A Sustainable Train of Thought

Knowledge….I feel like I’ve been drinking from a fire-hose these past couple of days.

On Saturday I went to HealthCamp, held at Citizen Space in San Francisco, and on Monday and Tuesday I’ve attended the Internet Identity Workshop at the Computer history Museum in Mountain View. It’s finishing up on Wednesday (that would be tomorrow…today?), and I’ve decided to present RentAThing in one of the final afternoon sessions (IIW2006B is being run in the unconference style).

I really want to write more about my experiences at both workshops, but I’m exhausted after today’s proceedings and further elocution will have to occur at a later time.

Haiyan pointed out a blog post about a reputation network that’s in development by monkeymodulator for World of Warcraft, an online Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).

What you get to rate is player behavior and characteristics, such as reliability and fun-ness. This would have been nice to have when I was playing StarCraft a couple of years ago. When you’re playing a multiplayer game online, the quality of the other people you’re playing with impacts the game as much as the game mechanics. I’m talking about quality of playing—because a bad player or newbie can make you lose an otherwise winnable game—but I’m also talking about the character of the player (in the real-world sense), taking into account whether he or she is interesting, fun, intelligent, etc.

Talking about games brings up an interesting point: tracking reputation within a game is relevant to the game experience, but is it relevant to real-world activities? What is the relationship between in-game reputations and real-world reputations? In essence they’re all reflections of you, so they’re all relevant. The difference, however, is that real-world transaction take place within one construct and set of rules, and game transactions take place within a different construct and set of rules. By entering a gaming situation, you are entering a world where the rules may be drastically different from those of the real world.

Ultimately, the hinging point or the difference between reputation in the real world and reputation in a gaming situation lies in consequences. Real-world consequences are inherently different from those of the virtual—one example, perhaps the most obvious difference, is that in-game characters may have unlimited lives. Therefore, while in-game transactions may mimic real-world transactions, because of this difference in valuation (and by valuation I mean the assessment of the consequences related to a particular action), reputation within one system (in-game) is inherently different than in another (real world). My assumption is that humans will respond differently to different rules and consequences. Therefore, a set of actions within one rule system will not necessarily reflect actions within a different rule system. For example, in many video games you kill other characters and creatures. This behavior does not translate into real-world behavior, for obvious reasons. (People who are confused by the disjunction of realities—in game and the real world—may have trouble distinguishing one rule-set from another.)

But what if one rule system were imposed in another rule system? One situation that springs to mind is Diablo II by Blizzard. One of the online gameplay modes is “hardcore mode”. As Blizzard explains:

Hardcore mode is a more challenging style of game play on Battle.net, recommended only for experts. In Hardcore mode, you live only once, meaning that if you die, your character can no longer be used.

Clearly, the addition of this rule system changes behavior simply through the addition of consequences: your hard work in developing a character can all be lost in a few moments. Suddenly, the situation shifts: reputation is meaningful because it provides important information that may mean the difference between living and dying (in the online gaming environment, of course).

This notion of consequences is one I explored in my thesis project Thimble, where I found that the notion of consequences was important to lending weight to ratings. In the case of thimble, consequences arise from your relationship with others in your local, physical community: you can’t hide from your bad behavior.

Even with my recent focus on reputation, I haven’t lost my focus on some of the larger issues I was interested in at the beginning of the year. Those issues are absolutely relevant to reputation, particularly bottom-up change. The thing I like about reputation is the ability for everyone to participate—reputation is derived from the choices we make and our actions. Harnessing that ability for individual action on a broad scale could have huge implications for climate change.

Al Gore has a new movie coming out on May 24, and in a recent interview on Grist.org he had the following to say:

What everyone does agree on is the need for a bottom-up appeal to the American masses rather than a top-down campaign focused on leaders in Washington. “The momentum right now has to come from the grass roots,” Gore says. “I don’t think it’s gonna come from Washington. In fact, I know it won’t come from Washington.”

The difficult question has always been: what will it be that gets everyone excited enough to participate and how can they harness that excitement and engage in the process? I’m not saying that reputation is a panacea, but it certainly has some interesting possibilities as a component in larger solutions.

While I was in London, I worked on some experience prototypes to test out a borrowing service. The first experience prototype looked at breadth by essentially implementing a borrowing/sharing service with myself as the mediator. Using insights from that prototype, I subsequently focused on the area of trust. Specifically, when going up to a stranger, what dynamics are involved in the negotiation and transaction? What information do they need, and what obstacles appeared? The insights I gained from these prototypes will inform the structure of my service.

Experience prototyping is necessary to validate or refute assumptions upon which I’m building this service. And since I’m focusing on real-world interactions, it’s necessary to work with real people.

An interesting option, however, was suggested by Karl Schroeder in his blog entry Rights Currencies, Reputation Economies, Dibs and MMORPGs. Namely, using game-spaces, such as MMORPGs, to prototype economic systems. The virtual nature of online games prevents or limits any real-world damage while presenting a relatively low barrier to entry (unlike, say, real-world economic systems which tend to require revolutions) and an opportunity for iterative testing.

We are in fact currently seeing some direct economic relationships developing between the virtual and real worlds: the online role-playing game Project Entropia is now allowing players to withdraw real cash from ATMs based on their in-game bank account.

As I noted in my other blog I’ve been helping Rapleaf with their debugging process and giving general feedback on the site. You can check out my current reputation on Rapleaf by clicking on the badge at right.

It also looks like the Applied Dream reputation project is getting popular. I’ve found it listed on quite a few sites, along with a lot of interesting comments.

Your Actions Follow You Around (worldchanging, with some great comments)

Your Actions Follow You Around (we make money not art)

RentAThing, a Portable Reputation Management System (the effects on marketing)

Reputation Rebang In Progress (makes a connection to freakonomics)

How Do You Measure Your Reputation? (reputation and the real-estate market)

RentAThing (Some other people working on reputation, from a P2P perspective, it seems)

RentAThing II (Another post on RentAThing from the above site)

Online reputaties voor dummies: RentAThing (Dutch, I think)