Ed Castronova proposes a legal rubric called interration, kind of like incorporation for virtual worlds. He divides all virtual/synthetic/online/artificial worlds into two categories: closed and open.
Closed worlds have no interaction with the outside world (Earth, real life, meat space, whatever you want to call it). Open worlds feed off the interaction between the two.
Castronova’s closed / open dichotomy has a problem: Even closed worlds’ membranes are semi-permeable. This ineluctable permeability, established through Lastowka & Hunter’s concept of the user-avatar cyborg, must be recognized and governed judiciously through the Charter of Interration, and through proper use of the End-User License Agreement (EULA).
Castronova’s closed / open world theory is predicated on seeing the cyberspace and meatspace dichotomy as clear, which it is not. The division between the two is governed by the Permeability Principle – an almost axiomatic theorem in my research that is essentially rooted in that cyborg concept put forward by Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter in “The Laws of the Virtual Worlds”. Let’s look at the cyborg concept, the permeable membrane between cyberspace and meatspace, and how that undoes Castronova’s neat dichotomy. Then we’ll see how EULAs can compensate.
First, the cyborg concept:
A cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is an organism enhanced by technological means in order to extend its capabilities beyond those ordained by nature. While we typically think of cyborgs in the Hollywood sense (e.g. Borg), there is no component of the definition that precludes the application of cyborg to people who, by way of the extension of the psyche we call the avatar, project themselves into electronic artificial worlds. The consequence of this is that the avatar and the user are inextricably linked: nothing done or felt by either is in isolation from the other.
Second, the permeable membrane between cyberspace and meatspace:
In subscribing to the “consensual hallucination” that is cyberspace, we locate it (or any of its constituent artificial worlds) as exclusive of and tangential to the offline natural world. Put another way, we see virtual worlds and the “real” world as spheres that touch but do not overlap. I believe that this is not so much a single tangential point of contact, but instead a compression and warping of both spheres at that place of contact. Thus they are not perfect spheres, touching at a single tangential point, but warped such that there are multiple contact points – for each user/avatar pair at a minimum, even is there is no other interaction – leading to an area of contact that forms a membrane between the two worlds. If a world were connected to another by only a single contact – a single user/avatar pair – perhaps that membrane would shrink to a single point, and exclusivity would be in the hands of that single tangent-causing individual. But that is not the case. There is an entire contact patch, and thus a membrane, and it is anything but opaque, fixed, solid, or otherwise impermeable.
The bidirectional psychological connection between user and avatar is undeniable. Just as economists and sociologists demonstrate that patterns emerge whenever a group reaches a critical mass, so does some sort of dynamic evolve in the shimmering, fluctuating membrane between the natural and artificial worlds. And the seething mass of that dynamic is the product of the back-and-forth within each user/avatar pair, between avatars, between users, and between user/avatar pairs when they reveal one side to the other. It must be recalled that users are free humans, avatars are cybernetic projections of those humans, and human behaviour is not predictable on an individual level. What is predictable is that on a group level, transgression of the membrane occurs, and thus the membrane is permeable.
Third, the dichotomy is not neat:
If the membrane is permeable, it will be transgressed. The seething mass of collective transgression ensures that the worlds are joined not by a singular point, but by an area that bears closer resemblance to a train station, ferrying people and goods between two locales.
The EULA and the Charter of Interration:
Castronova’s interration rubric could be simplified as follows: The laws enabling interration, analogous to various Business Corporation Acts, would set out rules for closed worlds, in which the membrane is impermeable by law, and rules for open worlds, in which the membrane is permeable and governed. What we have seen above is that all worlds, at least to the extent that the avatars are projections of human users with offline lives, are open. Some, of course, are more open than others, depending upon the extent to which they encourage membrane transgression, but all are open. What needs to be done in order to facilitate the sorts of creative and expressive freedoms that are possible in a closed world, while also enabling fully open worlds that are ancillary to the offline world, is two-fold: recognition of degrees of openness in interration laws, and a separate but related way of regulating the transgression of the membrane. The first is by establishing interration statutes that are nuanced and well-informed, such that the Charters of Interration they yield are as varied as the worlds that are possible. The second – the regulation of transgression – is realized through the End User License Agreement. The EULA, used as a behavioural contract that is customized to the Charter of Interration it supports, in any individual world, can ensure, to the same degree that entire legislative systems do today, that play/avatar pairs only transgress the membrane in a way that is in keeping with the “sociological” goals of the virtual world.
The question, then, is how to keep the EULAs in this positive form, without resorting to draconian and expeditious clauses that usurp users’ intellectual property and penalize players with blunt instruments such as account termination. Will these EULAs require the evolution of in-world justice systems?
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