Castronova Predicts Exodus to Virtual Worlds

I dig Edward Castronova, the guy who wrote a book about the social biz behind the rise of online gaming, and now he's got a second one out with a provocative thesis.

Synthetic Worlds, selectively scribbled in and nestled between Steven Kent's Ultimate History of Video Games and Raessens and Goldstein's Handbook of Computer Game Studies on my shelf, is a well-reasoned, easy-to-read engagement of the social and economic ramifications of the rise of machine-driven virtual worlds.

His new one, entitled Exodus To The Virtual World, considers what might happen if reality sims like Second Life trigger an exodus of people seeking to "disappear from reality."

The BBC interviewed Castronova, a professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, who said in discussing the book: "My guess is that the impact on the real world really is going to involve folks disappearing from reality in a lot of places where we see them...so what I tried to do in this book is say, 'listen - even if the typical reader doesn't spend any time in virtual worlds, what is going to be the impact on him of people going and doing this?'"

At one point, he even draws parallels between a potential exodus into cyberspace, and the early seventeenth-century, when thousands abandoned Britain for a new life in North America. "That certainly changed North America - and that's usually what we focus on - but it certainly changed the UK as well," he said.

Now the latter is certainly a powerful sound-bite, but is it really a fair comparison? The people leaving Britain for a new life in North America were doing so for much more radical reasons than, say, the average real-life obese or socially maladjusted user who turns to Second Life because of social exclusion or physical insecurity. Compared to those early North American colonialists, we -- at least in Western society -- live lives of relative and politically autonomous plenty. And of course, someone exploring a virtual world like Second Life can still instantly disengage by simply stepping away from the computer, say, when someone drops by, or we need to sleep, or the dinner bell rings. Disease, famine, and all the other lovely circumstantial factors that led to the death of untold numbers of early British settlers in North America play no role in the colonization of virtual space.

Moreover, what of the indigenous Americans left to the margin of that example, whose world -- to extend and invert Castronova's analogy -- was in fact gradually subsumed by the colonial influx? Imagine a powerful, relentless, culturally alien wave slowly and inexorably reconstituting the fabric of your "reality," changing it to the point of near-eradication. Today, only the most fleeting remnants of that "reality" continue in the traditions of atavistic practitioners on pockets of federally reserved land. Nothing like those indigenous peoples exists in today's online simulations -- there's simply no parallel.

So while I can almost see the relevance of Castronova's broader point about the impact of the "exodus" on British society, I wonder if it North American colonialism was the best hook to hang it on.

But let's change the subject.

Ever hear of Jean Baudrillard? (The last name's pronounced something like bow-dree-AIR.) French theorist, wrote a treatise called Simulacra and Simulations which had its pop-culture moment in the first Matrix film, the part where they flash to the green book Neo pulls off the shelf. It contends that the human experience is a simulation of reality, as opposed to reality itself. I know, I know -- such deep thoughts.[1]

My question, in an attempt to rescue these ostensibly "sophisticated" ideas from what I've come to view as their esoteric and largely useless academic prisons, is: What does a prediction that everyone will be involved in a virtual environment within 10 years really amount to?

I was reading an editorial in an aviation magazine the other day in which the writer related his experience as a child sitting in front of a flat picture-poster of an airplane cockpit on his bedroom wall. Both he and his brother would imagine flying the plane the cockpit represented around the world, having all sorts of virtually real adventures. His contention, no doubt in part viewed through a nostalgic filter, was that these little afternoon or evening exploits were vastly more "real" for him than any flight simulation (including Flight Simulator X, with its multiplayer elements) since.

You've heard that sort of thing before, I'm sure. It's just the idea that computer-simulated environs are merely glorified extensions of what the human imagination's been doing ably on its own for millennia.

Besides, isn't anyone with a computer sending email and using instant messaging already involved in a virtual environment, complete with its own social, political, and even economic strata? Why view Second Life as such a bold, unique, and if you'll permit, paradigmatic shift? How many of you spend a dozen hours positioned in front of a computer screen doing "work" in a cube or office or from home (on a plane, in a hotel room, etc.), interacting socially, politically, and economically with others? How different is that, really, from someone who spends a dozen hours sitting in front of their computer screen and "playing" something (socially, politically, economically) like Second Life?

The whole concept of mingling "states of reality" and its repercussions for human society is hardly a new idea. Science fiction authors have envisioned an "exodus" to virtual space for decades. In 1946, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's story "On Exactitude in Science" conjured a world in which cartography had become such a precision discipline that the map necessary to chart the planet was unfurled on a perfectly one-to-one scale, ergo the perfect replication of reality itself.

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Near the turn of the century, author Tad Williams considered in his sprawling Otherland tetralogy what might happen to a society where groups of people have transitioned broadly into cyberspace -- socially, politically, and economically. What would happen, for instance, if the wealthiest groups secretly pooled their assets to fund a scientific solution to the problem of consciousness, and attempted the first transfer thereof into a hyperreal reality sim to achieve both immortality and "godhood"?

My question, and I really don't mean it in a smarty-pants semantic sense, is whether it's proper to refer to what's happening with simulations like Second Life or World of Warcraft or Whatever Comes Next as an "exodus," i.e. a mass departure or emigration, or if this is all simply the culture coming to terms with a phenomenon that -- with all its social and economic implications -- we've been undergoing since well before those games and simulations existed.

[1] Actually, one of his deepest and most compelling, as far as I was concerned in grad-school anyway, is that fantasy-fueled environments like Disneyworld thrive, at least in part, because they reinforce the sense that everything not Disneyworld is "what's normal." We define "reality" by constantly referring to things we view as "not reality," in other words.

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