Like many current virtual world creators, friend of the show Matt Mihaly is lazy. OK, they call it user created content or inclusive design or something, but it’s just laziness. His latest work shirking strategy is to get you, the public, to invent a race for Iron Realms’ new MMO. So if you have Beast of an idea - see the entry criteria here. And of course you can’t call your self a TN reader unless you satisfy yourself of the IP rights involved. At one of the sessions, Tyler Ochoa from Santa Clara University’s School of Law was presenting on his recent work on avatars. A Berkeley student from the back asked a question about what laws govern property within the Second Life? Did property concepts translate into the new virtual environment? How did property and contract laws relate?

I (Elizabeth) am delighted to be guest blogging at Terra Nova for the month of April. I want to discuss a current project that I am working on, and in the process I hope to gain suggestions on the direction it should take in the future. Beginning in January 2007, I decided to take 100 first year property students into Second Life as part of their graded work. (I am currently a visiting professor of law at Seattle University School of Law, teaching property, intellectual property, and copyright). The idea of taking 100 students into Second Life was a gamble indeed…for so many reasons. I was not alone in my endeavor, however. I have had the most amazing 2L research assistant, Rachel Goda, who early in the fall, agreed to be part of this crazy adventure, and lend her enormous gaming expertise, both to the design and execution of the project.

To begin, I should explain how I came to this project. This year I am a visiting assistant professor at Seattle University School of Law, teaching intellectual property and property. What this translates to is that my field is copyright, and as part of my teaching package, I was also assigned to teach a year-long first year property course for the first time. A bit daunting with the traditional concepts of first in time, adverse possessions, estates and future interests, landlord-tenant, communal property, easements, nuisance, eminent domain, to name a few.

Here was the paradigm. We are deeply entrenched in problems of contemporary property law. But our casebook—our traditions—make us always aware that we are a product of our feudal past—our British feudal past. That is the paradigm that many over years and years have taught Property law. Second Life presented a new opportunity. Now, teach property as three phases: a feudal British past, a contemporary traditional property context, and the future as embodied in worlds like Second Life and the concept of “virtual” property. What can our past teach our present and our present teaches our future? What elements of property are being translated into Locke’s new “America”? (Our case book begins with Locke’s “Thus in the beginning all the world was America” )

The imagined project took many forms over the Fall semester—I thought of having each student create an avatar. I thought of groups that would work with an avatar over the semester and interact with each other. I came, however, to choose a very different model. We have one avatar – Fizzy Soderberg (named by the first group) and fourteen groups of seven to nine students. We would have a pet hamster, so to speak. We would follow Fizzy’s journey through the semester. Each group would be given ONE week to explore Second Life with Fizzy, gather the latest news, and most importantly, research a key concept in property law. At the end of the week, the students record a screencasting in my office. The PowerPoint is prepared by the self-appointed group leader. Each student creates their own portion of the script. Then, the 15-20 minute presentation is presented to the class, as well as being posted at Fizzy’s Second Life and iTunes.

The remaining portion of this post is how the exercise is structured in more detail, along with the weekly property categories in the project. This project could not be possible without Rachel Goda, whose enthusiasm, patience, smartness, and experience has really made this project possible. She will be writing the majority of the second post. And finally, I want to make a disclaimer. This is in many ways an intentionally naïve project. The students were given a few law review articles on virtual worlds, and we had discussions about the kinds of questions, the kinds of news stories that were being discussed particularly with regard to Second Life. We also had Daniel Huebner (Director of Community Affairs at Linden Lab come to our class virtually on the first day of our class in January as a kick-off to the project (thanks to Rachel). But other than that, I wanted them to take their limited knowledge of property and pair it with their limited knowledge of Second Life.

We are about to set out on a journey, an experiment, an adventure. We, as part of our class this spring 2007 semester will enter Second Life, the virtual world that is currently the rage. We are part explorers, part journalists. The goal is to take the concepts we are learning in our property course, and see how the traditional, modern conventions of property are manifesting themselves in a virtual world. This will be part of a larger project, and is an attempt to blend research and teaching. We will be producing screencasts and written reports on what we find that will be posted to a website for both our class as well as a larger audience. We will have virtual guests to our class, and Rachel Goda (my research assistant) and I will be reporting our findings in a number of venues this spring.

Digigardener (that be me, Bruce Damer) shooting the breeze with the gang in Alphaworld version .30, summer 1995. See more early images here. I was reminded that while standing around in the .30 version of Alphaworld in summer 1995 (see image above) a group of us were moved to come up with some new words to describe the experience of being inside a new medium. I distinctly recall commenting to the group "guys, what we call the experience of being here, I mean, we aren't merely online, hmm... I guess we are simply inside a world or 'in-world'". In the grand tradition of other new terms being hyphenated when they are in training-wheels, in-world has now become inworld and is being used pretty widely. See Google search item #4 for "in-world" which encapsulates this shift.

Activities and having fun in-world... Groups Starting, joining and managing...Of course if you Google the term "inworld" in its unhyphenated form you get: Did you mean: in world...but the search does give some positive hits including the homepage of a virtual worlds design company called InWorld Studios. So... I guess the term is slowly wending its way "OutWorld" toward the Websters. Just the other day I was sitting with a couple of hypercharged folks who had been Second Life residents since last October and where bubbling over with creative possibilities and business ideas. It occurred to me that a good term to describe their state of mind as being "world-struck" (aww heck, lets strike the hyphen and just say "worldstruck"). I couldn't restrain my own bubbling and blurted out "hey, you guys are worldstruck!" Oops, now I had to explain myself.

Originally the term avatar came from Hindu mythology and is the name for the temporary body a god inhabits while visiting Earth. Avatar can also denote an embodiment or concrete manifestation of an abstract concept. The ancient Sanskrit term avatara meant "a passing down". Avatar was first coined for use in describing users' visual embodiment in Cyberspace by Chip Morningstar in the early days of Habitat back in 1985. In text-based virtual communities, the term avatar is not used, users are identified instead by handles, aliases or nicknames. Avatars are also called: characters, players, virtual actors, icons, or virtual humans in other virtual communities or gaming worlds.