Is an avatar us, who owns it, and if our avatars are simply code on a server somewhere does the owner of the server own the rights to that representation? Or in granting a license to be “present” does the use of that license grant us ownership of what we create from that license (including identity).
A much longer posting to follow on thought of identity based on a recent death which impacted a virtual world, but first a quicker response to a posting by Taran over on KnowProse.
He first points out an article covering the theft of an avatar on Gaia.
To me, it astonishes me that the article starts out by saying “This is a true story” but then I seem to have fallen down the rabbit hole, and it’s only when I try to explain what I’m doing down in said hole that I realize that people out there in “reality” can give you funny looks sometimes.
The story summarizes the theft of a girl’s avatar and the legal and moral issues that arise. I won’t get into the article itself. Jack Meyers is co-listed in the by-line of an article which refers to a book by Jack Meyers, (about which book I’ve written before).
In any case, I was more intrigued by Taran’s comments on the story. A few quotes:
“The emotional investment that people put into avatars is usually lost on people who create and manage virtual worlds”
I totally disagree. Virtual worlds are designed to a great degree to enhance, by whatever means possible, user’s emotional investments in those worlds. No emotional investment = no hooked in desire to return = no subscribers or else tons of churn.
What value is the whole of a virtual world? It is all subjective, we know that – but the point I am making is that the value of a virtual world is subject to each individual user’s perspective as well as the collective of the user perspectives.
I also disagree. The value of virtual worlds is not subjective. In fact some of it is perhaps more objective than our ability to measure value in the “real world”. At least in a virtual world you can examine an ecomomy with full control of the inputs and outputs and the ability to monitor the impact of change using highly precise tools. Those tools and the use of those controls isn’t always exercised or measured, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Theoretically, we could also measure the value of emotional investment. It would not be hard, for example, to include a little survey much like Second Life currently has about how satisfied users are with their experiences to include a measure of emotional engagement. Changes could be enacted to see whether they impact the level of emotional engagement which could then be tied to statistics such as time in game.
Happiness and other so called qualitative emotions can be measured, and compared to activities. This was demonstrated quite keenly in Flow.
“Someone explain to me how an avatar is virtual. Synthetic, yes. Virtual? No.”
I really have no idea what he means here by virtual. I think he means is equating virtual with “not real”. And while I quibble with the specifics, I don’t argue that we attach real values and emotions to our avatars. And I’m the first to defend the rights of avatars against the sole control of those who own the patforms on which they find their expression. The “Gods of Code” need some restrictions on their rights over these expressions of our identity: policy, law and the courts will eventually come to an accomodation on how to balance avatar/individual and platform rights.
Platforms themselves will move towards different combinations of varying levels of walled gardens and varying levels of open source of code and representations of objects within that code. Avatars themselves will become increasingly universal, and portable in greater or lesser degrees. And the attachment of ‘real world’ identity to avatars will be facilitated through identity verification and systems for screening and unscreening real world information.
But frankly I also think its time to move a bit past the debate about whether our avatar selves are worth value. They are. An object is an object.
But I’d also like to consider whether object appropriation should immediately be resisted. I don’t mean theft, which has a malicious intent. I mean appropriation. As a society, subversion and appropriation are the seeds of creativity which are themselves the seeds of change. I’m not sure it should be a given that we should jump to the conclusion that we require walled gardens around the “brand you” any more than corporations should have limitless extensions to brands that are ubiquitous and that society has a right (and need) to appropriate through mash-ups and social commentary.
As well, I’m not sure that the issues of identity and ownership will be as cut and dried as “my avatar is me therefore I own its value”.
I will come back to this in my further explorations of the strange loop, but I believe that consciousness is partly external. We are NOT our physical bodies. A large component of our consciousness is external and is represented in the symbols that our consciousness lends to and borrows from the world and community around us. Avatars remind us of the externalization of consciousness, a profound realization which may lend virtual worlds a deeper impact and leads to the concepts I’ve discussed of the recursive self and the strange loop.
As well, avatars are fluid – they change based on the symbols they appropriate and the symbols that are given to them by their ‘controllers’. But further, avatars will increasingly combine diferent inputs. For example:
- Who will own an avatar that is registered in my name but that runs off of a ‘bot’ program owned and maintained by a third party?
- Who will own an avatar created by a corporation and assigned to an individual for the purposes of an in world project? Who owns and carries the reputation of that avatar (accrued primarily by the user rather than the corporation that owns it)?
- When account sharing and swapping is increasingly common, who is the end owner of the representation – the person who registered it?
- Is there a mimimum threshold for an avatar being an avatar vs. an NPC? In games, there’s usually a clear line – an avatar is either run by a player or run by the computer. But what about avatars that are run by a combination?
- If I have 5 avatars sitting around doing nothing, are they avatars or are they bots? If those bots are impersonating avatars (i.e. “persons”) for the sake of driving traffic stats, running real estate scams, etc is this immoral or against the Terms of Service? Do I accrue the same rights when I have 10 versions of myself? Does an ‘inventory’ avatar (common in games and increasingly common in virtual worlds) enjoy the same rights of identity and ownership?
- What about a corporate avatar? The avatar that “owns” much of Rezzable apparantly doesn’t have an actual person behind it. Does that avatar enjoy “individual” rights and how do we define its value?
Value in virtual worlds is real. An object is an object. Avatars are real – BUT, what we mean by the term avatar is changing and its definition is contentious for political, philosophical, emotional, technical, legal and other reasons.
Issues of identity and ownership are complex – there’s the recursive self, the strange loop, and then there’s the more practical issues that arise because of the very appeal of virtual worlds – fluidity of persona, appropriation of community symbols, and various layers of systems of identity presence and verification.
Instead of getting caught in the hyperbole about defending the value of avatars as “real” it’s far better, to my mind, to move on to the far richer terrain of just plain assuming that the value is there. Jack Meyers is preaching an emotional story to the corporations about how ‘human’ people in virtual worlds are (and making nice fees doing so) and I praise his spreading of the gospel. Myself, I’m more intrigued by what I take as givens and that leave others wondering how far down the rabbit hole I’ve fallen.
