Emerging Virtual Institutions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.”[1]
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.[1]
