One of the big Internet memes going around of late (though by no means a terribly new one) is "code is law". A short, loaded phrase with enough shades of layered meaning to engender pleasure, satisfaction, worry and disgust. The phrase itself means a whole lot of different things, depending on context and environment.

What it generally doesn't have much to do with is the law or governance - though as a generalization there are exceptions.

What is code?

Code is a set of instructions to a computer about what to do in every circumstance. At the heart of it, a computer is an idiot child who can only add and subtract and compare numbers. A programmer (often called a coder) creates layers of circumstantial instructions that ultimately all involve adding, subtracting and comparing numbers.

The languages a programmer works in provide shortcuts so that the programmer can think in more abstract terms than mere addition or subtraction, but in the end, the programmer thinks through the steps to perform a task or respond to a situation and encodes those steps in baby talk that even the idiot machine can perform. Computers are not smart. Computers are stupid, but very fast.

Given correct instructions a computer performs many thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tasks per second. Given incorrect instructions, the computer will get things wrong just as fast.

If no instructions exist for a circumstance, they just don't. A computer cannot think or reason or feel or judge. It can only compare. And it can only compare numbers, and only when the instructions tell it to. Everything a computer deals with is represented as numbers, from the text on your screen to the data flowing into and out of your network card. If it can't be represented as numbers, then sometimes it can be represented as something that can be represented as numbers.

Many things can't be represented as numbers, and those are the things that computers are incapable of. Also, since a human must forsee situations and turn them into instructions (code) before the fact there comes a point of diminishing returns with complexity. Complex systems become exponentially costly and large. To keep the costs down, options are limited.

Code as law.

Most gamers are used to the idea of code as a limiting factor, even if they don't really think of or understand the code. From the early interactive fiction game's message "You can't do that ... yet." or "I don't know that word."

However, it's not that code is a limiting factor for the most part. What it is, instead, is an enabling factor. If someone didn't think of it and write the instructions for it, you can't do it. If someone did think of it, and wrote the instructions to prevent it, you can't do it.

Most MMO's won't let you get naked. Many won't even let you get down to your underwear. Some won't let you change clothes at all. Being able to is not an important factor in those environments.

In some computer games you can wander in and out of the houses of others, take their things, and prod the little computer people for a canned piece of conversation. However you can do this only where the code permits it. You can only enter a house if a group of artists, designers and coders arranged for you to be able to. You can only take the possessions of the little computer people because they gave them possessions, and wrote the instructions that permit it. You can't get a canned response from a little computer person if someone didn't write the response, and someone else didn't write the code to enable you to get it.

Without the code you're not playing a game or living in a virtual world. You're watching television, or reading a book instead. Code permits, rather than restricts. Code can be used for restriction as well. That's done less often but it happens occasionally.

The absence of code to allow you to perform a specific task or action does not necessarily constitute governance. The presence of code to allow you to perform a specific task or action does not necessarily constitute governance. No more so than the presence or absence of my front fence constitutes governance. It primarily serves to keep trash from blowing in my yard, and to prevent the annual festive displays of the house across the street from shining into my house.

In this context, code as law has nothing to do with laws, legalism or governance. We're talking about the other definitions of of the word law.

12a. A statement describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met

13. A general principle or rule that is assumed or that has been proven to hold between expressions.

14. A principle of organization, procedure, or technique

--Source: The Free Online Dictionary

Law in the legal sense may number among the most common definitions of the word, but are by no means the only ones. Frankly, law is a lousy word to use in this case, but it's hard to find a more specific word that doesn't fall prey to similar problems of overloaded meanings.

Removal of code, as law. Won't someone think of the children?

If you look carefully at a lot of computer games and many MMOs you'll see something missing. Children. Many games had them, during development, fleshing out the stories, providing missions, quests and motivations, and so forth.

Then the publishers came, with their lawyers and their briefcases. The children had to go, they said, we are exercising our options. So the work of artists, designers, coders, writers and voice actors were expunged, or locked away; and the team scratched their heads. "We can have a skinny (yet busty) elf chick in a combat thong and a strip of gauze wading hip-deep in blood, tearing out the spines of her enemies (basically almost everyone), but we cannot place a single child in the village for her to rescue?"

Arx Fatalis had a single child. Neverwinter Nights had some, but they were made invulnerable. Troika's games are pretty much free of any children. Grand Theft Auto allows you to park your car on top of policemen and chainsaw grannies, but no children are present anywhere. Think about major games and consider where you don't see children; where it's really rather peculiar not to. In some cases they weren't put in. In others, they've been taken out.

Why? Because the code treated the children as it would any other game character, and publisher are almost more worried about the potential liability of someone remixing their content than they are about their shareholders.

And that brings us around to policy and governance.

The choice to add or remove or change code to confine or restrict action. What if the software on your computer refused to associate with other products because the manufacturer didn't want you to buy or use those other products? Not because of any technical requirements, nor development cost factors, but a deliberate choice to force your hand. Oh, wait. That's already happened - there was a big court case about it and all. Actually some very few products still do it.

Nonetheless, most people are used to the limitations of their software, whether those policies are there by technical limitations, cost limitations, story requirements or policy/governance. If you shouldn't be able to do it, you can't. Code is expensive, and developers and publishers don't burn millions of dollars writing code they don't want to ever be used.

Welcome to Second Life.

And then you arrive in Second Life. You can take your clothes off! That's one of the first freedoms people discover. Back to nature, Adam and Eve, the whole bit. Never mind that the orientation areas are all PG and nudity isn't permitted. It says so somewhere, but people aren't used to the idea of having to make their own behavioral choices within software. They simply assume that that which is not permissible is simply not coded, and therefore not possible - because that's how it works everywhere else that they have been!

A new resident running around naked with a prim penis attached is dismayed to be hauled up short by a landowner in a PG sim. They don't understand. "If it's not allowed," they demand to know, "then why does it let me??"

Code as law is what people are used to. Since they can do it within the software framework, their default assumption is that it is permissible, even advisable.

Why is Second Life so different, then?

It's all a matter of what you are simulating.

Everquest, Final Fantasy, Anarchy Online, Guild Wars - they're not really simulating worlds. They're simulating games and stories. The behaviour of every component is subservient to the game or story simulation, including your possible actions. These are all about managed and controlled experiences.

Second Life simulates an environment. It's all about unmanaged and uncontrolled experiences - at least from a code perspective. The code itself only really acts to implement the environment and limit exploitation - and in an open environment like Second Life, limiting exploitation isn't terribly easy, without limiting the very things that make the environment worthwhile.

The system could, for example, throw you out of (or prevent you from entering) a PG sim if you don't have any clothes on. Check avatar. Wearing clothes? No? Keep out!

Of course, I could make clothes that make the wearer appear to be nude. The code cannot judge, only compare. Clothes? Yes. Welcome, Avatar!

To prevent that, someone's got to forsee it, and write the code - or, more usually, plug the condition after the fact. By comparing numbers. Which numbers make the clothes look that way? Which ones don't? Get it wrong, and some people are excluded, who should not be. Many anthropomorphic animals don't wear clothes, but they are considered decent and for general exhibition (ask Disney). Suddenly they are excluded. More code, comparisons, more exceptions. Every time you encode a restriction, exceptions crop up. Every exception you encode lets a few cases slip through the cracks.

Soon your code starts to look like the US Tax Code, with more exceptions and encoded governance than environment simulation. After a while, you look at it and think that you should have written another Guild Wars instead.

Every space has rules.

So, Second Life's 'law' largely boils down to the social space common-law that you exercise every day in the physical world: Every space has rules. Whether those are underlying capabilities of code, overarching Linden Lab Terms of Service/Community Standards, or any rules that a landowner chooses or creates, every space you step into in Second Life has some rules.

The underlying system won't - can't - enforce conformance to those rules. Not without destroying just about everything you really like about Second Life. In the end, behaviour is up to you, the user, and enforcement is in the hands of landowners.

"Code is law"? The code is not going to do it for you. Frankly, you don't want it to.