To Kill an Avatar, published in legalaffairs, provides an excellent analysis of how virtual crime plagues the growing number of online immersive worlds (There, Everquest, Norrath), and explores the very real-world issues of balancing centralized laws with individual expression.

While subscription-based immersive worlds and online communities of practice are more kissing cousins than identical twins, designers of online learning and other interest-based communities have much to learn from their virtual world relatives.

The article points out how, just as in the real world, online societies require constitutions, laws, and civil enforcement mechanisms to survive. The case is all the more interesting because, unlike LambdaMOO and other early online communities that witnessed crime, fraud, and other lawless behaviors amongst its members, the newer crop of subscription-based worlds have functioning real economies (for example, “in 2000, the GNP per capita of Norrath—the total, in real dollars and cents, of all goods and services produced there—was roughly equivalent to that of Bulgaria”). With actual dollars at stake, the “reality” in “virtual reality” indeed becomes much more real.

But, rather than live under the perfect “good government,” the author points out how a utopian online life is the last thing community members want:

If EverQuest’s substantial numbers are any clue, people seem to prefer to suffer through adversity in order to “earn” their status within a virtual community. The resultant struggles among avatars to increase disparities in status, wealth, and power are part of the entertainment. When it comes to the virtual world, it is the will to power that is the feature, and equality the bug.

Thus, designers of immersive worlds face a paradox: they must provide enough decentralization and freedom into the system so that it remains an exciting and lively world to (continue to) live, yet they must also enact regulations, laws, and enforcement mechanisms to prevent over-abuse. Says the author:

You could make a virtual world without the possibility of crime—but it would probably be about as dynamic as Pong or Tetris. It turns out that as we build denser, more immersive, and more compelling virtual realities, we bring into our virtual realities numerous unanticipated real-world potentials. By creating virtual lives, investments, and freedoms, we create the conditions for virtual crime. Is there a solution? Short of changing human nature, there is probably no way to avoid the difficulties of crime, at least if we want our virtual worlds to be as engaging as the real one.

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