The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece today from Benjamin Duranske, a lawyer and author on virtual worlds, on the role that virtual worlds will come to play in the real world. Much of its content, whilst news to the rest of the world, will not be new to readers of this blog: that virtual worlds are going to be big news in the future for both consumers and brands. However, Duranske makes two points which are certainly worth considering.
He points out the increasing authority of the real world in the virtual world, particularly giving examples of the difficulties which Linden has had with illicit activities in Second Life in the past, which it is now seeking to address. The long arm of the law will inevitably get longer as virtual worlds become less of an unknown quantity in mainstream legal and law enforcement circles, and that’s clearly a good thing. It is an absolute requirement if virtual worlds are to be considered a mature phenomenon, ready to reach the mainstream, that they are seen as a tool of the real world, and not somehow other from it. The application of law in a virtual context is symbolic of that shift, as well as an important goal in itself.
The second point Duranske makes is that 3D walled gardens will not succeed in becoming the new 3D web, just as the walled gardens of the early web such as AOL did not succeed in becoming the web and mobile network operators’ walled gardens have now broken down in favour of the open web. This is perhaps no longer a controversial point; Second Life, as discussed earlier this week, is no longer attempting to ‘own’ the 3D space, and is instead pushing for open standards and to make its money acting as a guarantor of infrastructure, rather than trying to be the entire infrastructure and content itself.
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