An Exodus Recession?

“I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far future. But I didn’t think about the possibility that the term ‘virtual environment,’ in its economic meaning, might expand to environments as diverse as Hulu and Facebook. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction.”

…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..

The metaverse is emerging, through the increasing use of virtual world technologies that act as platforms for end-users to create, develop, and interact, expanding the realm of human cooperation, interaction, and creativity. The conference focus is scientific research on applications and developments of these metaverse platforms: Second Life, OpenSim, Open Croquet, Activeworlds, Open Source Metaverse, Project Wonderland, and others, providing a forum for the research community to present and discuss innovative approaches, techniques, processes, and research results.

For more information, see the JVWR site. (And be sure to check out their new issue — guest-edited by Mia and Mark and featuring, among others, a nice article by Burcu and a roundtable with amazing Sarah and brilliant Liz).