World of Warcraft Academic Conference

This past weekend there was an academic conference in World of Warcraft. When I first heard about the conference I was intrigued by the concept. The topic of the use of virtual worlds for research was intriguing, but even more so I was intrigued as to how the conference would work

As many of you know I have attended more than a couple of conferences in Second Life so the opportunity to explore a conference in another virtual world was right up my alley simply from the point of view of comparing the technologies and the experience.

Unfortunately I was only able to attend one day of the conference, so my observations are limited to how it ran on the very first day. I will post links to other blog posts reviewing the event at the end.

Looking at the content of the conference, the session I was able to attend was more discussive than instructive. Certain questions were presented and the group shared their thoughts and experiences, some backed by fact some backed by intuition. Although less structured than a standard conference session it was an interesting round table discussion.

My personal recommendation for future sessions would be a little more focus, and a glossary. I asked a number of dumb questions, "Can you define what you mean by x," and after each question a number of people whispered to me that they had had the same question. That said, with the question and answer format it is harder to keep control of the discussion and it is hard to know what exactly would need to be in the glossary.

From the technical standpoint it was very different from the experience of Second Life. Although I recognize the focus of this conference was one that would likely appeal to people who already have experiences in virtual worlds I am going to look at the experience from the perspective of the challenges of holding a conference in a virtual world. (Yes, I know that WoW is not designed for it. This is merely looking at the challenges given the design of the world.)

In World of Warcraft there are no ways to limit who can enter an area, kick people out of an area. This presents a considerable level of risk to a conference. You can try to pick a remote location but a horde of people with the same group tag heading in a general direction (with the initial starting place announced in a public place) is pretty easy to track. If someone wanted to they could have rounded up a gang and entered into battle with the attendees which could have been pretty disruptive, unless we all decided to hang out as ghosts for the duration of the conference.

Another challenge was getting to the conference. Luckily I had been in at the beginning and had been added to a group for the pre-conference raid. This meant I had indicators on the map indicating where the people in my group were which allowed me to find the location. Without teleport (in general) or an easy way to mark and travel to coordinates on a map getting to a location or directing a person to a location requires that they have a reasonable ability to follow directions, as in go east along the hills and then turn north at the tree.

One thing that they did that was clever was to use the guild chat (think group IM for those familiar with SL) for the conference. This meant that even if a person was not present they could participate in the event. There was no remote viewing of any presentations, but then there is no way to bring a presentation in to World of Warcraft so this was not a problem.

Over allit was a very good first experiment with holding a conference in World of Warcraft. Although a conference is not the standard fare for how people interact in World of Warcraft it is not completely beyond the pale of reasonable interactions. We often see people using applications in different and unexpected ways. I would say that holding a conference in World of Warcraft is not for the faint hearted, but as a place to gather and play and discuss I think a lot of benefit can be found.

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More on the conference:
Stereo Left, Right, Centre on the conference
A flickr group of photos

If you were at the conference I'd love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to comment below.

Adventures of the Virtual Sort

Before you is a passage. Blocking the passage is a large sign made up of a wide plank with four pendant planks.
The top plank invites you to press with the words 'Install World of WarCraft(tm)'


A small creaking voice of warning is heard 'don't press that - turn around! turn around!'.


Do you
1) Press Install World of Warcraft(tm)
2) Listen to the warning and press Exit Installer or
3) waver and examine the documentation.

With a bold stab of her staff she presses "Install World of Warcraft" and proclaims loudly to all who would hear her "She who hesistates is lost""

And with a swift motion she was hurled into another world.

Does Trademark Use Belong in a TOS?

Hopefully I will correctly have followed the guidelines and read enough in the four of the, I believe, 8 pages of trademarking law and guidelines that this post will not result in my account in the Second Life® virtual world being revoked. The strange wording of the previous sentence was predicated by the new Terms of Service and specific brand guidelines that would prevent me from saying my account with the name of the virtual world between my and account.

Now I agree that the corporation that owns and operates the above mentioned virtual world (neither which I am certain how to properly address since it isn't clear that just mentioning them as proper nouns is permitted) has a right to protect their copyright, and perhaps even a responsibility to do so. However, I have three major issues.

1) The guidelines are not exactly clear. (as is evidenced by the above awkward wording and references.)

2) We are describing a virtual location that lots of users reference. When referring to other trademarked terms a person can a say I love company A and I hate company B and I work for company C and not be violating trademark, even if it they do so in their personal blogs. The new branding rules are very confusing. I've studied law and I find it confusing. The not so great with legalese users are going to get lost in the pages of requirements. I'm not sure how to find the balance between protection of trademark and reasonable use but I can tell you it isn't there yet.

3) This is my biggest complaint. These do not belong in the TOS. Yes, trademark should be defensible, but when it remains trademark law it means if you flub up you will get a cease and desist notice first and you can fix the problem. Sometimes it is an innocent mistake or a use from a time previous to the branding documents. When it goes into a TOS it means that a violation of these rules can result in a summary cancellation of the users account and a forfeit of all of their intellectual property and investment in the world with little or no recourse.

Now, I am not a lawyer, I could be misreading these things. Also it is likely a legitimate thing to put into a terms of service. If I object I am free to remove my account.

That said, it seems to me that it is a valid complaint and a cause for unease that these trademark laws are appearing in the Terms of Service. I know of at least one person who is canceling a project. It certainly has caused me to pause and consider the risk of the projects I am proposing.

Are there any lawyers out there who would care to comment?

P.S. Finally found a 9th page 3 links down from the page referenced in the Terms of Service with the chart of usages, I can now tag my post appropriately.

Is Griefing Free Speech?

I just went to an incredibly interesting panel at Life 2.0 on Intellectual Property, Privacy and Identity in Open Virtual Worlds. One thing that came up in the discussion was griefing, and was griefing free speech. Several people posited that it wasn't but I think that the issue is not so cut and dried. I also think that the supposition that griefing is limited to virtual world situations is incorrect. There are physical world analogies to the acts of griefing, and we may consider the real world analogies, as acts of free speech.

Just as a note, I am not saying that griefing is just fine - I am asking that we think about griefing in the context of speech and ask at what point an action goes beyond the bounds of valid free speech. Outside of virtual worlds there are disruptive actions taken, ften in the name of free speech. Some of these disruptions are seen as protests that are valid free speech - as they do not threaten the lives of others, and then there are protest actions amd disruptions that go beyond that that leave the domain of reasonable/valid free speech.

Likewise there are disruptive actions that some people define as griefing that may be seen as free speech and then there are points where griefing goes beyond reasonable/valid free speech. Defining that boundary of where virtual world disruption goes beyond "reasonable/valid free speech" is tricky because we want to use physical parallels, but an action in a virtual world is not necessarily identical to its analogue in the physical word.

One more point to mention, free speech does not only apply to protests and speech that are for "valid causes" (who decides valid.) Some of the fundamental cases that defined free speech as we know it now (within the US) were based on the rights of some less than pristine characters. Rights exist for scoundrels and angels alike.

To look at griefing and free speech in more detail lets look at some edge cases.
(For these examples I will ignore the aspect of this being private property verses a public venue. Private domains fall under a much different legal scope than public domains. Private domains can restrict who comes and what they do to a much greater extent.)

Lets take a look one of the more publicized "griefing" incidents in SL, the CNET interview with Anshe Chung. If the protesters had only held up signs protesting Anshe Chung and her business practices I think most people would claim it was free speech. However, when they threw phalluses it was elevated to "griefing" in most people's eyes.

Why? Because of the offensiveness of the object? Is free speech made invalid because it is offensive to some? Because in a physical world throwing something would be a valid action? But an we say that throwing things in a virtual world (which does not have the same physical impact) has the same status as throwing something in a physical world? The flying objects caused no physical damage to the people and created no laundry bills unlike throwing rotten tomatoes or rotten eggs

I am not saying that CNET and Anshe shouldn't be upset by it. Furthermore the effect on the public perception of SL adds to the emotional ire towards the event. But many protests in the real world have caused ire and affect the reputation of institutions. But at what point did the protest cease being free speech? And, at what point did this become griefing? Is that boundary the same?

Lets look at another example. Noisemaking devices can be very disruptive. Lets say that on some sim some group left a bunch of noisemakers that would alternate when they would make noise and turn off and on, over a period of time and then the noise makers would delete themselves. Would this be griefing? It seems disruptive and perhaps pointless and I know some would claim that it is griefing.

Well what about the Cell Phone Symphony at Improv Everywhere. I would posit that this is a near identical example, and something see as a glorious example of making art with free speech. And it also parallels some examples of griefing in the virtual world.

How much does the perspective of where it is (real/virtual), who is doing it, and why they are doing it change our desire to call something a valid act of free speech? Are the difference that change our reactions ones that actually change the validity of their right to speech?

It is true that (at least in the US context) that freedom of speech can be restricted in time, place and manner. But the ability to restrict these (within the public space) is limited and speech cannot be simply prohibited because it is offensive to some. This limitation on the restriction of speech within the public sphere brings us to a few questions which I think need to be asked, and do not yet have answers.

What are the public places within a virtual world? Must there be public places within a virtual world? If there are public places, to whom to we redress issues of excessive limitations of freedom of speech? If there are no public places, does the right to free speech exist within a virtual world?

Yes, right now virtual worlds could simply be left, or the protests published outside of the world, but as virtual worlds become more of a daily reality, does that mean that freedom of speech erodes?

An Autonomous Metaverse - in Text

The video in the previous post seems to have disappeared so I will try to recap what I discussed in the previous post.

First there is the general lay of the land in law and virtual worlds. Since the people behind the avatars live in a physical space those people will fall under the jurisdiction where they live. What is legal or illegal in their country or city or etc. will likely apply to them in the virtual world.

The place where this begins to get interesting is really in the Virtual World provider space. While the provider is bound by the laws of where they and their machines reside there still is a question of how does the provider interact with the laws that apply to those that use their worlds. Although this has been dealt with to some extent by the Internet, there are many areas that are different as there are actions within a virtual world that do not exist on a relatively static web page. One would hope that providers will spend some time looking at the international legal spectrum and come up with a plan of how to handle these rather than just reacting to the cases as they are presented, but predicting how those laws will apply or appear even is not an easy task. (How many thousands of conflicting laws are there?)

So that is the obvious case - laws of the physical worlds will come to apply in the virtual worlds. But...what if the virtual world could be sprung free from the legal jurisdiction of the existing legal systems. What would you view as a "legitimate form of government" in that world? What kind of laws would develop?

Now at first glance it seems like that is a pointless question - how unlikely is an autonomous world. Well I don't know how likely, but to me it doesn't seem impossible. In fact, using existing technologies and legalistic oddities I could see how such a virtual world - or grid - could be created. Let us call this virtual world the autonomous metaverse. There are three components that I think are necessary:

1) Places for the servers
2) Anonymous network access
3) A way to get money in and out of the system and to the physical person

For the servers, having watched the legal dances of services such as bittorrent there are legal jurisdictions that are fairly hands-off on what is served up on the network from their locale. This would be the place to start for hosting the autonomous metaverse.

For the networks, on the video I was postulating that something along the Freedom network that Zero Knowledge Systems had created would work. But the Freedom network has since disappeared. Since then I have found out about the Tor network which provides anonymous communication on the network (and seems to have built upon the work that was done on the Freedom Network. Connectivity to the autonomous metaverse would be through Tor or networks like this - and be restricted to access through such trusted channels.

The money at first seemed to be a hard one, until I started thinking about what in the US we call "offshore banking". Either offshore banking or other anonymous banking methods could allow money to go in and out of the autonomous metaverse and be placed in some account that the physical person could access. The legality of this may be questionable for the person receiving the money, although I suspect there are legal means that could be used as well.

Using these three components the autonomous metaverse could work outside of other legal jurisdictions.

It would be interesting to see how law would develop, what laws would develop, how they would be enforced, and what would happen if one could cross from the autonomous metaverse to the standard worlds.

An Autonomous Metaverse

I have been involved in a discussion over on Virtual Worlds Connect about how law applies to cyberspace. Some side discussions got me thinking about how one might go about creating a virtual world that could have an independent legal system. I thought I'd capture the general ideas in a video.

After the introduction to the more practical aspects of law and the metaverse, the alternative metaverse idea begins at about 2:20 on the time-line.

The video associated with this post seems to have disappeared. For the ideas contained in the video please see the post "An Autonomous Metaverse - in Text"

Brief thoughts on Second Life & The Media

I was just reading an article on ABC News about the SLCC. I find it amusing the constant "well only x people made a lot of money in Second Life".

What percentage of Internet users make real money on the internet. Is it even 1%? What use is the Internet then? Oh..it was started as a way to exchange ideas between scientists, educators, and inventors? People use it just to share with others and connect to family far away? Where's the worth in that? Could it be the communication and connection and creativity has its own worth?

SL is just a new medium that is still growing. It's also different. When companies first came to the internet few made much money or had more than a few brochures online. It took time to learn the new medium and now many businesses exist only on the web. Given time SL, or other virtual worlds like it will develop in to a new medium for business and yet still be a medium for play - not unlike the internet, but at the same time in a different way than the internet.

And for those who ask why would you spend money on virtual objects - what does your movie ticket buy you? 2 hours in the theater and a memory? How is that any more tangible than a virtual outfit that may be "worn" many times and is used to impress someone who might become a business partner?

Hype is hype, but given time and the development of more pervasive bandwidth and better computers virtual worlds will become as common as instant messaging and email.