No thanks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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

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