Second session at the Virtual Worlds Conference at Emory covers the ‘collision’ of virtual business and virtual government.
Panelists:
Meeting the panelists:
Byron Reeves, of Stanford
- psychology of self representation
- how can we take some of this ‘primitive engagement’ energy and use it in serious contexts
- not so much learning and simulation environment, but how to actually do serious work in virtual worlds
- non-visual things you can do…e.g. non visual games, synthetic currency via email
Rachel Gibson, University of Manchester
- looking at election campaigns online and use of Web and email
- moving into virtual worlds opens up new possibilities
- more abstract idea that there are “virtual worlds of connection” across 2D Web spaces, leading to cyber maps of linkages between web sites, how they’re connected
- current use of tools like Second Life is really migration from Web site to 3D environment
- politics ON and politics OF virtual worlds two different questions
Bill Dutton, Dir of Oxford Internet Institute
- Virtual worlds will powerfully influence routine choices through how people use these virtual networks will “reconfigure access” – who we know, how we communicate, what services we obtain, who we obtain them from
- In politics, virtual worlds demonstrate the opening of the “fifth estate”
- Individuals are choosing to network, creating new networks, and doing this independent of individual institutions (i.e. NOT the traditional media)
- Creating a new “estate” and increasing friction with traditional social systems including major media
Dave Altig, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
- Discussed whether banks will have a place in virtual worlds
- Reminds that a bank is a set of regulations – restrictions on their behaviours based on regulations, with different banks defined differently (e.g. commercial bank vs. ‘hedge fund’ are different because of their regulations)
- Banks therefore currently can’t actually exist in SL because there are no regulations to define them
- Interestingly, Altig points out, the banks in SL didn’t look all that different from real banks
- Comparison to wild cat bank days of the 80s
- Inevitable encroachment of real world into virtual because you can’t think of these types of institutions without these rules/regulations
- “I sort of wish Linden Labs hadn’t intervened…to see whether an institution would have arisen”
- “The experiment continues to see whether inter-commerce institutions can arise without regulation”
wildcat days of the 1980s? lol
check out the chase /capitalone/ bank of amercia credit card interest and fee scams of “lowering rates” as they raise them that was just on the ABC nightly news tonight.
but really any of you university folks realize yet that the “made in china” VR logo is the end of your western pulpits to pundit from?
all vr activities will be the equal to watching “american idol” 3 times a week, and all governments relegated to who feeds the slop and cleans up the poop from under the “batteries” of humans plugged into the creative machine of fantasy thats basically the TV to Walmart connection of today, but all played out as pixels vs flesh..
the reality of the virtual…promoted by the ignorance of the new. encouraged by the myth of the victim
Thanks Liv for the comment….and apologies for the note format of my comments which were done live on site. So a few additional bullets to put Dave’s comments in context:
- He was making the points that a bank is solely defined as such because of the regulations that allow its existence
- Therefore, unregulated institutions in SL were never banks in the first place
- Which is unfortunate, because it would have been interesting to see whether the social setting would have ended up self-regulating.
- BECAUSE, as he pointed out, let’s face it, even the real world has proven that regulation doesn’t make a bank a necessarily honest institution, and their use of loopholes such as in the wildcat days are proof of that, recently with sub-prime, and even loopholes around checking accounts.
Finally, I won’t comment on university folks. Some of them are very interesting, passionate, and committed to finding social good from virtual worlds. There was a great deal of discussion, for example, about whether virtual environments are useful for people who are disabled, who have mental disorders, etc. Social phobias, aspergers, demonstrations of schizophrenia for the purposes of creating empathy amongst healthcare professionals were a few of the topics they touched on as far as the real life benefits of virtual worlds.
It’s also interesting that you bring up the entertainment paradigm, because the mixed reality part of the conference included attendance by the CEO of Kaneva who is creating a “light version” of what you describe – he painted a picture of virtual worlds as being constant sources of entertainment, with links to TV shows, in world games and contests. However, when he was asked “what happens when people get bored of being entertained” his response was basically “we’ll entertain them MORE”…the extension of which is the more apocalyptic version that you lay out.
One of the things that continues to strike me, as it did today with the academics, was a carelessness around definitions of the metaverse. Virtual worlds continue to be painted as “places”. And while virtual spaces can often look like places, it’s a narrow definition of persistent, simulated computer environments in which multiple people can participate. When viewed from that broader context, metaverse applications of the future will include a range of utilities, applications, communities, and tools that augment reality, mirror it, and are escaped to from it.
Very intelligent discussions around the privacy and control issues that arise, including corporate control and, as you pointed out, the unseen power of Asia and China with their massive virtual communities, may well become the leading issues around trust, identity and privacy in the years ahead. These issues apply equally to Web 2.0.
I have no idea what you mean by “encouraged by the myth of the victim” or “promoted by the ignorance of the new”…I fear my brief notes made it sound like the participants were ignorant to the peril of virtual worlds, which they clearly were not.
And to add one final point of clarification, I am not a “university folk”, I never graduated, and never will. For me, and this isn’t true for everyone, life was a sufficient academy.
“Regulation” of a financial firm is not what makes something a “bank.” Back in the early days of the United States there were many many unregulated institutions, especially in the “Frontier States” which called themselves and were considered banks. SL is in a state a lot like the USA was several hundred years ago. Unfortunately, SL is now becoming more and more regulated and mundane, and is becoming more and more like our real lives in most western countries. Pretty soon we’ll all need a virtual world to escape from our current virtual worlds…