Re: [ogpx] where does VWRAP fit?

[Joshua Bell <[e-mail]>]

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.