Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama from Randy on Vimeo.

There is a fundamental element of social construction and adaptive behavior emerging here at the dawn of the 3rd millenium CE. The theory isn’t new, but the larger-than-life spectacle of the 2008 US election cycle and the attending catastrophic meltdown of global capital is reinforcing it’s pragmatic application. Amidst these crises the competitive mechanisms of control and persuasion are grabbing as much airtime as possible to capitalize on the power vacuum opened with the shattering of the old paradigm. Everyone is rushing in to assert their agenda and make one last valiant stand at defending their personal dogma.

The Cartesian universe established the illusion of truth and rationality. Rennaissance thinkers submitted that reason was the best path. Yet it’s clear that humans are highly emotional creatures often far less motivated by logic than biology. Even our physics has betrayed rationalism, now merely a thin veneer of structure over an inherently non-dual soup. Dualism is no longer an effective metaphor to represent the complexities of the world we witness. We are at once possessed of great convictions, yet whimsically dizzied by the myriad of possible realities before us. We are children waking to adulthood, both strong and vulnerable.

Biology compels us to adapt our behaviors. Or die trying. The energy and food crunch reminds us that, even after so many long and determined aeons of civilized life, we’re still essentially a balkanized mess of tribal apes competing for resources. All mechanisms of power basically roll up to this core mandate of the human operating system. The last 50 years or so have radically altered the stage of our evolution, establishing a massive abstraction layer spanning almost all human endeavor: the Noosphere of Teilhard de Jardin. The modern competitive environment, while rooted in the flesh, is increasingly a domain of the mind. Those who understand this and act to influence the construct have demonstrated a competitive advantage, though often more in the service of biological imperative than any noble commitment to the collective.

The ability to manage social narratives has become an adaptive differentiator in an increasingly mediated world. It is not just the recognition that a narrative exists around all things that occur on the public stage, but that this narrative must be deliberately crafted and managed in order to successfully compete and advance in the game of life. This is a defining element of the modern stage and one that has only become possible within the vast infrastructure of global communication heaved up across the planet over the last hundred years.

By nature of our participation in this shared abstraction, much of our lives now exist in a consensual representation. We’re all so connected that the apprehension, interface, and understanding of life itself is increasingly a collective experience. So much content of humanity is abstracted, uploaded, shared and discussed, buzzing in frenetic cycles that get shorter and shorter every day. We are a hive becoming aware of itself but the thing we behold is not a Platonic truth. It is a consensual creation.

What truth exists is the validity of the moment. The weight of the news cycle. Which prevailing current has the greatest mindshare? Who has the most eyes? As Heisenberg predicted, the truth lies in the observation and the collapsing of the eigenstate. It is only a momentary concrescence quickly enfolded back into a sea of possibility. The Simulacrum is moving so fast now and is so rich with compelling content flickering across the full polemic spectrum, that Truth has ceded to attention. Attention is the foundation of influence. What undergoes the formality of becoming is a matter of debate, not destiny. Indeed, the unfolding of history itself is becoming a product of the human marketplace of ideas. Memes with the most persuasion are writing the future. Our collective world is crafted in large part by those who seize the narrative. Karl Rove, Frank Luntz, and Roger Ailes are perhaps the greatest masters of this emerging social adaptation.

If reality tv has taught us anything, it’s that integrity and community will always be challenged by amoralistic, self-interested actors; and that some people will inevitably sacrifice humanity for success. We are being trained to look past any moral failings and honor the mechanical skill in effectively manipulating the game to one’s advantage. Whether by muscle or cleverness, victors arise on the backs of those they out-compete. Yet more and more the battleground lies in the minds of the people and that strange interstitial space of mediated discourse.

Now, amidst financial and constitutional meltdown the very machine of civilization is called into question, the minds of the masses are left awed and exposed, eyes wide in the headlights of seeming doom, mouth agape pleading silently for context and leadership, ready for the next distraction, misdirection, scapegoat or salvation, preserved only by mad poets, fevered musicians, relentless philosophers and the like more inclined to loving than fighting, though perhaps just as drunk on the powers of Life. Opportunists are racing to grab center stage and push the story in their preferred direction, hoping the narrative is stronger than the needs and expressions of the human social animal.

The battle is on and the territory has shifted - “the hearts and minds of America” are at stake. This is deeper than it appears on the surface. We are on the edge of a knife. Progressives, leftists, and peacenicks of all stripes must engage the social construct and actively manage the narrative. It’s not enough to offer the most logical solution. Indeed, the opposition will seize on this as another example of “liberal intellectualism”. The rules of the game have evolved and we must play it or perish. If Truth is dead and history is written by the victors, then the ideals of life, liberty, happiness, and peace need the best marketing team on Earth.

But dig: though the annals of Respect implore us to hate the Game not the Player, beware of such moral relativism and it’s erosive impact on integrity. Do not absolve the player of responsibility. Do not cast your votes merely on who plays the game most effectively. The rules themselves are a fluid property of narrative and we would all do well to keep in mind the social ideals of community and cooperation. Check yourself, lest you wreck yourself.

If we’re heading towards a time when the average person is looking at the world through augmented reality overlays - mobile camera readers, HUD glasses, implants superimposing datas on the “real world” - how much of reality will still be shared? Will the building I see be the same as those around me? Will reality itself begin to fragment into inumerable niche channels? Is it already? What will this do to our sense of self & space? Is this any different than the existing degree of sub-genre-fication that divides our cultures through class & affiliation? How do local communities find strength amidst a rising tide of non-local belonging?

Here’s a relatively concise list of elements I feel are required for a truly modern immersive world experience. This list includes some basic requirements as well as those forward-looking and convergent technologies defining the new digital world. Roughly in order of importance:

Life - agents, animals, vegetation, vehicles, flocking, emergent interactions
Particles - trash debris, dust, fluids, bugs & birds, all dynamic
Lighting - variant & dynamic, color shifts, shading, sun/moon tracking
Physics - collision, substance, weight, gravity, limits, damage
Audio - locational sounds, ambiance, music, machines, voices, life
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Time - periodic day & night, false(game) time vs. real-time, sun & moon(s)
Weather - wet, dry, clouds, fog, sunsets, wind, tides, waves, storms
Seasons & Schedules - weather, light, plant growth/senescence, trains/buses, clothing, habits, migrations
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Affordances - findability in & across worlds/nets, location, mapping, geocaching
Communication - in-world, out-world, across social nets, mobiles
Identity - user metadata, visible profiles, affiliations, interests, skills, media, world stats
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Interaction - with users, agents, objects, machines, architecture, landscape
Narrative - goals, needs, desires, food/money/health/tools/tech/toys
Authoring - persistent in-world modding, grafitti, tagging, comments, construction, destruction
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Media - in-world & out-world news, rss/video/SMS/Twitter/datafeeds, radio/mobile/tv/web
Record & Broadcast - user & world cameras, vids pushed to net broadcast, user record/publish, broadcast to in-world channels/spaces

I’m heartened to find the Metaverse Roadmap, sponsored by the Accelerating Studies Foundation. While I’ve been moaning about the shortcomings of immersive 3D technologies, they’ve been defining the template for progress. Much of their thoughts align with my own, painting an exciting future of convergence across modalities, devices, and workflows.

The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.

In sum, for the best view of the changes ahead, we suggest thinking of the Metaverse not as virtual space but as the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds.

The Tyrell Corporation:

Based in Los Angeles in the year 2019, Tyrell is named after its founder Dr. Eldon Tyrell and is a high-tech biocorp primarily concerned with the production of life-like androids called replicants. Tyrell’s slogan is “More human than human”. The headquarters for the corporation is over 700-stories tall. The Tyrell corporation is the only outfit making Nexus-6 replicants which are so human-like that the only way L.A.P.D Blade Runner Units can indentify them is to sit suspects down and go through an exhausting empathy test called the “Voight-Kampff Scale.”

The Tyrell Corporation was also involved in the exporting of replicant labor to the outer space colonies for situations deemed too dangerous and degrading for regular humans such as military operations, high risk industrial work, prostitution and slave labor. One could call it interstellar commerce or just growing an army of slaves.

Riding the wake of Second Life’s 2007 publicity blitz, there have been many new entrants into the world of 3D immersion, once idealistically known as “virtual reality”. While Second Life has created an interesting experiment, they have so far seemed unable to turn the exposure into compelling innovation. The new batch of lukewarm 3D-world offerings seem little more than shiny re-iterations without anything truly exciting. Too often they all seem to reduce to fancy chat rooms. VR may be edging into interesting territory in quiet research groups and questionable government projects but the practical applications that hit the street seem to be stuck in the uninspiring rut of fashionable avatars and in-world video streaming. The exciting possibilities of the virtual domain appear to me to be lost in the banalities of the 20th century marketplace.

Way back in the early 1990’s the visionary projections of what VR could become, as touted by Terence McKenna, Jaron Lanier, Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer, Howard Rheingold, and many others, were rich with grand roadmaps towards deep immersion and hyperconnectivity. Great fantastic vistas would rise up in cyberspace while we clothed ourselves in magical representations, walking as telepathic deities in an unbridled world of our own making. The mind would become manifest in a vast psychedelic playground of the Soul. To be sure, this grand vision has been incrementally realized to some degree but the narrative was so compelling and exciting that the world expected it to arrive as soon as the internet started wiring us all together.

The early experiments pointed the way forward but were unrealizable in any practical setting that didn’t require $150,000 of university or milspec hardware. The dream was quickly subsumed by the criticism and the simple limitations imposed by the tech needed to support such visions. Platforms like VRML, ActiveWorlds, and Blaxxun emerged to try and bring VR to the masses - or at least begin to lay the foundations for practical world building - but once again they were assailed by those who wanted the fabled metaverse now and were unwilling to wait for the tech to catch up to the vision. Indeed, the worlds painted by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson - arguably the visionaries most responsible for the general conception of what VR is supposed to be - were so rich and compelling that, in some ways, they set the bar so high that attempts to date have typically been judged on their failure to reach that vision instead of on their movements towards its inevitable realization.

From my perspective, the current climate of discussion around open immersive worlds seems to have internalized the criticism and imposed it’s own self-limitations. The dream is no longer seen as safe or economical. The scope of implementations represented by Second Life, There, Metaversum, as well as the brand worlds like VMTV and Sony’s Home seems restrained and cautious, either sitting on old open platforms hoping the users will create compelling content from faded API’s, or erecting pretty, branded walls around restricted party clubs that are little more than targeted marketing opportunities. The only visible push for innovation seems to be jumping on the social net bandwagon and attempting to integrate Facebook-like features into 3D, but the actual implementations have seemed short-sighted and awkward at best. And why should Facebook just snap into 3D? Isn’t there a different modality that’s more appropriate to immersive worlds?

The need for a safe business model seems to have overwhelmed the value of a compelling forward-looking vision and a willingness to embrace new technology. The new Linden CEO seems to be a business functionary, brought in by the investors to drum up profits. Will they use them to push the platform forward or just make better ad space? And I understand that money is required to do these things and you really *do* need a good business model. But developing proprietary client platforms that try to re-invent the wheel every time they want to integrate a web 2.0 feature is not cost-effective or safe. All of the prevailing social web sites have open API’s that provide query returns and push-data streams. Flash and other rendering layers will happily provide dynamic overlays that enable truly compelling and interactive representations of user data. A safe and valuable business model would be to build a powerful scenegraph with rich material support and an elegant renderer, give it a simple javascript API, then skin it with a dynamic 2d layer. Wire it up and avatars now have pretty callouts that can display their interests and affiliations, their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles elegantly parsed and reconfigured for in-scene consumption; you have dynamic layers in-world that can show Twitter updates and RSS feeds, or media content and push advertising; your personal UI affordances can live alongside unobtrusive world nav controls; you have SMS, IM, and mobile comm support across worlds; you have the ability to have scaled interfaces and affordances appropriate to multiple device interfaces; you have the ability to send your camera feed out-of-world to a web page embed. The possibilities grow exponentially when immersive worlds are designed from the ground up to be cloud-aware, social, and scriptable.

I keep looking out for really interesting developments in this space but nobody seems to be doing it (caveat: I don’t see all and I’m only writing from my limited perspective). The most compelling examples are in the carefully-crafted MMORPG’s and truly immersive worlds like GTA4 but these worlds are closed and financed by huge warchests. Nevertheless, they are the ones who are painting the future and start-ups would do well to study their success and consider the properties that make them so compelling. Do we really need another hokey tween clubhouse? Maybe we do but let’s also take back the dream of truly rich and collaborative worlds that redefine what it means to be human and where the lines between material reality and digital space blur beyond recognition.

I do honestly applaud the efforts to create new 3D platforms but I plead with developers to push against the restraints imposed by critics and markets alike. The hardware is mighty, world culture and communication is going digital, and open networks are becoming the default standard. There has never been a better time to be idealistic about virtual reality and immersion.

I have a lot of issues with Second Life - mostly because I’m frustrated by their potential and their seeming inability to act on it - but it’s nevertheless an interesting sandbox to explore the greater frontiers of virtual immersion and social ontology. To this end, Japanese researchers have wired up a Second Life avatar to respond to the thoughts of a paraplegic.

…he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.

…”In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves… and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.

The totally awesome and ingenious feature of Twitter & webcams in GTA *is not* in GTA4. Just a dream. Rockstar: see my LinkedIn.

Chris23 6 minutes ago from twhirl

No time to comment on this one, but do note the conflicting results of this Gartner report on the success (or lack thereof) of virtual world businesses:

The vast majority of virtual world projects launched by businesses fail within 18 months, but the impact of the collaboration technology on organizations could eventually be as big as the Internet, a market research firm said this week.

Fully 90% of business forays into virtual worlds fail because organizations focus on the technology rather than on understanding the needs of the employees using it, Gartner said.

I’m driving along in a 1963 Cadillac trying to hold the lumbering sway of its heavy chassis straight to the road as I rumble down the city street past the usual castaways and early risers. I can’t feel it but the steam coming out of their mouths makes me think it’s a bit chilly out, though at least one or two of the morning denizens are blowing cigarette smoke, not just hot breath. From the radio in my Caddy rise arpegiated synth lines, sawtoothed and filtered, beatless but rhythmic, like a ca. 1993 ambient chillroom set. The sounds lift and expand taking my view up the pink walls to the roofline, then higher to the dawning skies. A synthetic voice like a female Hawking intones the moment of eternity, speaking softly to the evolutionary imperative of our cultural awakening. Rich pads wash under it all merging with the engine of my Caddy and the sounds of the morning as I roll on down the streets.

It’s sunrise and I’m back in Liberty City.

I haven’t spent much time at all in the great MMO’s like World of Warcraft or Everquest, but a part of me lives and breathes in the otherworld of Grand Theft Auto. I have deep memories of slamming a stolen Sentinel (BMW clone) down the blurring night streets of the first Liberty City in GTA3, under the glowing lamps and through the fog, the pounding beat of the rave channel banging and echoing in dubbed out midnight madness. One of those songs is a signature for me - an anthem - yet I’ve never known it anywhere else. I played Vice City and San Andreas too, but I’ve never been that concerned with the missions. For me it’s about the immersion and the place-ness of it all. An open landscape rooted in reality yet free of enduring consequence.

I’m in the new Liberty City and I’m struck by the light. I’ve come to really appreciate a good lighting model, having worked on some in the past and having had the opportunity to see the warmth of truly rich algorithms. The world of GTA4 is heavy with reds and yellows making it feel more earthy and warm. Underneath the raised railways, light and shadow are splashed across the streets filtered by the steel webwork above. As I drive below my car flickers dark & light in shadowed semaphore. Flying over the city islands in a cheat-enabled helicopter the sun washes across the water like a giant fish catching the light across a thousand shiny scales. I can see boats far below skipping across the surface. The sunsets are beautiful, casting a pink orange glow across the building facades. It deepens to red and then blue as night falls and the moon ascends.

The city is alive, crowded with traffic and pedestrians and little bits of trash blowing past. Birds take flight as humanoid bots engage each other, driven by runtime AI imperatives. I saw one car rear-end another. Both drivers stepped out and began cursing each other. In moments, fists were flying and a brawl ensued. At another moment I was accosted by a Russian who ran into me on the sidewalk. He didn’t like the cut of my jib and began attacking me. Fortunately for me (and him, given my heavily-armed status), a cop car had just been passing. It stopped and out came two officers who detained and arrested the man, stuffing him into the back of their cruiser to be whisked away to some deep digital prison. Even polygons can go to jail.

On my cellphone I get calls from my cousin Roman pleading for rescue from his angry Albanian loan sharks. Then a call from my new girlfriend, Michelle, who wants a second date (there are friends in the game and how you treat them will determine the opportunities presented to you in the future). Hopefully it won’t be back to the bowling alley - the site of my bitter defeat on the lanes. But really, I just want to drive around and harass the cops. My cellphone also lets me enter cheat codes to stock up on weapons cause I’m not feeling very safe on these mean streets without a rocket launcher and a heavy caliber assault rifle. This place is violent and sooner or later somebody is gonna step up on me, be they local hood or bad cop. Maybe I might slam my stolen SUV into a police cruiser or accidentally run down some pedestrians on the sidewalk while changing the radio station (I love Weazel News! The game is rife with rich socio-political satire that very much reflects my own new-millennial sensibilities, skewering many of the malicious entities stalking our planet). Or I might land my helicopter on the roof of a ten-story building and begin sniping at gang members down on the street. The point is, sooner or later I’m gonna do something that will upset the cops enough to come after me. Then it’s just a hail of gunfire, exploding vehicles, SWAT teams, and fiery helicopters raining down from the sky.

In one firefight I was getting shot by an LCPD officer as he marched straight at me, his pistol popping hot lead into my chest. I struggled to find a weapon, finally raising a shotgun to his face. He fired one last shot as I pulled the trigger and, as the color bled out of the scene and the camera tilted and pulled away, both he and I flew backwards from each other, blood flying with our bodies falling to the pavement in gravity’s final embrace. A short re-spawn and I’m back on the streets, fitted with milspec gear and an unbidden lust for mayhem.

I’m crouched and sidestepping across the road, targeting several LCPD cops and pulling off shots at each. There are at least 6 squad cars parked sideways all around me, lights spinning and sirens blaring. Some have dead cops in front of them, others have officers crouched behind open doors yelling and firing guns at me. Two SWAT helicopters circle overhead, speaking through loudspeakers while firing heavy artillery on my position, city skyscrapers rising up above like Anubin guards at the gates of the Underworld. Their numbers are declining but they’ve got me out-gunned. I know I’m going down but how many can I take with me? The car next to me is on fire and two cops are stalking towards me, firing. I pull out a grenade and as the silver bullet with my name on it sears deep into my chest, I drop it to my feet, pin pulled, falling to my knees. The two cops are right next to me, stunned for a second, then turn to run just as the fuse hits the charge and all three of us are blown several yards into the sky like fiery twisted rag dolls, arching off each in our own singular trajectory pulled inevitably back to the earth just as the car explodes and flips itself in a giant fireball of twisted metal.

It’s the little things like this that make me glow with happiness. The sheer magic of physics and agency. The emergence of such rich and staggering complexity from a simple set of rules. The reality teased out from so many lines of code. The place is alive and feels so whether I’m there or not.

I haven’t played many of the missions. I will, but only to learn more about the city. Like, where the internet cafe’s and strip clubs are, and which buildings I can enter. The place is so huge it takes a monumental effort to get an understanding of the geography. I keep trying to remember street names and neighborhoods, referring to the map to cohere it all into a consistent sense of place. This is a challenging task when your inner cochlear equilibrium is telling you you’re sitting on a couch, not hurtling down a boulevard. And it’s just so big. Liberty City is modeled after New York City and it really looks and feels like it’s gotten pretty close. Rockstar (the game maker) has included a multi-player mode that allows up to 16 people to enter into the world and play missions. Cops v. Robbers, Gang Battle, etc. But it’s clear that the goal, given enough computational meat, will be to turn Liberty City into a persistent MMO. Imagine if hundreds or thousands of user could populate the city 24/7…

I want it. I would pay for that. It could become my Evercrack. Even now there’s a part of me, a piece of my self, that lives in Liberty City. In some moments of reflection I am a humble but well-armed Russian immigrant walking the streets under that beautiful orange-red haze of sunset, waiting for the lights to power on and glow in the night fog. Waiting for the restrictions of the default world to shift imperceptibly enough to break some of the constraints of law and society. I’ve never bought into the notion that video games make kids violent. Bad parenting and abuse makes kids violent. Judgment and hatred makes kids violent. Ignorance and fear lands kids in jail and kicks them out onto the streets. For me and most, these worlds enable the imagination to come closer to daylight. They are sandboxes of the Self. Playgrounds of the mind. Liberty City happens to be a playground somewhat prone to violence but it’s also a place of fun, lit with humanity and humor.

As these places become more real and engage more eyes, the content will open up. To advertising, of course, but also to home-brew music and video. To Twitter feeds and blog RSS. Ap Wire news will spill into game world video displays. What if I could design a bot skin that looked just like me? Put it on a bot, add my own voice clips, and then watch recorded video of that bot’s experiences in the game world while I’m away? Imagine CCTV’s on virtual street corners that pipe live feeds to real-world desktop clients or http? Imagine smart mobs and political protests by avatars who have modded their characters to hold signs or wear furry costumes. MMO’s should be hackable and prankable, wired to the web and mobile devices. I want to use my game cell phone to call other players across the city. I want to use my real-world iPhone to call and see people inside Liberty City. I want the lines to blur more and more between reality and virtuality. I want the spirit of imagination to ingress deeply into the world of humanity.

And I want fast cars and powerful weapons that don’t really kill anyone.

Grand Theft Auto IV delivers in great measure. The world is deeper, more alive, warmer and richer. Traffic snarls and the citizenry engage and react. The city is enormous yielding endless hours of fun and immersion. So much to explore, so many cars to jack, with an engaging narrative weaving through the streets and alleyways. GTA4 is a caricatures of America, witty and sarcastic, painted across an inconceivable amount of polygons pulsing to the currents of floating-point mathematics. It’s a playground for 30-something children of the modern West, reaching out to live the myths of a street warrior culture peddled by media and fiction. Most of all, Liberty City is a model for the ongoing ingression of mind into matter and the wiring of datastreams into the social consciousness. Half the joys of GTA4 are the expectations and imaginations of what future iterations will bring to the genre… what fictions will become real and how the bodies we inhabit will reflect into such immersive virtual worlds unbinding the Soul and Self from flesh.

Perhaps I’m gushing with fanboy glee but I have a sense, as of yet unwritten, that something very deep and transformative is occurring in the digital lands we’re moving between…

Boing Boing linked to a cool Flickr stream comparing game landmarks in GTA4’s Liberty City to those of it’s role model, New York City.

In games, immersive worlds, forums, social networks, and in blogs we inhabit multiple selves. In most cases, theses virtual spaces are walled islands with little relation between them. Increasingly it’s becoming apparent that continuity is necessary to resolve these fractured selves and to open up the channels of communication between the diversity of online containers. This can be seen in the new wave of web 2.0 aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo that aim to collate our myriad profiles, friends and content streams into a single portal. Now, Technology Review reports that several companies are working to enable avatars to move between virtual worlds.

More and more, such affordances will move into virtual spaces. 2D content streams and communication pipelines will feed into and across immersive worlds. A WoW player should be able to call up a HUD console in the game and locate their friends across all of the virtual worlds they’re currently in. They should then be able to communicate with them through IM or VoIP and subsequently transport to join them in another world. GTA4 has announced a feature to allow users to call each other in-world using the game cell phone. Shouldn’t this extend across game worlds and out into real-world mobiles? API’s could evolve to mine user communications (Twitter in WoW?) and chart locations on world maps. In the age of digital society, findability is key.

The vast amounts of personal profiling we’re building up around ourselves in MySpace, Facebook, blogs, and other forums should be accessible through our avatars and from all places we inhabit, virtually and in reality. It should be present in our devices and our profiles. As avatars, it should follow us like a digital skin (secured and opt-in, of course) layered in transaction-appropriate trust profiles that fly-out on mouseover. My avatars should contain more information than just polygons and scripted motions. Social transactions are information exchanges. My LinkedIn profile should be accesible to anyone in 2D and 3D if I so desire.

The realness of immersive worlds should leverage the fundamental reality of our digital profiles and interests. If these platforms are going to become truly compelling, they must work to integrate the API’s, content streams, and communication channels of the web2.0 revolution. We’re in the midst of a completely unprecedented historical shift as all of our cultural and intellectual content is going digital, made manifest in searchable, findable, and persistent datalogs. The profiles we create around our virtual selves are growing larger and larger, and they are being recorded and left open for many eyes to see. Imagine the political candidates running 10 or 15 years from now. So much of their lives will be a matter of public record easily searchable and graphed out to show affiliations, donations, histories and contradictions. So much of who they are will live online like a shadow. SO much of who we all are.

Virtual worlds are poised to engage directly in this shift and draw culture and identity into their domain. Instead of closed platforms, worlds like Second Life must open up and grow to become contiguous spaces whose character arises from the types of people that choose to gather there by affiliation, interest, and intention. MMORPG’s like WoW will continue to offer highly crafted narratives, specialized social groups and hierarchies, and bleeding edge rendering tech but will acknowledge the tremendous personal content within each player distributed across their digital and analog lives.

Of course, if virtual platforms become more open, their business models will inevitably shift towards advertising. Space is space, whether 2D, 3D, or 4D, and eyes are eyes especially when they gather in great enough concentration. As in the real world, the exchange of goods and services will always be of great value in any domain, so the shift towards continuity will be a shift towards reality. Virtual worlds have the unique proposition of creating fantasy within the world of life. So the shift towards reality in the context of a realized fantasy brings both closer together. It is part of the alchemical formula of bringing spirit into matter. It is the power of gods to create in an unlimited universe. It is the movement of the ghost in the machine as our real selves grow more and more to include virtual, digital, non-local aspects of identity and presence. Who am I but the sum of my transactions with the world? These words I’m writing and posting on the global billboard become preserved bits of my self. Your interactions with them extend my identity into the virtual world. All my words are facets of my expanding digital identity. My self-reflection extends from my body, my deeds, my actions towards others around me, to include the ideas and statements I leave online, the avatars I inhabit, and the webs of disembodied people I associate with. In 100 years I may roll up in bits under some social anthropologist’s data-mining PhD nudging their graphs this way or that with my Tweets and posts.

Aggregation of social data serves a very practical role of making it easier for us to manage an increasingly vast amount of data, but it also serves a larger role of helping us defragment our sense of self as it fractures out across so many new digital domains rising and falling daily. If we’re to walk like new gods through worlds both real and virtual, shouldn’t we do so with as much wholeness as possible? In a world that’s made it so challenging to have a fully integrated psyche it’s really imperative that we lay down a strong foundation of holism and continuity as we move into the unfettered vastness of the digital noosphere. As strong cohesive selves we can better wear the masks of avatars and wield the power of virtual gods.

In a move that further realizes the place-ness of popular immersive worlds, players of Grand Theft Auto 4 will be able to use their cell phone to mark songs they hear in the game world, then recieve info and a link to buy the song on Amazon. I like this feature since it acknowledges the increasing continuity across real life and game worlds but I think the implementation falls short of being really compelling. The game should automatically provide heads-up info on the song and artist, and I should be able to make a purchase in-game that saves a file to my console, to my mobile, and/or puts it in my Amazon or iTunes shopping cart for later download. And what about having an in-game music player I can fill with songs?

If you hear a song you like as you’re tooling around the streets, you can “mark” it by calling ZIT-555-0100 on your cell phone, and soon receive a text message with the song and artist names. If you also happen to be a member of the Rockstar Games Social Club, Rockstar’s community site for GTA IV and all future titles, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the song from Amazon for less than a buck.

Though I assume they mean you use your real-world cell phone it’s not totally clear. Shouldn’t my game character have a cell phone that can place calls/sms to other gamers in-world, across games to other worlds, and out to real-world lines?

[UPDATE: the cell phone will be Nico’s in-game mobile.]