But his salvo only inspired another round of viciousness, even more vile than the first. With this, other members of the class could not resist joining in. IBEX was attacked by a string of characters in the class as cowardly for hiding behind a pseudonym and as sick for what he had said. None of this had any effect. IBEX came back, again and again, with an ugliness that was as extreme as it was unrelenting.
The space had been changed. Conversation fell off, people drifted away. Some no doubt left because they were disgusted with what had happened; others did not want to be IBEX’s next target. There was a brief period of life in the space as people rallied to attack IBEX. But as he came back again and again, each time more vicious than the last, most simply left. (One time IBEX came back to protest that he had been wronged; in the week before, he claimed, he had not posted anything, but someone wearing the white sheet of IBEX had posted in IBEX’s name, so that he, the real IBEX, had been defamed. The class had little sympathy.)
But it was not just the online class that changed. As we met face to face each week, I felt the atmosphere bend. People felt the creature in the room, though no one could believe he was a student at the Yale Law School. This was their classmate, hiding behind a smile or a joke in real space, but vicious in cyberspace. And the very idea that this evil was hidden under a smile changed how people felt about smiles.
Some called this the “David Lynch effect”, an allusion to the director who portrays the rot of society just under freshly painted fa çades. We felt in that class the rot of our community just under the surface of smiling and functional students. There was a (relatively tame) Jake Baker in our midst. The space had permitted behavior that destroyed community — community that the space itself had created. Community had been created in part through the ability to hide — to hide behind a benign pseudonym; to hide hesitation, or editing, in the writing; to hide your reaction; to hide that you were not paying attention. These anonymities had made the community what it was. But the same anonymity that created the community gave birth to IBEX as well, and thus took the community away.
SecondLi(f/v)e(s)
These four places that I have just described were all described in the first edition of this book, each in just about the same terms. They’re old stories, and the lessons they teach are still precisely the lesson this chapter is meant to convey. But I don’t mean to suggest that there’s been no interesting progress in the cyberspaces that the Internet has inspired. The last five years have witnessed an explosion in cyberspaces, much more dramatic than anything I imagined when I first wrote this book.
In one sense, these spaces are nothing really new. They have fancy new technology that, because computers are faster and bandwidth is broader, functions much better than their earlier versions. But the MMOG space I described in Chapter 2 was inspired by real places.
What’s changed, however, is size. As Julian Dibbell described it to me, the question is
does size matter in these kinds of spaces? And I think it does. The text-based world is naturally limited in size. The limit is not so much text versus graphics as it is limited cultural accessibility versus a much broader accessibility. That makes for larger spaces.[43]
The result is “something socially richer in a lot of ways”, “not so much the particular affordances of 3D graphic imagery, which will also someday look pretty crude. ”
Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games (again, MMOGs, or MMORPGs) have become a whole industry. Literally millions spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours each year in these spaces along with literally billions of dollars to live these second lives. While living these second lives, of course, they are also living a life in real space. When they’re playing the MMOG World of Warcraft, they are at the same time playing father or wife in real space. They have thus not left the real world to go to these other places. But they integrate the other places into their real world life, and the last five years has seen an explosion in the percentage of real-world life that is lived virtually.
These “games” can be divided roughly into two types. In one type, people “play” a game that has been defined by others. These are “role-playing games.” Thus, World of Warcraft is a role-playing game in which people compete to gain wealth and status (making it not so different from real life). Grand Theft Auto is a game in which people engage in a kind of virtual crime. These games all have a structure to them, but they differ in the degree to which people can customize or create their own characters or environments. The vast majority of online games are role-playing games in this sense. One site that tracks these communities estimates 97 percent are role-playing games of some sort.[44]
The second type involves much more construction. These spaces provide communities in which people at a minimum socialize. In addition to socializing, there is creative and commercial activity. Depending upon the game, the mix among these activities differs substantially. But they all aim to create a virtual world that inspires a real community within itself. These games are an extension of the MOOs I described above. But they extend the virtual community of a MOO beyond those who feel comfortable manipulating text. These worlds are graphically real, even if they are virtual.
Of course, within both of these types of MMOGs, there is creativity. The differences between them are simply a matter of degree. And within both, there is commerce. Second Life — described more below — generates over “$4,000,000 U.S. in interpersonal transactions”[45] a month. Aggregated across games, as Edward Castronova describes, there is a great deal of commerce produced by these virtual worlds.
“The commerce flow generated by people buying and selling money and other virtual items (that is, magic wands, spaceships, armor) amounts to at least $30 million annually in the United States, and $100 million globally.”[46]
And more interesting (and bizarre) is Castronova’s estimate of the gross national product per capita produced in various virtual worlds. EverQuest, for example, has a GDP which is about half that of “the Caribbean Island Nation of Dominica.”[47] And the GDP per capita of Norrath “was about the same as Bulgaria’s and four times higher than China’s or India’s.”[48]
For my purposes here, however, I want to focus on the second type of MMOG, and two of these in particular. The first was an early leader in this space — There. The second is a growing and extraordinary success — Second Life.
Second Life is, as its website describes, “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” 3-D in the sense that the experience seems three dimensional — the characters and the objects appear to be in three dimensions. A virtual world in the sense that the objects and people are rendered by computers. Built by its residents in the sense that Second Life merely provided a platform upon which its residents built the Second Life world. (And not just a few. On any given day, 15 percent of Second Life residents are editing the scripts that make Second Life run.[49] That platform originally rendered beautiful green fields. Residents acquired land in that world, and began building structures.) And owned by its residents in the sense that the stuff that the residents of Second Life build is theirs — both the “physical” thing itself (the car, or the surfboard, or the house), and any intellectual property right which might be embedded in that thing that they have built.
44.
MMOGCHART.com Home Page, available at http://mmogchart.com/ (cached: http://www.webcitation.org/5IwtbpPE9).