 | Great summary of legal issues around VWsMarch 26th, 2008 |
Cory Ondrejka has a great slideshow summary of the legal and regulatory issues around virtual worlds that comes from the class he is doing at USC. Take a look:
collapsing geography: apoc week 10 (part 1)
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I have to disagree with him on his point that there is no magic circle. Oh it’s not perfect, got some holes, some gaping holes. It’s certainly no where near the theoretical idealized version we sometimes read about but it’s still there. Even his Venn diagram illustrates that VW and the real world only overlap at some points.
Which raises some questions for me. Should we be tearing down what is left and further integrating the real into the virtual as Second Life is doing or should we be shoring up what’s there? Personally I like magic circles.
Also, which way is the tide going? Are technological, legal, and design advances in the coming years going to push us towards or away from integration. Currently integration is a big thing but is that only because it’s new or because that is the direction the industry is taking?
As I said I like magic circles. And while I have no doubt that Second Life style VWs will continue to integrate more closely with the real world I picture games attempting to be as separate and distinct from it as possible. Many of the gaps in the existing magic circle are technological in origin and as we solve those issues I have no doubt that at least a subset of worlds will fill them in.
I am used to seeing the term ‘affordance’ in the same sentence with ‘norms’. For Cory’s slides to make better sense in the legal domain, he should discuss the balancing of norms and affordances.
This is a topic one can associate with identity systems (eg, realID), where the system validates the identity to determine the affordances within the local norms that create the situated context, a redundant terms but useful because it associates proximity and location. Consider for example laws that do not allow a nightclub or liquor store within some distance of a church or school. The location may have affordances that are excluded by proximity properties. The question of interest is do these real world norms make sense in the virtual world? Once asked, this leads to the rights of the devs and server owners to limit the affordances of the member through the norms set by the devs and server owners, so back to the contract. The IP norms are a different and much tougher or much simpler problem depending on how one regards the evolution of the norms given the properties of the medium (eg, digital IP will never make anyonw feel protected or be protected in fact).
I disagree with the magic circle stuff, too (as Cory correctly predicted), but I pretty well agree with the rest of it. Basically, I don’t see the magic circle as a physical boundary, just a boundary: it’s what you get when a group of people agree to restrict their behaviour for no more reason than the benefits they get from all restricting it. Sometimes this coincided with real spaces (“different rules apply in here”) but they don’t have to.
A 1-slide-in-141 disagreement is hardly worth mentioning, though – everything else is Good Stuff.
Richard
Powerpoint really dumbs down the mind.
One thing I found hilarious is those diagrams where he puts “the world” (real earth) as a thing “out there” or “over there” and then put “the game” inside the magic circle. But of course, the game is part of the world, and the world penetrates the game.
Could someone please explain the meaning and usage of this groovy hip new word “affordances”. I’m quite certain I’ll be able to add it to my adjustable game of “Conference Bingo” along with various terms like “toolkit” and “in the space” and “That said,”.
P.S. btw if ever there was a Magic Circle, it’s Second Life!
THE MAGIC CIRCLE
In the middle of a circle drawn on the ground stood one of the little boys, sobbing and making strange movements, and the others were standing at a certain distance laughing at him. I was puzzled and asked what it was all about.I learned that the boy in the middle was a Yezidi, that the circle had been drawn round him and that he could not get out of it until it was rubbed away. The child was indeed trying with all his might to leave this magic circle, but he struggled in vain. I ran up to him and quickly rubbed out part of the circle, and immediately he dashed out and ran away as fast as he could…
The Yezidis are a sect living in Transcaucasia, mainly in the regions near Mount Ararat. They are sometimes called devil-worshippers.
Many years after the incident just described, I made a special experimental verification of this phenomenon and found that, in fact, if a circle is drawn round a Yezidi, he cannot of his own volition escape from it. Within the circle he can move freely, and the larger the circle, the larger the space in which he can move, but get out of it he cannot. Some strange force, much more powerful than his normal strength, keeps him inside. I myself, although strong, could not pull a weak woman out of the circle; it needed yet another man as strong as I.
If a Yezidi is forcibly dragged out of a circle, he immediately falls into the state called catalepsy, from which he recovers the instant he is brought back inside. But if he is not brought back into the circle, he returns to a normal state, as we ascertained, only after either thirteen or twenty-one hours.
To bring him back to a normal state by any other means is impossible. At least my friends and I were not able to do so, in spite of the fact that we already possessed all the means known to contemporary hypnotic science for bringing people out of the cataleptic state. Only their priests could do so, by means of certain short incantations.
From Meetings with Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff; Arkana/Penguin, 1988
Could someone please explain the meaning and usage of this groovy hip new word “affordances”.
It’s actually an old word, first from psychology, and then appropriated into the field of industrial/interaction design. It originally meant “the universe of possible actions (with something)” and now tends to mean “the universe of possible actions that something makes obvious.” Don Norman and “Design of Everyday Things” is probably the best place to look for this latter (more common) definition.
I saw a couple of good questions and a few things that are probably moot outside the accademic context the slide show was intended to be used in. I understand that this blog leans way towards the bearded side of the world.
However I have to take issue with the basic premise. The whole thing speaks under the assumption that a VW is outside and seperate from RL. As stated by other people above, every bit of every VW lies inside RL. No matter how hard you try to pretend that the bits in that server are an actual room, guess what? it’s still just bits in a server. In terms of human behavior and legal issues I think the real world trumps the VW. If, for example I am stalking Raph’s character in Eve and blowing him up all the time, then CCP may ban me (no RL crime). If on the other hand, I stalk Raph in real life and post RL pictures of him in the shower in SL (gross), then I’ve broken a RL law and he can take legal action against me. Why do accedemic types have such trouble understanding that RL laws still apply to behaviour in VW’s? If I kill your character in an MMO, it’s not murder. If I do damage to your room in SL that causes some RL harm to you, then Linden should be able to file vandalism or hacking charges against me. If your boss spies on you and accesses private information without your permission then he’s invaded your privacy (whether in RL or VW). If your boss sees that you are learning how to grow pot plants in a public space (wether RL or VW) then you were in a public space and shared that information freely. There are gray areas there but they are already covered by real life laws. No new laws are needed just because you think that room in SL is more real than it really is. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen discussions like this, but it never fails that someone doesn’t understand that RL laws still apply to the things people do. And goegraphically speaking, the fact that you may live on Pluto while I’m in South Carolina doesn’t matter either. Law governing jurisdiction over electronic crime is already written and legal precedents have already been established (well maybe not between here and Pluto, hehe).
@Swift Voyager
I think you’re missing the point 
No one really argues that VW exist outside the real world. But since they’re simulations anyway then they can simulate being outside the real world. The arguments then fall around how much should they and how much can they maintain that simulation.
Also it’s pretty obvious that certain actions have different rewards/consequences/results in VW and the real world (and between different VWs). But the discussion there is over things that either do match up or people feel should match up. Content creation for example. Some state that creating something in Second Life is for all intents and purposes no different than painting something in real life. The medium may be different but the base act is the same. The arguments there are over where to draw the line at what constitutes “creation” and who owns it.
Prokofy, the term “affordance” comes from “afford” and was used by the perception psychologist Gibson who tried to come up with his own new foundation for perception (which didn’t catch on). In the original meaning it refers to what you are inclined to feel like doing given a particular setting (your habitat). Different animals responds differently to what they are presented with, thus the affordances of the environment will vary from species to species. Norman who spent some time with Gibson picked up the term and used it for what an artifact makes you feel like doing, but I think usuability is largely culturally dependent so… Besides Norman has changed his use of the term to “perceived affordances” when it comes to computers… (There is no fucking button, there is only light.)
Summa sumarum: It is a much abused term devoid of any reasonable meaning.
Though what makes it useful is in design: what does this design element encourage the user to do? What does a clean white wall incite/encourage a teenager to do? (Graffiti…)
@Prok: As I said, one often finds the phrase “norms and affordances” where norms are the local or situation-specific limits on the affordances. IOW, not ‘all possible acts’ but ‘acts sanctioned by the local culture’. You have consider both in the design. In western serials from the 30s, having cowboys fighting aliens is a violation of the genre norm. In that sense, one might also think “kitsch”. In legal sense, it is about the rights of local jurisdictions to set rules for such things as pornography, prostitution, etc.
Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should particularly given the tastes of the market. See zeitgeist.
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Great summary of legal issues around VWsPosted on March 26, 2008 by Raph
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