Is having an ‘alt’ in Second Life a moral failing? Where does “Your World, Your Imagination” begin, and “Our World, Our Imaginations” take over? In an environment with purposeful fluidity of identity construction, open-ended opportunities for exploration and immersion, and as many prims as your land can handle – does assuming a secondary identity constitute a moral failing, or is it maximizing the promise of the platform?
The issue of alts (setting up a second, separate account which thus constitutes a “second you” within the Second Life world) is not just intriguing, but also a hint at the challenges related to avatar identity and ownership that will be one of the most striking areas of discussion in the years ahead.
Avatars and Identity
I’ve written at length about the our personal relationships to our avatars, and what I prefer to call the “strange loop”, lifting off the concepts of Douglas Hofstadter.
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January 22, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Just a quick word on alts.
I use an alt to seperate the “normal” me who is pretty out there as far as identity profiling from a character for a specific setting. The example being that I created the alt account of Degan Blackadder sepcifically to be a villain in a fantasy RP setting. Why? Because honestly could you really believe a villain named Mace Maverick? >=)
January 22, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Haha. Good point.
How about heading over to Twinity where you’re stuck with *gasp* your REAL NAME! What kind of virtual world is THAT?
January 23, 2008 at 6:01 am
This is a great post, Dusan, I’m glad to see people writing posts as long as mine, but here’s my immediate response:
“I am large; I contain simultitudes.” per Walt Whitman.
Seriously, this fear of alts, and hatred of changeable and mutating identities may go back very far and deeply to the folklore of all cultures, but let’s not be too precious here.
We seriously need an avatar rights movement to break free of coders, or at least to pit one set of more enlightened coders against the other more endarkened ones who are indeed recreating the Gulag Archiplego literatally and figuratively.
If I have a real-life enterprise for which I need the augmentation or tool of virtuality, I can easily get together in real life in person, by registered mail, by telephone, by email, by whatever, without having to burden the anonymous avatar realm with my needs. The needs are engendered by reality; they can be satisfied in reality without devising elaborate coders’ schemes to tie identity.
All your efforts to make alts come to naught if the coders have ways of tracking your IP, your log-on locations, various other identifying features of your “footprint” that they can process at fantastic speeds to block you everywhere. And that in turn can be used to block your purchases, rentals, sales, etc. in virtuality and truly hobble your expression and even your survival.
I always find it humorous that the technolibertarians are the first to make themselves anonymous, to use anonymizers, to be concerned about anyone tracking them, but then they whole-heartedly embrace — as a class — the most aggressive data-scraping that takes away the privacy of others.
Nick Yee does not understand Second Life; his research is faulty. He’s the guy who could claim that avatars have gazes, and that he can track their genders in this fashion. They don’t have gazes in SL. I’ve challenged him a number of times, but he’s one of those celebrities at Stanford that about whom it’s impossible to get anybody to do the most basic challenge.
I totally repudiate the reductionism and Darwinism implied in Yee’s concept that your avatar’s shape or height or whatever will change your behaviour. This is just old rewarmed Marxism (“the material affects consciouness”), or facile Myspacism, I don’t know which is worse. There are quite short and stout and ugly avatars all over the place, but they can command immense respect and authority — sometimes merely by having the last name “Linden”. An avatar can look like a jailbird, but if he has the last name “Millionsofus,” he’s golden. I’m sorry, but Nick is spouting facile nonsense, drawn from games, and not even a very deep take on games.
I’m glad you’ve marked the concept of “tribal” morality here, because that’s exactly what prevails in SL. Of course, there is very real grounds for fear of the changeable in SL, especially the gender-bending, because there is a small and persistent class of people — especially males — in online communities who delight in tormenting females by pretending to be female and lesbian and partnering with them, or finding real-life males and pretending they are females in RL — and causing a lot of emotional harm (and there are even a few females who crossgender and mislead others about their real lives, too, though it is less common).
This pain in communities has been so great that it has spawned a great deal of the thinking around avatar anonymity — there is nothing people fear and loathe more than the idea that the wrong gender is pairing with them.
Obviously I think people should be free to transgender, but I think they have crossed a moral boundary when they do not let a potential romantic (or even business) partner know their real gender, given how much this still means in the real world.
I’m not buying the concept of “therapy” if “therapeutic” means “I get to make an alt and grief others with harassment.”
There is a quotation from Ayn Rand, whom I normally dislike (I am definitely not a follower of her elitist and callous belief system), that makes sense to me:
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
However, I like to couple this saying with another quotation:
“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” Pope John Paul II
January 23, 2008 at 6:41 am
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse The Place of Alts in Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Possession or Expression Quote from the site – Is having an ‘alt’ in Second Life a moral failing? Where does “Your [...]
January 23, 2008 at 10:00 am
Dusan, great post, very thought provoking and a lot to go on. Worth going back to read again, and dip into all the other references to.
Then I’ll work out perhaps what I should feel about my alt, as I have Heleno for work, and an alt not for work. Not that my alt gets up to anything outrageous but its an easier way to separate work and home. Funnily enough, it seems easier in the real world to do that.
Some people know both my identities, but they are people that I chose to share that with. Its not meant for any form of deception, and more for personal exploration whilst not limiting my virtual experiences for fear of jeopardising real life.
Great debate to have!
January 23, 2008 at 10:49 am
[...] Place of Alts in Second Life There is a really fascinating, and challenging, piece on Dusan Writer’s Metaverse blog today about the rights and wrongs, good and bad things, about having an alternative avatar in Second [...]
January 24, 2008 at 4:52 am
Nexeus Fatale has an interesting view on alts…commented over on his blog. http://www.nexeusfatale.com/journal/managing-your-%e2%80%9calt%e2%80%9d/#comment-7637
He takes the view that alts are primarily possessions…extensions in some limited way of who we are, but more within the context of our investment of time and attention in each of these alts. He proposes this doesn’t do anything to change that it’s still “all me” just different parts of me with different roles.
I propose that this would be true except that the code actually constrains our abilities to choose the manner in which these different roles can be expressed, which picks up on Prok’s points (more about after a good sleep
)
If we view and describe avatars as possessions or ‘extensions’ of ourselves, as game worlds do in which their function is first the accomplishments of goals (no matter how slowly or with how much socializing you attain those goals) then we’re missing a larger question which is whether the code and the ‘policy authorities’ (platform owners but ALSO those in the world with us) are constricting our abilities to control our expression, and thus setting us up to buy into a morality without even realizing it’s being sold to us.
January 24, 2008 at 3:35 pm
What a stunning coupling of quotations Prok, capturing in a few lines what would take me another novel to try to sum up. A few comments of my own in response if you’ll indulge me.
First, I don’t have any particular opinion about Yee’s research. I’m not very good at evaluating methodologies and so on, but intuitively some of his findings strike me as a little off the wall. His idea that people react spatially in SL like they do in RL is an example – he seems to claim that with people we don’t know, we tend not to look at them, staring away at other things, sort of denoting shyness and self-protection. I won’t dig into his methodology, but what I do know is that with AOs and different choices for where you hover your camera and perspective the idea of “look at” as a mechanism for measuring what we pay attention to is an odd one.
However, I will say that in game environments it does feel like it makes sense that our choice of avatars affects how we’re able to relate to others. Think of it like being in school and picking members of a team – I’m more likely to grab a human warrior than the gnome warrior, even if they have comparable skills…somehow a tall buff human commands more attention than the gnome, unless you start overlaying reputation (consider it a blinded trial). Therefore, if others react to us differently because of our avatars, then it seems to make some intuitive sense that we’d start to act differently too (or at least those of us who pick up on social cues because of insecurities or other reasons).
Not to bring Castranova into things, but he made the interesting observation that one of the appeals of gaming platforms is that everyone starts out at the bottom. In fact, social convention in games tends to discourage helping out the newbie other than peripherally, and certainly not in a way that would threaten equality of opportunity. The idea of everyone having the same starting point is preserved through social constructions and the code. Thus, the idea that buying a level 40 character in WoW is against many user’s ‘moral code’ because it bypasses equality of opportunity.
I’d argue that your choice of AV impacts the social dynamic you have with other people, but doesn’t negate your ability to command respect, Linden behind your name or not. Some people may dislike furrys, for example, but that doesn’t mean that a furry can’t be as revered as a human male, it just makes the path through the ‘lower levels’ different.
This on its own is a rich vein for study or reflection. When IBM joined the Linux community it was a newbie like everyone else, picking up the grunt code work, participating, and trying the best it could to shelve its corporate paternal instincts. You come to the game with bad hair and one of 8 pre-defined shapes – what you do with it is your own business, but we all start off in roughly the same place.
I think this speaks to a wider question, which is how reputation is established, which then brings us back to issues of identity, trust and anonymity. Mark Bell recently asked whether object camping was affecting the economy – kind of an odd question, I thought, as if gifts as part of camping were something new.
But I also think he missed the broader point, which is that I’d guess that the “real economy” is a mere sliver of the transactional economy. 10%? 5%? Giving gifts, sending someone a script, giving someone a vehicle – this is probably where most of the real ‘value’ in SL takes place and I’ve argued that we should look at SL like we’d look at open source or Wikipedia – economic value isn’t measured in those instances of value creation by how many ads are sold but rather how much content is created and shared.
In SL, the real estate market is a significant measure of growth or stagnation, and I don’t argue against its importance, but I’d also argue that there are invisible economies (or ones that aren’t measured) namely in the ‘out of world’ transactions and those in world where no Lindens change hands (the gift economy, which contributes to relationships, status, and the net value of the objects that have been created whether sold or not).
Which circles me back to the point that so long as we look ONLY at value creation as forms of possession, the longer we’ll be open to potentially being victimized by the code. It’s not just a question about whether assuming an alt is ‘deceptive’ to others, but it’s that the code first denies a wider range of choice, because while SL is an open world, our tools for construction of trust, transparency, and freedom from tracking by the platform owner have limitations. Second, and for whatever reasons, a tribal morality increasingly governs virtual worlds which is either a worrisome trend or an indication that perhaps we’re striving for a pre-rational way of engaging with society (intriguingly on a platform that by virtue of being code is completely rational even if not rationally constructed at times).
When I hear discussions of alts, they seem to revolve around “I needed an alt in order to be able to go somewhere/participate in something/etc” that I can’t do with my main, or “I need an alt because I want a personal and a business presence”.
The first seems to reaffirm the sense of a tribal morality, with people getting upset because someone is running off from their usual social circles under an alt identity…social pressure to “stay with the family”. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but SL is constructed mainly on the premise of a territorial morality. In a world that’s supposed to be about ‘your world, your imagination’ it seems a radical notion to put pressure on someone not to have 5 girlfriends or to be a Gor in the morning and a mom at night so long as they don’t directly intrude on others.
What I fear, however, is that people get lost in parsing personal dynamics and end up spending all their time talking about time and balance, and not enough time wondering whether the platform itself, through the restrictions built into the code, the lack of ability to assure privacy from code/IP/log and log-in information from the platform owners, and the inability to choose our level of information participation through identity toggles or other means is facilitating a social morality where groups in SL tend to ban together and discourage what is the promise of the platform – maximum choice, maximum protection from intrusion, and the ability to be anything and go anywhere without restriction or fear.
January 25, 2008 at 3:21 pm
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January 26, 2008 at 11:58 am
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January 30, 2008 at 3:40 pm
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February 24, 2008 at 7:54 pm
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May 22, 2008 at 10:34 pm
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January 8, 2009 at 11:45 pm
[...] your second life becomes just another facet of your first. Without true pseudonimity, without alts, in this age of weblogs and social networks, you will soon find out that, in the metaverse, too, [...]