Is having an ‘alt’ in Second Life a moral failing? Where does “Your World, Your Imagination” begin, and “Our World, Our Imaginations” take over? In an environment with purposeful fluidity of identity construction, open-ended opportunities for exploration and immersion, and as many prims as your land can handle – does assuming a secondary identity constitute a moral failing, or is it maximizing the promise of the platform?

The issue of alts (setting up a second, separate account which thus constitutes a “second you” within the Second Life world) is not just intriguing, but also a hint at the challenges related to avatar identity and ownership that will be one of the most striking areas of discussion in the years ahead.

Avatars and Identity
I’ve written at length about the our personal relationships to our avatars, and what I prefer to call the “strange loop”, lifting off the concepts of Douglas Hofstadter.

While issues of avatar identity have long been studied in gaming environments, with seminal works looking at things like gender and race choice in worlds such as Everquest or Warcraft, synthetic worlds such as Second Life introduce new dynamics – including the fact that the ‘membrane’ between physical and virtual is less prominent (the magic circle is a porous membrane), and the ability to tailor your avatar’s appearance in an almost infinitely customizable way.

Much like studies of gaming environments reminded us that synthetic worlds are just that – worlds, with economies, politics, sociology, and ethnography, amongst other potential domains for study and design, the same is true for ‘open worlds’ like Second Life. In fact, researchers increasingly see Second Life as the ideal test bed for research because of the sample size of residents, the lack of constrictive symbolic definitions, and the flexibility of the platform. (See erratic wisdom for some thoughts on the topic).

The Impact of Avatar Representation
Nick Yee studied what he called the Proteus Effect of avatar appearance and representation on how we act and behave in virtual worlds. His study found, for example, that people with more attractive avatars were more intimate in self disclosure and interpersonal distance than those with less attractive avatars. Also, people with taller avatars behaved more confidently in a negotiation task than those assigned shorter avatars.What i found compelling was his opening discussion that defined the Proteus Effect and noted that (emphasis added):

The notion of transforming our appearances permeates our culture. On the one hand, minor alterations such as haircuts, make-up, and dressing up are seen as socially acceptable, if not socially desirable. On the other hand, the ability to truly transform oneself has been regarded in myths and legends as both dangerous and powerful. Consider for example werewolves andvampires from Europe, the kitsune (foxes that can take on human form) from Japan, the god Loki from Norse mythology, and the god Proteus from Greek mythology. The Greek god Proteus is notable for being the origin of the adjective “protean” – the ability to take on many different self-representations.

In this study, Yee is examining whether avatar representation influences how we act and behave, and does so by examining assigned identities – in other words, can the personality behind the avatar “break through” regardless of how they’re presented, or does their representation influence behaviour. He found the latter.

In previous game studies, and Raph Koster looked at this related to games as a source of fun and self-insight, it’s been seen that individuals tend to always play the same characters, regardless of the game environment. This lack of range Koster took to be very self-limiting and argued that games and play be constructed to encourage individuals to explore different representations as a source of self insight.

Avatar Ownership and Transparency
Issues of avatar ownership and how to create trust and transparency where one of the virtues of the environment is anonymity, immersion, “pretend” or role-playing (at least for a large number of people) will become increasingly challenging technically as virtual worlds become larger commercial engines that need new mechanisms for managing trust.

If I sign a contract with an avatar but have no information about the person behind the identity, how do I know that the contract is being signed in good faith, and how will I have recourse if the contract isn’t honored?

Ugo Trade had a brilliant conversation with Eben Moglen of IBM on these subjects, and I was particularly struck by his insights on the portable avatar and how to create technical underpinnings to avatar identity not just for the purposes of contractual enforcement (which is what I had always imagined) but also because it would empower individuals to engage in more subtle ways, while letting the power of choice rest in their hands rather than those of platform owners.

In a far-ranging dialogue, Moglen proposed that our ability to turn on and off elements of our identity should be partly triggered by how we feel about the spaces we enter, especially as the virtual world becomes more ubiquitous and the ownership of worlds becomes less clear. He proposes that

It has got to tell you what the rules are of the space where you are it has to give you an opportunity to make an informed consent about what is going to happen given those rules. It has got to give you an opportunity to know those things in an automatic sort of way so I can set up my avatar to say, you know what, I don’t go to places where I am on video camera all the time. Self, if you are about to walk into a room where there are video cameras on all the time just don’t walk through that door. So I don’t have to sign up and click yes on 27 agreements, I have got an avatar that doesn’t go into places that aren’t clean and well lit.

But just as interesting as his notions of how identity, transparency, and avatar portability should be coded against a system in which spaces themselves have a transparency to their notions of privacy and protection, were his thoughts on the fact that avatar identity can not just be affirming, as in the case of being able to “be what you want, how you want it, through anonymity” but also that our online identities can be confining:

I see again and again the ways in which people now find themselves unable to make certain life choices easily because there digital self has acquired an inflexibility that constrains their non-digital self.

He gives the example of a woman who wanted to close down her mySpace page but was pressured by friends and family not to do so, because they depended on her for the archiving of photos and some other information. As Moglen pointed out:

Now there is a point that a fundamental decision occurs that she feels pretty seriously about as an individual. But she is being subjected to a campaign of peer pressure to hold her in circumstances that she is not going to like in order to get the photo album back.

We have got to understand that when she wanted to leave town and she couldn’t. The digital self was trapped by a fence that the physical self had no problem passing through and moving on from.

Alts as Escape from the Gulag?
Moglen paints a picture in which our avatars can easily become ensnared in a Web of information, whether by the design of platform owners (often referred to as “stickiness”) or inadvertently, as in the example above:

We don’t want that to happen to people. We understood when the Soviet Empire decayed that all over it were places where people felt trapped in webs of surveillance and betrayal and interaction that had a kind of sinister feeling even if there is no Gulag and there is no shooting…But we are aware that these webs of knowledge about us are beginning to control us because our digital persona is subject to leverage and to being interfered with in ways that matter.

In this view, current code can create traps in which because avatar identity and transparency can’t be as finely managed as he proposes, and because the environments into which we move our avatars also don’t provide markers as to the levels of privacy (and the ability to ‘opt out’), there is the very real possibility of ending up in a position where our digital representations are trapped. He argues that this isn’t that much different from the real world ‘surveillance society’ (I’d extend the analogy to ‘dead end jobs’ and being ‘trapped in a marriage’) nonetheless, we can leave a marriage or leave a job, but in the digital domain there are often traces of ourselves that we can’t pack up and take with us, much like the example of the mySpace page where we can’t easily back up our photo file and ship of a copy to your friends list.

In this less liberating code structure, it could be logically extended that assuming alternate identities (an “alt”) is a way of creating escape hatches from current webs created by social structures, economies, dependencies, and even embedded within objects themselves – for example having items for sale in someone else’s vendors, or being the only one in an in-world company with full perm versions of sales stock.

A Philosophy of Alts – Moral Choice?
The discussion at Ugo Trade was an argument for thought and development around code – building systems and process for avatar identity, environment tagging, security, and privacy with some sort of acknowledgment for the legal and social challenges that lie ahead as more and more of our work, personal lives, and interests are tied up in our digital representations.

In the absence of a clear data architecture built on this basis, avatar identity and the use of alts often comes down to choice, and often within the context that in spite of the seemingly open-ended nature of emerging synthetic worlds, our choices become constrained because of limits to the code.

There are valid reasons to have alt accounts including simplification of business process and transactions, or artistic purposes (being able to assume different representations for a machinima, for example). Leaving these aside, however, the decision to assume an alt can seem to be a purely social choice, and being a social choice implies that it may have some sort of moral underpinning.

At one level, then, virtual worlds become platforms for testing concepts of morality. In one school of thought, for example, Phil Roberts proposes that morality is in many sense a maladaptive response to increased rationality:

(It) is a maladaptive manifestation of our need to justify our existence, in this case by conforming to a shared subconscious theory of rationality in which ‘being rational’ is simply a matter of ‘being objective’, as exemplified in the moral maxim, ‘Love (intrinsically value) your neighbor as you love (intrinsically value) yourself’. Although none of us can actually measure up to this standard, we nonetheless come to experience feelings of worthlessness (guilt) along with a corresponding reduction in the will to survive (depression) when we deviate from the standard to an unreasonable degree. In other words, a capacity for guilt (having a conscience) is a part of the price we humans have had to pay for having become a little too objective (too rational) for our own good.

Virtual worlds could be considered test platforms for the theory that causing or feeling guilt because of a presumed moral choice is perhaps because of our sense of failure to justify our existence.

Within the more accepted confines of how we define morality, however, how we evaluate whether it’s an acceptable choice to have an alt should proceed from some definition of whether we believe in cultural relativism, prescriptivism, etc. Assuming an alt can be considered an act of conscience because it implies either hiding, lying, obscuring, or escape. As such, it assumes a morality for virtual worlds that’s more anthropological than philosophical.

Wikipedia offers a concise definition of tribal versus territorial morality, (doesn’t it always provide concise definitions?):

Celia Green has made a distinction between tribal and territorial morality. She characterizes the latter as predominantly negative and proscriptive: it defines a person’s territory, including his or her property and dependants, which is not to be damaged or interfered with. Apart from these proscriptions, territorial morality is permissive, allowing the individual whatever behaviour does not interfere with the territory of another. By contrast, tribal morality is prescriptive, imposing the norms of the collective on the individual. These norms will be arbitrary, culturally dependent and ‘flexible’, whereas territorial morality aims at rules which are universal and absolute, such as Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’. Green relates the development of territorial morality to the rise of the concept of private property, and the ascendancy of contract over status.

Therefore, if we claim that the use of alts can cause harm to others, we’re perhaps reverting to tribal morality, in which the good of the collective is imposed as the moral benchmark against which the behaviours of an individual should be measured. Assuming a second identity should thus be measured against whether the collective (and individuals within the collective) are worse or better off because of that choice, rather than whether that choice does explicit damage to an individual territory.

Thus, discussions about the use of alts provides insight into the possible shift in virtual worlds back to a more tribal morality. This might be more true of MMORPG environments, where the concepts of guilds, levels, and group contribution are far more important than territorial concerns, because few MMORPGs have territory as such.

Alts as Therapeutic Exploration
Finally, I’d propose that we’ve seen the power of avatar representation as a direct correlate to behaviour, even within the limited confines of MMORPGs where avatar identity can be assigned, or at least limited. If avatar representation impacts behaviour, then could our choice of avatar be purposefully used to influence behaviour in a positive way?

Work with patients with Asperger’s shows great promise for the use of avatars as ways of learning social skills, for example. As time goes on, I expect to see further study and thought put into how to purposefully craft therapeutic discovery by using avatars and identity as a form of lucid dreaming, self-discovery, and self-expression.

You Should Have Told Me You Were You
There is a rich vein of study, discussion, policy, philosophy, and law in the future of avatar identity, ownership, and expression. Whether we assume multiple identities, and whether we assume these identities within the same virtual worlds adds a second vein. It first highlights the issues of trust and transparency that the Ugo Trade interview explored, which demonstrates how the ‘code’ can actually trap our digital representations in communities and information webs from which it’s increasingly difficult to escape.

I’d propose that because of this, alts will be increasingly used to create “escape hatches” including perhaps purposeful destruction, wherein we destroy identities with alts in order to bypass the inability to easily ‘step away from’ digital persona. This will cause confusion and increasing spirals of mistrust amongst others, until systems for user-chosen ‘identity toggles’ are able to deepen trust amongst individuals and their avatars.

I’d also propose that this will open new pathways in discussions of morality, with virtual worlds as test beds for ethical theories. The response to whether alts are good or bad implies an ethical framework. If we presume that assuming an alt is a moral failing because it challenges the underpinnings of community, then it may imply that virtual worlds open the gate to an age in which morality is judged as pre-rational and tribal, rather than modern and territorial.

Whether this is for better or worse, it implies a return to “guild hall” days. It would imply that we would increasingly see small walled off communities within virtual worlds with deeply enmeshed codes of moral conduct in which the good of the collective is enforced at the expense of individual freedom. In MMORPGs, this collective conscience has been shown to be far more powerful than individual freedoms, and social norms are strictly enforced.

On the other hand, open worlds such as Second Life also offer a venue for personal exploration and expression that might have tremendous therapeutic value. Future research and hopefully increasing attention to virtual worlds for their therapeutic potential would seem to be a source of an argument that the healthy and purposeful assumption of alternate identities can be the source of personal wisdom toward a more integrated self.

As always – a strange loop. Synthetic worlds magnify, focus, and contain our explorations until they cycle back to catch our “real selves” and to challenge our long-held assumptions. Alts, for example, seem like separate questions – divorced from reality, and ‘not possible in real life’, until we awaken and discover that the very questions about avatars and alts are really questions about trust, self-confidence, faith, our personal moralities and how we view our ethics in the context of the broader “tribe” or “world”, and our yearning to have a purpose and place in life.

How we respond to these issues is often a far deeper indication of the strength of our foundations and a measure of how we value ourselves as individuals than it is a true opinion on issues related to code or moral relativism. As always, the rabbit hole seems to take us on a strange ride, but when we reach its end we find ourselves … well, we find ourselves with us.