How Virtual Worlds Shape our Real Identities with Richard Bartle & David Birch #1

Welcome to The Future of You. Today we're joined by two guests. Firstly, Richard Bartle, who is a British writer, professor, and absolute legend in game research and design, specializing in online games in the massively multiplayer online games industry. He co-created MUD1, the first MUD, in 1978, and since then has authored the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds, which many people know covers the history, ethics, structure, and technology of massively multiplayer games. He spends half his time as a games industry consultant and half his time as a professor of game design at the University University of Essex, where, by the way, he gained his PhD in artificial intelligence. One of the things he is especially well known for is his research on player personality types in virtual worlds, dividing them into four types: Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers, and Killers, which has grown into an online test that is generally referred to, not by him, but by everyone else, as the Bartle Test. David Birch is an internationally recognized thought leader in digital identity and digital money, and he's been named as one of the global top 15 favorite sources of business information by Wired, and he's ranked one of top 10 most influential voices in banking by Financial Brand. He's also the global ambassador for Consult Hyperion. That's the secure electronic transactions consultancy that he helped to found. Now, he's someone I always turn to when I have questions about the future of money, and his book, Identity is the New Money was one of the books I sought out whilst I was writing my own. I recommend you follow his Substack, characteristically wittily entitled In the Future Everyone Will Be Famous for 15 Megabytes, or you can read his columns in Forbes. Now, we had a fascinating conversation with these two pioneers in their industries, always brilliant at pinpointing what the emerging trends are, but also what we should do about them. And we talked obviously with Richard about the founding of MUD, and the kind of characters that one is, or the persona one has in virtual games like that. And that was very eye-opening, I think. And it led on to a conversation about the economics of the metaverse. And of course, the conversation ended up combining both these factors until we got to a conversation at the end, a chat about whether you could even tokenize the self. And we talked about that in relation to both you know, you as a creator in some of these spaces, and also just goods that have value. It really was a very interesting conversation, quite a long conversation with an awful lot of content in it. It's great to get these two guests together, and the fact that they know each other, of course, means that they had quite a chemistry. So I do hope you'll enjoy what is the first episode of The Future of You. Podcast and listen to Richard and David on identity and identities in a virtual digital world. So to jump right into it, Richard and Dave, can we talk a little bit about where we are with identity in this increasingly digitized world that we now live in, but also this emerging virtual world or virtual worlds. One of the things I wanted to talk to you both about actually was how we turn up in these environments. Are we characters? One of the things I was thinking about in my book was as we become more sort of bits of data and bits of characteristics in these sorts of worlds, are we actually becoming characters rather than persons? And as we take on different persona, are we really ourselves in some of these places or spaces. So maybe I could start with you, Richard, and particularly thinking about, you know, your time with MUD, founding that. You know, are we digital players? Are we virtual personas? How do you think about our identity in these spaces?

Well, it depends on the space, but for game worlds, when people start playing these game worlds, they, they're looking not at their character as even as a person. They're just looking at it like you might look at a word processor document. It's just something that's there. But after a while, they start to look on their character as their representative. So it's, this is a different person, but they're representing me. They're my representative. But as they keep playing, they switch over time. So it's less than my representative, then it's a representation of me. So it's an aspect of me that I'm projecting into the world. And as they become more and more immersed in the game world, ultimately their character becomes themselves. The player themselves is their character. So the way it works then is that games provide players with a series of decisions that they'll have to make. There are many, many decisions. And as they're making the decisions, the players will be making some decisions that they, if it was really them truly in the real world, they would make, but other ones be more experimental. And sometimes the experimental ones are the exact opposite of what you would do with the— you're at one side and your character is another and the real you is in the middle. And sometimes they're slightly ahead of them so that the character is not quite like you, but is a bit like you. And you're just saying, what would I do if I just did a different thing? And after playing these massively multiplayer online role-playing games for 2 to 4 hours every night for 2 years, then players will be and become their characters. So it's a way of exploring who you are. You get to be and become yourself through playing these games.

I think even before the emergence of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games, this kind of emergent behavior was already evident. And I can sort of flag up two reasons for thinking that. So one is Richard and I have a, you know, a shared heritage that we don't normally talk about in front of strangers. But obviously, Tracey Follows, you've become something of a friend over the last few minutes, um, in that we both used to play Dungeons Dragons, which you didn't used to be able to say in public due to the RPG critical community. But, but now we feel comfortable admitting. And one of the things that's very surprising— well, this was very surprising to me as a kid, essentially, as a young person, which I saw in my own kids as well— is this idea of experimenting with, with who you are, which at first you think you're just playing a game. But as things go on, one of the things that's fun and exciting and interesting, and one of the reasons why I still play it now all those years later, is that element of experimentation with different parts of character. So that's— I think that's one source which you probably could have— if you looked at games, you probably could have seen that sort of coming. But the thing that's surprising to me is just how quickly these properties emerged. I was looking up something from Richard's earliest days, and as far as I can tell, approximately 10 minutes after The Mud was conceived, people were complaining that they were addicted to it and were losing themselves in this virtual world. And, you know, it was going to cause psychosis and all this sort of thing. So it's interesting to me, Richard, just how quickly this idea of the avatars, the experimental characters emerged in those spaces.

Yeah, you're right with the Dungeons Dragons observation. Yeah, that's correct. It's a form of role-playing, and in role-playing you get to be someone you're not. And so it's like a laboratory where you can experiment under safe conditions with who you are. And if it doesn't work out, then, well, you start up with a character, and if it doesn't work out, then it informs who you are as a person. So it's not role-playing like on a stage where the, the character is fixed and it's the character can inform you about yourself because you're playing somebody who isn't you on the stage, but you can't change the character very much. Whereas in a role-playing game like Dungeons Dragons or one of the massive multiplayer games, then you can change the character, so it's not just you moving from one direction, you're moving from both directions, and that gives you an understanding of who you can be and who you really are without the constraints of what reality has set for you.

But when you sat down to write that first virtual world, that wasn't the goal, was it? That this was an emergent property of that world, I think.

It wasn't just me, it was me and Roy Trubshaw. Yeah, I always have to give Roy a shout out. The original aim of it was to make a better world. We didn't like how reality worked. We didn't like the way that in reality you were judged by who you were in terms of other people's views. So I've got a Yorkshire accent. Yorkshire accents, yep, they're trusted as being these people, plain speaking, don't lie. But on the other hand, they're peasants.

Yeah.

And if you're in a— if I go to America where they don't recognize the accent, they think that I'm smart, erudite, well-educated, but I'm a villain because all Hollywood villains are English. So you get judged on these things. You get judged on all sorts, what you look like, whether you're disability, sexuality, gender, age, weight, everything. And you never get to be who you are if everybody else is pushing you into the boxes the way they want you to be. But if you go on to a virtual space where you can recreate another identity and wear that identity and then experiment and see if you like it. Throw away the bits you don't, keep the bits you do. Change yourself, change the character. Then ultimately, you and your character become the same. And that's why when I— at the beginning, when you asked the question, I said, yeah, you start out with an objective view and eventually go to subjective until when you and your character are the same, you're immersed in the game world, and then that is you at that point.

This reminds me very much of when I was reading up on the otaku in Asia, so the obsessive fans of anime and manga, and how they wanted to create these fictional worlds that their characters exist in and they sort of feel they themselves exist in. It's not that they're naive, it's not that they think, oh, you know, they don't realize this is a fictional world. They do. They prefer it to the real world, and they actually feel that it's a better world because it reflects their values and their standards and their norms, and they're not particularly happy with the ones in the real world. So these are the worlds that they inhabit. And of course, there's a lot of conversation about how sucked into these worlds they get, but it's— I think it's really interesting. It's not a naivety, it's very— it's a conscious thing. And I wonder if actually during the pandemic and with the amount of stress and pressure and expectations that there are on teens, especially these, these days, whether that's one of the attractions to these sorts of worlds.

Well, for teens, they've always— teens have always been experimenting with their identities, so these, these just give them a place to do it where otherwise they might have, um, I don't know, had to have got drunk or something to, uh, cast off the, um the worries that their actions may have consequences.

I think it's different. I mean, you probably regard me as a sort of reactionary Dungeons Dragons snob, but when you're playing Call of Duty, you're not imagining a new character, you're inhabiting a part that's been created for you. That's not quite the same as when you're sitting around the table.

No, no, no, I'm talking about the role-playing games, particularly the massively multiplayer ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because if you're playing not just Dungeons Dragons, if you were playing Monopoly, then no one really thinks that you are an old boot or a Scottie dog or a top hat.

But am I right, Richard, when you were first launching MUD, that the, the roles one was playing, they weren't defined in terms of gender? Yeah, yeah. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's particularly interesting looking back on that now.

Well, we had to use— we had to have gender in there because it was a text-based game, so we had to use the English language, which is gendered. But we wanted people to be able to be who they were. We weren't going to impose, you are playing the role of a mage, you're going to jump on the mage train and go to Mageville and get off at the other end and be a mage. You are what you do. You can do what you behave. If you wanted to pretend to be Alice in Wonderland, you could pretend to be Alice in Wonderland. So we asked the two questions when we started. The first one we actually needed, which is, "By what name shall I call you?" The second one we'd rather we didn't have to use, and that was, "What sex do you wish to be?" And that was because of the, the fact we had to use English pronouns. But neither Roy or I would have wanted that at all because it was partitioning people again. And even that, though, it led to lots of cross-gender play because people will if you're playing to be somebody else, well, what's the opposite of you? And there we go. But the game itself had a number of ways that you could— your character could change sex, gender. Well, it would be sex because it was actually binary. We only had two. And the way we had the— sometimes there were puzzles that you had to be a particular sex to be. So like the You had to be female to kiss the prince, and you had to be male to kiss Sleeping Beauty, that sort of thing. So players had to swap between genders, and then there were spells that would change people's gender. And sometimes you'd be playing and you just wouldn't know what gender you were. Are you male or female at the moment? Uh, yes. Quick, oh yeah, okay, male, right. So it wasn't intended to be a a game which put your real-life features into it. The only thing was your mind, who you are, your character as an individual. And for that, we needed to throw off all the other things.

Before we sort of move on to the kind of economics part of it, I just want to ask you a question. I mean, I might be barking up the wrong tree on this, but I sort of think in some ways In the same sense that yesterday I was Theogenes, the devoted cleric of Torm, and bringing down lightning on my opponents and so on. You're playing that role.

They had it coming.

They had it coming, they really did. To some extent, first thing this morning I was on LinkedIn playing the role of Dave Birch, the digital identity guru. And then a bit later on, I was on Twitter playing the role of cryptocurrency skeptic and so on. And I, I'm just curious as to someone who's very steeped in these worlds, the extent to which you think there is a kind of gamification of our characters underway. Because obviously the reason why I'm on Twitter is not to increase the sum total of human knowledge, but, but to get influence and so on, and on Twitter to get followers, and you know what I mean? Like, it's a sort of gamification, isn't it?

Well, yes, in different contexts you're going to wear a different hat and be a different person, but the you who's behind those people is fundamentally the same. Now, postmodernists would probably say, well, no, they aren't. Everybody's just superficially different. Areas, but having seen people develop as people in role-playing games, I'm not sure. I think there is, there is a fundamental core to somebody that informs all the other aspects. So yes, when I'm giving a lecture to my students, I'm not the same person as when I'm taking a lecture from my wife, but the me inside there is just moderating my behavior based on what the output is. But I'm doing that conscious. Well, the filter I'm wearing is deliberate, like the filter you're wearing is deliberate. You could, if you wanted to, now suddenly turn into the, um, I'm speaking to, uh, my worshippers in the temple. And yeah, if you, if you set the context for it, if you say, look, I'm—

no, no, but, but in, in the same sense that Theogenes, the devoted cleric of Torn, will do things that I would never do. I will say things down the pub that I would never say on Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, I will do things on LinkedIn that I wouldn't do down the pub. And to your point about this kind of strange, you know, you start off playing this role on LinkedIn or wherever, but over time it sort of becomes you. That's who you are, you know.

So in a way, this kind of interplay between the real and virtual is more insidious in some ways than Or liberating if you've learned, you know, in a sense to sort of explore different facets or even sides of your identity, or indeed different identities. And then maybe it gives you the confidence to take it out into the real world. Maybe it doesn't, but, you know, maybe it does. And I guess only time will tell with that.

Well, the danger is that when you bring things in from other contexts, it can remove your freedom. So If somebody from LinkedIn walked into your Dungeons Dragons session and watched you playing Dungeons Dragons, you would be a little more self-conscious than you would be normally. If someone was reporting your LinkedIn prognostications on a back channel on Twitter or something, they might be saying things that would influence what you're doing on LinkedIn in ways that they shouldn't. So, and likewise, if you're playing an MMO and someone's speaking with their real voice over real headphones, then you that limits you automatically, suddenly, oh, you're American, oh, you're female, oh, you've got a really bad lisp, oh, you're deaf. I said— so there's all these things that where if you bring more of other contexts in, it removes your ability to play within the context you are. But sometimes you don't want to play. Sometimes you just want to be the— I'm the expert and I want you to listen to me. I don't want to have to explain all this. But just for you, I will. But, you know, really, so yeah.

Dave, your question's really— it's made me think about something to do with rights, which is, I know there's kind of a conversation percolating about whether people role-playing in these games or whether avatars or characters or whatever need certain specific rights. It was kind of fascinating the other day when Facebook, as was, but now I think we're calling it Meta, were suggesting that avatars would have to almost be socially distanced, if you like. There'd have to be a distance between—

well, they have to be. They actually are, as of, I think, as of Friday. Yes, there's a default 4-foot exclusion zone.

Yeah, so that's an interesting thing to me because one thinks of the interplay between the physical world and what we've all just been through, and now the— these sort of social distancing rights in the virtual world, and will they play back into the physical world? What are your views on that, both of you?

I think you said earlier on it's too soon to tell, which I think is true for some of these things. Of course, that's why it's interesting about it, but it's a specific area of interplay that I think is, is causing this kind of metaverse eruption, and it goes back to a phenomenon that— so, so one of the reasons why I was talking to Richard originally was because I'd noticed that these virtual worlds were beginning to grow their own economies. And so in other words, they were making this step into what, uh, Jaron Lanier called economic avatars. And people were beginning to do serious studies around these nascent economies. And I thought, well, this is interesting. This must be going somewhere. Oddly, in a way it didn't. So in those very early days, you had things like EverQuest and so on, and And in fact, one of the very first blog posts I ever wrote— I'm embarrassed to say how long ago it was— was because I calculated on the back of an envelope that a Chinese person mining virtual gold in Warcraft was actually earning more money than an actual Chinese gold miner. And actually with slightly better health and safety conditions as well, I would have thought. And that's why Richard and I were originally having these conversations. And Richard, as it turned out, was proved to be correct because he said that these things probably wouldn't And actually, that sort of happened, didn't it, Richard? So we had these economies, but they never really turned into real economies.

No, they didn't at the time. This is one of the things about the metaverse is that people haven't learned from what happened in virtual worlds a long time ago. Even that thing with the bounding box, there was a church world, it was called. Church of Fools, and they put it in, and you could— the very first day, there was someone on their knees praying, a woman on her knees praying, female avatar, and a male avatar went and stood in front of her so it looked as though she was performing fellatio on him. Now, everybody would put a bounty, but I mean, why would you not do that? And yet it's as if these people at Meta hadn't seen it. And it's likewise, we're seeing a lot of things now that people are making suggestions of which we've already tried in some ways. And there are paths you can navigate through. But in terms of the games, the, the whole free-to-play economy with microtransactions is what probably ultimately did for the, the gold farmers. We still do get gold farmers. But nowadays, the revenue model of the virtual worlds has changed so that effectively you buy it. Well, I don't know if you are, but some players are buying things for stupid amounts of money from the developers and in so doing are subsidizing the rest who are paying for pretty well nothing. Now, in a game context, some of the players are achievers and they want to win the game on its own terms. So they don't like it when somebody can succeed on other terms by paying money.

That's like me getting upset when people buy Twitter followers.

Yeah, it's like I may be the world 100-meter champion, but I'm going to retire now, so I don't need this title anymore. Who wants to buy the title of being the world's fastest man? I don't need my BSc. I got a PhD. Why do I need a BSc? Who wants to buy my BSc? Yeah, well, I don't need my Victoria Cross. I've got hardly any money. I can sell it for £100,000. 'Yes, there you go, you can put VC after your name now.' Well, no, none of those things work.

Can't buy other people's credentials.

That's it. And in virtual worlds, players regard their gear, some of them regard their gear as being credentials. And you don't want somebody coming along and saying, 'I've got one of those, it cost me £8.' Or, 'I'm a much better player than you because I paid €1.50 to get a +1 against that particular monster.' So in that kind of context world, it doesn't make sense. It's not going to be acceptable. But in a world with no context, like Second Life, something like that, well, people aren't going to care because it doesn't matter. But where it does matter, people do care. And that's rough. That's really why it didn't take off and why cosmetic items only are the way to go for free-to-play.

Interesting.

So My crackpot theory, which I'm going to test out on Richard now because he hasn't heard it before. My crackpot theory is that the metaverse is the virtual world plus NFTs, essentially. So, because these are things that you can actually own, whereas in the virtual world you don't really own anything. You know, you buy the magic sword, but it's actually not your magic sword. It still belongs to, well, now Microsoft or Activision or whoever. So while the concept of the economic avatar didn't work in that game's world, I think that the reverse isn't true, which is, can the technology of the game world work with the economic avatar? And I'll give you a simple case study just to illustrate why I think this might be the case, which was a few months ago, I gave a talk to, actually, as it happened, the Colombian FinTech Association, for which I was paid, and, or more to the point, for which I still haven't been paid. And they tried to say, so we did it on Zoom and then they tried to send me the money to one of my US accounts and it got bounced for presumably AML, you know, reasons or whatever. And then they tried to do it through Wise, I think, because that got bounced. And then a couple of weeks ago, they tried to send the money to my UK bank account. It still hasn't arrived. Now, if you imagine a slightly alternative version of which, you know, now we're, now we're in some game world together. I mean, we're not actually demons or whatever, we're actually people, but now something interesting has happened because the money in that game now becomes real, so it can be owned by people and passed between them. So now, you know, I give my talk and they give me some, I don't know, not Bitcoins or something, but, you know, some game currency, but that actually has sort of value. Economic loci would grow. In other words, people would begin to do business with each other in these tokenized environments inside these virtual worlds, not because they have some underlying deep-seated commitment to anti-censorship money or smash the server, but simply because it's cheaper and easier. It's cheaper and easier to interact, but crucially interact economically. And this is where it collides with Richard's context, which makes it so interesting.

Well, there was this— this was beginning to happen in China with the Tencent coins, which China thought, hold on, this is like an alternative currency. We're not having that. And they stamped it down. But people using Tencent coins for buying things that were nothing to do with games, meals and things, because other people accepted them. Now, if you can get people to accept the coins or the NFTs or whatever as having the value that you believe they have or more than you believe they have, well, then you can use it. But then, of course, if the Colombians have been bounced back for anti-money laundering, well, if they had been money laundering, they would have still been able to give it to you in the game. And then do you suppose that the governments would be pleased with that? Probably not. It really depends on how the governments treat it as to whether it's going to be a success or not. Things that have value only have value if people are prepared to pay for them. Ultimately, we have a fiat currency because you have to pay your taxes in it. If you didn't, then you could pay for everything in felt-tip pens if you wanted to. But you have to have a fiat currency because that's the only one the government accepts for the taxes. And that's what they'll throw you in prison for if you don't pay them, if you try to give them something else. You have to convert at some point from your online wealth into regular economic money.

But this is why I sort of think that the Bank of England's work on digital— because I see a lot of commentary about this idea about digital currency and the sort of digital pound and stuff like that. I think it's got nothing to do with buying things in Waitrose, you know, where my debit card works absolutely fine. But it does have a lot to do with the point you're making. So if I'm doing something in the metaverse, even if it superficially looks like a game but actually has some economic value to other people, then I might accept World of Warcraft gold. Probably not, but I certainly would accept sterling if it was in this tokenized form that could exist in these virtual worlds. And that's why I sort of think the metaverse— at first it just seems that this stupid thing where people are selling each other pictures of chimpanzees with sunglasses on through some elaborate money laundering schemes. But I don't know, I think there's something there. The tokenization means that real economic activity can take place in those environments.

I've always wondered that, is it an additional economy that you build on top of the other economy? Because then obviously it's another revenue-generating economy for the people and the platforms who are creating and building it. My, my wonder whether the likes of Meta, if you are carrying out these kinds of activities and exchanges in Meta, do they take the commission off it? Do they, uh, put certain permissions around it? You know, is it just you and the person you're exchanging this with in this digital or virtual world, or actually are there a whole bunch of new rules and regulations, not like in the physical world, that the likes of Meta might put around it? Because they see that as a commercial opportunity. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that, whether that's just naive.

Well, in the FT, I think it was last week, so I've gone blank on his name for a second, the, the CEO of Microsoft, um, Satya Nadella. So Microsoft just paid $75 billion for Activision, and he said— I'm paraphrasing, I can't remember the exact phrase— but he said something like this, this is our first step towards the metaverse. So clearly they expect to earn some economic— I mean, first of all, if it's just people playing games, that is absolutely colossal in a sense which I'm certain I can say Richard had never anticipated. You know, games are now bigger than Hollywood, music, TV, everything else put together. I heard somebody the other day, I can't remember who it was, I heard somebody saying Call of Duty is on the scale of a James Bond blockbuster every single day. Every single day.

Amazing.

So even if it was just for that, it would be amazing. But it isn't just for that. It's for using these technologies and spaces and equipment and interfaces for other economic activity. I'm— I mean, that's, that's what I see the metaverse as being, I think.

Well, I will agree that there are definite places for real money in a digital world. And if it's a digital world with no game context that's limiting what makes sense, then fine. I mean, I would query whether having a digital world made sense because why would you want to be in that world?

Well, because I don't like this one, just as you said earlier on.

Yeah, but if the reason I don't like this one is because I'm a nobody and then I go online and I'm in a virtual world where I'm also a nobody, then I'm still a nobody. If I'm rich in this world—

Nobody everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, universally nobody. But if I'm rich in this world and I go online and I'm still rich because I'm taking my money with me, well, yeah, obviously I'm going to be pleased. And obviously the people who are advocating their visions of the metaverse have all got— they're all the non-nobodies rather than the nobodies who will actually be populating it. But thinking of what you can do in a metaverse that you can't do in the real world, well, yeah, I can pay for things with digital coins perhaps, and maybe they won't get charged more than what a credit card charges me. But still, what am I doing there?

But to loop round to the point you made at the very beginning, you know, when you say like, why would the metaverse be different? Is because there would be different yous. You could have different yous in the metaverse. There might be half a dozen of me in the metaverse. There's me, the slam poet. You know, there's me, the digital money person. There's me, the, you know, Manchester City fan club organizer or whatever. Like in the metaverse, This idea of the partitioning, the experiment, but with economic value seems quite new to me. That is different from what we had in the past.

It is, but we've tried it. There's some similarities for things like Second Life, for things like LambdaMu back in the day. But ultimately, there's got to be a reason to be there. And if the reason to be there is, well, you can be somebody who isn't you, well, there are better places to be people who isn't you, and that's in game worlds. If your reason to be there is, I want to be the real me, but I can't be in the real world because in the real world everybody thinks I'm in a wheelchair, but here I'm not, or here I'm in a wheelchair and I'm going to make sure everybody treats people in the real world better with a wheelchair, whatever your action is, if you're there for a purpose, what are you doing other than that? It's a solution. That's not got a problem.

Let me give you an example that references one of Tracey Follows' earlier comments about credentials and so on. So one of my memories from the early days of web commerce, which goes back to that sort of similar kind of time, was I used to get an email newsletter about payment systems. Just to benchmark how dull my life is, I used to get an email newsletter. And one day we got an email from these people saying, sorry, we just can't afford to do this anymore. So we need some donations to keep this going. And so I thought, actually, our company will donate to that. We find it very useful. So I emailed back and said, well, we're happy to chip in whatever it was, $500 a month or something. I don't even remember what it was. And the guy said, actually, fantastic, but to save on the paperwork and the bureaucracy, can you just send the money directly? To our ISP instead of to us.

Fine.

Or their web hosting company or something. So we paid for their web hosting. And the newsletter turned up and it was exactly the same. It had a little thing at the bottom which said many thanks to Consult Hyperion or, you know, words. And it was fantastic. And the thing about that was that was an important— you know, it was an economic transaction that had value that was free trade that both parties entered into frequently, but was wholly based on reputation and not identity in the sense that I had no idea who was actually producing that newsletter. I didn't know if it was a company, a room full of students, a dedicated and enthusiastic individual. It could have been North Korean disinformation campaigners for all I knew. But over time, I'd found it very useful, and so its reputation had economic value, and I didn't care about the real identities of who was behind it. And I can't help but feeling there is a different kind of economy that can grow around that sort of thing.

Just before Richard responds to that, I'll throw in another thing that I wanted to ask you both, which is connected to that, which is if we're going to require biometrics to go along with our identity, which, you know, will then be some sort of fundamental that's required for the giving of credentials for you to use at some point. Aren't we going to need to connect to those biometrics when we're in the metaverse? So what I'm kind of asking is, the digital identity system that relies on biometrics, isn't that going to have to be carried over into the metaverse? And then doesn't that throw up a whole load of questions about what our identity can or cannot be there?

It depends what you're using the biometrics for. If you're using the biometrics for strong authentication against an online— by which I effectively mean cryptographic keys. So if you're using the biometrics to authenticate me as the owner of these cryptographic keys, which are in essence the online identities, that's absolutely fine. If you're using the biometrics to identify me, which of course is where biometrics is all going wrong.

Well, this is why I asked the question. Yeah.

There's an interesting debate about online anonymity later today, actually, with that I'm going to be listening to with Jamie Bartlett, used to run Demos. And I was talking to Jamie a while back about— I can't remember what the context was— biometrics in London. I think the police were using them. And he said, well, of course, if this technology doesn't work, it's going to be an absolute nightmare. But if it does work, it's going to be even worse. And that's kind of how I feel about it. So using biometrics to identify people, that surely isn't the metaverse of credentials and reputation and so on.

Well, yes, I agree. The kind of dystopian world that this presents, I can see players going straight to game worlds where they don't have to do that or to other sites where they don't have to do that. Because what have you got to hide? Well, actually quite a lot I've got to hide. I don't want people coming along and persecuting me for my views in any way whatsoever. And I don't want the government clamping down on what I say because it doesn't fit with what they want. So, yeah, I don't want any of this stuff. And if you're just using it for, as Dave says, the cryptographic keys, well, yeah, that's fine. That's just to unlock something, to prove that it definitely belongs to the person who's— who this body who has this body, but anything else, it takes away from humanity. You see, the thing is that identity isn't a label. You're not walking around— I walk around with Richard stamped on my forehead, but I can walk around with anything. I mean, my World of Warcraft character— well, I don't play that now— but my Final Fantasy XIV characters, they've all got different names, all got different personalities. I play them different ways. But if they were all identifiable to be me, well, I couldn't do that, could I? In economic terms, you can see how it'd be there for the security. You want to know where something came from, but it wouldn't just be used for economic terms. That's the problem.

Control system. Now, I was— we're getting almost onto tokenization and digital goods and assets. And one of the interesting stories I saw the other day was Have you heard of the Bitmouse DAO? So this is a DAO that wants to inject Bitcoin into a mouse in a genetically modified virus, and they want to then track the value of the mouse as it reflects the value of the Bitcoin market, I suppose, or the price of Bitcoin. And they've even gone so far as to say that actually the progeny of the mouse obviously will have this DNA, will have this altered DNA. And so obviously these baby mice will have Bitcoin within them. And I just think, okay, that's maybe an interesting thought experiment. It's bringing the idea of identity in a virtual environment with exchange with Bitcoin. But frankly, obviously it's horrifically dystopian. But it was reported in Interesting Engineering and it made me think more about this idea of whether we're going to end up tokenizing ourselves. So if we've got property or we've got artwork or we've got other economic goods, if we do have economic goods that we feel are of value and we're tokenizing them because we want somebody or a community to participate in that, are we going to get to the point where we're almost tokenizing our own identity? Is that even possible? Or is that something that you think is beyond this?

Yeah, I think there's two, there's two separate things there. So there's, will we use DNA for storage? The answer is yes.

Yes.

Because DNA is a very dense data storage mechanism. Although of course it would be unwise to use it for your Bitcoin keys because errors in the DNA transcription would eventually mean that you'd lose control of your keys. But the other point about self-tokenization, I mean, people are already beginning to experiment with this. I think it's really rather interesting. Someone said the thought experiment the other day, the way things work now, they were using the example of the American pop singer. I can't think of her name now, the famous American pop. I can't think of her name, but it's a woman pop singer. So basically, you have to go to a record company and get an advance and get management and all this sort of thing. And the alternative, which is you sell tokens in yourself and people buy them, And then when you become famous, these tokens are worth more because you can use the tokens to get into your shows and things like that. That doesn't seem crazy to me at all. I mean, that sounds—

Basically buying shares in somebody, aren't you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you can do that in a token, I mean, the reason why the heavy-duty finance people are interested in tokenization again, isn't because of a commitment to anti-censorship, whatever it is. Because when you exchange tokens, if I sell Richard shares in me, that involves all sorts of mucking about with custodians and delivery versus payments and broker-dealers and, you know, settlement and clearing. And but if I sell Richard tokens in me, that's it, end of story. The tokens go from me to him. It's all over. So this idea that tokenization provides a lower-cost infrastructure for certain kinds of financial transactions. I don't even think that's radical. I think that's mainstream thinking now. You know, the cost of financial intermediation has gone steadily up despite the invention of transistors and laser beams. And, you know, this is a way of bringing it back down again.

Yeah. It's the question of when I'm buying a token in you, what am I actually buying?

Yeah. Yeah.

It's always what rights come with my receipt of this token? Is it just a picture of Dave sitting there smiling, or is it a case of every single amount of income that Dave ever gets, a small portion is directed towards me because I own a share in Dave?

Well, this is why I distinguish between— so when I'm talking to people, as I try to distinguish between tokens that are useful and tokens that are useless. So tokens that are useless, we call them art. By the way, so whether you want to value that or not, it's entirely up to you. It's useless. The value is entirely subjective. Tokens that can do something, get me into a concert or allow me to listen to some music or something, that's different. Those things have a different economy around them. And I don't see why that economy won't grow. In fact, I think you can see kind of little bits and pieces here that it already is growing.

I concur. If something's got an actual value to it, then whether you're buying a token or in the past it would have been some series of legal paper having to sign, it's just a way of oiling the economy. And that makes it a lot easier. And if it's a token that's on some blockchain or if it's a token that's just sitting in a database somewhere, then it doesn't really matter how it's implemented. It's just a case of what have I bought and what rights come with it, what have I actually bought. But if you want to then take your token into another context where it doesn't make sense, so trying to pass my Dave Birch concert tickets for his poetry slams to someone else who sings rather than writes poetry, well, that isn't going to work. But in a game world, it would be like that.

It would be like trying to say, you've got this thing here, it transforms into this, and so But you could easily imagine an online Lady Gaga fan club that you can't get into unless you've got an actual Lady Gaga ticket, you've been to an actual Lady Gaga concert or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I saw— I can see those things working. Also, the point about the biometric authentication, the idea that you show up at the O2 with a ticket that's an NFT, but to actually use it, you've got to biometrically authenticate that you control the key. That actually, to me, sounds better, easier, and cheaper than what we have now. Yeah, so there's every reason to go in that direction.

Why even bother with the token if it's just the biometrics? If I just need to put my thumbprint on there—

no, but that's biometric identification. That's what we don't want. We don't want you to be identified.

That's why, that's why demonstrating possession of the token is better than just having your picture taken, you know, because what I was interested in was whether, you know, we started off the conversation about how liberating some of these worlds can be and gaming can be, and you can be different personas, and you kind of come around to, is there an increased commodification really of identity or personas or whatever? There's obviously commodification of goods and services within the metaverse, within games, but what about the self? And I wondered if the increasing commodification, if it happens, of the self in this way is perhaps, you know, not so liberating and becomes a constraint. But I guess this is one of the things, you know, that's going to be so fascinating to navigate over the next, what, decade, about how this really does pan out. Is it liberating or does it become a constraint? I don't know, final thoughts on that maybe?

Too complicated for a podcast. But I am sort of broadly optimistic, I would say.

I would say that it's liberating if you can have multiple identities, not so liberating if you've only got one identity. And thoroughly oppressive if you have to display that identity to anybody who wants to see it. It's just a case of papers, please, isn't it?

Exactly. So I'm going to ask you one final question. Thank you so much for this fascinating tour de force. I can't wait to listen back to it, actually. There's so much richness in this. But I'm going to ask you for one final thought on what action we should take on identity to ensure that actually it does go in the direction we'd like to see it go, that we've been discussing here. Whilst you think about that, I'm just going to let our listeners know that I'll be speaking at the next TBD conference on March 31st. That's Technology, Behavior, and Data. The theme this year is hope and expectation of the future. So from big tech to activists, scientists to slam poets— Dave will be interested in TBD— isn't like any other conferences. It's, uh, it's fast and it goes for the throat. So join me and over 30 other speakers you've got a 25% off your ticket today. Just use Future Review at the checkout and head over to thetbdconference.com. That's thetbdconference.com and pick up your discount today. Okay, Dave, Richard, final thoughts on action for identity.

We need to stop thinking in terms of identity, like a national identity scheme and this sort of thing. We need to start thinking in terms of credentials. And reputation. And here, I think interestingly, the pandemic, although nobody would have wanted that way, the pandemic has actually advanced the state of the art a little bit with developments around the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard and this idea about presenting credentials in order to do something instead of presenting passports or driving licenses or who you are. So I think shifting the focus back to what you said originally about reputation and credentials, I think, is the way forward.

Well, I'm gonna have to change my answer now because Dave's is better. No, for me, credentials— you are who you are and you are what you do. And in a game world, which is where I come from, what you do is who you are. And the credentials that you have are all through your own actions, through what you have done, that have influenced others. And this is why when Dave said credentials rather than identity, I thought, ah, ah, that's right, it is, it is about credentials. It's about being able to verify that you've jumped through the hoops, you're the one who can do it and has done it. Yeah, so.

That's great. In a future episode, we are going to analyze the trust framework. Has come out from the UK government in particular on sort of credentials and attributes and have a look more closely at that. So maybe we'll return to you on that, but that's fascinating and a great conclusion. Thank you so much, both of you. It's been wonderful to get the chance to speak to you, and thanks very much.