Raph’s Website » Portable identity

Portable identity

May 25th, 2006 (Visited 3081 times) Tags:

3pointD.com picks up on the discussion on horses and governance (alas, without using the horse metaphor!) and offers,

The alternative is a distributed metaverse in which a series of online spaces exist not in a contiguous pile but as loosely connected locations on a metaversal web, much as Web sites are connected today. Some of these would be public, some would be private, some would be restricted to a certain group of people. Instead of one administrator, you have thousands or millions. Instead of your inventory and avatar and all that’s associated with it existing in one place, dependent on that place’s back-end, those things exist in portable fashion.

Under this model — in which you can host your own corner of the virtual world (or have it hosted for you through a hosting service) — exit costs are radically reduced. If I leave a loosely connected space in the distributed metaverse, all I lose is access to that space. My inventory and identity go with me. The administrator may lose the income associated with my activities there, but small spaces are much less costly to run, so my power over the administrator is reduced (though not eliminated). The people have more power, much as Prok envisions. (If the network is built on an open-source, peer-to-peer architecture, the people have even more power.)

I think this misses one critical architecture component, which is identity. “My inventory and identity go with me.”

How?

First, it assumes that all these connected worlds are operating under one single personal identity structure, which is highly unlikely. One of the first things to go when you allow users to each run worlds is compatibility between identities. We’ve seen it in the past, when certain mud codebases became near-standards — quickly, things diverged, and character portability became impossible.

You could have some guarantor of identity, but that guarantor would have to be external to all the above, and then it would once again be in the position of power described earlier, albeit more like a namespace operator. You’d have to replicate all of the Internet infrastructure for things like identity attacks, namespace management, root servers, etc.

This all aside from the fact that Trip Hawkins and 3DO reportedly patented avatar transfer from world to world sometime in the mid-90s.

But really, the second point is the other rub: people do not and will not want one identity. They will want one per space, most likely.

Anyway, broadly speaking, other than picking those nits, I agree overall. And that’s part of why I don’t see any of the walled garden services as being the metaverse. But I also do not see it as solving the administrative issues within any given world. Some worlds will be popular, some won’t, there will be people who demand a say in how those worlds are governed and who are not the world owners, and we’ll be back at the same situation Prokofy decries, only within a node within a network, instead of in a walled garden.

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Fashion Mania - 90s fashion wrote on May 26th, 2006 at 6:17 am:

dependent on that place’s back-end, those things exist in portable fashion. … This all aside from the fact that Trip Hawkins and 3DO reportedly patented avatar transfer from world to world sometime in the mid-90s. … Original post:Portable identity by at Google Blog Search: 90s fashion

Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog wrote on June 15th, 2006 at 2:22 pm:

OUtlandish box art for retro games: Donkey Kong – via Wired Teaching with Games project discovers school computers are not up to date – Latest results from the EA/Futurelab partnership suggests tech is holding students back, says Joystiq….Portable identity – Raph says, you can’t take it with you… Police launch new game to promote good citizenship – keep those pesky kids off the street with videogames. From gamesindustry.biz… Wii Got All the Press, but Games For Health Had Great E3 Showing

Faith wrote on May 25th, 2006 at 9:40 am:

[...] Comments [...]

Philip Isles said on May 25th, 2006 at 11:07 am:

Perhaps this is comparable to the fact that people do not wish to wear the same outfit/uniform wherever they go. Would it be possible to have two levels of avatar, one that changes on the surface (similar to clothes/accessories) and one that stays uniform throughout (the body beneath).

Another alternative may be an avatar with preset preferences that change depending on its’ location.

Charles Ellis said on May 25th, 2006 at 2:07 pm:

On a purely technical level, I’d say the identity management system (to the extent that it exists) used by the Web and the Internet could stand a reworking. There are already a lot of people trying to work towards this, developing replacements for LDAP and ActiveDirectory and Passport, as well as making those solutions work for any regular web user. (Personally I’m kind of a fan of Sxip.)

The problem, however, is that they can’t be truly distributed, because identity is a trust-based issue. Unless you choose to trust everyone equally (and that doesn’t really solve any problems), certain sites or organizations become centralized places to be trusted, and thus become powerful due to their control over the information people either entrust to them, or trust them to provide. So really it can’t be helped.

As for the concept of identity on a non-technical level, I definitely agree with you that people are not going to want to keep the same identity across all spaces or virtual worlds. And the administrators (if there are any) of those virtual worlds may just as well not want people to use an identity that doesn’t fit with their world. You wouldn’t want an avatar that is essentially Neo walking around in an MMO like Africa. And in the case of inventory, Neo’s machine guns just wouldn’t have any relevance in most virtual worlds.

Prokofy Neva said on May 25th, 2006 at 3:14 pm:

>One of the first things to go when you allow users to each run worlds is compatibility between identities. We’ve seen it in the past, when certain mud codebases became near-standards — quickly, things diverged, and character portability became impossible.

I’m going to have to take your word on that, but I can see that identities that hinge on war-game concepts like having to keep track of how many beasts slayed or some skilling points might not be safely saved. Could we separate identity from performance, then? After all, I might always chose magician or always chose healer in every game, or I might have 3 things I’m always going to select — couldn’t we create a nexus or sphere or features that make up an identity — name, dress, face, legend, likes, dislikes, A/S/$L as we say in SL.

If we have portable identity, heck if we can even port just *part* of the identity hither and yon we’re in business. I instantly think of the story of Urizenus Sklar. When Uri was booted from TSO, he was able to keep some of his simoleons in the now-defunct GOM. GOM was willing to change them to dollars and then to Lindens. His preserves millions and ill-gotten ebay millions or whatever his stash consisted of was housed in GOM until he could recreate in SL with the same name and even look. Those of us following the adventures of Uri didn’t know him in RL but we could keep up with on YM and find him under the same or a similar name elsewhere.

In fact, the ability to convert and reconstitute the identities is vital for the free market in the Metaverse. I couldn’t have justified buying land on the risky Linden land auction after emigrating to SL until first I took my highly skilled-up sim from Blazing Falls, who had maxed out 10s in all the categories, who had rares like the Afghan dogs, and who even had the uber rare founder’s simmy, and sold him on ebay – the fungability of that guy on ebay made it possible to buy half of the simulator Refugio in SL and get started in business. If I decided to emigrate to WoW or PE, I’d want to sell Refugio.

To be sure, as Charles Ellis is saying, you can’t plunk down in ATITD, say, with a robot outfit made in SL — the game’s set of looks and clothing don’t contain the robot look. But there will be enough convertibility stations along the way that you can house different parts of your identity from games and worlds along the highway here and there, like somebody keeping their clothes in the bus lockers of different cities. Plus, you don’t require absolute convertibility while traveling. You know that you can’t convert your rubles overseas so you try to spend them out while in Russia.

Raph said on May 25th, 2006 at 3:38 pm:

It’s going to take some sort of independent identity registrar to accomplish that.

Jim said on May 25th, 2006 at 10:25 pm:

Being stuck with one identity, whose handle is some unpronounceable cross between a lame nickname and a social security number?

No thanks.