convergentsystems

Virtual Nations

Virtual Nations

by

William Sims Bainbridge

 

 

The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent

the views of the National Science Foundation or the United States.

 

 

 

            Virtual worlds are computer-generated environments having some similarity to the physical world, in which humans are represented by avatars or other surrogates, and where people may interact socially and economically. They have a very real potential to enhance government operations and offer new possibilities for popular involvement in public decision-making. However, several lines of argument suggest this potential may be modest. Current virtual worlds have serious technical limitations, some of which may be inescapable. Some technical limitations might be overcome only by concerted investment in research and development, raising the question where the necessary funds will be found. Other technologies compete with virtual worlds, notably the existing World Wide Web and teleconferencing systems. Perhaps even more serious, governments themselves are mired in inefficiency, and seem incapable of handling many of the challenges facing them. This means both that governments may be too slow to adopt new technologies that might help them fulfill their missions, and that the problems governments face might be too severe for solution by any means.

            These concerns suggest that this essay will need to juggle multiple perspectives. Much of its coherence will be provided by the two premiere examples of contemporary virtual worlds Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW). Both were created by California companies, Linden Lab in San Francisco, and Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine. However both are international in scope. North Americans are outnumbered by Europeans in SL,[1] and WoW is popular in China and Korea as well as Europe. Indeed, Blizzard is owned by Viviendi, a French media company, and recently merged with Activision to become the world’s leading pure electronic game company.[2] However, the author of this essay will emphasize American perspectives. One reason is that he has spent decades studying the culture and society of the United States, and thus can draw more confidently upon analyses of this nation. A second reason is more important: At this time this essay was written, the United States had moved a considerable distance toward fascism, and there is reason for concern that any movement back toward a more liberal form of government might be only temporary. This perspective, among others, suggests that we need to consider the revolutionary potential of virtual worlds, as well as how they might comfortably support conventional democratic institutions.

            At best, however, we can only outline socio-technical possibilities and identify some of the questions that would need to be answered before major applications of innovations from virtual worlds could transform government operations. That caveat allows us to be a bit speculative on some topics, but does not release us from the responsibility to base our comments on the best available current knowledge. We must begin with a description of today’s virtual world technology, based on research the author has carried out in our two very influential examples.

 

Two Virtual Worlds

 

            Virtual worlds, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, offer models of future computer-organized virtual groups that could become extremely important for digital government. Virtual worlds are computer environments in which large numbers of human beings may interact, do useful work for each other, and build enduring social connections. For example, in World of Warcraft more than nine million subscribers form short-term action-oriented groups called parties and long-term groups called guilds, employing a variety of software tools to manage division of labor, spatial distributions, activity planning, individual reputations, and channels of communication, to accomplish a variety of often complex goals. A broader system of essentially permanent allegiances, comparable to current national governments and major corporations, frames the volatile forming and dissolving of small and medium-sized cooperative groups. Developed for online virtual worlds, these social technologies have a clear potential to supplement and render more flexible the existing structures of government, but they may also represent a significantly new departure in human social organization.

            Before we can analyze these possibilities, we need a clear picture of what today’s virtual worlds actually are like. Both SL and WoW run on ordinary desktop or laptop computers, although fast processors and graphics cards enhance the experience. They use the conventional computer screen for display, and today’s virtual worlds are not to be confused with virtual reality (VR). For decades, engineers, scientists, and science fiction writers have imagined physically immersive VR environments, that surround the user with three-dimensional images mimicking a dynamic physical environment at high fidelity. Two distinct approaches are commonly used. First, a computer-generated scene may be projected on the walls, floor and ceiling of a room, often called a cave, perhaps adjusting to the actions of the user and simulating such visual phenomena as shadows and movement. Second, the user may wear a head-mounted display that presents different images to the two eyes, thus achieving stereoscopic illusion of depth. Today’s virtual worlds employ neither of these methods.[3]

            However, the experience of dwelling for long in a virtual world reveals that the conventional view of immersive environments may be wrong. Despite the lack of expensive VR equipment, these worlds can be extremely immersive in a psychological sense. I find WoW especially so. 

            First of all, a number of features of human vision harmonize well with existing technology. My own computer setup places a wide computer monitor about 18 inches from my eyes, so it fills most of my vision. Humans can see details only near the center of their field of view, and peripheral vision detects nothing more than gross movements, neither detail nor even color. We use several methods to perceive in three dimensions, and binocular vision is only one of them. In WoW, distant mountains are hazy, just as in the real world, simulating the distance effect of the opacity of the atmosphere. Almost all virtual worlds display distant objects smaller than near objects, and show objects growing in angular size in a realistic manner as the viewer subjectively approaches them. A natural consequence of this is that straight lines provide the perspective depth cues that Renaissance painters labored so hard to master. Thus, rapid movement of the person through the scene, for example running through a forest in WoW, correctly shows objects flowing past in three dimensions.

            A second insight concerning the immersive quality of virtual worlds is that action inside them can become so meaningful to participants, that emotions make the environment feel real. In World of Warcraft, one undertakes a number of quests and other goal-oriented activities that give the world purpose. Interacting with other players and the dangerous environment, one feels anger, fear, surprise, anticipation, pride, shame, and even sometimes gratitude. Thus, the world is psychologically impressive, therefore immersive.

            The third point on realism is that these are persistent environments. Suppose you are standing in Second Life, talking with two other people. As often happens, events in the physical world intrude, for example you need to go to the bathroom. You return to your computer to find that one of the people has left, and the other fills you in on the end of their conversation. While you were away, SL persisted, and events took place that you did not observe. 

            A fourth point is that virtual worlds are multi-modal and thus multi-sensory. Especially in the case of WoW, sounds are integrated to some extent with actions that can be seen. In mid-2007, both SL and WoW added integrated voice communications, but even before that users could run auxiliary voice channels, using special services like Ventrillo and TeamSpeak, or conference calls in an online phone system like Skype. Both music and sound effects have long been available in both virtual worlds.

            None-the-less, it is clear that current virtual worlds are far more modest than future ones might be. For example, one can well imagine an advanced-technology input system that made avatars look and act realistically like their owners, using computer vision and cheap transponders, like RFID tags, attached to clothing to detect limb movement. As Jason Leigh and Maxine Brown quoted me in Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery):

 

Today’s virtual worlds contrast sharply with the concept of total immersive VR that has long been popular with science fiction writers but has proven so difficult for computer scientists to achieve in the real world. Second Life and World of Warcraft images are restricted to the screen of an ordinary computer monitor, rather than filling the walls of a VR cave or binocular head-mounted display. On the one hand, this may suggest that people really do not need visually perfect VR. On the other hand, today’s virtual worlds may be preparing millions of people to demand full VR in the future.[4]

 

            Most virtual worlds, including SL and WoW, employ special client software, rather than web browsers. Thus while they communicate over Internet, they are not part of the World Wide Web. However, objects in Second Life can provide hyperlinks to web pages, and both SL and WoW are supported by massive, diverse web-based information systems.

            Second Life describes itself as “a 3D online digital world imagined and created by its residents.”[5] Linden Lab sells virtual land to subscribers and provides tools for creating three-dimensional objects, plus a scripting language that gives them the power to animate these objects and control such things as automatic text generation and links to information resources. Linden Lab manages an internal currency system, which is based on “Linden dollars.” On January 13, 2008, the exchange rate to buy Linden dollars was L$265 = US$1. Aside from a few legal restrictions, such as a recent prohibition against gambling casinos, few rules constrain the behavior of residents.  

            At the risk of oversimplifying, Second Life residents can be categorized as follows. Many are tourists and curiosity seekers, who visit SL once or twice, then never return. Some are representatives of corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions, who have created public relations displays in SL, in hopes that visitors will find them interesting. A few are members of organizations like IBM that conduct seminars or other group meetings inside the environment. Others are entrepreneurs or innovators who hope they can create profitable businesses in SL, dealing in virtual real estate, products like virtual clothing, or services. Some are attracted to the SL “red light district” where they explore novel sexual orientations and seek partners. A fair number belong to social groups that meet in SL, often organized around special interests like astrology, environmentalism, or Star Trek. Finally, perhaps the most important groups are artists, computer programmers, or design students who create the virtual spaces and objects that give SL its vitality.

            My experience with Second Life began at the August 2006 conference of the World Transhumanist Association in Helsinki, Finland, where my presentation was carried in an auditorium of the virtual world, as well as one at the university. Remote participants from around the world could hear my words and watch two screens on a virtual wall, one showing me and the other my PowerPoints. Or, they could ignore me altogether, and chat with the other remote attendees in SL. The government agency for which I work, the National Science Foundation, is considering what presence it ought to have in virtual worlds, and I have been leading an effort to prototype possibilities. Over the summer of 2007, I worked with Stephanie Nieves, a college student intern who created demonstration displays based on NSF-funded research projects, and with NSF colleague Mary Lou Maher, who has considerable experience directing design students in both Second Life and the competing virtual environment, Active Worlds. In Figure 1, Stephanie is showing Mary Lou and me how a combination lock can be added to a door, then programmed to open it when the right combination is keyed in. We are in Mary Lou’s virtual design studio, and everything visible in the image including our clothing was created by an SL user.

 

[Figure 1 about here]

 

            World of Warcraft, with 9.3 million subscribers, is the most successful massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG). Central to the game are approximately 5,000 quests, pre-designed adventures of varying lengths and difficulties that earn the player valuable rewards if completed. But it is far more than a game; it is also a drama, an allegory, and a realm of the real world. From the standpoint of commerce, it is a billion-dollar harbinger of a new mode of communications. From the standpoint of the humanities, it is a total work of art, as prophesied by Richard Wagner’s 1849 treatise, The Artwork of the Future.[6] From the standpoint of the social sciences, it is a magnificent laboratory for understanding social and economic relations, cultural change, and the technological transformation of human personalities. However, it cannot be modified in the myriad ways in which Second Life can be, so it is much better adapted for observational rather than experimental research.

            For a year I have carried out an ethnographic research project inside WoW, rather as a cultural anthropologist might study an exotic society, with some methodologies rather more like those of a cultural historian. This research project was carried out by running 15 characters through WoW, like research assistants or native informants, using two computers and two subscriptions so they could interact with each other. They covered both factions (Alliance and Horde) and all ten races: Human, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Draenei, Orc, Troll, Tauren, Undead, and Blood Elf. The classes are: priest, shaman, mage, druid, warlock, rogue, paladin, hunter, and warrior. To explore the diversity of supernatural cultures, the team includes six priests and two shamans, but just one of each of the other classes. At least one practiced each of the professions open to mid-level characters: mining, herbalism, skinning, alchemy, enchanting, leatherworking, tailoring, blacksmithing, engineering, fishing, cooking, and first aid. A total of more than 1,500 hours of ethnographic work took two of the characters to the top 70 level of experience, the 13 others to lower levels that allowed the team to explore all corners of the world, and generated a vast trove of data notably in nearly 20,000 “screen shot” pictures. 

 

Social Computing Applications

 

            Acrimonious political debates about the alleged incompetence, rigidity, or dogmatism of particular government administrations may obscure the important point that the public expects its government to accomplish unprecedented tasks, some of which may be impossible and many of which cannot be completed by following pre-set plans. More flexible structures may be needed, both for setting goals and for reaching them. Numerous information technology tools developed for the virtual worlds could be adapted to manage the work of constantly changing groups and networks of individuals for the purposes of government. In a very real sense, they are a “third way” alternative to representative democracy and market economies. 

            In representative democracy, citizens vote for candidates and parties whose policies they tend to favor, and then legislatures and executives establish programs to carry out the public’s wishes. Unfortunately, the practicality of the goals or the adequacy of the means are often uncertain, and governments experience great difficulty in fine-tuning their programs or abandoning them altogether. Market economies are very good at finding trade-offs between competing values or investments, and in conducting efficient exchange between individuals or groups, but they are criticized for failing to take account of public goods and other “externalities.” Like a market, the groups in virtual worlds bring together individuals for their mutual benefit, giving people considerable freedom concerning which goals they will seek and which paths they will follow. Yet like government agencies and contractors, the goals they select from are largely set by a higher authority, and thus they are capable of producing public goods.

            Already, many government agencies recognize the training potential of electronic virtual environments, including the armed forces.[7] The BBN Technologies Corporation, which was instrumental decades ago in the creation of Internet, has been active in adapting electronic games for training, and the company’s website lists fully 28 commercial games that have been used for this purpose by the US military.[8] For example, Falcon 4.0 has been adapted by the US Air Force as an F-16 combat flight simulator, and Sub Command is used similarly by the US Navy. Interestingly, the Air Force has also made use of Starcraft, the science-fiction twin to Warcraft from which World of Warcraft was developed. Starcraft is a strategy game, rather than a virtual world, but Falcon 4.0 and Sub Command put the user in command of a fairly realistic war vehicle inside a complex environment and thus would qualify as virtual worlds, especially since many of the newer examples connect multiple players.

            Another application that is gaining serious attention is modeling social processes, such as the spread of infectious diseases through a population. Rather than simply assuming the ways humans would behave, and programming them into a multi-agent system or other pure computer simulation, researchers can create or observe situations in virtual worlds that mimic epidemiological processes from the real world, integrating real human beings into a multi-agent system. A team led by Yasmin Kafai at the University of California, Los Angeles, has already used the children’s virtual world Whyville in an experimental study of reactions to a measles-like epidemic affecting the avatars.[9] 

            Perhaps the most famous example was accidental, a plague that spread throughout World of Warcraft on September 15, 2005. The game employs many biological metaphors in motivating action, and characters often contract short-duration diseases from the “non-player characters” (simple artificial intelligence beasts and humanoids) that are common across this virtual world. But in this case, a contagious disease was added to an isolated region of the world, on the assumption that sufficient safeguards existed to prevent it from spreading from player to player. This proved to be false, and by one estimate four million characters were infected. In the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Infections Diseases, Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman argued that this WoW plague actually told us something important about real epidemics that had not been factored into current computer models: Some people might move toward the source of infection, rather than flee from it.[10] When Science News interviewed me about this idea, I responded:

 

I tend to think it’s more realistic than we acknowledge, that there would be motivations for people to go to the disaster. If you believe, as I do, that the federal government can’t succeed in containing it, you would rush to the place where they were giving immunizations, knowing that the smallpox was going to get everywhere pretty soon. It goes well beyond mere curiosity seeking.[11]

 

            Quite beyond the issue of government planning in the area of public health, many social programs could potentially be tested before implementation. The Boston Globe newspaper has quoted economist Edward Castronova as saying, “Down the road, you might have a situation where every government maintains a whole bunch of virtual worlds, trying out variations on its policies to see how they work.”[12] This would especially be the case for new groupware systems designed to facilitate the flexible completion of large numbers of small government-sponsored projects.

            Let us imagine a possible future example, allowing the US Environmental Protection Agency to monitor water quality across a wide geographic territory, such as every pond and stream in the nation. The data will be instantly updated and analyzed by information systems, and the main challenge is to obtain a very large number of field measurements of water quality widely distributed over time and space. You want to volunteer — or play the game for prestige points in your community — so you log into an online site, let’s call it World of Watercraft (WoWater). You key in your general location, perhaps your postal zip code, and select the looking for group software modeled on that in WoW. In a few moment, WoWater has linked you to four other volunteers who happen to be near different points along a nearby river. For your entire group to “win,” you must each go to several locations along the river and collect data at specified points in time.

            Technically, the measurements are made simply by plugging a probe into your cellphone and dipping the probe into the water. The cellphone automatically records the exact time and location, and sends a chemical analysis of the water to the WoWater database. Once all the geographically dispersed members of your expedition have completed all the measurements, the Honor section of the WoWater website automatically updates your personal pages to display your success and award you the points you earned in this very serious game.

            If you appreciated the help of the four other members of your expedition, you may add them to your friends list so you can invite them to go on a variety of environmentalist quests in the future, or even invite them to join your persistent guild. Such guilds may organize their own group activities, such as carrying out campaigns against egregious polluters in your environment, both online and in the material world. The social utilities in World of Warcraft, developed on the basis of extensive experience in other games, are already well designed to coordinate small, ad-hoc groups undertaking somewhat complex tasks, as well as mobilizing the membership of persistent social groups on either a periodic or emergency basis.

 

A World of Warcraft Case Study

 

            An example of how the WoW groupware operates to bring people together for a common goal is the experience my character Catullus had on the night of January 27-28, 2008.  Catullus was a Blood Elf priest in the Horde faction, and thus an enemy of the competing Alliance faction.  Having reached experience level 65, out of the total of 70 levels, he was solo questing in the north central part of Nagrand, fourth most difficult of the 52 virtual-geographic zones of World of Warcraft.  He had joined the largest guild, Alea Iacta Est (AIE, "The Die Is Cast"), which had fully 1,186 members of level 10 or above.  He received a private text message from Bunks, a fellow member of his guild, saying "Hey, want to do the Ring of Blood quests here in Nagrand? Lots of experience and great rewards."  The social modules of the WoW software interface allowed Bunks to immediately discover which other members of his guild are currently online and what zones they are in, specifically to facilitate cooperation.  After a brief exchange of information, Catullus agreed, and a memo box opened on his screen, formally asking him if he wanted to join a party led by Bunks.  He clicked the box to agree.  This immediately gave him access to a new chat channel, just for members of Bunks's questing party.  Gold dots appeared on his nested set of maps, showing where the other members were in virtual space, and mousing over each dot revealed the character’s name. Face icons and status bar graphs opened along the left edge of the computer screen, and Catullus could mouse over the icons or use the groupware to get more information about the other members.

            Bunks was listed as a level 66 shaman, which is a rather good specialization for fighting in an enclosed space like the Ring of Blood.  The second member was Norser, also a member of the AIE guild, who was a powerful spell-caster, a level 70 warlock who could summon a supernatural minion.  The third member of the party was a level 65 mage named Borza who belonged to a different guild, Tears of Draenor.  Catullus sized up his partners and asked who was going to tank.  According to standard MMORPG theory, there are primarily three roles in battle.  A tank attacks the enemy and stands toe-to-toe in melee combat, aggravating the enemy and drawing all the enemy's fire.  A tank needs heavy armor, but need not be a powerful killer, because that role is played by the DPS (Damage Per Second) members of the team, for example a hunter who stands at a distance, untouched by the enemy but shooting bullets or arrows at him.  The third role is healer, whose main job is using magical spells to counteract any damage done to the tank.  The ideal tank is the class of character called warriors, but this team of four had none.  The ideal DPS is indeed a hunter, but the team had three members who could deal damage at the moderate distances in the enclosed battle ring.  Catullus was a priest, the ideal class to serve as healer, so his primary role was to heal the tank, if they could recruit one.  After about ten minutes, they were joined by Damurota, a level 65 warrior of the Warmaul Hill guild, and the team was complete.

            The six quests of the Ring of Blood were a series of melee combats, in which a huge and powerful opponent would enter the ring, towering over the team, and attack Damurota.  Catullus could see a bar graph representing Damurota's health, and could tell when it was dropping far enough to require him to cast a healing spell, often several spells in rapid succession.  On occasion, the opponent's aggression would be directed at a different team member, so when Catullus saw another partner's health bar dropping, he could select the correct person for healing.  This did not always succeed, so one or more of the team would "die" and need to be resurrected after the combat ceased; one time all five died, but death is only a temporary setback in this virtual world.[13]  In one of the combats, all four other players were killed, and Catullus needed to switch to offensive mode, healing himself as he employed a magic wand to kill the enemy at the last possible moment.  Frankly, despite the quality of the groupware, it would have been quite useless if the players had not been both highly experienced cooperative fighters, and familiar with the standard roles and functions each combatant can be expected to perform.  After the team achieved its final victory, Catullus returned to his solo questing, only to be interrupted again suddenly.

            As he usually does, Catullus was reading the AIE guild text chat when not thoroughly occupied with his own individual battles.  At 10:49, a fellow member named Moobie posted this message: "I just got off my Alliance spy; they are planning a raid on Undercity tonight, 50 people."  What Moobie meant was that he had just been running a different character in the Alliance faction, leaning that members of the Alliance were organizing a major raid on one of the Horde cities.  Very quickly, AIE organized those of its members who were online to travel to Undercity to defend it.  When Catullus got there, he ran through the central trade district, helping the others kill Alliance characters who had broken in.  Once all the invaders had been exterminated, Catullus went to the front entrance of the city, where small numbers of Alliance characters repeatedly attacked over the next hour.  When that activity had died down, AIE spontaneously decided to organize its own raid on an Alliance city, at first mentioning Darnassus, then deciding on Ironforge.

            The groupware can handle teams with forty members, but AIE’s counterattack recruited more than this, so two raid groups were organized. Catullus joined the group organized by Astuss, a level 70 rogue who had an extensive experience fighting members of the Alliance, notably a remarkable 8,890 lifetime honorable kills. Figure 2 shows the main page of the raid section of the social groupware system incorporated in the World of Warcraft user interface, displaying all forty members. Notice that the names of the forty members are arranged in eight groups of five, each one color coded by the character’s functional specialization. Each of the eight groups can function like a five-man questing party; for example, Catullus will see constantly updated information about the location and condition of the four other members of Group 3: Cyleidor, Balerius, Stigg, and Eldacar. The tiny crown to the left of Astuss’s name indicates he is the group leader. He has delegated fully a dozen assistant leaders, marked with the outline of a crown, giving them the power to invite new members and giving them access to a special leadership chat channel. All forty members will be able to communicate over the general raid chat channel, and all members of the AIE guild will also be able to communicate on the guild channel.

 

[Figure 2 about here]

 

            Astuss, but not Catullus, has the power to move someone from one group to another, simply by clicking his mouse on their name and moving their name where he wants it. If this were a well-planned attack, or one of the teams competing in one of the battleground arenas in WoW, he would have set up each group as a self-sufficient unit, with tank, DPS and healer. However, this mass attack on a city is bound to be chaotic, so he has made no attempt to do so. There is no discernable pattern to the distribution of the following classes of characters totaling forty: druid (1), hunter (8), mage (4), paladin (4), priest (7), rogue (5), shaman (3), warlock (7), and warrior (1). Similarly, Astuss could have arranged the players in some logical order by experience level, either distributing the lower-level players evenly among the 26 level 70 players, or concentrating them in weaker groups that would not be at the forefront of the attack. Along the right side are tabs for the different classes or specialties of the characters, allowing the leader to recruit the needed skills and assign the appropriate division of labor. Given that this raid was a rapid response to an attack by the other faction, there was no time to recruit a well-balanced team. For example, there is only one warrior, when one might have wanted to have a warrior in each of the eight subgroups.

            Figure 3 shows a typical display just before the attack began, that gives all the information and tools available to Catullus. Most participants had rendezvoused at Kargath, a Horde outpost in a zone adjacent to the territory dominated by Ironforge. Once many participants reached that point, they rode north on their mounts (not only horses but also giant birds and trained dinosaurs), and the picture shows them just after they have crossed the border into Loch Modan, part of the Ironforge Territory. The picture is dark simply because the time is evening, as indicated also by the tiny half moon in the far upper left corner; clicking on it would reveal the exact time. The icon in the upper left displays the current situation of Catullus himself: level 65, member of Group 3 in the raid, and with full bar graphs for health and for the mana he will use to cast healing spells. Below that are smaller but identical displays for the four other members. 

 

[Figure 3 about here]

 

            At this point, Izeila, a level 21 hunter, was in the group, along with her trained beast represented by an even smaller icon below hers, but Astuss shortly moved her to Group 4, and moved Cyleidor into group 3. To the right of the icon representing Catullus is one for Hollus, a member of the raid but not the same group. Part of the preparation for an attack is the sharing of resources, and Catullus has just given Hollus two strengthening buffs that only a priest can give, represented by the fourth and sixth of the tiny square icons under the bar graphs for Hollus; these will last for several minutes, well into the battle. Catullus had clicked his mouse on several of the characters around him, looking for ones who needed protective buffs, most recently displaying the information for Hollus, a display that will vanish again in a moment. The special buffs and other conditions applying to Catullus himself are visible as the six small square icons along the right top edge. Note the box saying "Lieutenant General Eiji" near the bottom right; this indicates the character that happens to be under the mouse cursor at the moment, and clicking the mouse would display Eiji's information in the place where the information for Hollus now stands.

            The circle in the upper right corner is a simple zoomable map, with dots and arrows representing the locations of fellow raid members. Clicking the map would fill the screen first with a map of the entire local zone, displaying locations of raid members, then maps of adjacent zones or the whole world. The text near the lower left corner of the image is the most recent messages of three separate chat channels: local defense, the guild, and the raid, using different colors to make it easy to focus on the raid chat. To make sure that the most important messages are noticed, the raid leader can display a short command in huge letters on the middle of the screen, announced with the sound of a claxon, but does this only at crucial moments in the battle itself. The square icons all across the bottom and right side are things Catullus can do, such as casting a spell, checking resources in one of the five supply containers he is carrying, or opening some of the groupware modules such as the raid census shown in Figure 2. It should be abundantly clear that this interface is extremely complex, and only very experienced users can handle it effectively in the heat of battle.

            After this picture was taken, the raid rushed forward, battled its way through a lightly defended tunnel at North Gate Pass, and assembled again just outside the gate of Ironforge, where a few members of the Alliance were ready to defend their city. The raid was able to blast through the complex gate area before being stopped and all its members slaughtered just inside the Ironforge commercial area between the auction house and the bank. Again, death is only a temporary setback in World of Warcraft, so the invaders prepared to resurrect themselves simultaneously when a countdown reached zero. Only at this point did the raid leader announce the special target of the raid, presumably in order to reduce the possibility that a spy would tell the Alliance defenders where the Horde attackers were actually headed. 

            The Alliance defenders may have felt the most likely target was the throne room that lay just the other side of a narrow passage, where King Magni Bronzebeard could be assassinated. But this would have been a mistake, because the real target was the Deeprun Tram, the unique subway train that connects Ironforge, the capital of the Dwarves, to Stormwind, the capital of the Humans. After great effort, Catullus and about twenty other members of the Horde raid were able to reach their goal and turn off the battle flags that allow Alliance players to attack them. Then they could ride back and forth between the two enemy cities, perfectly safe and able to taunt members of the Alliance at every stop.

            Many readers may feel that this fanciful evening of adventure is frivolous and has nothing to do with modern government operations. I believe there are several reasons why this would be a mistake, of which three deserve mention here. First, the same software could be used to organize a rapid community response to a real disaster. I happened to grow up in a Connecticut town that had a volunteer fire department. When a house caught fire, for example during the middle of the night when my own parents’ home did in fact burn, a call to the fire station caused a tremendously loud horn to blare out a geographic code telling the volunteers they needed to rush to a particular part of town. Whether because of the primitive nature of the whole system, or simple bad luck, my parents and sister were killed in the fire, although their house itself was saved. In an era when many citizens carry Internet-connected cellphones or similar devices, we will need emergency response systems to galvanize the community for action, whether or not these systems are directly inspired by the ones currently operating in virtual worlds.

            Second, virtual worlds can be valuable sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. The very differences between Second Life and World of Warcraft let them exemplify somewhat different future scientific applications for government-sponsored research:

 

In terms of scientific research methodologies, one can do interviews and ethnographic research in both environments, but other methods would work better in one than the other. SL is especially well designed to mount formal experiments in social psychology or cognitive science, because the researcher can construct a facility comparable to a real-world laboratory and recruit research subjects. WoW may be better for nonintrusive statistical methodologies examining social networks and economic systems, because it naturally generates a vast trove of diverse but standardized data about social and economic interactions. Both allow users to create new software modules to extract data.[14]

 

            Third, people who have invested extensive time in WoW or similar virtual worlds, develop a host of skills that potentially transform their ability to handle other information and communications systems. Obviously, practice using the complex user interface under emotionally exciting conditions would help the person react in a well-organized fashion when using a comparable interface to deal with real-world challenges.  More broadly, I think virtual worlds teach people to employ information technology tools when thinking through problems, to plan ahead, and to cooperate on short notice with equally well-trained strangers. I have often observed unruly players, apparently pre-teen boys, learn how to play responsible roles in teams, questing in World of Warcraft. Thus, the social lessons taught in virtual worlds, as well as the technical lessons, can be priceless.

 

Critical and Utopian Applications

 

            To this point we have described the diversity of information technology tools used to support social cooperation in virtual worlds, then explained how they could be adapted to mediate in new ways between government and its citizens. However, this assumes that conventional systems of governance are beneficial and need only to be improved in some minor ways to meet the challenges of the future in a manner that is both just and effective. An alternate set of assumptions would hold that the current system is unjust or doomed or both. One need not accept these radical views to find their implications interesting, and we must conclude this essay with the possibility that virtual worlds are more subversive than supportive of the current system.

            Interviewed on the influential television program, Meet the Press, late in 2007, presidential candidate Ron Paul expressed concerns felt by many Americans that their nation was decaying into some form of imperialism or fascism:  "We're not moving toward Hitler-type fascism, but we're moving toward a softer fascism: Loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business."[15]  These words echoed those of President Dwight David Eisenhower, uttered on the same television channel nearly forty-seven years earlier: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”[16] Eisenhower then described the technological revolution that could make this form of soft fascism all the more likely:

 

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

 

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

 

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

            Some will react to the words of these two Republicans as if they were passages from Lenin’s angry little book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, dismissing them for being disloyal, unpleasant, or simplistic.[17] For Dr. Paul, a clear sign of America’s fascism is the Iraq War, which he considers to have been unnecessary and thus profoundly immoral. Paul assumes that by the middle of the twentieth century, educated and free people agreed that an aggressive war is a collective form of murder, never permissible. Opinions differ still about the decision by the Bush administration to go to war, the degree of dishonesty versus incompetence in the case it made for war, and who should take the blame now for at least 100,000 deaths and perhaps many more. Yet one reading of events is that Americans were by-and-large happy to send their military forces to kill the citizens of other nations, until their own people began to be killed in some numbers and military success proved difficult to achieve. Dr. Paul’s rhetorical reference to Hitler raises the specter of Nazism, and part of the mythology about the Nazi era holds that the German nation was mesmerized by a few evil individuals. This myth is preferable to the earlier myth that the Germans were by nature a primitive and violent people, but it may be no more true.[18] Rather, all human groups are both by nature and by necessity ready to kill members of competing groups, and any attempt to establish a world-wide pacifist mentality will be doomed to failure. This is where virtual worlds come in, both as allegories and utopias.

            In the most intellectually developed religion of World of Warcraft, the doctrine of the Holy Light promulgated from the Cathedral in Stormwind, there are three cardinal virtues: respect, tenacity, and compassion. The most difficult of these is compassion, because whenever we act to help someone we rob them of some of their autonomy. Thus, WoW’s vision of compassion is more Buddhist than Christian. The goal is not to save people from suffering, but to help them learn from it. Tenacity is one of the things they should learn, never to allow even death to deter them from accomplishing their goals. Respect is a militaristic virtue connected with chivalry: It is permissible to kill someone to obtain his resources, so long as you do so with respect. This lesson America has not learned, because it routinely slanders its opponents, whether at the moment they are Germans or Islamists.

            Indeed, World of Warcraft overflows with anti-imperialist rhetoric. On one level, each player is supposed to be loyal to one of the factions, either Horde or Alliance, but on another level the faction leadership often proves to be incompetent, self-serving, and capricious. Ironically, many of the quests turn out to be futile. In the midst of dire attacks from enemies, one quest sends the player on a hunt for hors d’oeuvres for an aristocrat’s garden party; another sends the player to a distant land for scientific soil samples that wind up getting dumped by a government flunky on a mud pile. Many other quests are effective yet anti-establishment. The player meets "deforesters" for the Venture Trading Company who are clear-cutting a forest in the Charred Vale, and gets the opportunity to chop them down in retaliation. Indeed, WoW incorporates a tremendous amount of environmentalist propaganda against the military-industrial complex that has done great harm with polluting industries, resource exhaustion, and weapons of mass destruction. The expedition of a big game hunter, named Hemet Nesingwary, sends the player slaughtering dozens of animals, a clear anagram reference to Ernest Hemingway who paradoxically extolled macho virtues while claiming to oppose fascism.

            Some WoW quests draw upon politically radical movies or similar objects of popular culture. In tropical Stranglethorn Vale, the player is supposed to assassinate Colonel Kurzen, who is clearly based on Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, in Apocalypse Now, a movie satirizing American neo-colonialism in Vietnam, based in turn on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” that critiques European Colonialism in Africa. While Toshley's Station appears to be named after a location in Star Wars, it really represents the outpost attacked by huge bugs in the anti-fascist satire, Starship Troopers, complete with a military officer named Razak Ironsides after the commander in that movie, Jean Rasczak played by Michael Ironside. Two non-player characters, Klaatu and Barada, echoed the most famous phrase of alien language in science fiction, "Klaatu barada nikto" from the anti-war film The Day the Earth Stood Still; the absence of a character named Nikto reflects the disaster that occurred in the fantasy satire, Army of Darkness, when the hero could not remember this entire phrase correctly. When a warlock's imp attacks in World of Warcraft, it often shouts, "Can't we all just get along?" This phrase was famously spoken by the American President in Mars Attacks!, played by Jack Nicholson, and searching the web for the phrase indicates that it became prominent in American popular culture after Rodney King repeatedly spoke a variant of it after his wanton 1991 beating by racist Los Angeles police was captured on videotape and provoked riots.

            If World of Warcraft is fundamentally subversive, Second Life is utopian. In principle, except for the land sold and taxed by Linden Lab, this virtual world is entirely created by its residents. Some rules have crept in over time, such as bans on child pornography, gambling casinos, and most recently unregistered financial institutions. Said to have been inspired by the imaginary Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, like World of Warcraft it is tied to a west-coast American counterculture, but it seeks to empower ordinary people more than to critique the elite.[19]

            The logical extension of these principles would be full cultural and legal independence, in which virtual worlds seceded from the (perhaps) dysfunctional nations of the mundane world. Already, social theorists have contemplated non-spatial government that represents the interests of online communities that are not limited to any particular patch of dirt.[20] My own research has turned up many indications that the subculture to which virtual worlds belong has departed from conventional culture in many ways. Notably, participants are much less likely to be guided by religious belief, and more likely to prefer the suspension of disbelief associated with science fiction and fantasy.[21] So, we can expect that virtual worlds will prototype many social innovations that might then diffuse to offline governance, while often preaching sedition. The question then becomes how much this revolution is real, rather than virtual.

 

 

Figure 1: A Design Team in Second Life

Figure 2: The Raid Membership Window from World of Warcraft

Figure 3: The User Interface During a Major Raid in World of Warcraft

 

 

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