The difficult question is this: do virtual worlds (and virtual communities) now have more controls, gates, filters, rules, because a single generation's unique and unreproducible historical experience has become an inflexible structural precedent that defines all future online sociality, that is the ur-culture that gets reproduced as ritual and expectation, or because the first generation of players and talkers online discovered some universal and general truths about how modern human beings will behave socially when they're given the technological capacities to do so? 

"Yes, we know that Tom Cruise, whom we watching in "The Last Samurai" is that same guy from "Mission Impossible." But if, at the critical moment in the 19th century, Japanese film he were to whip out a plastic-explosive, pull off a latex mask and say, "Show me the money, $#%!" we would run screaming from the movie

"There's plenty interesting to say about where online gaming convergence is goingCross-over of "stuff" from game-to-game ain't itUT Austin's Anne Beamish and Trinity Univesity's Aaron Delwiche are both featured in the articleStudents have been responsible for some of SL's most interesting moments, including the group of UT Austin luddites who argued that flying was destroying the fabric of society and that everyone should walk instead! If we were to start from scratch, to get the fire in the belly that Richard seeks, liberate the players in virtual worlds, would we find that a generation that has grown up with videogames as a basic part of their cultural world create very different forms and norms of gameplay sociality than their predecessors? Have they acculturated to the structures and "common sense" of a world they never made? Or are we struggling with deeper fundamentals of modern human nature?