Are people more polite in virtual worlds?

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Do people behave better in virtual worlds than on blogs, forums and chat rooms on the Web?

A group of virtual world advocates say "yes." They just can't prove it yet.

"Character rancor is much different on blogs, Twitter, (etc). It can get very petty," Jaron Lanier, scholar-in-residence at U.C. Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, said here Wednesday at the Always On technology conference.

"In Second Life, it's almost more like theater or centralized. I don't see people getting into petty interpersonal knots with each other. But this is anecdotal."

His theory is that people behave better in virtual worlds because they can be economically tied to their property, for example, and have "more to lose if they're creepy," he said. Lanier's other theory is that seeing people, even in the form of an avatar, evokes empathy.

To be sure, Lanier, a pioneer of virtual world technology who coined the term "virtual reality," acknowledges he's biased. In the 1980s, he founded VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality products and whose patents were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. His most recent venture, animation software company Eyematic Interfaces, was bought by Google. And he's an adviser to Linden Labs, creator of the popular virtual world Second Life .

Lanier played host to a panel at Stanford University that included Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab; Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president at IBM; and Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun. To be sure, all of the panelists have a stake in seeing virtual worlds take off more widely with Internet users, corporations and advertisers, so that they can become viable economic engines. A major factor in that growth will be in showing the intangible benefits of virtual worlds, such as fostering human relationships that are more polite than say, anonymous posts in Internet forums, according to the panelists.

"We've studied this," Rosedale said. "We have forums and we watch them fight in forums and then see them be civil to each other in Second Life."