Virtual worlds grow, the number of users increase, the number of platforms expand, and in the competition for attention single-purpose virtual spaces position themselves for business, privacy, or specific functions. This increase of users entering environments that are in many ways unique from other Web-based applications in their ability to embed actual economic value and production is an exodus that thinkers like Ted Castranova say may reshape society. While I disagree with how we should port lessons from virtual worlds to government policy, I agree with Castranova that the exodus may be profoundly dislocating.

A friend considers leaving Second Life – a sort of reverse exodus, which gives hints of how deep this dislocation might become. Why people decide to leave virtual worlds is in some ways a deeper window into the meaning of synthetic worlds than why they arrive.

People arrive in virtual worlds for simple reasons – they want to have fun. They want to play. Meet people. Explore. Create. Or maybe even make money. Over time, businesses will come as well to meet, collaborate, and to create brand experiences. And on the surface, people leave because they become bored, they’ve leveled up as high as they can go, the rewards decrease, they become immersed in a way that has a negative impact on real life, or something better comes along.

But something often happens along the way, something that’s increasingly rich terrain for sociologists, philosophers, businesses, and others with an interest in how technology can be both liberating and constraining. And it’s my basic premise that persistent 3D social spaces are at their most basic level experiences – a game that wants to entertain and keep users. But at their most complex level, they’re new ways of creating, interacting with, and sharing concepts. At this more complex level we start to gain new insight into definitions of personal identity, the nature of work, the possibility for transformative change, tribal morality, and a deeper exploration of data architectures that won’t just lead to more information, but lead to information that is self-propagating and intelligent, information that retools itself and creates new conceptual frameworks.

Balance and Conditioning
When you talk to people in Second Life the word “balance” often comes up. Balance represents the line we draw between time spend in synthetic worlds and the real one. While there’s an argument that games don’t cause addiction, I’d argue that technology, games, and virtual worlds have the power to be so compelling that we, consciously or not, decide that these worlds have more appeal than the real world – also the basis of Castranova’s premise that if games are so much fun that they siphon people off from real world production, that the real world will need to compete.

New interface systems, including Emotiv, in which user’s brain waves are read to determine the level of emotional stimulation, will allow games to adapt so that they become harder or easier depending on a user’s level of engagement. This points to a time when our experiences in games or virtual worlds will reach a high level of Pavlovian conditioning – feeding us with increasing or decreasing stimuli in order to maximize enjoyment and, dare I say, keep us hooked.

Over time, new approaches and therapeutic strategies will emerge to help us see and make decisions about platforms that program our dependence. We’ll increasingly share stories and strategies for maintaining balance – and some people will achieve it and others won’t. And some will leave virtual worlds because the negative consequences become so dire that they have no choice. Individuals will make a choice, just like they make a choice going to a movie or staying at home and renting a video. Except in this case, the video might have, for some, a dislocating energy that brings its own challenges and opportunities for individual growth.

Virtual Worlds and the Visualization of Change
My premise is that 3D spaces give us a new way to visualize concepts. This includes visualizing relationships with others. Until you’ve experienced it, you won’t know how different it is to hold a meeting in a virtual space compared to a teleconference or Web call. The feeling of presence and the ability to share documents, pictures, and objects in a “space” brings a deeper and more intuitive engagement. Immersive environments, like games, or like the more open worlds like Second Life and its peers, create experiences that let us walk in our own shoes, while walking in those of another – our avatars, the worlds they move through, and different environments.

Increasingly realistic worlds like the coming Blue Mars, and continual improvements like Windlight and Havok, not only make these spaces more compelling, they also create a richer palette for expression.

But it’s the interplay of the “real” with the virtual that is the richest source for the possibilities of change. If we purely think of virtual worlds as separate, we’re ignoring the fact that they are NOT walled gardens. They may have walls – platforms like World of Warcraft erect as many barriers between the game environment and external realities and economies as possible. But there are always chinks in those walls – either cracks or with entire chunks missing. Commerce will always find a way to cross over where there’s money to be made. Intellectual property will always find a way to be disseminated as widely as it needs to be, no matter how much copy protection we try to employ. But more important still, the selves that people bring to virtual spaces are not turned off when they log off. It may seem like there’s a separation between avatar and controller, but they’re part of each other, living in a strange loop.

The Strange Loop isn’t a virtual world phenomenon. I’m lifting from a broader theory and looking for its application to virtual worlds – not because I believe it’s the only way to look at life, but because there’s something strangely suitable to virtual world experiences which offer features and experiences that are sometimes hard to replicate in the real if at all. It is this shuttling back and forth between what we learn in virtual worlds and how we live our real lives that points to the deeper social dislocations that might be around the corner, building on other trends in society and technology.

These are specific tensions, and they’re highlighted in the unique environments of virtual worlds. It’s not that these tensions don’t exist more broadly, but virtual worlds are one way to experience their meaning, because as research continually shows moving as a “person” through a lifelike environment can be more believable to our minds than other 2D, non-social forms of communication (even when it doesn’t look real, and in fact especially when it looks too real, because then our minds look for the chinks in the representation).

TENSION ONE: Craft vs. Production
I think of this as the Anshe Chung vs. Rezzable paradox. On the one hand, technology enables rapid, low-cost, and mass production. The famous Anshe Chung 10 Linden store, their mass production and management of real estate, or the outcry over tools (some “legal” and some not) that allow mass copying and back-up of objects stand on the one side. And anyone who’s ever rezzed a prim just for the pure love of it stands on the other.

What stands between them is mastery of craft versus mastery of production. Ten years ago you needed specialized equipment to mash up music. To alter images. To make your own movie. Heirloom vegetables were almost extinct but now they sit beside their organic “100 mile” cousins at a chain grocery store. Value is being created by smaller and smaller producers – right down to the unit of one. And in virtual worlds, this movement is writ large in almost every sim and build. Black Swan is the craft ethic built large.

Add to this a second level, which is the cascade of content. Someone writes a door script. The script is added to a door that someone else makes. The door is added to a build. And so on. And at each layer, there’s an opportunity to cascade content to the next user group. One of the failures of most corporate builds in SL, including for example Giorgio Armani, is that they don’t cascade content – it’s product, not craft, and it’s not made to be mashed up by others. As I wrote about previously:

Giorgio Armani tried to force feed its brand into the SL community and failed miserably. Not only did they ignore the talent within SL, but they thought that their brand message and content would be sufficient unto itself to engage a community of what I can only call futurists – people who have embraced a world they can call their own, where new methods for collaboration (see Wikitecture), learning and content creation are being cobbled together from the SL toolset (and often in spite of it).

CNN is starting to get traction in SL, because they have the right idea – let the users create content and see what they come up with. What do they tell you? What does it mean? The machima of Robbie Dingo has far greater power, at the moment, than anything some movie studio is coming up with in this creative community – for CNN …the idea of recognizing the collaborative and creative nature of the media at least wasn’t lost on them.

I’d also propose that virtual worlds are slowly starting to extend this craft ethic beyond items and objects and into the realm of concepts and ideas. It’s one thing to mash up a song, but it’s another for a group of users to mash-up the record industry itself. Virtual worlds are hand-crafting and mashing up business models, ideas, and approaches to collaboration. I believe that concepts themselves will soon become components, cascading into new concepts using tools that are just now starting to appear, like independent ecosystems, Wikitecture, and others.

But this tension comes at a price – both for business and for individuals. When we discover that individuals want to be part of the production process…no, DEMAND to be part of it, it becomes clear that the model of controlling and optimizing production may be over. This is dislocating…as consumers we start to seek out authenticity and craft. We start to demand a voice in production, whether as producers ourselves or through proxies. And as businesses we start to realize that there is a world of prosumers who might beat our state-of-the art R&D and factory floor to the punch.

Tension Two: Tribal vs. Territorial Morality
I grew up believing that I lived in a society where there was such a thing as the common good. Laws protect that common good. But that the common good was held in balance with individual rights. This meant that I had the right not to have my person or property interfered with. The common good wasn’t so good if it had the right to throw me in jail arbitrarily, or to seize my property because it just wants to. Sounded a lot like communism or socialism.

But game environments, through their construction, seem to be re-introducing a culture based on tribal morality. I’ve argued that this is in large part a result of the code. Students of virtual worlds have written about the socialization that happens in game environments – how newbies are treated. How social norms are maintained. How griefing is defined (often, the trumping of the enjoyment of the many by the actions of someone who believes that the individual right to use the code trumps the culture of those IN the environment).

All of this feeds wider discussions and discoveries about the role and rights of the avatar, alts, identity, trust, and transparency.

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.

This tension, between game and virtual worlds in which tribal morality provides a looser framework for social interaction, one based on status and reputation rather than property and prescriptions, has implications for how we view work, life and policy. It shifts us from one mode of thinking to another. From “what is my job” to “where do I fit in”; from “what is mine” to “what do I contribute”; from “who’s in control” to “who do I trust”; from “what do I want to do” to “what is needed”.

There is rich discussion around issues of identity and trust, because these are becoming the wider currency in a market and world of ideas. Reputation is becoming more important than what we own or where we work. And on the Net, where everybody can be invisible, the need to be able to toggle our identity so that others can connect it to our reputation is taking on greater urgency.

The Practical vs. the Impossible
I’m a fan of reflective architecture. And of Not Possible in Real Life. Not just for the shiny prims and moving lights….but because I believe these are new languages for understanding concepts and how we can interact with them.

Spore might not be a virtual world, but I think it will do more for virtual worlds than all the others combined, because it will make the impossible occur – the creation of a rich, procedural universe generated with user inputs but able to exist without them.

Fiction reminds us of impossibilities. A good painting. Dreaming. Virtual worlds let us interact with those impossibilities and create our own. For some, this can end up being “thumb-sucking” (in Neva’s immortal words ) because we look at it for the sake of looking – and for others, it can be the chink in the armor of habit – opening up our eyes to the world around us, making us realize that maybe we haven’t really looked before, haven’t explored how malleable and filled with possibilities reality really is, lost as we are in the drudgery of simply living.

Perhaps virtual worlds are the visual demonstration of a new renaissance. Or maybe they’re just a diversion. In either case, they highlight that the practical needs a partner in the unrealistic and the impossible. Survival needs a partner in hope. And waking needs a partner in dreaming.

The Power of Imagination
Through the imagination we can feed hope, because as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said: “there is an innate optimism in all works of imagination.” Through the imagination we become transported:

“…outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. Isn’t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? It takes us to the space of elsewhere.”

We arrive in our lives alone. We rotate in and out of each other’s orbits, and still the planet of ourselves spins off elsewhere. We share a dance, we sit on a beach and talk, we make love, we struggle to find our place, we wear different masks and play different roles, we learn, we grow, we fail.

And then, still, we are alone, and the sky is above, and the gravity that pulls these planets of ourselves hums with its unknowable intentions. And we see those intentions sometimes. And we feel that togetherness with something that we only really know in those times on the dock.

“There is a river of creativity running through all things, all relationships, all beings, all corners and centers of the universe. We are here to join it, to get wet, to jump in, to ride these rapids, wild and sacred as they be.” (M. Fox)

Leaving Second Life
People will come and go. More worlds await, the real one included. New horizons and lessons. Hard crosses to bear, and others to unload.

We’ll study why people arrive in virtual worlds and we’ll examine why they stay. We’ll find productive uses and we’ll learn to mass produce them. We’ll institute new controls and try to stop the drift into theft and anarchy. We’ll create more “normal” ways to express identity in these new spaces.

Some will depart because they get bored, find new thrills and adventures, find love or lose love, or decide that it’s getting late, and they have other affairs that need tending.

But for now, a few pathfinders will live in that space of tension. The tension between dreams and reality. Between on the one hand the hope of translating the impossible into new languages and ways of living, and on the other despair at its erosion in the face of bad policy, code or a cool indifferent world.

And how can I NOT end with the following:

We must become ignorant
Of all we’ve been taught,
And be, instead, bewildered.

Run from what’s profitable and comfortable
If you drink those liqueurs, you’ll spill
The spring waters of your real life.

Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.

I have tried prudent planning
Long enough, from now
On, I’ll live mad.

-Rumi