Sara: second life and anonymity

Role and Sustainability of Anonymity in Second Life

Introduction

The possibility for anonymity in Second Life provides tremendous opportunity for individual and collective social experimentation. Because Second Life affords us the opportunity to act through avatars whose actions are essentially untraceable to us, there is an amazing ability to test-drive new identities and new ideas. The possibilities for what aspects of real life may be recreated in Second Life are endless, and because Second Life also affords us the opportunity to create an entirely new identity, we have the chance to see how an alternative version of ourselves would function personally, socially and professionally. Second Life also provides an opportunity not only for us as individuals to try out new identities, but also for society to experiment with new paradigms for our institutions. The Second Life world is essentially a low risk “sandbox” for social experimentation.

However, in the end, perhaps the most interesting thing about Second Life will not be the opportunities created by the world itself, but rather what we learn about ourselves and our society from how we handle those situations where Second Life intersects or conflicts with the real world, or where in-world disputes achieve real world proportion. We have already seen this in situations involving romantic relationships in Second Life1 as well as the Second Life economy2, and this is no surprise – it seems to be a fundamental element of human nature that either love or money will be at heart of nearly every dispute. As Second Life develops and comes to ever more closely resemble reality, people will invest ever larger amounts of real love and real money in the virtual world. This will make Second Life more interesting and valuable, but will also likely result in people taking their Second Life disputes increasingly seriously. As a result, there is also likely to be growing momentum in support of holding the person behind the avatar responsible for the avatar’s behavior.

Why is Second Life Unique?

At first glance, Second Life appears to be unique for the completeness of its environment, for the way in which nearly everything that may be found in real life can be found in Second Life. However, there is actually almost nothing in Second Life that is not found elsewhere on the internet. We already have a thriving online economy, chat rooms on every possible topic, a plethora of dating sites and no shortage of online gaming opportunities. What is unique about Second Life is that it combines so many of these applications, as well as many aspects of real life, into the same online environment. As such, Second Life offers more than an anonymous mask to hide behind for controversial message board posts or commitment-free online sexual rendezvous. Rather, users are challenged to create an avatar with a complete, integrated personality, able to function in many different areas of Second Life. Although one person can have multiple avatars, each avatar must still be internally consistent if it is to fully participate in the game.

Second Life is also unique for the way in which it challenges us not only to create our character, but also to determine our own goals and make the game interesting for ourselves. Unlike other online multi-player games, the Second Life platform itself does not provide an obvious goal for the players. While there is likely a place in Second Life where dragons may be slain or mixed martial arts battles fought, it is also possible to spend a day filling out an employment application or arguing with a virtual spouse about the arrangement of your virtual furniture. Having an exciting Second Life is no more of a given than having an exciting real life, and it is no more clear what our goals should be in Second Life than it is what they should be in real life.

Value of Second Life to Individuals

Because the Second Life environment is so real and so diverse, and so much of our Second Lives are up to us to determine, Second Life provides a tremendous opportunity for individuals to live out the choices they did not or could not make in their own lives. Most of the places and identities in Second Life are things someone is doing in real life, just perhaps not us. For people without access to a diverse range of social opportunities, Second Life provides a chance to go many more places and meet many more people than their daily lives would otherwise allow. The favorable exchange rate and easily definable muscles and curves mean it is also a place where everyone can be rich and gorgeous – a virtual Lake Wobegon with no poverty, disease or obesity. Because of this, there is potentially more equality in Second Life than in the real world. Race and gender are meaningless because we have complete control over those attributes. Although certain jobs or credentials might still be impressive, because there is no way to know whether the person behind the avatar actually has certain qualifications, we are left with little else to judge people on except the ideas they present.

Second Life can be more than a refuge from real life; it can also be a place to experiment with a new identity or a new business idea before investing money and reputation on it in the real world. Second Life provides for low-risk personal development – if things go well, your avatar can continue building social capital and forming new relationships. If things go badly, the avatar can be easily abandoned for an entirely fresh start on life.

Value of Second Life to Society

Second Life is not only a place where individuals can experiment with alternative choices, but also a place where society and institutions can experiment. Like the internet generally, Second Life has tremendous capacity to turn many private goods into non-rivalrous public goods. We are able to open some parts of Harvard Law School to the public via Berkman Island without actually making it harder to get into classes or causing additional wear and tear on the furniture in the Hark. Much of the value of the Harvard experience is the networking opportunities and the chance to discuss ideas with other intelligent people, and Harvard’s Second Life presence extends some of that to the online community. It is in this way far superior to, say, merely putting our casebooks online, which represents not so much the totality of the HLS experience, but rather the one small part of the experience that involves logging on to Westlaw alone in Gropius at 3am.

The economic potential of Second Life for real-world companies has received considerable press coverage in recent months.[(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm 3)] From a societal perspective, the truly fascinating aspect of the Second Life economy is the in-world financial system consisting entirely of the goods and services produced and consumed within Second Life. However the economic participation of real-world companies is one of the fundamental nexuses between the Second Life world and the real world, and is for that reason important in the ultimate degree of integration between Second Life and the real world.

The Fundamental Paradox of Second Life

The value of Second Life to both individuals and society is dependent on two key elements: the realism of the virtual world and the ability to completely control how others see us through our avatars, which seemingly requires that they be considered independent entities. The more complete the Second Life world is and the more closely its offerings mirror those of the real world, the more valuable it is as a place for individual and collective social experimentation. Increasing the realism of Second Life both generates and requires increasing nexuses with the real world. Yet, this creates a fundamental problem: where Second Life intersects with real life, the avatars’ lives intersect with the lives of real humans. To fully utilize the potential of Second Life the world should be as realistic as possible, and this includes having a strong and growing economy and opportunities for deep emotional relationships. However, a functioning society with an economy and the full complement of business and romantic relationships creates opportunities for individuals to harm one another, and thus seems to require some kind of enforceable rights granted to members of the society. However, it is almost impossible to actually enforce any kind of rights against an avatar.

Obviously incarceration of an avatar is impossible, but it is also virtually impossible to enforce economic sanctions without enforcing them against the user behind the avatar. Perhaps the most important feature that distinguishes Second Life from real life is the ability to abandon one’s identity at any time and simply start over. In this way it is impossible to get any real justice against an avatar, because the user behind the avatar can always create another avatar. Abandoning one’s avatar does not even necessarily mean abandoning its property, as the first avatar can hand over all of its assets to the second before permanently absconding from the virtual world. In this way, Second Life provides an opportunity for what is essentially an endless series of shell corporations.

Other games have succeeded in maintaining anonymity where Second Life may be unable to because they lacked the economic aspect. Romantic relationships create disputes, but assuming that actual marriage in Second Life is not possible, in-world romantic disputes are less likely to lead to causes of action. However, because there are people making their full-time livings in Second Life, there are real world amounts of U.S. dollars being exchanged. Once the avatars have the potential to create real world amounts of economic damage, someone will likely have to be held liable. It seems logical that property in Second Life must be considered real property because it has the potential to be exchanged for real money, and the logical owner would be the person controlling the avatar. However, this begs the question of whether this person also has liability for the actions of his avatar, as well as whether the avatar itself may be considered property of the account holder. Because the avatars are so easily replaceable, it is likely infeasible to recognize them as independent entities before the law. One option is to consider the avatars as we do corporations – independent legal entities whose independence from their creators can be challenged if certain requirements are met.

While an alternative virtual society that more effectively segregated its economy from that of the real world might be able to avoid this problem, all virtual societies will struggle in that they must grow up against the backdrop of the society that already exists. Avatars, a product of their creators, arrive in Second Life expecting certain rights and societal norms. When it comes to dispute resolution, they will likely expect to either have their disputes settled by an in-world mediation system closely mirroring real-world systems or they will expect to be able to take their dispute outside the Second Life world.

This is the key paradox of Second Life: in order to be taken seriously and be as useful and interesting as possible for individuals and society, the world and all of its avatars and transactions must be considered “real”. But as soon as they are considered real, the avatars must be accountable in some way for their actions; rights must be recognized and enforced. If rights cannot be enforced against the avatars, then they will most likely have to be enforced against the avatars’ creators. The problem is that to do so, there will have to be some identification of the account holders that created the avatars. If this comes to pass, it may mean the end of true anonymity in Second Life and a challenge to a fundamental building block of the virtual world as it currently exists.

Is Anonymity Necessary?

If we accept the premise that the Second Life economy and society will not be able to continue to grow in scope and degree of integration with the real world while maintaining anonymity of the avatars, we must then address the question of whether anonymity for the person behind the avatar is really necessary, and if so, to what degree. In considering this question, it is interesting that Second Life has appeared at a time when the internet as a whole seems to be consistently eroding the degree of anonymity we enjoy in our daily lives.

For example, the social networking site Facebook has had tremendous success functioning as an anonymity reducer. While Second Life allows us to try on an entirely new personality, Facebook requires that we be ever more consistent across different real world settings. Because Facebook is so widely accessible, the pages we create must be appealing to friends, family, potential employers and potential mates all at once. Although we have control over these pages, which in many cases function as a kind of advertisement for ourselves, they must be consistent with our real life attributes and demonstrate consistency of behavior and personality across a variety of social contexts. It is similar in this way to the creation of an avatar, except that it represents the totality of our identity and reduces the extent to which we can try out different aspects of our personalities in real life. Where Second Life provides complete anonymity for Second Life encounters, Facebook removes much of the anonymity of real world encounters. It will be interesting to see the degree to which there is support for protecting anonymity for Second Life users at the same time that so much of the internet is trending towards reducing anonymity.

Whether complete anonymity is necessary to make Second Life as useful as possible depends in large part on what we consider the purpose of Second Life to be. To the extent that the goal is to provide a completely open environment for personal identity experimentation, the anonymity would seem essential. Second Life would likely suffer if our avatars had to be as employer-friendly as our Facebook pages. Second Life also creates a society that is in many ways more equal than our own, and to remove the anonymity would likely reduce that effect. One of the most interesting things about our mock trials in Second Life was the impossibility of true voir dire with avatar jurors. Even if the avatar is asked all of the same questions about background and biases that would be asked of a real-world juror, the avatar’s point of view cannot be separated from that of its puppet master. This creates an interesting opportunity to challenge stereotypes: what happens when my avatar shows up claiming to be a forty-seven year old gun-toting right-wing moral majority Republican and then argues in favor of the legalization of marijuana?

On the other hand, if we wish to experiment with new societal systems for education or dispute resolution, knowing something about the people behind the avatars could be incredibly useful. For example, knowing the real demographic of people interested in attending virtual HLS on Berkman Island might help with other public outreach programs by the law school. Companies with a Second Life presence might be interested in the demographics of who is interested in their products (not that we need to provide more ways for companies to conduct market research). To the extent we are using Second Life to experiment with new mechanisms for dispute resolution, it seems impossible to judge the efficacy of such a system without knowing who the players “actually” are. Our trials were entertaining and informative, but no one could argue that jury deliberations lack something in fairness when 90% of the jurors are Harvard Law students sitting in a seminar room with the judge and the last 10% have no idea of the collusion that is occurring. If we are ever to use Second Life for real trials or real hearings that level of anonymity likely could not exist. After all, jury trials and congressional hearings are both instruments of a democratic system and democracy is at its core a system of “majority rule.” Application of such a system becomes untenable where multiple avatars may be controlled by a single person.

Can Anonymity be Preserved?

Truly preserving full anonymity is likely impossible. Anonymity and privacy are already under siege in this country, and it is likely that commission of a crime such as libel or slander against a real world person or organization in Second Life could provide grounds to subpoena the account information behind the avatar. The mechanism to gain access to the user information in such a case would likely be similar to that used in the RIAA case, through which we have already seen the extent to which privacy concerns quickly yield to economic interests.

However, while it may not be possible to maintain an entirely non-recourse environment, it is probably possible to maintain an environment in which people are able to preserve their anonymity as long as they do not cause real world economic damage. To the extent that economic damage may be inflicted within Second Life on one avatar by another, perhaps making this simply a risk of playing the game is a reasonable cost of preserving anonymity within the Second Life environment.

To make Second Life most useful for society, it would probably make sense to have some kind of limitation on the number of avatars per person. If, for example, each person could only have one avatar, it would increase the robustness of information gathered about public opinion based on happenings in Second Life. It would increase the social capital of avatars generally, because even if the avatar expressing the view is not in reality part of the demographic they claim to represent, it is still one real person putting their political and social capital in a given setting behind a certain view. This would make Second Life more tenable as a political force without necessarily disrupting the anonymity.

Conclusion

The continued growth and success of Second Life depends in large part on its successful integration with the real world, as well on as vesting its economic participants with certain enforceable rights. Therefore, it is unlikely that the environment will be able to remain in as much of a state of nature as that in which it currently exists. However, Linden Labs does have an incentive to keep as much of the freedom as possible in Second Life to ensure its continuing expansion and popularity. For those who worry about the costs of regulating Second Life and the internet generally, this may be the silver lining. Unlike the universities being challenged by the RIAA, Linden Labs has a significant economic incentive not only to avoid liability but also to continue providing a viable platform on which users can experiment with a true “Second Life.”

1 See e.g. Alexandra Alter, Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?, Wall St. J. (2007), http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118670164592393622.html.

2 See e.g. Benjamin Duranske, Rampant Trademark Infringement in Second Life Costs Millions, Undermines Future Enforcement, Virtually Blind (2007), http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/05/04/trademark-infringement-virtual-worlds.

3 See e.g. Robert D. Hoff, My Virtual Life, Business Week (2006), http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm.