CTO Articles
Published in IT World
March 28, 2007
Identity management and virtual worlds
Virtual worlds[1] are on the rise all over the world. The "new" thing called the Web has met its first serious challenger in the form of immersive, 3D environments that underlay Second Life[2], There[3], Habbo Hotel[4], World of Warcraft[5] etc. Use some of these for a while and the Web can seem rather flat - physically and metaphorically - by comparison.
The whole space has that new frontier feel to it. The possibilities are endless. It feels very much like the early days of the Web when some folk got overly enthusiastic, some folk had great ideas that changed the world, some folk pooh-poohed the whole thing and missed the boat... The same cast of players can be seen assembling in this new space. All of mankind's laudable virtues and regrettable vices are well represented.
A certain type of person (and I freely admit to being one of them) always wonders whether or not revolutionary IT developments will exacerbate or simplify existing problems. Sometimes great change can actually simplify existing problems. Sometimes existing problems become ten times worse. An example of the former is software distribution. A browser is a piece of software that you distribute so that you do not have to distribute other software which you make work "through" the browser. An example of the latter is...
Hmmm. I was going to say "...identity management in virtual worlds". Here is what I am thinking: identity management is hard. Really hard. Perhaps even intractable in the general case. Maybe the whole concept of identity is flawed? Maybe identity is just a shorter name for a counter-party residual risk formula in some complicated spreadsheet. Perhaps there is no way to formally bind bits to brains (i.e. electronic actions to individuals)? Come to think of it, what does it mean to be "me" anyway...
You see the conceptual tailspin I am in on this one? Well, throw virtual worlds into the mix and what happens. Yikes! Now there are avatars floating around virtual worlds doing things - moving virtual stuff from A to B, buying and selling stuff for "money", interacting with other avatars in complex ways... Each virtual world is isolated. They generally have their own "browsers" and identity management mechanisms. There is no way to jump from one of these worlds into another one, no way to revenue share the "money" that moves around these virtual worlds, no single-sign-on passport to hop around the virtual worlds...
That sure sounds like it complicates an already extremely complicated problem. Perhaps it does. However, I see one glimmer of hope. I am a big fan of Poyla's Maxim that the more general problem may be easier to solve. It has saved my life more than once in my IT career.
Perhaps - just perhaps - the more general identity problem evinced by virtual worlds will actually save the day and make boring old Web identity management trivially drop out of the more general case of identity management of avatars in the new infinity of 3-D spaces that is forming all around us?
Here's hoping.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world
[2] http://www.secondlife.com
[3] http://www.there.com
[4] http://www.habbohotel.com/
[5] http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml