Death and Taxes 
in a Virtual World

In the virtual environment of Cybertown, social order is maintained by encouraging citizens to talk nice and find jobs

by Jeffrey R. Young

Welcome to Cybertown - where having a  powerful job brings money and prestige

You’d think virtual reality would be the one place you might escape death and taxes, those nagging certainties of human existence so famously noted by Benjamin Franklin. But the founding fathers of Cybertown – a 3-D virtual environment on the Web — have gone out of their way to forge a social order that keeps participants fearing virtual demise and earning virtual dollars.

A recent gathering in Cybertown’s “Newcomers Club” was interrupted, for instance, when a virtual police cruiser rolled up, ready to eject any player who dared break one of the community’s rules.

The police car was just a crude 3-D drawing, of course, like everything else in this cartoonish portion of cyberspace that has the look and feel of the shoot-’em-up game "Doom." Every citizen of Cybertown selects a visual representation, or avatar, to stand in for them in the virtual world. My own avatar was pretty bland — a man in a black shirt, blue jeans and glasses — but I could just as easily have chosen to present myself as a robot or a bikini-clad babe.

With the police car on the scene, I tried hard to look innocent.

"What do you do?" someone asked the police car, using the text chat window that appears below the 3-D portion of the Cybertown interface.

"I boot ppl," said the police car (using an abbreviation for "people"). Booting someone from a virtual world essentially means killing them, or at least ejecting the character from the system.

"I can boot the mayor if he is doing things wrong," the police car further boasted.

This police car character, whose nickname is 5of12, is one of the many security officials in Cybertown. He or she — you never really know in Cybertown — earns virtual money and experience points for every hour of work.

Membership to Cybertown is free, but all citizens are encouraged to get jobs. And several of the jobs involve enforcing the rules of Cybertown’s constitution, as well as helping newcomers. Common jobs include Block Deputy, Block Leader, Neighborhood Deputy, Neighborhood Leader, Club Owner and Club Assistant. Every character’s job title and experience points are prominently displayed, and a good way to impress someone is to hold a powerful job or lots of experience points.

This elaborate social infrastructure makes Cybertown unique among the many 3-D virtual chat environments on the Internet, which are collectively called "virtual worlds." And the approach raises interesting questions about how much structure a good fantasy realm should have.

To visit Cybertown, all it takes is a standard Web browser and a free software plug-in that supports the 3-D environment. The first place new "immigrants" see is the town plaza, a futuristic space that could pass for the set of a low-budget sci-fi film. Usually, dozens of avatars are in the plaza, sliding around like pieces on a chessboard. Movement is limited, though it is possible to jump, fly, or beam to another location.  (View a screenshot of Cybertown).

Most of the action takes place in the chat window, where text appears rapid-fire as citizens talk to each other, often about nothing in particular. At times, all the fancy visuals seem to go unnoticed by the fast-typing participants, and some even choose to play in "2-D" mode, with graphics turned off. But the 3-D animation does help evoke a sense of presence — reminding users that a real person is out there typing to them. 

Sound is also used to breathe life into Cybertown, though with less success. A low-quality voice-synthesizer reads every word of the chat aloud, in a grueling, robotic monotone.

Cheryl Cox, Cybertown’s director of marketing, says the rules and regulations of the world make it more engaging and cohesive than other virtual realms. The regulations also give citizens a sense of ownership, she added. "People feel like it’s really community run, so they have a lot of input and impact on the city."

"All Web sites refer to themselves as communities," she notes. "We try not even to use that word. We say ‘beyond communities’ or ‘a virtual society’ because it has all this structure to it. Our tagline is ‘Civilization for the virtual age.’"

The system is surprisingly effective at keeping the language and content of public conversations in Cybertown from getting raunchy. When a Club Assistant named redian blurted "shit" in the town plaza, for instance, a Security Captain named TruthJustice quickly piped up.

"redian This is a family chat area. Please refrain from using that type of language here or that type of context! Thank you, CT Security."

More often, players simply say "watch your mouth" when they see foul language — as they might in a real life public place. Those who don’t heed warnings are disciplined or booted.

In private areas of Cybertown, however, almost anything goes. That hard-earned virtual money can be used to buy and decorate houses, and people regularly host parties and gatherings for their online friends. Undoubtedly, people do all kinds of things inside their houses that they can’t or won’t do in the town plaza, Cox says. Some citizens will tell you that cybersex is common in private.

Naturally, some newcomers complain about the ever-present sense of order in the public areas of Cybertown. 

But others relish the sense of security.

"It make this place a lot safer than most other chat sites on the net," says Auraeanna, who in real life is a 21-year old woman attending college in Idaho. She says that in another chat system she has used, for instance, "if someone was cyber stalking you, or being sexually lewd to you, or being racist, or other such intolerable nonsense, there was nothing that could be done about it."

As for the jobs, some players take them more seriously than others. I’m a Club Assistant, but I have no idea what club I assist. I slid into the town’s Employment Office one day, and someone offered me the gig without much explanation.

To outsiders, perhaps the biggest question is why anyone would want to visit a virtual world in the first place, much less get a job there?

A German man says he comes to town to improve his English. A female college student says she visits to spend time with her fiance, who lives in another city. Many others say they spend time in Cybertown to make friends and talk to people.

"A lot of people here are lonely, I think," said a woman nicknamed Sexydeb. "They come here for entertainment."

Cox, Cybertown’s spokeswoman, puts it differently. "People come in to be social and to reach out to people," she says.

Besides, she adds, Cybertown allows players "to do things that you either don’t or can’t do in real life."

As it turns out, many of Cybertown’s citizens aren’t old enough to get a job in their real towns, since the largest portion of users are between 13 and 17 years old.

The sheer numbers of users suggests that there’s something compelling about the environment: more than 400,000 people have registered, and hundreds enter Cybertown each day.

Some experts say that humans, by their very nature, are drawn to virtual reality. In Cyberseduction: Reality in the Age of Psychotechnology, Jeri Fink argues that the lure of cyberspace is part of a constant human struggle between the mind, which strives to be immortal, and the body, which inevitably deteriorates. "Perhaps cyberspace is the best example of our need to deny death," he writes.

But the concept of death, and maybe even of taxes, in many ways gives shape and order to social experiences. And maybe we can’t live — literally or virtually — without them.

Jeffrey R. Young covers technology for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is also a graduate student at Georgetown University, pursuing a master’s degree in Communication, Culture, and Technology. He can be reached by e-mail or via his Web site.