Whatever the core platform has or doesn’t have is added, removed, altered or amended by the operator, within feasible limits.

While I’ll post on it in more tiring and lengthy detail, my point is that the code is in danger of derailing the ability to synch real world rights with what’s possible in virtual worlds. The coders say: you can’t ever really secure digital objects from theft so we’ll make a half-hearted attempt to protect those objects but you’re better off hiring lawyers. The platform owners then take this code and say “well, I’d like to protect objects but this code does a half-ass job of allowing me to do that so why bother”. And then the user who actually MAKES the stuff looks around and goes “well, hold on, where’s MY recourse in all of this – the courts?”

The courts then circle back to the code and say, “sure, we’ll protect your rights, but can you show me a paper trail, a water mark, a policy somewhere so that we know that a crime has been committed” and everyone looks at each other and shrugs and says “um, well, we never thought of all that, or it was too hard to do, or information needs to be free anyways are you kidding?”

Interoperability doesn’t solve any of these issues. My point about interoperability is, if you’re going to be redesigning or designing the metaverse so that avatars can teleport from place to place don’t you think now is the time to also think about these wider policy issues that will let us actually synch all this coding that’s going on with law? Otherwise we’ll find ourselves, much as we have on the broader Web, at the mercy of the decisions that were made when the thing was built where the motivations were use and profit (in its different guises) with a passing glance given to the folks who would actually be affected by it and using it.

My initial post on avatars isn’t to claim avatar rights, but to try to paint a picture of the many ways in which my avatar is more than just an asset that gets passed through protocols from grid to grid. My avatar is the embodiment of my domain knowledge, contains elements of my identity and the ability to authenticate and transmit that identity, and serves as my contractual proxy with platform owners whose policies can be explicit but which are also often vague, lacking enforcement, or where there is information about the spaces that are guarded by the platform owners.

So long as my avatar is treated as a shirt that I put on which needs to be passed from grid to grid, then the folks who are coding the ability to do that deny there are more than protocols and authentication that need to be considered. These other things that my avatar represents are inherent to my embodiment in virtual spaces and I’d prefer they weren’t left to individual platform owners to sort out, because they have a tendency to be vague or obscure.

While an open metaverse can be a good thing – the more the merrier, I guess, there’s a lot to be said for thinking through in more detail the centralized functions. Second Life works, in part, because there ARE centralized functions, but by calling openSim a platform on which could sprout a million worlds, so too will sprout a million decentralized functions, functions which are, in my mind, central to my ability to protect the integrity of the many things embedded in my avatar besides what kind of attachments I’m wearing.

You’re not making sense at all ascribing to me some viewpoint that doesn’t want to make “the rest of Web experience simpler”. Huh?

Again, literalism is the downfall of the Internet. You are trying to secure avatar rights THROUGH Interoperability, making the right to move through worlds something inherent inside code. And my point is that avatar rights CANNOT be housed in code or they will always be at the whim of coders. They must be housed in real life law; and indeed, they are already, it is a question of gaining their validation.

Tateru can’t be allowed to impose a connotation of “world” always with “commercial marketing use”. Sorry, that’s illegitimate argumentation from a leftist position. Worlds are worlds, whether commercial or not. This constant tekkie nit-picking on this question is really only about one thing: they wish to label everything a “platform” so that then code is law, and they as coders are utterly on control.

If they had to concede something that is socialware, that is somewhere beyond software as we know it, because the public gets to participate in its making and its constand revision, they would be ceding their utter control. And that’s why they find this so hard going. Too bad. It has to be wrested from their prying little hands.

There is a conflict between the rights of platform
makers who want freedom of expression and the rights of avatars who want to protect IP, content, and secure due process especially with things like bans and inventory confiscation. But that’s ok, this is the same conflict between the state and the individual as in RL, and it simply must be fought until the right balance is found and the game gods’ overweening powers are curbed.

OK, sure, I see your point. And maybe we’re agreeing in a sort of round-about way. I’m willing to call it an environment, but that also leads me, by the mistake of taking an analogy too literally, into thinking of a 3D space as being more a “place” than a “place with rules” and maybe that’s because I associate environments with a spectrum ranging from a clearing in the woods to a shopping mall, although I suppose both have rules and norms, it’s just the source that’s different.

But I still feel this is important, this need I have to parse the language, because in the process of coding an environment at some point it moves from being a platform into something more. I’m willing to acknowledge that a platform can be coded simply to make a space, but I’m trying to point out that at some point that code is appended with decisions, in particular decisions about the underlying operator’s need to stay in business, and that as soon as these decisions are made they intersect with the complex ownerships and rights that I have which are represented through the ‘shirt’ of my avatar and its ability to perform choices.

If we code the platform and say “look, it’s just a platform, it’s not a world” then my question is two-fold:

1) are you sure you’re not either ignoring or off-loading the range of decisions that eventually make that platform an environment or world, and by doing that are you sure you’re not neglecting to build something into the code that will later allow a range of choices and transparency, and

2) who WILL make these decisions, because I’m assuming that somehow we’re supposed to leave it to all the individual platform owners. If this is the case, and the philosophy is to let the individual platform owners decide, then I’d argue that the code should be crafted in a way that gives consideration for how to create transparency around these decisions that platform owners will make but secondly, as I’m making clear in talking about my avatar, this approach neglects that there IS a commonality to the proposed use of the platforms, which is the ability of my avatar to move from one to one and to interact upon them.

Of course, other restrictions are *chosen*, and in the face of some of the unavoidable limitations, there are a number of possible paths that can be chosen. Currency, for example, is commonly selected as a limiting or barrier device (either as a fiat, or as a gold-standard – or occasionally as a fiat-gold-standard currency, depending on what limitation is being addressed).

I confess I’m not convinced yet that the definitions of world vs platform above don’t have a majority overlap. Hmm.

How about ‘Environment’ instead of ‘World’? That’s the traditional term (the ‘World’ term is more of a marketing slang).

And I know the definition of this has been argued endlessly by other far more capable minds than my own. For most people it really is as simple as what Prok says: it’s a space, it has people, and there’s drama (the latter maybe not tongue-in-cheek at all, because drama implies that there is something beyond just people in a place that causes it).

In defining a world versus a platform, however, I’m going with the definition that a platform is the code that enables representations and interactions with them and that’s pretty much it. The world arises when norms, limitations and policy is combined with this ability to enable representations and interactions to create a space in which my ability to make choices and enact them is influenced by the design of these decisions: to have commerce or not, to enable object permissions or not, to have a governance model of some kind, to deploy a terms of service, whatever – the list is endless and is partly why I posted at such tiring length, to make the point that these things are subtle as well as obvious.

Now, as I say, far better minds than mine have grappled with this issue of what a virtual world is. The word “world” is not analogous to the real one. But certainly something becomes a world when the code is extended past display (the shirt) and into policy, or if policy is too wonky, when the code is extended with decisions that people make that influence my ability to make choices.

I’m taking for granted by the way that the code, or the platform, enables what I consider almost “costs of entry”: the space is persistent, more than one person can be in the space at a time, and the space provides a sense of locality of some sort, perhaps like the tree that Prok refers to.

Arguments over whether that space needs to be 3D or 2.5D or even 2D don’t seem relevant to me, except if you split hairs over what ‘sense of locality’ means – if it doesn’t feel like a place, then it probably isn’t one, it’s a Web site.

I’m also not entirely sure whether we need a definition of avatar, although obviously there needs to be a connection to “being in the space” – Lively has a concurrency limit, but you can still be in a Lively room past concurrency, it’s just that your avatar doesn’t appear – are you “in” the virtual space if your avatar doesn’t rez?

So before I go on with my next post I’ll leave it like this:

- A platform is the code that creates a persistent location in which there is a sense of place, and where one or more person can be at a time.
- A world is the extension of this code through any means which establishes a layer of restriction on what can be done in that location. For example, through additions to the code (commerce, identity, permissions, etc), to governance (terms of service, codes of conduct, law), or to actions by the individual hosting the platform.

Finally, while restriction sounds limiting I don’t mean it that way. Restrictions can be appended based on the idea of encouraging or allowing possibilities – the possibility for commerce, for example, or the possibility of creating a safe space by restricting membership.

OK. Well. Let me call it my working definition with the right to append.

As for worlds. Can we define ‘world’ for the sake of this discussion, before we try to decide whether something is (or should be) a world or not? It seems a bit pointless otherwise.

Any of these definitions? http://www.yourdictionary.com/world

I explain what the pass code issue is, for ME, and I suppose I’m different somehow, in my own mind anyways. But something I don’t understand is why when it comes to technology you seem to think it’s fine that we should need to do some work for it. Easy technology may be an oxymoron but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be desirable. You want the new user orientation to be better, why can’t the rest of the Web. Why is it that it’s fair to decry friction within Second Life but when it comes to trying to make the rest of the management of our Web experiences easier it’s a non-starter?

I have no idea how to respond to what you guess is the point of the post. You conclude without reading that I can’t concede there are avatar rights and then conclude that I probably want to secure them. So your conclusion is, um, I don’t think avatars have rights but I support interoperability to protect those rights that I don’t believe they have.

As far as believing that avatar rights are human rights and should reside in meat-world rather than code, then I suppose the same is true of objects. They’re property and should reside in law rather than code, correct? So both my avatar and me, the content creator, should call our lawyers is the idea?

You’re wrong about what I conclude.

@ Tateru: I disagree with the analogy although I suppose I agree with the rest of it, with a particular focus on the fact that my avatar is also the way in which I’m able to interpret locations and their written and unwritten rules and code.

My avatar is a representation of those things, but implying that it’s like a shirt denies that the avatar extends beyond how I appear in a space. A shirt makes me look a certain way in the world, is something I invested in, but it doesn’t represent anything else, including my relational claims in the space and what I’m arguing is also the vehicle through which I carry the written and unwritten contracts and values by which the space accommodates me.

In your analogy, crossing the border from one space to another isn’t about the avatar, because that’s just a shirt, unless the shirt itself signals location, action and choices to others, and is the recipient of the same.

My wider point however, isn’t whether the avatar is a shirt or has rights or carries a passport, although those things are in some way a component – my wider issue is that the idea of interoperability is being driven by code, and that the coders are offloading the responsibility for the policies within these spaces by saying “we’re not worlds”. I don’t want the coders running so far ahead of policy that they then say “oops, sorry, too late, the code wasn’t built to accommodate that”.

It’s not the shirt that’s the issue, it’s whether the worlds will be properly constructed to let me know what their dress code is, with sufficient flexibility and transparency for both nudist colonies and black tie affairs.