What if virtual worlds, no matter their purposes, narratives, unique details, and other variations, could be linked? What if they had borders between them, keeping the right stuff in its place, but in other ways being permeable?
I am in the process of revising my paper, “Sheriffs and Vigilantes of the Cyber-Frontier: Justice within Virtual Worlds,” and have also just read Cory Ondrejka’s essay, “Escaping the Gilded Cage: User-Created Content and Building the Metaverse.” In the paper, I elaborate on “interration,” a process proposed by Ed Castronova, and expanded by Jack Balkin. Essentially, it would make new legally recognized jurisdictions out of virtual worlds, complete with proper articles of “interration,” principles of accountability, and formal limits on liability. It would do to virtual worlds what incorporation does for entrepreneurs and businesses.
Ondrejka, in his essay, suggests how to make the Metaverse an actuality. The Metaverse was a complete virtual world in Neal Stephenson’s phenomenal novel, “Snow Crash.” It should be noted that Cory Ondrejka is one of the head honchos at Linden Labs, creators of Second Life – a bona fide attempt at the Metaverse.
What I wonder is this:
What if the Metaverse, rather than a single massive virtual world like Second Life, were a set of tools and protocols that linked virtual worlds together? Just as the Internet is not the World Wide Web, but the set of tools and protocols connecting the Web, e-mail, file transfers, Usenet, and many others, the Metaverse would be the collection of interfaces between the virtual worlds.
What does this mean for interration?
It would make individual virtual worlds into nations, states, provinces, territories, etc., of the Metaverse, complete with border rules. You could travel from Everquest into The Sims, but could not use your weapons there. And you could travel from Second Life into World of Warcraft, but could not bring in creations from Second Life that would unfairly advantage your character in WoW – at least not without some sort of tariff or exchange being applied.
Anyway, just a thought for now. What do you think?
Loading ...
Well, my initial reaction is to ask, “Why?” Why would we want to do this? Is there a benefit to the visitors of/players in these virtual worlds? This is not my area by any means, so it is quite possible that I’m just missing something here.
Pingback: weblawg.net: Information Society through the Prism of Law » Blog Archive » On Virtual Travel
Good question, and especially interesting for your choice of words, K. A “benefit”? Depends how you determine what constitutes a benefit. Much of the legal scholarship looks at benefits in terms of pecuniary details. Much of sociological theory deals with political and social power as benefits in addition to or instead of pecuniary gains.
I’m defining it very loosely: the benefit to the player that can be gained is anything that the player considers to be a benefit. So, to the list of pecuniary, political, and social benefits, I am adding pleasure, experience, and the opportunity to be curious and explore. Anyway, more detail in the follow-up post, linked to below in the “trackback.”