Saturday, November 24, 2007

Robert's Reading List: Halting State, by Charles Stross

I just started Halting State, by Charles Stross. I'm only a few pages into it, but the plot is shaping up to be about a heist in a virtual world. Apparently, a bunch of orcs with a dragon in tow for muscle have knocked over the central bank in the virtual reality game operated by a start-up company in London Edinburgh. The story opens with our protagonist, a police sergeant, interviewing the company executives about the crime. The executives are quite distressed over the matter, acting as if this theft could jeopardize the fledgling company. It's not yet clear whether these dire consequences are because the virtual currency is freely convertible, like in Second Life, or because the company has spent a great deal of effort to develop a realistic economy which now stands to be disrupted. Anyway, our hero. . .

Wait a minute!

A bunch of virtual characters residing on a company's server walked into a virtual bank residing on the same server and stole a bunch of virtual money by debiting it from the bank's account and crediting it to their own (after beating up the virtual guards and, one imagines, blowing the virtual vault virtual door). Does anybody else see this as just a bit too much analogy between virtual worlds and the real one? Why does the bank in a virtual world need an actual in-world location where the money is stored? That's necessary in the real world, since (some) money is made up of physical tokens that must be stored someplace when they aren't in use. Even in the real world this isn't strictly necessary; a bank could in principle just print off the bills (which are just placeholders for the "real" money recorded in the bank's ledger) as necessary, but this turns out to be impractical. Neither of these concerns apply in a virtual world because money in most virtual worlds works like debit accounts; you can complete a transaction anywhere, any time with no need for "physical" banks and currency tokens.

An even bigger head-scratcher is that the entire caper occurred within servers that are owned and controlled by the company that was victimized. They watched the whole thing occur in real time. Why not boot the offending characters from the game when you realized what they were doing, rendering them unable to complete the theft? Failing that, the backend database that stores the game data almost certainly has the capability to reverse transactions as necessary, so why not just have your sysadmins put the gold back where it belongs?

Charles Stross is my favorite contemporary writer; I've enjoyed everything of his that I've ever read, and I don't doubt that he will come up with something that will make all of this seem reasonable. However, for the moment this seems like an instance of a trope that I've seen a lot lately (including an episode of Numb3rs from a couple of weeks ago). Virtual worlds emulate certain aspects of reality, but they don't simulate reality in every detail. Right now, they can't simulate every detail because the computational power isn't there, but even once they can there is no reason to assume that they will. Many aspects of reality are the way they are because in reality we can't conjure objects into or out of existence whenever we want to. Those features don't have to carry over into virtual worlds, and where they are inconvenient, they won't. I don't expect to see virtual banks that can be robbed in future virtual worlds any more than I expect to see virtual landfills to hold all the virtual gewgaws that players no longer want. They don't add anything to the game (unless the game is a cops-and-robbers sim, of course), and, unlike in the real world, they aren't necessary.

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