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:
“That which is given to see
At any moment is the residue, shadowed
In gold or emerging into the clear bluish haze
Of uncertainty. We come back to ourselves
Through the rubbish of cloud and tree-spattered pavement.
These days stand like vapor under the trees.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“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)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)