Who's in charge in virtual worlds?

The global population of virtual worlds is growing fast, as is the business of creating and running them (venture capitalists reportedly invested more than $590 million in VWs last year). The question is, when bad stuff happens in VWs - theft, fraud, harassment, etc. - how should it be dealt with? Who's in charge, and how should "the management" set and enforce policy? "Another Perfect World" – a documentary from the Netherlands on what users and eventually humanity will learn from virtual worlds about governance, self-government, and community building – is about "grownup" spaces online, but the way these issues get worked out will certainly affect kids' online worlds as well (kids 5-9 are the fastest-growing demographic in a global VW user base expected to grow more than three-fold to 640 million by 2015 - see my coverage).

We're only at the beginning of this question, so maybe our educational institutions worldwide will have the wisdom to enable children to be part of what society works out – not as guinea pigs but as participants, members and hopefully stakeholders in the health of their own online communities, appropriately supervised but supportive of students' own agency as community members. For example, Quest Atlantis, an educational virtual world and game involving quests (the curriculum) that was designed at Indiana University, has 7 guiding principles (called "social commitments"): social responsibility, personal agency, healthy communities, diversity affirmation, environmental awareness, creative expression, and compassionate wisdom, which frame all activity and behavior in-world. One of the issues I hope QA and other educational VWs will address is social stratification and how power is attained and wielded – which, social-media scholar danah boyd pointed out in a talk she gave this week, is happening no less on the social Web than always has happened offline.

"Another Perfect World" gives examples of several adult virtual worlds that are engaged in fascinating governance experiments. The management of US-based Second Life takes as hands-off an approach as it can, leaving it largely to users to work out disputes, which they sometimes do with real-world detectives and lawyers. South Korea-based Lineage's management takes a similarly hands-off approach, but its users, who are largely Korean and have different cultural expectations of authority and hierarchy (than, e.g., the much more multi-national user population of Second Life) have staged an in-world revolution against the mainly feudal system in Lineage (I'm not sure if its outcomes have totally been worked out). Iceland-based Eve Online's management has undertaken a fascinating experiment, gathering a kind of parliament of players whose "power" (or influence over management) will grow only in proportion to their ability to grow its influence with fellow users in-world. These are, in some ways, advanced "civilizations" that are starting from scratch, where government is concerned.

The questions they are all being forced to consider are: Should users largely govern themselves in these worlds, as is the current modus operandi in most? When should management step in - when property gets stolen or people get harassed? What is management like - a capricious and arbitrary bunch of "Greek gods," enforcers of corporate policy, judge and jury? Will in-world user courts or arbitration boards need to be set up, as Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life parent Linden Lab, predicts? Already, the documentary suggests, it seems clear that a utopian society is no more possible in alternate worlds than it is in this one.

[Readers, pls note that shortly after I posted this, the producers of "Another Perfect World" took their doc off YouTube, so it doesn't seem to be available in full online (I checked a lot of sites). I could only find their own site with a trailer. Tx to Dennis Richards for the heads-up in Twitter.]

Undercover Mom in Poptropica, Part 2: The Apple Jacks of kids' virtual worlds

By Sharon Duke Estroff

Last week I detailed the good things I discovered in this popular kids' virtual world for 5-to-10-year-olds. This week...

What I wasn't crazy about

Video Game Overtones. Gallant educational effort aside, my suspicions were correct. Kids aren’t flocking to Poptropica.com by the tens of millions out of a quest for learning, they’re flocking there for the highly addictive video games. No sooner had I entered an Aztec ruin on Shark Island than I found myself hopping, flipping, and climbing Nintendo-style to a secret passage (a task that took me a good 30 minutes to nail down as I kept missing my landing targets and being tossed back to Go). Indeed, everywhere I turned on Poptropica held similar gaming challenges. It’s safe to say that for every second a kid spends reading educational tidbits on Poptropica, he spends hundreds more in videogame la-la land.

To Cheat or Not to Cheat. Let there be no mistake about it. Poptropica games are HARD. For a prehistoric parent like me, they border on downright impossible. At a loss for how I’d ever manage to sedate that Great White and save Shark Island, I turned to two of my joystick-savvy sons (ages 9 and 14) for assistance. But alas, they too failed miserably. That’s when I began combing the kiddie masses (at school, birthday parties, Chuck E. Cheese and the like) for advice on how to succeed in Poptropica. The consensus was clear and simple: I needed to Google "Poptropica Cheats." My search yielded no less than 36,000 results including this unsettling video on YouTube of two children explaining how to cheat on the site - a great opportunity, I'd say, for family discussion about "cheating" in game and virtual worlds vs. in the real world: Ask your kids the similarities and differences are.

Advertising All Around. I’m not naïve. I understand that for a free virtual world like Poptropica to be profitable it needs to feature paid advertisements. The Apple Jacks banners flanking the site didn’t bother me a bit. Nor did the Cinnamon Toast Crunch game that has kids collecting pieces of cereal. But is it really necessary to launch a full-screen pop-up ad every time a kid (or a mom) moves the mouse a millimeter too far to the right or left? Worse yet, the pop-up ads prevented me from returning to the Poptropica page where I’d been previously playing, forcing me to start the game all over again with a brand new avatar – five times. (Hmm, might such repeat registration have something to do with those reported 20 million Poptropica accounts? Hey, I’m just saying.)

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, I found Poptropica to be a lot like the Apple Jacks cereal it plugs so aggressively - loops of empty calories dusted with vitamins and minerals. Nevertheless, in a virtual-world cafeteria line full of straight-out junk food, it makes for a pretty good choice.

Screenshots

Apple Jacks everywhere

Immersive advertising: Embedded Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Many, many Poptropica cheats

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

'Mom-tested' sites for tweens

It's hard to find out much about MomLogic on the Web (couldn't easily find an About Us page), but the site put its stamp of approval on five sites for preteens: Stardoll (digital paper dolls + social networking), the Whyville virtual world, Imbee blogging, Allykatzz social networking for girls 10-15, and Yamod (a kind of YouTube for kids 14 and under). BTW, Imbee is fixing a problem the Federal Trade Commission had with the site. It has settled with the FTC, which had sued Imbee for children's privacy violations. Wired reports that Imbee asked kids to "register up front with their full name, date of birth and email address. Only after the child provided the information did Imbee send an activation email to the parents. And if the parents didn't activate, Imbee held on to the tot's data anyway."