There is virtual and virtual

Time for subtle ontological distinctions to cut deep, and deep in your pocket.

Ebay has just banned online auctions of virtual booty (gold, armor, weapons and all the rest) gained in World of Warcraft and other online computer games ("Ebay would not disclose the volume of sales of virtual game items recorded on its website, which reported 53.5 billion dollars worth of online auction trades in 2006").

At the same time, Ebay has not banned similar auctions concerning Second Life, the (no not a game!) ... virtual world and society where people (do not call them players), also represented by animated figures known as "avatars", buy and sell properties, like homes or land.

Both an armor (in World of Warcraft) and a home (in Second Life) are made of digits, "just" computer codes, so why the different treatment? Because, according to Ebay, there is a difference between the contexts: games, in one case, virtual societies in the other.

The distinction is untenable. It is utterly unclear why Second Life is not a game, or why World of Warcraft is not a virtual society: both are man-made environments where agents/people/avatars engage in role-playing activities. To be a bit drammatic: life is a game, language is a game, interactions are game-theoretic... how does Ebay justify its ontological distinction? Is there some hiddden, moral evaluation (game = bad, or not-serious or...) driving it? If so, this is even less satisfactory but it should be at least made explicit. It would seem to be rather arbitrary though.

The effects of the discrimination are going to be negative. When people wish to trade in some goods, banning the possibility of a legal transaction has often the effect of creating a black market, where everyone is worst off: the companies producing and managing the software and the virtual environments (no control and no revenues, plus disincentive to "play" hence less investments on the side of the customers), Ebay (no revenues), and the players, whether sellers (who either become dishonest or are at a disadvantage) or buyers (same reasons, plus the fact that they are not protected by any fair competition in open prices).

It will also be difficult to keep the boundaries between the Yes and the No zones. Poeple could simply agree to attach a game-good bonus to a non-game product. For example, they could start selling Second Life houses that come furnished with plenty of World of Warcraft weapons inside. You just have to pay that extra premium which happens to be what you would bid for those weapons.

Finally, there is a whole real-life, virtual-based economy attached to these digital environments. People make a living playing, earning and selling virtual goods. Banning some while allowing others means interfering arbitrarily with the free economy that should regulate them. It all reminds one of prohibitionism.

Sweden: from Linnaeus to Second Life

A long time since I last had the leisure to contribute to this blog...

On Saturday 27 January, Sweden began yearlong celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), its most famous scientist.

Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy and of ecology. Before him, scientists had tried a variety of criteria to map and organize the world in some decent, rational way. His fundamental idea was to use sex, or rather systems of procreation and reproduction. Since then, whales no longer count as fish, while rats and humans share a closer destiny. He understood the underlying fabric of life better than anyone else who had come before him. And he saw economics and ecology as strictly related.

Linnaeus certainly knew something about the life of information. His mapping was based on a new naming convention, known as the "binary nomenclature", which has come to dominate natural history and other scientific fields. For example, Plato had defined man as a "featherless biped". When Diogenes heard about that, he presented his colleague with a plucked chicken. "Here," he then declared, "is Plato's man!". Plato, a stubborn man, then added "having broad nails" to his original definition. Things had not much improved after that dispute, until Linnaeus' taxonomy catalogued humans as Homo sapiens and primates in the class of mammals, Mammalia - all names and concepts coined by him. He should be the hero of those Analytic philosophers who thought that all good philosophy begins (and perhaps end) with some decent clarification of language and a reliable and rigid terminology.

Linnaeus was ahead of his time. One wonders what he might have come up with, had he been confronted by another chaotic world, that of cyberspace. Any equally genial idea? Would he have given us the right system to map and catalogue all the different creatures and agents inhabiting the digital sphere?

The questions are not entirely speculative. If Linnaeus was a great innovator in the eighteenth century, his fatherland is no less daring today. According to Olle Waestberg, Director of the Swedish Institute, "We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden".

Sweden will soon become the first country to establish official diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life. (http://secondlife.com/) It will provide not passports or visas, but documents and information about them and about the country. Linnaeus would certainly have been proud of his imaginative country. The first step is taken. The next will be to explore the new territories with some clear ideas about how to make sense of them.