WORLDBEAT: ID malleability creates virtual-world issues

Virtual worlds are set to further complicate the answers to our most basic questions about identity -- who am I and, for that matter, who are you?

With pundits suggesting that virtual worlds are poised to leave the shores of early usage and begin to set sail toward mass adoption, now's a perfect time to start investigating the changing nature of identity as it becomes much more malleable and amorphous.

"We're just learning what identity is," said John Henry Clippinger, senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, during a debate on digital convergence and identity at a recent all-day virtual worlds conference cohosted by IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.

Vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Novell are coming to the same realization that all technology needs to include a special identity layer that can handle multiple IDs, he added. We'll need to apply various types of identity and authentication to different contexts, ranging from comparatively light security to seriously locked-down policies.

As more people enter virtual worlds and find uses for them in their work, social and home lives, they're likely to adopt a number of virtual personas. There will be times and places where it may be OK or even desirable for people to be anonymous, perhaps in areas where confidential feedback is sought or where knowing specifically who someone is just isn't important. Alongside such anonymity, there will be occasions and locations where any kind of dissimulation about identity is not only wrong, it's a felony, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. For instance, an adult pretending to be a child so that they can enter a virtual world that's meant to be only for kids.

However, resolving those kinds of problems is less likely to involve law enforcement and more likely to center around the contracts you enter into when becoming a member of a particular virtual world, according to Beth Simone Noveck, a professor of law at the New York Law School. "We'll see the emergence of more sophisticated contract services," she said, so that the residents in a virtual community set the rules on which their world is based and take all the major decisions on the criteria for the entry contract.

We've already dealt with a lot of issues around identity through our experiences with the Internet. These days, we're reasonably confident that those people online we give our credit-card details to are trustworthy. And trust is a two-way street, with our own online reputations more frequently becoming tightly intertwined with our identities. Take online auction Web site eBay and its PowerSeller program, which recognizes individuals who not only make a consistently high volume of sales, but who are also very positively ranked in terms of feedback from buyers. And, in general, how often do you Google someone you're about to meet for the first time to find out additional information about them?

Reputation is also an integral part of your virtual self, given that conversations in virtual worlds can be stored, and that who you are becomes more a function of the community's take on you, your behavior and your contributions to a particular piece of a virtual world.

Harriet Pearson, IBM's vice president of regulatory policy and the vendor's chief privacy officer, wonders about the concept of reputation bankruptcy. Might an individual who's fallen from grace in the virtual world and acknowledged their shortcomings then be able to effectively hit a "reset button" deleting their previous bad reputation and start over? In the same way that in the real world juvenile offender records are sealed so they can't be widely accessed, in the virtual world a former bad reputation could perhaps be expunged. "You don't want to be bugged by what you did," she said.

Avatars, our stand-ins in virtual environments like Second Life, Active Worlds and There.com, give little away about who's pulling their strings in the real world. An avatar can represent an individual, a group of people or even a robotic agent.

In choosing an avatar, someone might opt for a representation that closely resembles them or someone or something completely different. That freedom to choose how you look and your abilities can transform the way people feel about themselves, according to Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab. For instance, a real-world amputee could become a virtual full-bodied athlete, changing one identity for another, he said.

Of course, it's easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm about virtual worlds, but currently their residents only account for a small fraction of the computing population. "There's much spadework to be done," Moss said. "We're in the very early days, minutes or even seconds of the 3D Internet."

Mitch Kapor, chair of Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, readily agreed with Moss. While positioning virtual worlds as the new personal computers in terms of the likely disruptive effect they'll have on the current technology status quo, he expects it'll take around 15 years for virtual environments to move from the technology margins to the mainstream. In computer terms, "We're not even at the DOS era, we're still in the terminal emulation era," Kapor said.

It's an indication of how far virtual worlds still have to evolve that the all-day conference meeting took place not in a virtual environment, but in the real world at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.