Virtual Status

It is natural to think of status as a zero sum game, to assume that anything that raises your status relative to me must lower my status relative to you. What first suggested to me that it wasn't true was my experience as an undergraduate at Harvard. Different people care about status relative to different things, with the result that one can have, in the limit, a society where everyone is at the top of his own ladder. If Eugene is a chess master and Charles a billionaire, the victory that raises Eugene's status does not lower Charles', because Eugene does and Charles does not care about status in the chess world. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, across a wide variety of different reference groups. 

I made this point in another post about eight years ago. What brought my attention back to it was playing the beginning of the new part of World of Warcraft. It consists of walking the player character through a sequence of events, all easy, in which he is interacting almost entirely with computer generated characters—who tell him, over and over, what a wonderful hero he is. The same pattern shows up in earlier parts of the game, but this was a particularly striking version. Everybody can be above average. Everybody, indeed, can be in the top one percent. Provided that the other ninety-nine percent are NPC's, non-player characters. 

Which raises, for those interested in predicting the future or writing science fiction, the possibility of a world where most people spend most of their time in virtual reality, interacting mainly with virtual characters—precisely because those characters, unlike real people, are designed to make them feel superior. To some degree the phenomenon exists already with fraternal organizations where practically everyone is a grand high something or other. But the future may produce an enormously more powerful, hence more corrupting, version.

My son Bill informs me that a particular game, one I have never played, is  very good  in part because it successfully subverts the "you are the world's greatest hero" trope. He also told me that naming the game without a spoiler warning would be a Very Bad Thing to do, and I have edited this post accordingly.

Spoiler Warning

Jade Empire

Doing VR Wrong

I recently attended a presentation on what universities are doing with Second Life, a freeform virtual reality environment. A lot of it seemed to involve requiring a class of students to spend an hour or so learning to get around in the virtual world in order to then hold a class there instead of in an ordinary classroom. Since a class in a virtual world has lower fidelity video, lower fidelity audio, and less bandwidth in the form of facial expressions and the like than a class in realspace, it seemed a bit pointless.

It reminded me of my experiences about twenty years ago with educational software. I had written a price theory text and some computer programs to go with it, and gave demonstrations of the programs at economics meetings where my publisher was trying to sell the book. One of the standard questions I got was "how many chapters of the book are on the disk?" My response was that the chapters of the book were in the book, where they belonged. What was on the disk were not chapters of the book but computer programs designed to teach ideas in ways that could be done by a program better than they could be done with text and pictures.

My conclusion at the time was that most "educational software" was bogus—doing things on the computer that could be done just about as well in a book. The motivation was that computers back then were supposed to be exciting, sexy, exotic, so the same student who would be bored reading an explanation of supply and demand in a book would be riveted to the same explanation on a computer screen. I have the feeling that the same thing is happening now with University involvement in Second Life.

Two other points struck me. One was that our university had apparently spent a fair amount of money hiring people to construct its virtual campus on its island in Second Life. But part of the beauty of Second Life is that you don't have to be a professional to do stuff in it. It's a decentralized system where, provided you have access to space to work on--your university's island if you are a student--you can build things. The right way to use it is not to try to replicate a real world classroom with a bunch of student avatars but to give students access to what they need to do things in the virtual world. Such as create a virtual campus.

The other was a comment by one of the presenters that someone in physics wanted to set up physics experiments in the virtual world. It struck me as an oddly perverted idea. What is exciting about doing a physics experiment is discovering that the real world, physical reality, actually obeys the equations physicists use to describe it. Doing the experiment in virtual reality, where the physics professor has programmed the pendulum, billiard balls, or whatever, only demonstrates that the equations obey the equations.