Forthcoming in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Dr. D. Linda Gar­cia and I are excited about a paper we recently sub­mit­ted to the Jour­nal of Vir­tual Worlds Research, enti­tled “Syn­thetic Excel­lence: Stan­dards, Play, and Unin­tended Out­comes.” As the first co-authored paper I’ve ever par­tic­i­pated in, it was a chal­leng­ing paper to write. The paper’s inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach made for a lot of great con­ver­sa­tions and a lot of puz­zled late-night phone calls. But I think it was worth the effort. Here’s a lengthy abstract:

…While sup­port­ing the over­all goal of inter­op­er­abil­ity, this paper pro­vides a cau­tion­ary note. It argues that the value of stan­dards is con­tex­tu­ally based. Thus, for exam­ple, while inter­op­er­abil­ity may be highly valu­able in a purely economic/commercial con­text, it might, in fact, engen­der some unin­tended, neg­a­tive con­se­quences in the polit­i­cal and cul­tural realms. On this basis, the paper con­tends that, as stan­dards efforts become increas­ingly focused on the upper lay­ers of the Inter­net, care should be taken to assure that appro­pri­ate met­rics be adopted to deter­mine the costs and ben­e­fits of these stan­dards with respect to other realms of life.

We argue that such faith in the pre­dictable out­comes of stan­dards betrays a ten­dency both to think of vir­tual worlds as the inten­tional out­come of ratio­nal design, as well as to mis­ap­pre­hend the roles of diver­sity and play in dis­crete environments.

Employ­ing an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach, this paper takes a first step in explor­ing these issues. Focus­ing on the highest-level appli­ca­tions in par­tic­u­lar, it exam­ines cur­rent efforts to cre­ate stan­dards across vir­tual worlds, using mate­r­ial from the MPEG-V work­ing group as a case study. Advo­cates for these stan­dards fore­see clear eco­nomic ben­e­fits for pro­duc­ers and main­tain­ers of vir­tual worlds, as well as for their inhab­i­tants (Sivan 2008). We argue that such faith in the pre­dictable out­comes of stan­dards betrays a ten­dency both to think of vir­tual worlds as the inten­tional out­come of ratio­nal design, as well as to mis­ap­pre­hend the roles of diver­sity and play in dis­crete envi­ron­ments. We ques­tion this nar­row eco­nomic per­spec­tive. Argu­ing that a meta­verse — like all worlds — is highly com­plex, we con­tend that vir­tual world stan­dards — rang­ing from EULAs to the soft­ware code itself — can only beget unpre­dictable out­comes, which will not only affect rela­tion­ships between worlds, but inevitably within com­mu­ni­ties. To iden­tify the costs and ben­e­fits of stan­dards in these com­plex envi­ron­ments, all of these rela­tion­ships must be con­sid­ered (Steinkuehler, 2004). As impor­tantly, we argue that vir­tual diver­sity, like bio­log­i­cal vari­ety, is inher­ently ben­e­fi­cial to users of syn­thetic worlds. To real­ize the ben­e­fits of what Sutton-Smith (1997) calls “the poten­ti­a­tion of adap­tive vari­abil­ity,” we con­tend that what is needed is not stan­dards across vir­tual worlds but rather a broad diver­sity of syn­thetic, dis­crete ecosystems.

To make our case, we pro­ceed as fol­lows. First, we char­ac­ter­ize stan­dards and describe their role in soci­ety from the per­spec­tive of com­plex adap­tive sys­tems. Sec­ond, we look at how — from an his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive — for­mal stan­dards and stan­dard set­ting has evolved, empha­siz­ing their link to the ascent of tech­no­log­i­cal arti­facts with the con­se­quence that stan­dards devel­op­ment con­cerns have gen­er­ally been skewed towards rel­a­tively nar­row eco­nomic cri­te­ria such as cost, com­pet­i­tive­ness, and effi­ciency. Next, focus­ing on the case of MPEG-V, we show how this trend is being repli­cated today with respect to the devel­op­ment of stan­dards for vir­tual worlds. This, we con­clude, is an alarm­ing trend, which could give rise to a num­ber of unfor­tu­nate and unfore­seen con­se­quences. To make this point, we look at the unique (some might say sacred) role of games in the realm of cul­ture, which allow mankind to both gen­er­ate and adapt to a chang­ing envi­ron­ment. We con­clude that design­ing play envi­ron­ments, based solely on eco­nomic cri­te­ria, might seri­ously under­mine the inno­v­a­tive and adap­tive role of play as well as the evo­lu­tion of diverse cultures..