Do Virtual Worlds such as ‘Second Life’ have a contribution to make to sustainable development? I found myself asking this question when I came across a report on Sustainable Consumption and Production from the Sustainable Development Roundtable recently. The report is based around the need for a ‘one planet economy’. Putting it in its simplest terms, if everyone on the planet were to consume at the same level as we do in the developed West, we would need three planets’ worth of resources. Since we don’t have three planets, so the theory goes, we need to adjust our activities so that we live within our environmental means. Leaving aside the question of whether this analysis is accurate or not, it has captured the imagination of some politicians and could well form part of the political agenda for the future. What kind of lives would we be leading? And what would be the role of virtual worlds within them?
If Sustainable Consumption and Production ideas take hold we can say goodbye to cheap air travel and look forward to spending more of our holiday time taking local sustainable holidays. We’ll be eating more locally sourced and seasonal food and cutting back on imports of staple produce and exotics. We’ll be encouraged to reuse and recycle clothing and make do and mend rather than throwing away clothes because last year’s fashions no longer suit. It remains to be seen whether large numbers of consumers in the affluent West can be persuaded to buy into this kind of hair-shirt lifestyle given that consumerism has been the mantra for the latter half of the twentieth century. But, assuming that this is what the future looks like, is it possible that Virtual Worlds will provide some kind of escape?
I think we have to take it as a given that broadband takeup will continue and that a home computer and persistent internet connection will be the norm, even under the scenario outlined above. It will be possible for us to lead quite simple and restrained real lives, respecting the limits of the environment to sustain us, while leading rich, involved lives online. Clothing requires design, resources and people and places to sell the product in the real world; exotic creations can be produced in Photoshop, uploaded to Second Life and onto your avatar with no consumption of resources beyond the power consumption of the machines involved. One of my early ‘Wow!’ moments in Second Life came when I ran out of money. I realised that I could create a virtual home filled with all manner of entertainments for the price of few cups of coffee. I shelled out real money for Linden dollars and have never looked back. It’s clear that those of us who inhabit virtual worlds make large investments in our time there. We pay money for goods and services, we invest emotions in the relationships we develop with other players, and we invest time in crafting and customising our avatars and carving out a niche for ourselves. It is clear that these investments are worth a lot to many of us, mostly in small ways such as the L$1000 outfit you just have to have or your collection of classic cars, but also in the headline-grabbing examples such as the space station sold on Eve online for a significant sum, the level 20 WoW characters sold on eBay or the price of a private island in Second Life.
This conspicuous consumption is still sustainable because no real world resources are needed to produce and replicate millions of copies of the items we desire. Payment is the reward for the intellectual effort that has gone into producing these items and the time spent developing and refining the product. The price is simply what people are prepared to pay. And, as I’ve learned myself with my furniture business, once something has been designed and put up for sale it can go on being bought by residents for as long as there’s interest in the product. Pricing becomes quite interesting when you can look forward to months (or even years!) of regular micro-payments all of which add up over the long term.
But is it possible to live a simple and sustainable real life while living out fantasies that would make Donald Trump seem frugal in our Second Lives? Does the fantasy we indulge in reinforce consumerism (ooh, must have more new shiny!) or allow us to express it in a more sustainable fashion? My guess is that it is possible to live a rich and involved virtual life and enjoy it without feeling that similar material riches need to be had in real life.
One further interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that this emerging virtual world economy is one the developing world will be able to access on a level playing field once the technology is cheaper and more widespread. Now, before I get accused of being too pie-in-the-sky, let me say that ensuring people have safe water to drink is a much more pressing goal for the world than wiring up the Sahara with broadband and getting solar-powered laptops out there. But China is already well along this road and other developing nations are sure to follow. This means that designing goods for virtual worlds is a potential occupation for imaginative designers in developing countries, and a lucrative one at that. We are already seeing the outsourcing of content creation to developing nations such as China, an example would be Anshe Chung Studios. Virtual worlds provide a new avenue for wealth creation in developing countries, one not available to the countries which took the lead in industrialising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the concern that industrialisation in the newly industrialising countries will be a messy and polluting affair, blowing any agreement to control carbon emissions out of the water, a pathway along the road to economic development that does not consume real world resources has to be one worth taking.
Second Life content creators need to be on their toes; Chinese and Indian competitors might just be about to do everything better and more cheaply than you!
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