Emerging Virtual Institutions are patterns of organized culture; such as forms of government, business models, or social norms, that develop endogenously within a virtual world. Just as real world institutions are introduced to virtual worlds by their users and designers, virtual institutions are carried back into the real world when those people “log off.”
Emerging Virtual Institutions collectively include the future economic and community-based growth of virtual reality worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, the point where these spaces are no longer just a place for individuals to interact through computer-mediated reality, but instead become significant structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation within the real-world. As demonstrated by Prof. Larry Lessig of Stanford University in 2003, citizens of Second Life are capable of protesting the virtual laws of their space to enact positive change (in this case, allow individuals to have virtual property rights).
Institutions emerge in virtual worlds when the rules of the world encourage users to act in a way that creates a widespread pattern of behavior. Such rules can be hard-coded by the developers, but may be existing informal norms from within the virtual world, or imported from the real world experience of its users. The institution that results from this emergence then becomes a part of the rules that will seed future emergent conventions. The developer of a virtual world can shape the values of its users by carefully choosing the appearance of the world, the capabilities of its avatars, the challenges presented, methods of communication, and even the laws of physics, among countless other design decisions. These shared values, in turn, shape patterns of behavior and the development of institutions within the world.
Famous quotes containing the words emerging, virtual and/or institutions:
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“You can’t talk about a kind of democracy unless those who are affected by decisions make those decisions whether the institutions in question be the welfare department, the university, the factory, the farm, the neighborhood, the country.”
—Casey Hayden (b. c. 1940)