by many others in this space. One builds the world one will inhabit here. As a child, you grew up learning the physics that governed the world of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (violent but forgiving); your children will grow up making the world of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (still violent, but maybe not so forgiving). They will define the space and then live out the story. Their choices will make the laws of that space real.
This is not to say that MMOG space is unreal. There is real life in MMOG space, constituted by how people interact. The “space” describes where people interact — much as they interact in real space no doubt, but with some important differences. In MMOG space the interaction is in a virtual medium. This interaction is “in” cyberspace. In 1990s terms, people “jack” into these virtual spaces, and they do things there. And “they” turns out to be many many people. As Edward Castronova estimates, “an absolute minimum figure would be 10 million but my guess is that it is perhaps 20 to 30 million ” participating in these virtual worlds[3]. The “typical user spends 20–30 hours per week inside the fantasy. Power users spend every available moment[4].” As one essay estimates, “assuming just average contact time among these 9.4 million people, subscribers to virtual worlds could be devoting over 213 million hours per week to build their virtual lives[5] .”
The things people do there are highly varied. Some play role-playing games: working within a guild of other players to advance in status and power to some ultimate end. Some simply get together and gab: They appear (in a form they select, with qualities they choose and biographies they have written) in a virtual room and type messages to each other. Or they walk around (again, the ambiguity is not a slight one) and talk to people. My friend Rick does this as a cat — a male cat, he insists. As a male cat, Rick parades around this space and talks to anyone who’s interested. He aims to flush out the cat-loving sorts. The rest, he reports, he punishes.
Others do much more than gab. Some, for example, homestead. Depending on the world and its laws, citizens are given or buy plots of undeveloped land, which they then develop. People spend extraordinary amounts of time building a life on these plots. (Isn’t it incredible the way these people waste time? While you and I spend up to seventy hours a week working for firms we don’t own and building futures we’re not sure we’ll enjoy, these people are designing and building things and making a life, even if only a virtual one. Scandalous!) They build houses — by designing and then constructing them — have family or friends move in, and pursue hobbies or raise pets. They may grow trees or odd plants — like Martha’s.
MMOG space grew out of “MUD” or “MOO” space[6]. MUDs and MOOs are virtual worlds, too, but they are text-based virtual worlds. There are no real graphics in a MUD or MOO, just text, reporting what someone says and does. You can construct objects in MOO space and then have them do things. But the objects act only through the mediation of text. (Their actions are generally quite simple, but even simple can be funny. One year, in a MUD that was part of a cyberlaw class, someone built a character named JPosner. If you poked JPosner, he muttered, “Poking is inefficient.” Another character was FEasterbrook. Stand in a room with FEasterbrook and use the word “fair”, and FEasterbrook would repeat what you said, substituting the word “efficient.” “It’s not fair” became “You mean, it’s not efficient.”)
Although it was easy for people who liked texts or who wrote well to understand the attraction of these text-based realities, it was not so easy for the many who didn’t have that same fondness. MMOG space lifts that limit just a bit. It is the movie version of a cyberspace novel. You build things here, and they survive your leaving. You can build a house, and people walking down the street see it. You can let them come in, and in coming into your house, they see things about you. They can see how you construct your world. If a particular MMOG space permits it, they might even see how you’ve changed the laws of the real world. In real space, for instance, people “slip and fall” on wet floors. In the MMOG space you’ve built, that “law” may not exist. Instead, in your world, wet floors may make people “slip and dance.”
The best example of this space today is the extraordinary community of Second Life. In it, people create both things and community, the avatars are amazingly well crafted, and their owners spend hundreds of thousands of hours building things in this space that others see, and some enjoy. Some make clothes or hair styles, some make machines that make music. Whatever object or service the programming language allows, creators in Second Life are creating it. There are more than 100,000 residents of Second Life at the time of this writing. They occupy close to 2,000 servers housed in downtown San Francisco, and suck 250 kilowatts of electricity just to run the computers — about the equivalent of 160 homes.
But here we get back to Martha and Dank. In their exchange — when Martha blamed Dank for having a dog that died with pain — they revealed what was most amazing about that particular MMOG. Martha’s remarks (“Why do you have a dog that suffers when dying? Get yourself a pain-free-death dog, and my petals will cause no harm ”) should have struck you as odd. You may have thought, “How weird that someone would think that the fault lay not in the poisonous petals but in a dog that died with pain. ” But in this space, Dank did have a choice about how his dog would die. Maybe not a choice about whether “poison” would “kill” a dog, but a choice about whether the dog would “suffer” when it “died.” He also had a choice about whether a copy of the dog could be made, so that if it died it could be “revived.” In MMOG space, these possibilities are not given by God. Or rather, if they are defined by God, then the players share the power of God. For the possibilities in MMOG space are determined by the code — the software, or architecture, that makes the MMOG space what it is. “What happens when” is a statement of logic; it asserts a relationship that is manifested in code. In real space we don’t have much control over that code. In MMOG space we do.
So, when Martha said what she said about the dog, Dank made what seemed to me an obvious response. “Why do your flowers have to stay poisonous once they leave your land? Why not make the petals poisonous only when on your land? When they leave your land — when, for example, they are blown onto my land — why not make them harmless?”
It was an idea. But it didn’t really help. For Martha made her living selling these poisonous plants. Others (ok not many, but some) also liked the idea of this art tied to death. So it was no solution to make poisonous plants that were poisonous only on Martha’s property, unless Martha was also interested in collecting a lot of very weird people on her land.
But the idea did suggest another. “Okay”, said Dank, “why not make the petals poisonous only when in the possession of someone who has ‘purchased’ them? If they are stolen, or if they blow away, then let the petals lose their poison. But when kept by the owner of the plant, the petals keep their poison. Isn’t that a solution to the problem that both of us face?”
The idea was ingenious. Not only did it help Dank, it helped Martha as well. As the code existed, it allowed theft[7]. (People want reality in that virtual space; there will be time enough for heaven when heaven comes.) But if Martha could modify the code slightly so that theft[8] removed a plant’s poison, then “theft” would also remove the plant’s value. That change would protect the profit in her plants as well as protect Dank’s dogs. Here was a solution that made both neighbors better off — what economists call a pareto superior move. And it was a solution that was as possible as any other. All it required was a change of code.
Think for a second about what’s involved here. “Theft” entails (at minimum) a change in possession. But in MMOG space “possession” is just a relation defined by the software that defines the space. That same code must also define the properties that possession yields. It might, like real space, distinguish between having a cake and eating it. Or it might erase that distinction, meaning you can “eat” your cake, but once it’s “eaten”, it magically reappears. In MMOG space you can feed a crowd with five loaves and two fishes, and it isn’t even a miracle
