Re: [ogpx] where does VWRAP fit?

[Morgaine <[e-mail]>]

Just in case it's not plain, this discussion is now post-charter agreement I
believe.  Ie. we're not revisiting the charter, at least for a while, and
hence the following is in the context of defining the problem space,
solution space, and draft protocol specifications. :-)


On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Joshua Bell <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> And yet, from a formal/legal perspective, things are far more complicated
> than this, which is why "countries" is a non-technical term and those
> seeking to be precise use lovely terms like "nation-states". Check out
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation for some discussion about the
> terminology, or think about examples like England which is a country by yet
> not a sovereign state; it is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
> Northern Ireland, which in turn is a sovereign member state of the European
> Union (Hopefully I got that right...). Or think of microstates - contested
> and otherwise. It's not our job as technology implementers and spec writers
> to dictate policy, or disenfranchise the world-view of others.
>

This is pushing the analogy too far, but I can run with it if you like. ;-)

First of all (excuse the use of Second Life here, but it is our primary
example), note that the operators of Second Life and all of the residents of
Second Life know exactly which virtual world they operate or inhabit.  There
is not the slightest shadow of doubt about this in anyone's mind, and
therefore the regular suggestions that "virtual world" is ambiguous or
undefined or uncertain are extremely ill-founded.  Likewise, exactly the
same is true of OSgrid, as another example.  The alleged uncertainty about
the meaning of "virtual world" does not exist in the context of OSgrid (nor
of the many other similar grids).  They know exactly who and what they are.

Consequently, there cannot be any uncertainty about the meaning of "virtual
worlds" when we consider interop between two worlds such as Second Life and
OSgrid either.  There are two of them, each is a virtual world, and they are
distinct.  Linden Lab is not the only party that understands that their
virtual world has boundaries and policies that make it distinct and separate
from other virtual worlds.  All VW operators and all VW residents understand
this too, as perfectly as Linden Lab.  Claiming complexity or complication
in this is simply wrong.

Nevertheless, I'll run with your idea of inner complication for you, just to
show that it is ill-founded for virtual worlds.  Let's consider the case of
inner political subdivisions within nation states, and let's examine the
analogy of such inner subdivisions with interop between regions as opposed
to interop between virtual worlds.

Take for example the county of Sussex within the UK and the state of Kansas
within the US.  (These are arbitrary choices.)  Can a traveler from Kansas
visit Sussex by negociating a permit between the administrative domains of
Kansas and Sussex?  Clearly not.  The "interop" that needs to occur is
between the United states and the United Kingdom, even if a direct flight is
taken from Kansas to Sussex without a single foot being placed outside of
the boundaries of Kansas and Sussex.

And this is exactly what happens between virtual worlds as well.  Assuming
for the sake of the example that policy allows interop between SL and
OSgrid, a region from SL and a region from OSgrid cannot interop without
their respective virtual worlds being involved, because it is those TWO
worlds that determine the policies under which the interop occurs, and it is
those TWO worlds that define the sets of VWRAP services that are involved.

You can't cut one of those worlds out of the process, unless the idea is to
"steal" regions from it, which of course is not the case here.  That 2nd
virtual world must be involved if one of its regions is involved.


> Agreed. Just as the real world is not simply partitioned into "countries",
> virtual places will express far more organizational variety than we can
> currently imagine. I don't feel *anointed* to define terminology for the
> future users of such technology.
>

Unfortunately OGP *did* believe itself to be *anointed* enough to try to
sweep the identity of virtual worlds out of the equation altogether by
defining a "same virtual world" that bears no relationship whatsoever to any
"virtual world" known to any operator or resident anywhere. ;-)  I am hoping
that we can dispense with that totally incongruous redefinition of a well
understood term in the VWRAP specifications as easily as we eradicated it
from the charter. :-)


Having removed it, we can then address how VWRAP implements the
>> user-oriented requirement of interop between multiple virtual worlds, since
>> removing the "single VW" will allow us to refer to more than one VW.  We've
>> already been told *authoritatively* that, as it stands, the protocol will
>> only connect single regions or a region domain of regions to one single
>> virtual world, and not interop with a whole other VW.
>
>
> There is *no such authority* that could make such a statement. The draft
> charter does not speak in a normative fashion about virtual worlds,
> precisely to avoid such claims - based on your feedback!
>

By "*authoritatively*", I was referring to the statement made by Meadhbh
Siobhan on 30 August to the effect that "*OGPX is intended to provide
interoperability, not between worlds, but between hosts that work together to
simulate a virtual world*", which I assume was authoritative.  The *virtual
world* being simulated is the point of contention here.  The term either
introduces a new single virtual world that did not previously exist and
which bears no relationship to any virtual world known to any operator or
resident, or else it refers to just one, previously existing and well known
virtual world to which an independent region or region domain is being
added.

What it CANNOT do is to provide interop between two well known VWs, simply
because it is not naming them nor specifying any interaction between them.
An interaction between two region hosts does not provide interaction between
the two virtual worlds of which they are part --- it is at the wrong level
of the "virtual world stack", to make an analogy with layered protocols.


VWRAP as a protocol suite should provide the framework for moving agents
> between regions. Regions are represented as sets of services, which can be
> provided by multiple service providers, and within multiple trust domains.
>
> Given that, if you personally define "virtual world" as a set of regions
> that are provided by a single service provider, then VWRAP should indeed
> provide the framework for agents to traverse those multiple virtual worlds,
> policy permitting.
>


Except that such a redefinition of "virtual world" does not match the well
known meaning of the term in common use today.  I assume that you know what
"virtual world" means, since you operate the virtual world of SL, and that's
the common meaning that should be used here because it's the same meaning
that everyone else uses as well.

You cannot just arbitrarily redefine a common term like that when creating a
protocol designed to work in an area that already has a meaning for that
term.  It sows total confusion among those who have been working in virtual
worlds for years, people who already know very precisely what "virtual
world" means, as I assume you do yourselves in the context of SL.  And with
reference to Kari's thread, such a redefinition makes it impossible to
address the most significant entities of interest from the perspective of
users, which are the distinct virtual worlds themselves.



> If you personally define "virtual world" as the set of all regions that an
> agent can visit (provided by one or more providers), then no, VWRAP would
> not allow traversing multiple worlds because, by that definition, that agent
> can only experience one such world.
>

Multiple worlds exist.  Defining virtual worlds by reachability is
completely inappropriate --- they don't go away just because you can't reach
them.

And that's the problem with the approach taken by the old OGP documents ---
they sought to define a single virtual world by reachability, instead of
accepting that multiple distinct virtual worlds exist but wish to
interoperate.  The language that was used precluded this most clear and
obvious interop semantic from even being addressed.  It overloaded the
crystal clear term "virtual world" with an abstract and highly manufactured
fiction that does not represent any virtual world that actually exists.
(Don't say that it's not crystal clear --- you operate a virtual world and
you know what it is very clearly, as does everyone else.)


> Again, the draft charter text explicitly avoids talking about social
> constructs like "virtual worlds" precisely for this reason, based on
> feedback from you and others.
>
>
The reason why agreement on the charter was reached relatively quickly was
because "virtual world" was almost completely withdrawn from the language
used in the charter.  In contrast, that task still lies ahead of us for the
next phase where we examine the problem space and draft specifications.
Most importantly, the latest draft of the charter refers to "the state of  a
virtual  world", which strongly suggests that there are many virtual worlds,
and this was key to making the language of the charter satisfactory.

However, the name of the protocol is now "Virtual World Region Agent
Protocol", which alludes to Meadhbh's statement that the interop being
considered is not between virtual worlds --- it's within a single virtual
world as defined by its agent domain.  The regions involved are all part of
that single virtual world, not parts of different virtual worlds since no
second AD is involved.  This is fine as long as the protocol is indeed not
intended for cross-VW interop, but we've been down that road before and
apparently there is still a desire to handle multiple VWs as well.

Well that's fine, but we can't handle multiple VWs without referring to
them, and we can't refer to them currently because the term "virtual world"
is blocked from having a plural form by a very curious and wholly
unjustified redefinition of the term inside the specifications.


Morgaine.







================================================

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Joshua Bell <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:36 AM, Morgaine <[e-mail]
> > wrote:
>
>> *Users* of *virtual worlds* know exactly what the term means, in the same
>> way that they can distinguish one country from another when they go on
>> holiday.  People have been living with the concept of different places ever
>> since they started travelling beyond their village boundary, and nowadays
>> the popularity of tourism embodies that concept most vividly in the form of
>> *countries*.  Different countries tend to look different and have
>> different cultures and different rules (local policies).  This is entirely
>> natural and instinctive to us.
>>
>
> And yet, from a formal/legal perspective, things are far more complicated
> than this, which is why "countries" is a non-technical term and those
> seeking to be precise use lovely terms like "nation-states". Check out
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation for some discussion about the
> terminology, or think about examples like England which is a country by yet
> not a sovereign state; it is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
> Northern Ireland, which in turn is a sovereign member state of the European
> Union (Hopefully I got that right...). Or think of microstates - contested
> and otherwise. It's not our job as technology implementers and spec writers
> to dictate policy, or disenfranchise the world-view of others.
>
>
>> That concept doesn't disappear when "places" become digital.  Instead the
>> concept blossoms, because without the constraints of the physical world,
>> virtual places can be so dramatically different.
>
>
> Agreed. Just as the real world is not simply partitioned into "countries",
> virtual places will express far more organizational variety than we can
> currently imagine. I don't feel anointed to define terminology for the
> future users of such technology.
>
> Having removed it, we can then address how VWRAP implements the
>> user-oriented requirement of interop between multiple virtual worlds, since
>> removing the "single VW" will allow us to refer to more than one VW.  We've
>> already been told authoritatively that, as it stands, the protocol will only
>> connect single regions or a region domain of regions to one single virtual
>> world, and not interop with a whole other VW.
>
>
> There is no such authority that could make such a statement. The draft
> charter does not speak in a normative fashion about virtual worlds,
> precisely to avoid such claims - based on your feedback!
>
> VWRAP as a protocol suite should provide the framework for moving agents
> between regions. Regions are represented as sets of services, which can be
> provided by multiple service providers, and within multiple trust domains.
>
> Given that, if you personally define "virtual world" as a set of regions
> that are provided by a single service provider, then VWRAP should indeed
> provide the framework for agents to traverse those multiple virtual worlds,
> policy permitting.
>
> If you personally define "virtual world" as the set of all regions that an
> agent can visit (provided by one or more providers), then no, VWRAP would
> not allow traversing multiple worlds because, by that definition, that agent
> can only experience one such world.
>
> Again, the draft charter text explicitly avoids talking about social
> constructs like "virtual worlds" precisely for this reason, based on
> feedback from you and others.
>
>
>
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