Thomas M. Malaby
Contriving Constraints
The Gameness of Second Life and the
Persistence of Scarcity
Innovations Case Discussion: Second Life
Cory Ondrejka’s case study of Second Life is a rich account both of what makes
Second Life (SL hereafter) distinctive and of those possibilities that it may fairly be
said to herald for the coming (arrived?) era of virtual worlds. There is little doubt
that there is cause for excitement given the ways in which, as Ondrejka describes,
virtual worlds seem at once to combine the vast advantages of dramatic reductions
in material costs that digital technologies have brought with an increasing band-
width for social interaction and collaborative creation, all within a persistent envi-
ronment that allows all-important opportunities for failures as well as lasting suc-
cesses.
Somewhat ambitiously (maybe more than somewhat), Ondrejka takes inspira-
tion from these features of virtual worlds that he has identified to lodge a broad
critique not only at citizenship, as conventionally understood, but geography itself,
which comes in his account to represent the essential hurdle to innovation and
progress for humanity at large. I share wholeheartedly in the idea that these spaces
represent something of vast importance for innovation in the digital age, and one
of my aims in what follows is to fill in some of the connections that Ondrejka’s
account at times skips or even discounts, such as what games have to do with SL
and the “playfulness” that Ondrejka finds there, and how the reduction in materi-
al costs reconfigures resources within virtual worlds. But it is also true that in some
all too familiar ways SL and virtual worlds generally do not, and perhaps cannot or
even should not, overcome some of the constraints within which human collabo-
ration and creativity take place, and therefore we may find that the collapse of
geography, were it even possible, may not quite eliminate innovation’s obstacles.
THE GAMENESS OF SECOND LIFE
In Ondrejka’s opinion, SL is a creation to be contrasted with games, often in fun-
damental ways. But in downplaying this connection (one which, understandably,
Thomas Malaby is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published numerous works on virtual
worlds, games, practice theory, and risk. He is currently writing Making Virtual
Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, an ethnography of Linden Lab and its relation-
ship to its creation, Second Life. He is also a featured author at the blog Terra Nova.
© 2007 Thomas M. Malaby
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Contriving Constraints
may grow out of a concern to differentiate SL from virtual worlds that are founda-
tionally games), Ondrejka shuts down a number of avenues by which to account
for some of the most important characteristics of Second Life as he describes them.
Computer games pioneered the avatar and, more importantly, a particular inter-
face for its mastery, one that by convention involves the combined use of a QWER-
TY keyboard for movement and a mouse for adjusting view angles and interacting
with objects/other avatars. Alongside this development came a number of other
features of 3-D online environments and the objects within them, specifically the
physics by which these objects and avatars interact, as well as the idea of persist-
ence, whereby user actions can make durable (if limited) changes to the game
world.
What drove this innovation in computer games? All games make performative
demands upon their players—actions they must master (along with guesses they
must successfully make) in order to accomplish game objectives. This is one
respect in which games are open-ended in a way quite similar to Second Life—in
practice within them, in any given moment, things may turn out one way or the
other; they are, in a word, contingent. This performative contingency of avatars—
the never-perfect mastery of a body analog through a refined interface of fine-
motor skills—is a crucial part of SL, and something that helps us to account for
why it feels like “play” or a “game” to many of its users. This is because it is possi-
ble to fail, and to fail quite visibly and in multiple ways, when acting within Second
Life. This contingent performance begins with mastery of one’s avatar, often in
view of others. What is more, and unlike many other domains of online interac-
tion, such as those that are primarily text-based, the scope for failure is much
wider, containing text performance (in chat, IM) along with avatar presentation
and competence. In its physics, avatar affordances, and persistence, SL therefore
owes an enormous amount to computer games. This helps us understand the
importance of failure as well as the foundations of trust for SL and its prospects
for innovation.
Ondrejka rightly recognizes that a broad opportunity for failure is important
for SL, as such failure at relatively low cost is a necessary condition for innovation.
But we can see more clearly that at root this open-endedness is inextricably linked
to the experience of being in SL as someone who must perform through an avatar,
and aware that one might fail in doing so, even in very mundane ways (such as
accidentally toggling off while flying, leading to an embarrassing fall, complete
with an animation of limbs flailing). It then takes but a moment to see that, in
many of the other actions one takes in SL, one is similarly called upon to perform
in what feels like a social game. One of my first tasks as a new user, after all, is to
“make” myself—shape my avatar via a complex set of “tools” for managing every-
thing from my jaw width to my waist height, knowing all the while that this will be
my presentation of self to others in SL, with all the judgments of competence that
may entail.
There is thus urgency to much of the performance in SL, quite similar to that
which characterizes language immersion. A user is driven to master movement,
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Thomas M. Malaby
chat, building, flying, and other skills to a great extent because of the game-like
contestation over performance that characterizes games, in a contrived fashion,
and everyday life, in a boundless fashion. SL, while “boundless” in its open-ended-
ness the same way that other aspects of life are (there are no shared and established
game objectives), is more like the former in one important respect: it is an envi-
ronment that is subject to the contrivance of its makers, who have leveraged all of
these elements from games to make something that can so effectively begin to
approach the texture of everyday life.
This performative and social, game-like quality to SL not only forms the foun-
dation of its scope for failure and success, but also points the way toward a better
understanding of the bases of trust. As current research on online games has
shown, collaborative action in urgent conditions is highly generative of trust and
belonging. And this, after all, does not really surprise us. As Ondrejka suggests,
teams build trust through a combination of interaction that is sufficiently high in
bandwidth and oriented toward a common objective. This is something that many
games (those which allow for teamwork) are contrived to accomplish, and the les-
son to take from them, again, is that a sufficient scope for social action, beyond the
textual or aural, becomes fertile ground for social bonds because of the broad range
of small to large acts of coordination (of bodies, of avatars), any one of which may
succeed or fail. Much like a dance, then, avatar-mediated interaction can become a
source of trust that builds over time, not simply because of the prospects for suc-
cessful coordination, but because of the multiple small moments of success and
failure, and not just with direct reference to the explicit aim at hand. Ondrejka
understands that this process is happening, and that it is crucial for understanding
what virtual worlds make possible (p. 28):
By creating a culture of shared creativity, Second Life allows resi-
dents to learn from the examples of others, to situate their goals
and desires within the contexts created by others.
But even here the claim is actually too limited. We must see the mutual coor-
dination of performance in SL as going all the way down, to the most mundane
practices of managing avatar distance, sight lines, posture, and the like. It is
through this emergent practice, as an arena where some are masters and some are
learning, that trust is generated.
CAPITAL IN PLAY
Being and acting in SL thus feels like play, and this helps us to understand a cru-
cial point about what is at stake in virtual worlds. Ondrejka identifies the play-like
quality of SL when he writes (p. 32), “The safety that comes with mentally classi-
fying an activity as play leads to a free exploration of design space.” While it is
instructive that users often report their actions in SL as play, it is too much of a leap
(and one that obscures some important features of virtual worlds) to account for
users’ incentive to explore by reference to a lack of stakes (safety). This is because
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Contriving Constraints
while there are understandable reasons why we might look at virtual worlds and
see them as places that have so radically reduced certain kinds of costs that they are
effectively consequence-free (and that it therefore accounts for why people do cre-
ative things there), this is an error. Instead we should be ready to look more close-
ly and recognize how the stakes in virtual worlds are not eliminated but instead
radically reconfigured as compared to most offline domains, and it is this realign-
ment of resources and constraints that may account for the remarkable emergent
effects that virtual worlds have generated.
Ondrejka’s case study is deeply (and usefully) informed by attention to a core
insight about virtual worlds: they transform and vastly reduce material costs, those
associated with production and distribution in the market. But there is always a
temptation, upon seeing the ways in which virtual worlds seem to collapse geogra-
phy, to make two errors. The first is to see this reduction as removing constraints
altogether—the radical reduction in material costs can lead us to think that we are
in a “zero marginal cost environment” or a “post-scarcity economy” (p. 44). The
second is to take this reduction of constraint and its remarkable effects as confir-
mation that constraint of any kind (such as the geographic) is an impediment to
human innovation. An answer to this second, and larger, issue is one that very
probably lies outside the scope of this response, but here I would like to address
more directly the question of economy, cost, and scarcity.
We are in the habit of thinking of the economy as constituted and bounded by
the market—more specifically, by market transactions. This is the result of many
decades of academic treatment of the market as set apart from other aspects of our
lives, with their other kinds of human commerce and exchange. But scholarship
has slowly come to reflect more closely the human experience of the economy and
has developed a picture of it that incorporates not only the ways material resources
(cash, commodities) accumulate and move about through market exchange, but
also through other kinds of human exchange, such as reciprocity, the source of
social capital (trust), and learning, the source of cultural capital (competencies).
What is more, and as most social actors recognize, we frequently parlay these kinds
of resources one into the other. As examples, we may invest market capital in learn-
ing (tuition), or social capital to find a job, or cultural competence to establish net-
works of reciprocity (through hosting a dinner party, for example).
What does this mean for virtual worlds? The first thing we must notice is that
their structural characteristics of persistence and open-endedness (contingency)
make the accumulation of all these forms of capital just as possible within them as
they are elsewhere. All of these resources accumulate over time; human effort con-
geals in these various kinds of capital that then become the resources available to
us as we seek to accomplish our daily objectives. Goods (with vastly reduced pro-
duction and distribution costs of course), human relationships, and skills all can
be created and obtained in virtual worlds as a result of the expending of effort over
time. Ondrejka is thus correct in a broad sense when he writes that time continues
to be a scarce resource for people engaged in virtual worlds, but an understanding
of virtual world economies requires that we keep a more fine-grained level of
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Thomas M. Malaby
analysis at hand, to see what more specific scarcities persist, however reconfigured.
When we do this, we see immediately that trust and competence continue to be
scarce commodities. Establishing and maintaining a network of trust and obliga-
tion does not become a trivial exercise because many of the material costs of com-
munication are lowered. Similarly, gaining competencies that can be applied
toward innovation is also not a costless (or even near-costless) transaction. This is
because reciprocity and learning, as forms of human exchange, have always
required time in a way that isolated market transactions, over and done with as
they often aspire to be, do not.
What this means for virtual worlds is that, while Ondrejka rightly shows
enthusiasm for the vast reductions in the costs associated with (offline) geography,
it is overreaching to see this as creating a landscape that is essentially uncon-
strained. Instead, we may be better able to account for the excitement that is
sparked by these worlds by seeing them as radically reconfiguring the relationships
between these kinds of resources. It may be that it is more accurate to say that, over
much of human history, market capital has dominated other forms of human
exchange precisely because of the high costs of producing and transporting mate-
rial gods, and that therefore virtual worlds bring this situation more into balance
(at least for those with the material resources to access them!) by elevating the
impact of reciprocity and learning, so that all these forms of exchange are on a par
with each other.
WHITHER CITIZENSHIP?
Ondrejka is correct, in my view, in seeing that the implications for this reconfigu-
ration of constraints are broad, and I applaud his aim of taking the implications of
virtual worlds for innovation beyond the market and into the political domain.
Innovation, after all, is something that we must be prepared to recognize in any
sphere of human action, and citizenship is certainly a high-stakes category for such
rethinking. I would first note, however, that Ondrejka overstates the relationship
between the nation-state and geography. While it is absolutely inarguable that the
relationship of states to territory is a core aspect of how states initially formed, and
then continued to develop, to draw this connection too deeply obscures other
developments in the state, both in the past and presently.
The nation-state itself contains the clues and contradictions to help us under-
stand this. Forged through the linkage of a bureaucratic apparatus and a defining
ideology, nation-states were (and to a great extent still are) about creating legiti-
mate rule over a populace (and territory) through appeals to certain putatively
shared interests and characteristics. Amongst these is territory, of course, but
nationalism relies just as much on claims about shared language, cultural practice,
and kinship as it does upon shared territory. This is key, because over the course of
the 19th and 20th centuries movements to create new states became more and more
initiated and defined by claims of ethnic (from the Greek ethnos, or nation) com-
monality, ones that often then had to confront and resolve (sometimes quite par-
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Contriving Constraints
tially) geographic discontinuity, or even diasporic circumstances, with this nation-
al interest. In much the same way that gerrymandered political districts come less
and less to resemble any “natural” demarcation of a geographic landscape, so too
did nationalist movements of recent memory become less and less driven by com-
mon geographic interests. Thus, Ondrejka’s characterization of “the rise of geo-
graphic— often presented as ethnic—nationalism” (p. 44) must stand as a signifi-
cant, if not dangerous, oversimplification.
And this is important not simply because of the need to see the nation-state in
all of its historical nuance. It is also important because at this very moment nation-
states, often through and in response to the innovative actions of their transna-
tional citizens, are already confronting the flexible characteristics of citizenship
and forging new kinds of citizenship to fit the rapid changes in technology, trans-
portation, business, and political regimes, a need that Ondrejka identifies but
seems to suggest awaits the development of virtual worlds to get off the ground.
There is no doubt in my mind that virtual worlds will play a significant role in the
rise of new forms of citizenship, but Aihwa Ong (1998) and other anthropologists
have already begun to document the emergent accommodations, evasions, and
categories that nation-states and their citizens are forging in the context of what
she calls “flexible citizenship.” Whether it is transnational Chinese cultural elites,
who creatively claim and negotiated multiple citizenship and quasi-citizenship
claims (vis-à-vis Hong Kong, for example); Mexican villagers, spread across
California, Mexico, and other locations, who manage their kinship and other social
ties across a discontinuous geographic circuit through innovative uses of technol-
ogy and transport; or Latin American countries which are beginning to serve their
diasporic communities through web-based services (including absentee voting),
virtual citizenship is already happening. Ondrejka is right that our current array of
political categories is insufficient, but it is insufficient not only because of what
may come about through the use of virtual worlds tomorrow, but also because of
the innovative practices of people around the world who are making do today.
There is no reason to believe that the role that virtual worlds like Second Life
will play in the economic, political, and cultural innovation will be anything short
of monumental, but it is imperative that we keep in view the ways in which such
spaces, while transforming how many resources for us are arrayed and available, do
not fundamentally remove from human experience the kinds of human exchange
that inevitably produce both possibilities and constraints, and we must be ready to
see how the accumulation of interests, along with attendant and counter-to-inno-
vation practices of exclusion, may nonetheless appear within them, no matter the
promise of geography’s wane.
References
Ong, Aihwa (1998). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
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