Fieldnotes from the Metaverse — My Tiny Life
NOTE: “Field Notes from the Metaverse” will be turned into a book that documents the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. You can find updated content here:
We move ahead into the early 1990s, where players started testing the social boundaries of virtual worlds, how these boundaries were supposed to be different from reality — and how they ended up being the same.
Setting the scene
Gaming PCs in the 1990s were evolving rapidly. The first Intel Pentium CPU was introduced in March 1993, running at a clock speed of 60 to 66MHz. Three years later, the Pentium MMX was announced with “instructions intended to improve performance on multimedia tasks, such as encoding and decoding digital media data,” running at 166 to 200MHz. The first CPU to run at 1GHz was the Pentium III Coppermine, released in March 2000.
Much like MMX, graphics cards also started integrating computational capabilities. First to allow rendering of high resolution 2D images, later to calculate typical tasks of 3D rendering like texture mapping, Z-buffering or shading. Brands like Matrox, PowerVR and S3 were producing accelerator cards, but it was first 3DFx and later Nvidia and ATI (now AMD) that were widely adopted by both gamers and game developers.
The Creative Labs Sound Blaster was released in 1989 and quickly became the new standard for PC audio. It could play back 8-bit sampled sound at up to 23 kHz sampling frequency and record 8-bit at up to 12 kHz. The Gravis Ultrasound (1992) was the first PC soundcard to feature 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, stereo sound and 32 hardware audio channels for MIDI playback, setting the new standard for audio quality. Creative Labs offered a comparable card in 1995 with the Sound Blaster AWE32, followed by a cheaper variant called “Sound Blaster 32”. Like CPUs and graphics cards, sound cards eventually added specialized chips to accelerate specific sound-related tasks.
In 1997, Intel introduced the AC’97 audio codec, allowing hardware manufacturers to put the capabilities of the Sound Blaster into a single chip on the mainboard, with the CPU taking care of most of the required calculations.
The book we’re discussing in this article was likely written on a 166MHz Intel Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM, 1GB hard disk, Sound Blaster, a 3DFX card and a 4x speed CD-ROM, while looking at a 15" CRT monitor.
My Tiny Life
Julian Dibbell published “My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World” in 1998 as an autobiography of his virtual self.
The book starts with an article that Dibbell wrote for the Village Voice in late 1993. In it, he documented the first publicly reported case of sexual abuse in a virtual world: “A Rape in Cyberspace”.
[TW: Rape] In March 1993, a player called Mr. Bungle sexually assaulted multiple players in a MUD-variant called LambdaMoo. He used a game mechanic called a voodoo doll to be able to attribute his actions to other characters. While not technically being able to remote control others, the voodoo doll would make it look as if the target would indeed perform the actions imposed by Mr. Bungle. That evening, he would use it to force several characters to sexually violate themselves.
The incident caused an uproar in the LambdaMoo community, raising questions just how “virtual” such a violation really was. Several players posted afterwards on the mailing list about their emotional trauma caused by these actions. Others argued that no “real” harm had been caused because it happened in a virtual world.
Three days after the event, many users of LambdaMOO came together to discuss the matter, and while no decision was made during the meeting, Mr. Bungle was soon permanently banned from the virtual world. It also led to the implementation of a petition system where players could put forward governance and feature suggestions to the developers.
My Tiny Life continues the exploration of LambdaMoo from Dibbells perspective. His renditions of LambdaMOO’s complex society, with its voting systems, protocols and power struggles further illustrate how the boundaries between real and imaginary rarely stay intact when real values and beliefs cross over into the virtual realm.
Impact
Julian Dibbell’s articles and eventual book had a lasting impact on virtual world design. Designers and players realized the gravity of bringing their real selves into virtual worlds: They also brought along real bias, abuse, fraud, and exploitation.
The LambdaMoo-model of participatory governance quickly became the best practice among virtual world designers:
- A strong set of clearly written rules outlining what is encouraged, allowed, and punished
- Supported by a no-nonsense attitude and ability to enforce the rules, within the player base as well as the operators and administrators
- Based on a transparent governance process to be able to discuss and improve the rules
An example is the Terms of Service (ToS) and Council of Stellar Managament (CSM) in EVE Online. The ToS states rules and rights of players outside and inside the game, while the CSM is a player advocacy group, consisting of ten democratically elected members of the community, to voice ideas, concerns, and feedback from the community to the developers.
But even then, the boundaries of what is a virtual world could and should be able to facilitate were continuously challenged. The Ultima Online Postmortem panel at the 2018 Game Developers Conference recollects stories about in-world fraud, theft, extortion, assassinations, sexual favors, and genocide — sometimes for fun, other times commercially.
Virtual world designers started thinking about how to integrate topics like governance and responsibility into their design process while creating the virtual world. One tool the virtual world design community eventually adopted was the concept of The Magic Circle.
Described in a 2008 paper by Linser, Lindstad and Vold, the Magic Circle is a social construct that encompasses a specific experience within a virtual world. Sometimes the Magic Circle defines boundaries outlining the “correct” way to act within the space, for example defining that the space is cooperative, competitive, or both. At other times, the Magic Circle exists only to provide a boundary between the real and imagined worlds. But the principle should be familiar to everybody in social sciences.
Think of it like this: Everything inside the circle is allowed within the specific context and everything outside is either socially frowned upon or outright punishable.
Different virtual worlds have different ideas about what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s fine to shoot your friend in the face in Valorant and laugh about it. In your digital family meeting space? Not so much. In your digital work space? Likely punishable.
This provides a framework on how to describe types of behaviors, contextualize them in relation to the virtual world and then design around them.
But there are many more approaches and frameworks. Here is a short & subjective list of my favorite books & papers from that period:
- Amy Jo Kim wrote about “social engineering” of virtual worlds, including rules and requirements of membership, the style and mood of the visual design, and the structure and mutability of the environment itself.
- Jesper Juul looked at the complexities of player experience when interacting with rules, structures, and the fiction of games, creating systems to talk about them, leading to his 2005 book “half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds”.
- Raph Koster has been writing, but also documenting a lot of personal insights from many virtual world designers since the late 1990s: Laws of Online World Design. This is also a wonderful list of people to further read up on.
- Here is another vast collection of papers on the topic from that time.
- And of course, Damion Schubert established the well-known (and still used) metric to measure the success of abuse-mitigation in virtual worlds called: “Time to Penis” (TTP). It is defined as the time it takes until a new feature is misused by a player to create an in-world penis. Higher numbers are better, but time is usually measured in hours.
Meanwhile, players started forming Meta-societies. First called guilds, later also clans, corps or simply communities. These groups would initially form within a specific virtual world, but as new worlds become available and old ones die, the community would move together between games, platforms, and experiences, becoming early nomadic tribes in the Metaverse.
Players became not only inhabitants, but active contributors to virtual worlds. An example of such a community is The Syndicate. Founded in 1992 within Neverwinter Nights, The Syndicate eventually grew to about 500 members and broadened their purpose from playing within virtual worlds to nowadays participating in design, consulting, testing, and technical writing. Their contributions during the development of World of Warcraft for example led to the implementation of their own in-game faction. The founder and CEO of The Syndicate Sean Stalzer wrote two books documenting the history of the guild and their interactions with numerous virtual worlds.
Afterthoughts
John Perry Barlow missed the point in 1996 with his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
“Governments of the Industrial World, .. I come from Cyberspace, .. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, .. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.” — John Perry Barlow
A Rape in Cyberspace destroyed all hope for Cyberspace and the Metaverse to be something else, something somehow better than reality. Because if you have real people interacting with each other, you will need real governance. It doesn’t matter how many degrees the representation of that interaction is abstracted.
“In a lot of ways virtual worlds are just machines replicating and underlining the necessity for real-world concepts and structures like constitutions, laws, governments, police forces and so on.” — Raph Koster
If there is real value to be gained in virtual worlds, abuse eventually becomes economically viable and people will not only do it for fun, but also scale and monetize it.
This is how you see influencers defrauding their communities and industrial scale rug pulls. It also reinforces why it is a bad idea to allow the users of a virtual world to be the product — because it incentivizes people to make money by objectifying other people.
People will weaponize the Metaverse and abuse inhabitants for fun, but mostly for profit, if designers give them the opportunity.
And when reality enters the virtual, the relationship goes both ways: As virtual rebounds into reality, people will also try and game reality for fun and profit through virtual worlds.
Players have been manipulating algorithms and mechanics in games for personal gain for so long that it has been best practice to design with this in mind. As a result, game designers were not surprised to see this happen in other online platforms. “Russian Bots” on Twitter or the abuse of Facebook algorithms to manipulate opinions or increase reach were predicted long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the 2016 US election.
It turns out, in game design terms, Twitter, Facebook and social media platforms are just MUDs for some users.
A good example of how intentional governance and virtual world design can actively shape virtual world player behavior and social structures is Daniel Cooks talk at the 2014 Game Developers Conference.
About the series
The term “Metaverse” is currently claimed by many groups, driven by different incentives. Some groups attach the term to specific technologies (for example VR, AR, XR, Digital Twins or Blockchains), others see it as a future vision or narrative (sometimes dystopian, sometimes utopian). Some groups talk about the coming Metaverse, others argue that it already exists.
“Fieldnotes from the Metaverse” is a series that discusses the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. The goal is a holistic and inclusive view of the Metaverse space, separating visions, signals, trends, and hype.
