Jay Springett is a strategist and writer with a background in tech consulting and the philosophy of arts. He is currently an instructor at The New Centre and has guest lectured many university courses around the world. He speaks regularly about the future, technology and regenerative culture at events such as DevConnect (TR), Unsound Festival (PL), Sonar+D (ES), Fiber Festival (NL), Theorising the Web (US), and Transmediale (DE).

Jay is a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts, an admin of solarpunks.net, and a founding member of the decentralised creative exchange guild.is.

He is currently working on his first book “The Web Was a Side Quest“, exploring the history of worlds, Dungeon and Dragons, and the so called ‘Metaverse’. The book speculates on post-modernity and how the fusion of these ideas might actually be what computers have been for all along.

His essay collection on worlds can be found online at worldrunning.guide and he writes online at thejaymo.net.

Dungeons & Dragons and the Metaphors of the Metaverse

Dirk Songuer: Hi, Jay. It’s good to see you again!

Jay Springett: Nice to see you!

Dirk Songuer: When we first talked a while ago, you told me about your upcoming book. The way I understood it, you approach world building and concepts like the Metaverse through a very interesting lens, calling it an entirely new type of medium.

Jay Springett: Yes, I am currently writing a book that’s provisionally titled “The Web Was a Side Quest” and it is an argument that worlds are the 21st century’s newest medium. Not just the Metaverse, but all kinds of participatory worlds.

This also include things like movie franchises, wargames, comic, books, video games, theatre, music – they all can be folded into worlds as a medium. Which has big implications for how we understand society and culture moving forwards. And for that I’m currently deep into researching the history of gambling in society, and how that gave rise to statistics in the Enlightenment. Worlds have a long history.

Dirk Songuer: You also mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, and how it shaped the way we think about identity within these worlds. What do you mean by that?

Jay Springett: The innovation of Dungeons & Dragons as a social technology is that, for the first time, we were able to come down from the bird’s eye view of war gaming, chess, or other types of board games, and step into the simulation (or the metaphor) in the first-person. I often think about the amount of cultural vertigo that this must have caused in the 1970s in people discovering the game for the first time.

As Emanuel Derman says: “All models are metaphors” and people stepped into the metaphor or model, as in world model, or simulation – I’m using those terms somewhat interchangeably.

The other thing about identity and Dungeons & Dragons that is worth mentioning is what John Peterson described in his book “The Elusive Shift”. He talks about the difference between West Coast and East Coast Dungeons & Dragons players in the late 70s.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the original “White Box” Dungeons & Dragons rule set from 1974. It’s incredibly suggestive about what is possible and how you’re supposed to play the game, but at the same time the rules are quite vague. They were written with a lot of tacit or assumed knowledge on the part of the authors, Gygax and Arneson. And because of that ambiguity you end up with different interpretations of how Dungeons & Dragons was played.

On the East Coast of America, the people that discovered and played Dungeons & Dragons at universities and institutions were literary people, theatre people, musicians, artists and so on. They interpreted the rules through the lens of Keith Johnstone’s Impro, or Viola Spolin’s improvisational theatre. And they perceived the rules for Dungeons & Dragons as a machine for producing narrative, or for producing stories. Therefore, when they stepped into the simulation, they did so with the intent of finding an ongoing story. The rules and mechanics are only there to resolve what happens next. They exist to facilitate the telling of a story, of being in the world.

But when you went to Caltech on the West Coast, or to MIT, which was full of similar thinking engineering people, their interpretation of how Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to be played was as a combat simulator. The story occurs because of the things that happen in the world, the narratives are merely a by-product of the system that you’re playing. And of course, on the West Coast they’re all engineers and computer scientists, so it makes sense that Dungeons & Dragons is a combat simulator, all based on numbers. Which is why you get Jon Peterson’s phrase, or rather the title of his book, “Playing at the World”.

On the East Coast, they’re freely “playing in the world”. Whereas on the West Coast the game is entirely defined by the systemic limits of what’s possible. Narrative is secondary. They are playing at it. The two types of players are ‘story people’ versus ‘games people.’

And these games people were all over at MIT at the time, meeting at the MIT Strategic Games Society. People like Mark Swanson, who then designed several D&D campaigns. Or Tim Anderson, a famous computer scientist that co-created Zork. These were also the first people that looked at things like the SQL database whitepaper. They’re thinking about multidimensional systems, keys, identities, and identity as a cluster of ordinals. And so, in 1976 we got Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther, and then by 1978 we got MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) by Trubshaw and Bartle.

I think that’s the major insight about Dungeons & Dragons’ influence. You step into a metaphor, which immediately has these implications for how you understand the computer system that you’re dealing with. And in the mid-1970s, the questions were: What does it mean to log on? What does it mean to have a persistent identity inside of a metaphoric space, or the code space inside the mainframe? Those two things came along at the same time and influenced one another profoundly.

So in my opinion it’s the shift from Birds-Eye to first-person, or third-person to first-person the influenced software design, and is the major innovation of Dungeon & Dragons, one which we’re still downstream of in 2024.

Dirk Songuer: So the computer scientists interpreted the character sheet for a virtual identity as the “physical”, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics, and put everything in a database that represented the virtual world? It seems that much like the narrative of the world, the identity of a user isn’t chosen, but emerges from the statistics as a by-product.

Jay Springett: Your identity in these systems is not fully defined by you. The boundary of your identity is defined by the simulation itself. In Dungeons & Dragons, your identity is made-up of the character sheet, which contains a base number of attributes, like name, strength, your dexterity, skills and so on and so forth. You have these as modifiers, which are different between you and another person, depending on how strong you are, or how fast you are, or your inventory of things. All of these very simple abstractions that make up your identity. So, the attributes that we’re given in Dungeons & Dragons define the shape of the identity that we can portray or inhabit in the world of the game.

That shape is a container, which you then fill up with your own agency and identity. In “The Ordinal Society”, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy extended the thinking of James C. Scott’s “Seeing like a State”, in that we are essentially clusters of signifiers within cyberspace. We have all this metadata, which is basically what makes us “us” in the eyes of neoliberal capitalism and the systems we interact with every day. And I guess, also in the Metaverse.

It’s like how Facebook, and really all ad tracking companies, have their 100,000 metrics that make up the shape of who you are, according to them. That’s the container that you’re inhabiting when you’re browsing the web. The sum of these different points is how you are seen by the simulation. And not all parts of the simulation can see the same data points.

The reason why I’m belabouring this point, of having a shape inside the metaphor, or in the Metaverse, is that you can imagine how these computer scientists in 1974 or 1975 thought about identity as a form of character statistics. And how these ordinals have now come to make up your online identity.

Dirk Songuer: But even though the system provides boundaries through which somebody can express their identity, Dungeons & Dragons nevertheless was a radical departure from predetermined gameplay. Traditional games followed a strict, linear progression, whereas D&D introduced an unprecedented level of player agency. It allowed players to develop unique detailed personas that replicated or extended their own personality, or to challenge themselves to explore new sides of themselves.

Jay Springett: There’s a really good book called “Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion and Imagined Worlds” by Joseph P. Laycock. It discussed exactly what you are talking about. It looks at players of Dungeons & Dragons, what it did for them, how the groups felt about playing it.

One of the things that is clear, at least from my own research, is that the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, and the people that then went on to implement the ability to step inside a computer simulation, were not aware of Viola Spolin or Keith Johnstone and that area of temporary identity and improv that’s all downstream of psychoanalysis.

I mean, they were aware of roleplay in the workplace though. Post-war 1950s through the 1970s roleplay in the workplace was huge, driven by the influence of RAND Corporation and other think tanks. But that “taking on” of identity in the workplace was more about how you present yourself to the world through your interactions with the world.

Whereas the narrative roleplay is much more about the understanding of how you react to the world, and how the world reacts to you, as an individual. One is still an external view, and the other is a much more internalized view. And we still see this today when talking about online trolls who don’t understand why people care about something that’s on the Internet. We can clearly see that there is a performative break. The trolls are performing versus the people who are getting upset about things that happen on the Internet. It’s a kind of digital dualism, but not a hard one.

Dirk Songuer: This brings us to governance and the limitations not by the system, but social constraints in virtual worlds. Because we have struggled with this duality for a long time now.  Where wide-ranging identity exploration might be accepted in MUDs and other virtual worlds that are explicitly fictional, it is less common in non-fiction virtual worlds or utilitarian virtual platforms like workspaces. There, the basic assumption is that the virtual representation of a user roughly matches their real embodiment and identity. And the decision about what is acceptable and what needs to be punished is not always clear between those types of worlds.

Jay Springett: As I’ve grown older, I’m a much bigger fan of Sherry Turkle’s work around the second self than I used to be, because I do think people understand that they are performing a character when they’re online. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about puppetry recently, about how the animation of an identity online is probably a better conceptual framework.

Anyways, this is not to say that things that happen in the Metaverse don’t have real world consequences – the feelings are still real. Because as you said, there are all these examples around governance that were spawned inside of MUDs to various degrees of success. TinyMUD and LambdaMOO are probably the most famous examples of the collapse of governance.

Somebody asked me recently on a panel: “If I could go back in time and intervene at some point to change the modern Internet, what would I do?” And my answer was that I would go back, and I’d intervene when Yahoo was buying GeoCities. I wrote about this period in detail in an essay called “The Geocity and the City”.

The reason I go back to Yahoo buying GeoCities is that GeoCities was organised into neighbourhoods. For example, there was Area 51 for science fiction and fantasy sites, Hollywood for film and TV sites, and so on. What I didn’t appreciate until a couple of years ago is that on the backend of those neighbourhoods were forums and chat rooms. And if your site was in the Hollywood neighbourhood, then you could only see those chat rooms and forums. This vast world of GeoCities was actually segmented into something like geographic locations.

GeoCities hired a well-known community organizer early on to design those forums and the chat rooms. Each neighbourhood had a mayor who was paid for by GeoCities. And the forums also elected a council. All that meant if something went wrong, or if you felt like you were being treated unfairly, even by GeoCities itself, you knew who to talk to. This immediately solved some of the problems that we still have with, for example, Twitter as the global town square.

Imagine if you knew who to talk to if your account got suspended on Twitter.  I mean, sure, there might be a process, but imagine knowing who was in charge. It wasn’t a faceless algorithm. And of course, when Yahoo bought GeoCities, the first thing that they did was to get rid of the community team.

I just feel that this inflection point is really important for the later creation of social media and social networks. It could have gone in a completely different direction had that personal layer still been around. If that form of personal accountability had been the expectation when you joined a social network, that there would be a council that you could join, or have a conversation with employees of the company on a forum. It just feels like an important thing that no one has tried again, maybe because it sounds expensive.

Dirk Songuer: In early MUDs, a player automatically became a member of the admin team once they reached maximum level, and everybody knew these admins “personally” by their pseudonyms. But since then, it shifted to a separation of power as many admins abused that power. The enforcement of the rules became a performance where the admins regarded themselves as “acting gods” of the world. There was a whole variety of issues, and so the rules gradually built up and became more professionalized, but at the same time impersonal. I’d argue that we still see this inherent entitlement to become gods and “act out” in gamer culture to this day.

Jay Springett: I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I really want to write a piece or maybe record a long podcast on Xbox Live as the Metaverse. Because there are people in my life that have never joined social media, have never been on Twitter or Facebook. But they’ve spent thousands of hours on Xbox Live voice chat.

Microsoft built a global real time voice network in 2005 but there were absolutely zero governance mechanisms whatsoever. And as my friend Ben says, the experience of his first 10 years on Xbox Live was “character building”. Mainly because it’s different when people are being racist to you in text form versus them saying it to your face. And that had a much deeper and profound effect on him than anything that gets posted on social media today.

But it’s just it’s crazy to me that they built this, and there were no governance mechanisms for a long time. It makes me think about how in both Dungeons & Dragons and improv there’s the concept of “Bleed”, which is when things that happen in the game continue to affect you outside the game as well. As I said the feelings are still real. And I think if the West Coast Dungeons & Dragons players had a more sophisticated understanding of psychology and identity, rather than “playing at the world”, do we think that there might have been a better way in which the systems got designed? Not just virtual worlds but all kinds of software as we know it today.

Would that have made a difference? It’s an interesting question.

Dirk Songuer: There is also the fact that our legal system doesn’t really reflect, or rather agrees with, the notion that these are separate worlds at all. Virtual worlds are still software owned by somebody, running on servers owned by somebody, filling up disk space in a database owned by somebody. With this foundation, is it any wonder that people can’t really “play in the world”?

Jay Springett: This comes right back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the interview: The types of data that these systems collect around you.

On the legal side, I think that one of the key things that Richard Stallman and the others around the GPL movement in the 1990s never envisioned was the cloud. The GPL is written as a license that concerns itself with who gets to own what and who gets to control what. And we never thought that software would be running on a computer that you didn’t have access to. Sure, GPL-based software runs in the cloud, but all the value gets captured not by the software, but by the operator. Whereas the GPL was written for running code on mainframes.

But now you have this explosion of data points around an individual. And one reason is that we don’t have rights about what is being collected, or rather because it’s been abstracted away. Not only do we not have control, but we also have very little sense of what data is even being collected, let alone what they do with it.

Before they started tracking it, data was kind-of public, and that makes me wonder about identities in virtual worlds. What if the individual does have control over all their data, in the context of the world? You could take your data and plug it into a set of shared processes, and when you’re not there, you take it away again.

Dirk Songuer: And theoretically, that was what Web 3 was about. They wanted to create systems and components to run a new World Wide Web on, in which the data would live on some open and distributed blockchain. But that would have also meant that the user data could be plugged into any system, into any world.

Jay Springett: Yeah, for sure.

I think the outcome of that particular arc of recent technology innovation is going to be a set of new cryptographic tools, for example Zero-Knowledge Proofs. So, what happens is that we’re moving away from data and towards attestation. Rather than me telling you my date of birth, all you need to know is that I’m over 21. And I think that’s valuable regardless of blockchain or not.

I think that ZK and the technology around it is an immense positive that has come out of Web3. It’s going to have a profound influence on how society works, from local government to commerce.

Dirk Songuer: If we go back to the concept of worlds, the people “playing at the world” also use the metaphor of placeness. They talk about being “in” the game and act within a first-person perspective, even though their world is more like an emergent phenomenon of statistics. Why is the result the same “shape” as explicitly starting from narrative world building?

Jay Springett: My definition of “world” is that it has a clear inside and outside and a more or less coherent set of activities that occur within that inside. The magic circle if you will. When you spend time within any system like that you end up becoming acculturated to the activities and expectations of what occurs inside the of that world. What you end up doing is adopting a world view.

I sometimes write it like world(view) as if you’re the character or the agent viewing from the inside, that’s looking outwards at the world, and it’s quite 1990s of me as far as theorizing goes. But people adopt world(views) all the time. For example, when you go to church there is a certain set of expectations and behaviours and limits to what you can and can’t do. Both physically and socially. And while you are in “The world of the church”, you have a world(view). The same is true for an airport, and the same is true for Twitter, or World of Warcraft.

You adopt world(views) and take them on and off like a pair of lenses depending on which situation you’re in. It’s just a thing we do when we move from one social circle to the other. And then you end up with this set of lenses and it’s natural to think that you are inside the world, even though you’re just interacting with the interface.

It feels natural to say that you are in the world. I mean, people would talk about “being inside of PLATO” in the 1970s when they were in the mainframe. Brian Dear talks about that a lot in “The friendly Orange Glow”.

Dirk Songuer: As you mentioned, these early computer systems like PLATO were designed around the same time as Dungeons & Dragons, and that this had implications for how the developers thought about the concept of stepping into the metaphor of a computer system.

Jay Springett: PLATO and other multi-user environments like it predate the Metaverse that we’re talking about today because they had very different metaphors.

In 2023 I wrote an essay called “Dial M for Metaverse” that also touched on telephone trees. You know, the “Press 1 for whatever” announcements when you call a support hotline. These were patented after the invention of “Choose your own Adventure” books. These adventure books were very popular in the 1980s and 1990s and followed directly downstream of Dungeons & Dragons with “Fighting Fantasy” in the UK. Even if, you know, your friend’s sister thought these books were for nerds and stuff, she still knew that they existed. She knew how they worked, that you needed to turn the pages to find your way through a story.

I think it was Peterson in “Playing at the World” who said that a great deal of that statistics thinking around having an identity inside of a simulation came from baseball simulations. Gygax was really into that as a young man. Just imagine, Gygax would sit there with a bunch of statistics, roll the dice, and just simulate an entire baseball season in his basement.

And I believe that all of that, fantasy baseball, Dungeons & Dragons, and phone trees culturally primed us for the arrival of the Internet, and the World Wide Web, and now worlds.