Convergence Conversation

Who is actually at the broadband frontier?

There was a great story in the paper that I was reading on the train a few days ago. Not the one about the couple arrested for having sex on a train into Euston.  The typically English commuters ignored them and carried on reading their papers or working on their laptops (honestly, in this day and age -- didn't any of them have cameraphones?). The newspaper I saw rather quaintly reported that the woman involved was "from Essex".

No, not that one, the one about the couple getting divorced because a virtual private detective in Second Life caught the husband's avatar fondling a call girl's avatar.

I just couldn't believe what he'd done,' said Ms Taylor, 28. 'I looked at the screen and saw his character having sex. It's cheating, as far as I'm concerned.'

[From Second Life sex causes divorce | Metro.co.uk]

Most people's first reaction is, naturally, that these people are just plain mental. In a previous era they might have been UFOlogistsThere or communists or dowsers, but today their particular sociopathy is manifest in virtual worlds. I'm not so sure though. As I spend a lot of time online, and "e-know" many people very well despite not having met them, it is not clear to me at all that the intensity of relationships between virtual identities is any less than the intensity of relationships between real identities.

The growth of virtual worlds -- remember, the "western" virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are small in comparison with the "eastern" virtual worlds such as Cyworld in South Korea --  is very closely related to the rise in broadband penetration. As broadband penetration goes up, so the proportion of the population who spend their time in virtual worlds, and the amount of time they spend in those virtual worlds, goes up. South Korea has a very high broadband penetration: a quarter of the population are registered in Cyworld!

Globally, the numbers are staggering. World of Warcraft is a tiddler with its mere ten million plus users.

There are approximately 1.5 billion unique registered accounts (virtual players) of online games around the world in 2008.

[From T=Machine » More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008]

The size of the economies that are growing up in these virtual worlds are very surprising. As I have been observing for some years, the amount of money involved is already significant. What this means is that there are already substantial numbers of people who are investing the labour, skill and intelligence in the virtual world rather than the real world. 

China has had about 40 million people who frequently play online games through major portals, with an average annual spending of each player at 400 yuan (58.8 U.S. dollars).

[From 40 million online game players spend 400 yuan each on average_English_Xinhua]

Clearly, there is a virtual economy growing up in virtual worlds and we should want our industries to exploit.  Not in the trivial sense of setting up a meeting room in Second Life but in the more transformational sense of entirely new ways of making a living from disruptive use of technology.  I don't know what these new businesses will be any more than anyone else, but I do have a reasonable optimism about our creative industries ability to exploit the opportunity if the technologists can deliver the broadband platform.  By this I don't just mean the broadband connectivity: I mean the broadband connectivity plus the digital identity infrastructure needed to deliver privacy and security to individuals and organisations alike plus the digital money infrastructure needed to make economic activity efficient.

As our broadband penetration rises, the "Korean" shift into virtual worlds will happen in the UK and we will soon have to get used to the virtual relationship and everything that will go with it. The people in the newspaper report aren't freaks, they're pioneers.