State of Play V - avoiding inconsistency as a normative principle

State of Play V opened in Singapore last night, and it promises to be a really exciting conference. We saw a film by Glenn Thomas, which tells the story of a couple who build a profitable fashion business in Second Life. It provides a personal interest story as a way to highlight the difficulties, tensions, and possibilities of virtual world businesses. Entertaining, and well worth a watch.

One of the things that stuck me in the documentary was a discussion in an interview with Ailin and Guntram Graef. Guntram noted that Linden Lab really had a lot of power in SL, and Anshe Chung Studios had very little certainty or security in their virtual property or wealth. Ailin shrugged this off, explaining how Linden Lab had marketed their world in no such uncertain terms - "it's your world". I spoke to Guntram at the end of the night, and asked him to elaborate on this point. He told me how he saw virtual world owners as inevitably looking out for their own interests - early on, encouraging a small number creators and developers, but then shifting their focus as the world developed and grew. He said he believed t the platform owners had too much power to make changes to the world which adversely affected the participants, but was doubtful of any way to resist such changes.

My research over the last few months has focused on the inconsistency between the actions of platform owners in general and in particular cases. It seems reasonable to suggest that where a platform owner implictly or explicitly encourages certain forms of behaviour or expectations, the law should not support its ability to regulate the environment in a manner which is inconsistent. The real difficulty with this proposition is in identifying inconsistent behaviour. I do not mean to suggest that a platform owner should be prohibited from making changes to its ruleset. But where a platform owner encourages financial investment in a virtual world with a view to real world profit, it should not be able to rely on its ToS to deny any title or interest in the virtual wealth. Similarly, where participants are encouraged to build meaningful relationships (relationships which are vital to the survival of the platform), it becomes difficult to uphold its right to arbitrarily remove people from those social relations. I believe the law will easily be able to deal with the inconsistencies between a platform owner's actions on the one hand and the expectations which it has created and encouraged. The important part in this process is a critical analysis of the ways in which platform owners do or do not support certain forms of behaviour. More on this will come later - I'm in the process of writing this up properly.