Humans and Robots | Part 2: Identity mix & Robots coming into play
:: This article is Part 2 of a series covering the bio-mechanical soup the Internet serves us and its implications for the human variable in computer-mediated communication (Part 1) ::
Online identities are many-to-many
Years ago, life was simple and easy (from our current point of view at least) and each of us had only one email address with our full name in it. Quite clearly, things have changed: how many emails and IM accounts do you have today? How about your accounts on various social networks, blogs and online communities? We are now juggling with a variety of online identities which we often try to keep separate – something that is increasingly difficult to do in this “Age of Transparency” (see our previous column on this topic).
I use regularly 4 different emails, 2 IM services, 2 social networks, 2 blogs and 3 Twitter accounts. Of course, I participate also in various online communities (groups on mobile, gaming, payment, telecom, social networks, social media, virtual worlds, etc.) and have registered to dozens of services I rarely or never use.
My own experience, which probably shares a lot with yours, is that I juggle with different identities. What used to be [1 user = 1 identity] is long foregone and we clearly have [1 user = n identities]. Interestingly, there are additional situations such as a shared ownership of an online identity. It is the case for one of the projects I am working with where several team members share one single Twitter “corporate account”. So we have [n users = 1 identity]; it is similar to a “collective” of writers – there are speculations whether authors like Homer and Shakespeare were collectives so this situation is not new. With all this, the validity of the New Yorker’s famous cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” published in 1993 is now quite clear to all.
Robots come into play
Until then, only humans were involved. My take on multiple online identities is that it is actually not so different from the way we deal with offline identities: we generally go by different names with our colleagues, friends, parents, children, clients, strangers and acquaintances. We are just more used to it.
Things become interesting online when you start to see that robots can pose quite effectively as humans. The case we looked into initially was the MMORPG World of Warcraft, where some users rely on pieces of software to perform a number of boring and time-consuming tasks necessary to accumulate gold and experience for their character. A software named Glider promotes itself this way: “Glider is a tool that plays your World of Warcraft character for you, the way you want it. It grinds, it loots, it skins, it heals, it even farms soul shards… without you.” The game publisher forbids the use of such “third-party software” but it seems that the program is so good at posing as human that the game operators have a hard time noticing it. Other players generally find out quickly who is on cruise control and who is human. So a robot can already fool a machine. Let’s move on to the next case.
In 2005, the magazine Wired published an article about online poker games. It reported that some players actually rely on software to play on their behalf. Some were earning money this way from other human players – or possibly less capable software ^_^ – until human players quit the game for the lack of fun playing against software players. Building on the New Yorker’s punch line, the article concluded “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a bot”. So a robot, in some specific contexts, can fool unsuspecting humans. This has some business implications as we already mentioned in a previous post that over 5 billion USD worth of virtual goods were sold in China, Korea and Japan in 2008 alone. We also mentioned that a large part of the Real-Money Transactions (RTM) around World of Warcraft originated from Asia-based companies where digital labor is cheap. Are machines even cheaper than humans to make money with virtual goods? What’s the fun playing in a world where many citizens walking around are robots?
(to be continued)
– By Benjamin @ +8*
:: Commercial | +8* – Plus Eight Star is the leading cross-market strategic consultancy on Asia’s Mobile & Internet innovations. More about us here and in PDF ::