Unlocking digital identities, unlocking new ways to play and build

Original: https://future.com/unbundling-digital-identity-unlocks-new-ways-to-play-and-build/

By Jon Radoff

Who are you when you are online? As we spend more and more time out there, this question becomes even more important. Web usage has more than doubled in the past decade; for Gen Z, that's even more. The way we spend this time has changed as the early transactional web expanded into a wider range of creative, social and interactive experiences. As a result, our lives are often defined more by our digital identities than our physical identities.

But many of us don't have a single online identity. Just like you might emphasize different aspects of yourself on a date than you do in an interview, your self-presentation in an online game may be very different from that on social media.

This is something I've been thinking about and solving for years, both as a veteran player and as a creator and builder of games. In the years since, I've made games based on beloved franchises like Game of Thrones and Star Trek. I support hundreds of game developers at Beamable, participating in the co-evolution of digital identity and online creativity.

Digital identities, which encompass not only our credentials and data but also our outward expressions and relationships, have evolved from early iterations of forums, chat rooms, and online games, and are tied together by a handful of tech companies. But now, new technologies are emerging that take our digital identities apart and put them back together in new ways. From my vantage point in gaming, avatars and new platforms have accelerated game development, and that's happening especially fast.

This unbundling and rebundling of digital identities benefits both users and creators. Users can have greater control and better reflect how they see themselves and how they want to be seen. At the same time, creators and builders can now design and conceive games more efficiently: small teams can now launch games built in complex, immersive worlds without complex infrastructure or reliance on centralized platforms. In this post, I share how digital identities are evolving, where they may be heading, and how users and creators can benefit.

Bundling of digital identities

Today, digital identity refers to all your presence, relationships and data online. But in the beginning, a digital identity was simply an account with a username and password to limit who could use the network and isolate access controls to files.

Once multiple people access the same computer, they start storing information about what they're doing -- and even who they are. A good example is the finger command on Unix, which displays information about you, including the contents of your ~/.plan file:

The original intention of this Plan is to provide a text description of the work you are doing. But if you study the early Unix systems, you'll find everything from Zen koans to Lord of the Rings quotes to recipes for egg salad sandwiches. People use Plan to express themselves. It's like taking a driver's license and decorating it with stickers.

Meanwhile, on the Internet, an early messaging system called Usenet provided a shared space for self-expression. Outside the Internet, online services such as bulletin board systems (BBS) and America Online provide moderate environments for the exchange of information about common interests. Early online games, such as multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and "door" games, let people begin to impersonate their identities by taking on different roles and personas.

One can start to see through threads in the age of social media, whose appeal hinges on people's desire for self-expression and interaction. However, a by-product of the ubiquity of social media is the bundling of multiple online identities. The invention of Google Login and Facebook Login — ostensibly to make it easier for consumers to log in and help individual websites increase conversions — has vastly improved the user experience for many websites and provided advertisers with a valuable set of data . But it also enables the convergence of different digital identities.

Multiple digital identities emerge through avatars

A recent survey of Gen Z social media users in Hong Kong found that 65% of them prefer to use an avatar — a persona or image that digitally represents the user — over a “real” identity online. The reasons for this are varied, but it is likely a combination of wanting to carve out identities, curating the way they are perceived online, and using different personas creatively.

The first aspect, compartmentalization, is because people don't want to tie all their different social backgrounds and networks together. When you're playing an online game, you show a version of yourself (perhaps an aliased champion of the clan and a video of your latest raid). On LinkedIn, however, your profile tells the story of your career, with articles and videos to showcase your expertise.

When people lack the tools to create the version they want, they tend to rebel.

Regarding the second aspect, even within a given network, we curate different versions of ourselves. This is why people create multiple TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter accounts: to connect themselves to a particular niche of content, to use certain hashtags in secret, or to avoid discrimination. In an online world where you are no longer limited to "one body, one identity," a logical extension of one's fashion choices and personal grooming is also a creative drive.

In online games, people create different avatars ("alts") to try out different playstyles or adopt different avatars. This gives people the opportunity to experience the world from a different perspective. Recent figures show that a third of men prefer to play female characters in online games. (I play both male and female characters, and I met my wife in an online game while playing a female character.)

When people lack the tools to create the version they want, they tend to rebel. That's why there are fake Instagram accounts known as "finstas". This is one of the reasons Meta decided to separate its Meta Quest platform from Facebook Login. In the latter case, people are using the Quest primarily for gaming and immersive social experiences; they want the freedom to express themselves and form game-specific friendships in these environments, rather than being forced to tie their identities to The platform they used to wish Uncle Frank a happy birthday connected.

Overall, avatars provide users with more options for self-expression. This growing possibility benefits both users and developers, who can develop new infrastructure for their games. Take, for example, Metahumans from Fortnite publisher Epic. It's a realistic character system built on accurate simulations of skin, hair, muscles, and bones that lets you present an ideal version of yourself - including your preferred outfit, hairstyle, body, and face. Likewise, in the future, "speech fonts" could modify your speech to fit the voice you want others to hear -- including removing (or adding) accents, adjusting pitch, or changing gender. Real-time translation software could even be incorporated, enabling interactions across language boundaries.

Composability

A common criticism of avatar systems in the past is that consumers don't want them. In fact, platforms like the Xbox have had relatively limited success, with players often complaining that they're too cartoony or not used in all but the most casual titles. However, times seem to be changing. You can witness the beginning of this process in Roblox and VRchat, where you can take your avatar through countless games, worlds and immersive experiences. Here, your avatar is the core of your experience, not an accessibility feature. Why did this change happen? It's likely the convergence of a mass-market creator economy like Roblox, which makes it easier to build experiences, and digital identities, which are increasingly important to younger generations who have grown up in virtual worlds and virtual properties.

The next step beyond that is to rebind your identity so that you can move beyond the walled garden and transfer your chosen identity to other worlds with a common framework.

While many of these experiences will be games akin to Roblox, experiences that combine self-expression with a shared social environment are fertile areas for innovation. Imagine attending an online concert -- this is increasingly happening in the gaming world. Unlike a recording, a live experience is a dialogue between performer and audience. Part of the conversation involves you physically being in the virtual space, reacting in real time, expressing yourself through the way your avatar looks and behaves. Additionally, if you visit a merchandise table and collect tokens for your attendance, it can be incorporated into your avatar, composited into your identity, and carried with you to the next online experience you attend. The memory of this event will forever be tied to how you interacted and presented yourself online.

This desire to weave memories, events, and fashion statements into your online identity hasn't disappeared with legacy brands. It's why Burberry licenses content to Blankos Block Party, a gaming world created by mysterious Games, or why Balenciaga creates fashion for Fortnite. It's also why new digitally native brands like RTFKT are being acquired by Nike. Rebinding identities into avatars will involve fashion, animation, styling and engagement tokens from one experience to another.

How to achieve

One challenge is how to solve the "cooperation problem". How can we get companies like Disney, Universal, Epic Games, and Production Club to create — or even just allow — a way for our virtual characters to enter different experiences?

One way is to let Microsoft, Meta or Sony solve the problem for us. But that probably won't benefit developers, who end up trapped in the same creative and economic constraints as Facebook Login.

These real-world and digital-only experiences require a way for us to bring our virtual characters with us, using protocols that do not depend on the control of a particular authority. This is where web3 comes into play: the inherent composability of the blockchain provides an open environment for recording your avatar definition and bringing it to an unrelated environment. TraitSwap demonstrates how 2D avatar avatars work: it extracts metadata for NFTs you own, swaps traits, and lets you integrate branding elements into new avatars that represent your creations. Platforms like Ready Player Me combine a custom marketplace with an interoperable avatar system, allowing avatars to be imported into unrelated worlds.

The "key" to your avatar, then, could become a digital wallet. The inherent decentralization of the internet points us in the right direction: a Domain Name System-like system for mapping hostnames to IP addresses could become a method of identifying individuals. Protocols like the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) use the blockchain's immutability to provide a decentralized method of associating names with owners.

ENS demonstrates what the new identity package will look like. Instead of storing your identity in a centralized service, you keep your private keys in a digital wallet. The wallet's public address maps to a canonical name (eg "jradoff.eth") so your friends don't need to remember your hex wallet address. To log into a service on the Internet, you need to "sign" a request, which uses a cryptographic algorithm to prove that you are who you say you are.

When composable identities and digital wallets become commonplace, creators will have the power to craft games, worlds, music, and theater experiences that center around you, without having to build complex avatar and login systems from scratch. Beyond the technical advantages, it allows users to strengthen and build an emotional connection with the identities they present through their avatars. Independent creators and game developers can benefit from people's investment in identity, and they can retain more value of their creativity without relying on centralized platforms.

Additionally, creators can overcome some of the inherent problems of creating an online world: Instead of relying entirely on a business model of constant re-engagement, they can provide you with new content that you can bundle back into your avatar. For example, when Twenty One Pilots launches a concert in Roblox, a set of items for customizing your avatar is associated with the concert, which you can carry across multiple games. The result is that the value created in the concert exceeds the event itself. Decentralized systems can extend these proofs of engagement and customization beyond any one ecosystem.

This upends the typical experience-creation model of imprinting a temporary moment on your avatar, thereby enhancing its perceived value and enhancing your self-expression. These expressions are as personal and enduring to you as a music playlist.

A common criticism of shared avatar systems is that they can lead to jarring conflicts between creators' artistic experience and their online expression. But just because an avatar system is open doesn't necessarily mean it's unregulated. One way to think about it is that avatars provide a default system that can be overridden according to the rules of an individual world: If my Starfleet costume isn't allowed in the Star Wars experience, it might revert to the appropriate style. Object-oriented software development has dealt with inheritance, composition, different privilege levels, private versus public attributes, and polymorphism for decades. The virtual character system will be built on top of this technology.

identity rebinding

These emerging technologies have created simplicity for world builders, allowing the number of creators to grow exponentially. This trend has already begun: we can observe an accelerating number of modding, where individuals add their own unique experience to the core experience of a gaming system. We can find this in Minecraft, Roblox, and smaller games like Terraria and Undertale. Modding demonstrates a creative urge shared by many individual players that goes back at least as far as the storytelling of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons.

A new generation of builders is interested in shaping the Metaverse through game creation, modding, and worldbuilding—and how they project their identities into digital spaces. They are motivated to express themselves, create experiences, and connect with others in their own way. They care about identity and expression, not technology and infrastructure.

What started as a way of authenticating ourselves to computers and applications has evolved into a way of self-expression. Digital identity is no longer singular. We bring different identities into different experiences, sometimes maintaining continuity across experiences, and sometimes maintaining identities unique to a particular world.

These changes require better technologies to support privacy and security—while also supporting user choice, usability, and interoperability. While the challenges ahead are great, rebundling identity into a you-centric internet will enhance self-expression, both in terms of our performance as digital humans and our ability to create worlds and experiences for others.