Small Group Workshops
Cory Ondrejka - Josh Fairfield - Ted Castronova
The increasing complexity of
social interactions in virtual worlds has given rise to competing
visions of the role of "real world" copyright law in
fostering player creativity. Typically game companies assert an ownership
right in everything that takes place on their servers. But this leads to
treating everything that happens online as property, including those
aspects of player interaction and creativity, including on-line
identity and conversation that cannot be "owned" in the real
world. An alternative model has been to allow players to retain
intellectual property rights in their own digital creations. But this
approach, while affording players greater ability to translate their
virtual intellectual property into real world intellectual property, does
not do much to help them control how their digital creations will be used
within the virtual world. It gives rise to complexity in trying to
administer the treatment of works created and used by numerous
collaborators. Since many aspects of life in-world can be controlled by
the computer code of that world, it becomes possible to envision
alternative "digital property" arrangements which let players
manage and run their own intellectual property permissions or, more
radically, to stop thinking about a on-line creations as
"property" at all. The aim of this workshop is to design a
digital property system(s) for the virtual world to maximize player
collaboration and creativity, minimize uncertainty and foster free
expression in the metaverse. Any scheme created also needs to manage
information flow between the digital and real worlds, account for
artistic motivational biases of early adopters, and maybe even discuss
whether moral rights have a place in the digital context.
As we move from the
two-dimensional, text-based “web world” to more interactive
and immersive social cyberspaces designed for human interaction, we must
address how we will promote and protect the development of robust,
persistent on-line identity. Social cooperation in any medium depends
on trust. We need signals of commitment to support cooperative
behavior. While, previously, cyberspace undermined our ability to
create persistent, reliable and coherent measures of identity across a
distance, the technology of virtual worlds holds out the promise for
creating meaningful identity on-line. This workshop asks how we can use
the interfaces and tools of virtual worlds to strengthen on-line identity
and thereby produce social trust in cyberspace. We can create vivid,
visual representations of personal identity independent of our off-line
attributes and, at the same time we can create reputations independent
of social identity in real space. The aim of this session is to develop
a dynamic, player-managed social reputation system(s) for the
metaverse.
In groups we can do together what we
cannot achieve alone. The group in its myriad forms is the basic unit of
social and political organization. Social life is full of the groups and
associations that Tocqueville lauded a century ago. Activism and
organizing require the mobilization of communities of interest.
Lawmaking demands collective decisionmaking and deliberation.
Organizations of all kinds depend on the work of teams. This holds true
in virtual worlds as much as the “real” world. Not only do
games depend upon group play and the social organization of guilds and
clans but even social worlds are witnessing the emergence of novel and
purposive social groups. With networks and new computer-based tools now
ordinary people can become a group even without the benefit of a
corporation or organization. They can make decisions, own and sell
assets, accomplish tasks by exploiting the available technology. They can
exercise meaningful power in national, state and local -- indeed global
-- contexts.. They can exercise meaningful power themselves about
national, state and local – indeed global – issues. In this
Workshop we address how to use the interfaces of virtual worlds most
effectively to empower organized groups. The aim of this workshop is to
design the “group avatar,” the collective fiction of the
group in the metaverse.
