved.

The result: Drama!

This is a very anarchic reality with very low potential to wage war, enact vengeance on the one hand, but very little ability to govern over hierarchies on the other. Sure, if you can change real world money into Lindens and use that to wield power, but for the same money you can get a whole lot more slavish devotion in the real world.

The key to unlocking this dilemma is automated systems. Imagine if Second Life had non player characters, run on Linden servers, NPCs you can give simple instruction (act as a bouncer) or more complex ones (go to location XYX, use subroutine ABC there, find object D, take it to ZYX, collect the results and return here).  The implementation of NPCs would have very hard to predict effects in Second Life but it would have *big* effects nonetheless.

What is my point? My point is that the ability of an avi to wield indiscriminate power is extremely limited. It is limited by available time, personal magnetism, money, land ownership.  If you have all those aplenty, you can lash out and cause true misery over others. Make virtual realities bigger, the capacity to intentionally cause this kind of misery might end up becoming a goal by itself. That is something that concerns me, since I had sufficient of that in the real world. It’s the reason I do not play Eve Online – Eve allows (or effectively compels) its player audience to resort to a kind of predation that has the capacity to seriously hurt.