Cybertown -- A World Apart
By Max Van Kleek
background -----
Cybertown is modern incarnation of a MUD. Instead of using a text-based
interface, though, CyberTown is accessed through the web, and is navigated
via a 3D, VRML-like environment. While the 3D is expectedly rather
crude, each CyberTown citizen has a uniquely customizable animated
avatar, and each person may move one's avatar freely within the shared
3D space, where one sees other avatars. Citizens communicate through
an IRC-format chat window located beneath their window into the 3D
space. Cybercitizens and may chat in any of 8 languages including
French, Hebrew, and Japanese.
Space in Cybertown is partitioned into individual colonies and landmarks.
Colonies are named particular themes, such as "Teens", "Sci-Fi",
and "Inner Realms". They are themselves divided into Building
Zones, which consist of arrangements of individuals' houses. Each
house, colony, and landmark holds a individual virtual landsape, and
a corresponding new IRC chat space.
cybertown society ------
From inspecting its interface elements, one might gather that Cybertown
is just another avatar-based chat system, putting it alongside many
other services like The Palace, or Adobe's new "Atmosphere"
3D avatar-world authoring system. While these systems are not without
their own communities, their communities exist entirely for social
interaction and rarely extend outside the notion of a 'irc community'.
Yet, the citizens of cybertown seem to live in a complex virtual
world that, in many ways, resembles the real world. Not only does
each member of the society have his or her own social status, but
people also have formal titles, are encouraged to join clubs and form
loyalties with social circles, and establish geographic communities.
Throughout Cybertown, there is a rudimentary economic system, permitting
citizens conduct virtual commerce by trading merchandise, purchase
new merchandise, or even build houses and clubs. Perhaps the most
unique aspect of Cybertown, however, is its employment system.
employment ------
Cybertownians do not take their jobs lightly. At the Cybertown Employment
Office, citizens hired by employers to recruit for them greet passerbys.
Informal interviews are conducted in the office, and, if a good pairing
is discovered, the recruiter escorts the potential employee to his
manager's home, where a more formal interview is conducted in private.
These interviews are for positions of varying degrees of power, from
"Club Assistant" all the way up to a position of "Block
Deputy", the most powerful hired rank in society. If an citizen
is hired, their title is affixed to their username, publishing their
social status to the world.
Duties vary widely between positions. Like the real world, greater
power frequently equals greater responsibility. While Club Assistants'
responsibilities consist of logging on for a minimum of two hours
per week to moderate their club and conduct quizzes and contests,
Block Deputies are expected to spend most of every night keeping order
in their territories, conducting business with others, establishing
clubs, and hiring assistants.
Most Cybertown citizens take their positions so seriously that it
becomes a part of their real lives. Block Deputies will communicate
with their employees outside of the Cybertown environment, usually
via personal email, or MSN Instant Messenger. In this way, Cybertown
traverses its own barriers of its physical VR environment, and passes
into the lives of the people participating in the community. The degree
of involvement and participation that results is comparable only with
that of some of the more successful role playing and live action role
playing (LARP) games.
cybertown as life -------
Cybertown currently boasts a registered userbase of 665,000 citizens,
and routinely ranges from two hundred users online at any particular
moment, to several thousand. If these statistics alone do not say
enough about Cybertown's success, then speaking with its citizens
will. One can immediately tell that most citizens are entirely immersed
in Cybertown - and have entirely abandoned their physical identities
in favor of their self-designed avatars. More accurately put, it seems
that they have established a new identity for themselves, which they
have worked hard to design, and to build a reputation for within this
virtual society. In order to achieve this degree of immersion, Cybertown
did not have to turn to cutting-edge computer graphics or haptic interfaces;
rather, Cybertown uses only third-rate blocky 3D graphics with a primitive
chat interface. Yet, the sense of community within Cybertown fosters
a feeling of "belongedness" that is undoubtedly the greatest
source of attraction for the users to the Cybertown. This makes Cybertown
an exceptional example of a successful virtual community.
One question that Cybertown may ultimately help us answer might be
this: once one begins to replace face-to-face human interaction with
virtual interaction in digital spaces, what elements will be essential
for providing good human interaction, permitting people to form strong
social connections, or conduct business? Cybertown might help us answer
these questions, because it has isolated a "virtual" reality,
that is, a simplified model that contains many of the same elements
that exist in the real world.