"virtual" online gambling safe... for now.

First, let me make it clear that I never intended to be a Second Life blogger. I've never even played Second Life. But when I look at my tags and see just how many Second Life posts I've made, well, I've got to face facts. I've become a SL blogger. SL is just so perfectly hedonistic, such a funny little experiment of human interaction and behavior in a technical environment, how could I resist? Here you have a place where people can be the person they want to be, not the person they are. They can do the socially unacceptable - they could run down the virtual street virtually naked and still go to work the next day. So how DO people behave when you minimize or eliminate consequences? Hm, maybe I should go visit SL just to peoplewatch... I'm such a voyeur.

Anyhow, I recently read that the Feds visited Second Life to check out the gambling. Of course online gambling is illegal in most states of the USA, but people are gambling on SL and winning REAL money. For some reason though, that's ok. For now.

Honestly, I think everyone (including the Feds) knows that 'virtual' gambling with real money is still gambling, and is therefore illegal. But if the Feds decide to take that position, how can they police it, aside from taking SL off the net?

"...Linden Lab could potentially face criminal charges under the 1970 Illegal Gambling Business Act or the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The latter law, passed last year, takes aim at credit card companies and other electronic funds transfers that enable Internet gambling."

..."Linden Lab's rules prohibit illegal activity.

"It's not always clear to us whether a 3-D simulation of a casino is the same thing as a casino, legally speaking, and it's not clear to the law enforcement authorities we have asked," Yoon* said.

Even if the law were clear, he said the company would have no way to monitor or prevent gambling in Second Life."

*Ginsu Yoon, until recently Linden Lab's general counsel and currently vice president for business affairs

And if online gambling is illegal in SL, what about the prostitution? Sure, I know, the prostitution in SL is also virtual, no bodily fluids exchanged, just some one handed typing. It's about as dangerous as renting porn or watching pay-per-view sex webcams. But that is changing too. Technology continues to evolve, thanks to human ingenuity (and the fact that hardware doesn't complain about your leaving the toilet seat up/down). There is a growing field I can't type without laughing, you'll just have to read about it here. But as products like this are developed (Note: that link is NOT safe for work), and a virtual prostitute and virtual John can push keyboard buttons to stimulate each other's bodies in reality, where does that fall in the definition of netsex and prostitution?

As always, many questions, few answers. Except 42. I've got that answer.

~Elphie

Welcome to First Life

I've posted a couple times now about Second Life. So I've got to show you the funniest parody I've seen. "First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist". Check it out for an end of week chuckle.

~Elphie

In the immortal words of Pete Townshend, ‘Who are you?”

Before continuing yesterday's post about identity, I want to point out something tangentially related to virtual identities that amuses me. I've written before about Second Life, and how I don't get the attraction (outside of financial gain). Guess what - I'm not the only one who doesn't get it. Chris Pirillo has a funny blog post about his first Second Life experience - I laughed out loud reading it. Chris is no dummy when it comes to computers, so the fact that he ended up with a box on his head is extra amusing to me.

Ok, so back to identity. I've been talking with a few friends about this topic for months now, and while the discussion has been fascinating (to me at least), I am not claiming to offer any revolutionary new answers or insights on the topic.

So why do people end up with multiple identities (and I'm not talking about clinical schizophrenia)? Several months ago I had a conversation with a friend about not underestimating people’s personas based on what you see in public. I asserted that some people are exactly who they appear. They are comfortable in their skin, in their identity. Conservative or freak, they are exactly who they seem to be. But not everyone can do that. For starters, society would have a hard time functioning if everyone ignored decorum and rules and said and did whatever they felt like. So while it feels unnatural to be this conflicted and have a personality different from the veneer you show the world, it is often necessary.

Let’s face it, if Hermey had wanted to be a plastic surgeon instead of a dentist, he and Rudolph could have avoided their whole journey with Yukon Cornelius and the Island of Misfit Toys. Rudolph was different due to evolution or (as his father and other reindeer thought) a birth defect. The other reindeer shunned him even though his being different was completely out of his control. Hermey was a more egregious offender to society’s working order: he CHOSE to pursue a deviant career path from his peers. He wasn’t born a dentist, he had the nerve to choose that path instead of testing rubber duckies or whatever else the elf-master made him do in the little-people sweatshop. Either way, Rudolph and Hermey couldn’t fit in with North Pole society (though I’m thinking if Mr. & Mrs. Claus had been a little more liberal in sharing their peppermint schnapps they could have dulled their independent identities enough to make a go of it) so they struck out on their own. While the North Pole society depicted is a bit simplistic in its monoculture, the basic premise isn’t all that different from reality.

At a very basic level we push deviants to the fringes, underground, and that allows the rest of us to feel normal and safe. People are generally uncomfortable with things they don’t understand. So for a lot of people it is easier to mold themselves to fit in even if it isn’t who they are. It is a peculiarity of human society around the world that is started in our childhood as kids take sides and ostracize the ‘different’ kids, so we learn early in life to fit in. Later in adolescence even the 'non-conformists' (emo, goth, mod, punk, whatever) really do conform to one another – they listen to the right music, wear the right clothing to fit in with their tribe. Because isolation isn’t safe. If you are isolated from your tribe and get injured or have a bad season hunting you could die. It isn’t so drastic today because you can just go to the grocery store, but the basic premise of survival of the fittest comes back into play.

So what happens next is an interesting twist - identity drives materialism. People want things because they want to fit in. People in Miami don’t want the best pickup truck on the block like people in Topeka do, because it doesn’t help them fit into their tribe. Rudolph wanted a ‘normal nose’, because he wanted to fit in. You could argue that is a sign he is a weak person, er, deer, because he didn’t have the chutzpa to be himself – even if that meant being different. It isn’t easy to be on the outside looking in (as anyone who was unpopular in high school can tell you) but when even your parents don't understand or accept you for who you are, well, that increases the pressure to fit in tremendously.

next: I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got. (Really?)

~Elphie

are you kidding me? part deux

wow, the post on computer sex games generated a lot of comments. Only one here on the blog, but quite a few more via email or IM. Apparently I'm not the only geek that finds human nature and the intersection of technology and sexuality to be interesting, though that is no surprise really. For decades people have been fascinated by this topic, though typically in a more sex-cyborg to human equation (see Cherry 2000 - Pamela Gidley, Blade Runner - Darryl Hannah's Pris, or AI - Jude Law's Gigolo Joe) than the current technology-facilitating-human-to-human sexual interaction trend.

One reader sent me this link, which is a fascinating article about virtual prostitutes in Second Life (SL), an oft-cited MMO used for college-level coursework in the design of digital spaces, in art and architecture, and in media studies and sociology. SL has over 148,000 citizens.

In the article there is a quote from a guy who has paid real money for online tricks in SL which I think reflects my confusion from my prior post:

"Walking around in a virtual world matters. The girl you meet might take you to a sleazy motel or a scary dungeon, or maybe she'll show you someplace you haven't been before--stuff you won't get on the phone. Nonetheless, language is cardinal; complex computer interfaces often become obstacles to satisfying cybersex."

This last statement makes total sense to me. Netsex has a long text based tradition that started in bbs chat sessions in the early 90's - I know because I was on ISCA bbs a lot and eventually had to put "NO NETSEX" in my profile to keep the creeps away. but interaction was all txt based. Unless you were a killer ascii artist there were no graphics to go along with the conversation besides old school emoticons.

In many ways this is the book vs. movie argument. Some people prefer books to tv/movies because there is a lot left up to the reader's imagination - in movies you have to live within someone else's reality and run the risk of disappointment in their interpretation of the authors work. Ever see a movie after reading a book and think "that was *so* the wrong actor for that character"?

So its the GUI component (yeah, I prefer books) and the fact that people are plunking down $$$ for the games discussed in my prior post that I don't understand. The idea that you would buy a game purely for anonymous online sex (not even a complex virtual world like Second Life) and that would be a worthwhile investment over a free technology like IM or chat rooms just doesn't compute. But Second Life is created to be a robust virtual reality, where people can mingle and share ideas, exchange goods, etc. As such, it has a thriving economy. And like any society the world over, the oldest-profession has a place in this virtual world with brothels, pimps, and prostitutes running businesses that derive real life profit from their services - some SL brothels are estimated to earn $47K (in REAL money) a month. Ah, capitalism. This seems like a viable business model based on proven sociological models of cross-cultural human interaction.

~Elphie