Rest in Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

You are about to read a story of crime, deceit and punishment. The story takes place in a virtual world, but it is by no means a fictional story. All the characters portrayed have existed and the events recollected have actually happened. They are taken from the real everyday life of a virtual world. A virtual world is a virtual place that is persistent over time - unlike the environments of networked games like Quake - and it is accessible by many people at the same time. These people have to have some kind of self-representation, so participants can see each other, unlike the simultaneous visitors of a website. By calling it a place, I have implied that the system has to be based on some kind of spatial metaphor, unlike an electronic message board for instance. It can be a text-based system - but in this case it is graphical. My reason for telling this story is to point out some important aspects of the nature of the social interaction in this kind of setting that are easily overlooked by anyone who does not have extensive first-hand experience from participation in social virtual worlds - but I will save my analysis for later.