Exodus to the Virtual World: Policy, Fun, and an Alternative View of Castranova’s New Book

Exodus to the Virtual World is an intriguing, thought-provoking and in many ways brilliant book that is a wake-up call to the power of virtual worlds as the source of real world change and lessons for policy-makers. It also leaves me feeling queasy in its argument that the lessons of “fun” from virtual worlds should be a source of serious consideration by governments.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Castranova’s arguments if taken to one logical extension are for the brainwashing of citizens through a system of rewards (working on the concept of bypassing emotion by working directly on motivational systems) under the (hopefully) benevolent rule of policy-setting agencies (advised by enlightened economists) whose sole motivations will be to try to retain their user base (people in the real world) by competing directly with environments where “fun” is the name of the game (although I thought the name of the game for most platform owners was subscription revenue, but in any case).

This obviously isn’t the extension that’s intended. More likely Castranova had in mind what B.F. Skinner said: “People ARE manipulated. I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.”

I am not an expert
OK, so let me start by saying I don’t have the background, training, education or insight to contribute much to a discussion led by an economist who has done so much to widen our understanding that what happens in virtual worlds is not somehow a ‘fantasy’ – that real ecomomic value is created, that “an object is an object” whether we value it in gold pieces or US dollars.

My thoughts and feelings are user-based. And maybe because of this, I arrive at Castranova not as game designer, policy-maker, politician, psychiatrist or educator – I arrive as a user.

I want to get that out of the way because there’s so much to commend about Exodus to the Virtual World. Using virtual worlds as a laboratory from which we can take lessons, gain insight, and generate ideas for policy and improvements to societies is, to my mind, a great part of their purpose. I’ve come to believe the following:

- That synthetic worlds are a new platform for collaboration, creativity, and experience that will grow, much as Castranova predicts, and unalterably change society
- That as a new platform, and because of their nature, this will raise new questions and problems about identity, jurisdiction, law, privacy, and how value is created
- That synthetic worlds are one stream, however, in a much wider trend in which the tools of the social Web, the open source movement, and the facilitation of global collaboration without regard to national borders, are leading to changes in social networks, the structure of corporations and, inevitably, the role of governments.

I make these points because as I was reading Exodus to the Virtual World I couldn’t help thinking about it on two levels: one, within the domain of virtual worlds themselves and the lessons for policy, and second within a broader picture of these trends and forces and how I personally feel about the changes brought by new tools for collaboration and the creation of content and value.

The Exodus Theory
Others have commented and reviewed Castranova’s book, so I won’t give a detailed summary. Perhaps the best review, which was fairly glowing within the context of pointing out that the book is in many ways speculative, was on Business Communicators of Second Life. (Come back once you’ve had a glance if you haven’t read the book).

But here’s MY quick take of Castranova’s “prediction machine” (p xviii):

- Technology has improved, virtual worlds are getting better and game developers have learned over time how to make them FUN
- More and more people will spend time in virtual worlds because in many ways it offers better value for the time spent than the real world
- While there are serious dollar values within virtual worlds, value is also defined economically as being a choice between competing options for time and attention
- Because more people will spend time in these places, this will cause massive societal changes
- If that’s true, then policy-makers had better pay attention – their citizens will start withdrawing from other forms of participation in society
- In paying attention, these same policy makers would be wise to draw lessons from virtual worlds and see how they could apply them to the real world.

Simple enough. And profound, perhaps BECAUSE it’s so simple. Castranova has extended the lessons he previously drew in Synthetic Worlds that what happens in virtual worlds is very real, and that therefore the platform developers should take them seriously, hiring economists and experts to help craft virtual world policy. Now, he makes a further argument that the “real world” needs to tap into the insights of virtual world experiences to help craft new process and policy to help make societies better and, in his construct, more fun.

And that’s where I start to feel a little uneasy.

Valuable Lessons for Government, Individuals and Corporations
But first, I WILL say that it’s not that some of Castranova’s recommendations don’t have merit. For example, he argues that education will need to radically change. Kids who are weaned on Habbo Hotel will have pretty short attention spans, and the “teacher on the dias” model of education will need to change. Prototyping will need to become a norm.

If you want to stimulate discussion around new business models, approaches to government, or creating a not-for-profit enterprise there’s lots of food for thought, and if nothing else the book helps to challenge our assumptions about how things “should” be organized. But I have a few problems with some of the reasoning, and in particular when Castranova talks about the theory of fun.

Castranova’s Thoughts on Fun
Castranova’s main argument is for society to look at virtual worlds and to take lessons from how they create experiences that are fun for users. There are cautions in his arguments, so don’t get me wrong – his glasses may be rose-hued but that doesn’t make them rose colored. But let me pull a few quotes here from his section where he outlines a Theory of Fun and talks about the psychology of pleasure. Excuse me if I add my own emphasis:

“Clearly, it is a challenge to make people happy through manipulation of the social order. Yet this is precisely the challenge that virtual-world designers have faced and mastered.”

“There is also a distinct relationship between motivational systems and human emotions. For one thing, emotions come later…stimuli that engage the motivational system more powerfully will have a greater effect on the emotional system….In other words, the game is designed to be so enjoyable and fun that you lose yourself in it.”

“This is clearly a fast-moving field, but the point is, joys, and probably fun too, can be obtained and even increased when a person’s environment is correctly designed.”

“Indeed, linking together games would be one way to make flow happen more or less continually…”

“….fun is the mental state that games produce….Very few mental resources have to go into processing these symbols…Virtual worlds are nothing but fun, by design.”

So, one read of Castranova is the following: fun is good, because we like to feel flow and happiness; virtual world developers have learned a lot on how to create and manipulate environments to maximize fun; therefore, if governments took these same lessons and applied them to society at large, we would all have a lot more FUN in real life.

Let me throw out another quote:

The intent is to change a mind so that its owner becomes a living puppet – a human robot – without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is (a race) always amenable to orders, like an insect to its instincts. (Edward Hunter, Brainwashing)

In the Wrong Hands
Susan Greenfield speculated in Tomorrow’s People that mass media technologies could create increasingly infantilized, stimulus-driven, and asocial consumers whose every need is anticipated and provided by endlessly watchful information technologies. Castranova argues (albeit with a follow-up statement of concern for families) that improved artificial intelligence in virtual worlds (NPCs etc) can provide users with a constant stream of emotional and reward feedback to fulfill their requirement to feel part of a community, and to feel they are “progressing” – and that this is a GOOD thing. Perhaps this would end up meaning that we’d no longer have to seek out fun on our own. Games will provide all the emotional nourishment we need. And in Castranova’s view, even the real world will start to “get with the game” and provide the stimuli to make sure that our need for constant flow, for constant fun, is forever maintained.

I don’t argue that it would be nice if life were more fun. I think it would be great, as Castranova proposes, if getting a driver’s license wasn’t an exercise in pain but took the lessons of game environments and the idea of rapid prototyping to make it – well, to make it more fun. But in his definition, fun is primarily stimulated by acting on motivational (almost instinctive or reflective) systems, such that the emotional experience that follows is past control.

But designing a fun society because we need to RETAIN users from their exodus to virtual worlds, and doing so by learning how to employ the techniques perfected by game developers (quests, rewards, levelling, positive feedback through AI, and social systems “different” from the real world) strikes me as leading us down a dangerous path. I’m sure that most game developers are upright, honorable people. I’m sure that the much discussed play-testing of Halo, for example, was all about increasing FUN and NOT about how to keep users engaged for the longest possible period of time – to keep them hooked to the fun. I’m sure that most users would say that game developers and platform owners such as Linden Labs are shining examples of good governance whose sole motivation is user fun – and that this fun is never at the expense of individual or social rights, and is never towards the purpose of keeping attention, time, and taking as much of a user’s money as possible.

But what about those future nefarious platform owners who don’t listen to their user’s concerns or complaints? What about governments who take these same tools of how to stimulate and feed their citizens in a well-designed Pavolvian motivational/emotional feedback system and then extend it into continually adding new upgrades and expansion packs until – well, until perhaps we’re unable to leave at all?

What We NEED To Learn
I am not saying that Castranova’s book makes an argument for using the tools of synthetic worlds to learn how policy makers can better implement reward systems towards brainwashing citizens into a state of perpetual flow or happiness. I argue instead that as virtual worlds grow, and as the ‘exodus’ continues, the social upheaval WILL awaken today’s stakeholders. Those who are threatened – whether governments (isn’t China in the process of building the largest virtual world space?), corporations (isn’t Disney spending $100M on virtual worlds aimed at kids?) and others.

Castranova argues that policy-makers should look to virtual worlds for lessons on how to bring more FUN into life. His main focus is the gaming environments like EQ, Warcraft, etc. and I’d argue first that the future is in other 3D environments without the reward systems that he’s such a fan of as sources of ‘fun’, but that’s an argument for another day (I’d also argue that he’s overlooking the fact that people will not just “leave” real life to spend time in virtual worlds, but that real life itself will become increasingly virtual through augmented reality).

I would argue that there’s a far more significant discussion to have. Platform owners and developers have, until now, had carte blanche to rule their worlds however they like – in spite of giving the illusion in many cases of user feedback and communities. Castranova assumes that power will rest in the hands of government and platform owners. If true, and if real world policy makers try to embed “fun” within their ways of relating to societies, then we’re in for a scary ride.

His theory on the face of it sounds like it makes sense: virtual worlds have perfected fun, to the point where more and more people are escaping to those worlds and in some cases leaving the real behind altogether. Learn from this and make life more fun. But what if it IS China who’s controlling all those levers of fun that Castranova thinks policy makers should grab hold of?

I wonder, and it’s just a question – I wonder whether it might not also be useful to think about and learn from how platform owners maintain control, influence, stifle dissent, manipulate, and police? I wonder whether today’s participants in virtual worlds might have some ideas on how these “designers of fun” have also abused those powers? And thus not only provide lessons to the real world on how governments can learn new ideas and approaches to policy-making, but also learn what we DON’T want them to do?

Just a thought.