A persona (a.k.a. character, toon, avatar) is the mechanism that allows a user/player to interact with a virtual world created as part of a shared social activity with friends. It represents a combination of values and mechanics — attributes, skills, and other things dependent on the experience — and the personality and other individual choices that a player makes to define their character.

A node represents its user through a persona, and a persona travels: crossing a portal hands it from one realm to the next, with no central server mediating the transition.

Identity is a protocol problem#

Because personas move between realms that trust each other no more than two web pages do, naming and authenticating one cannot be delegated to an account system. The legacy plan’s “identity provider subscriptions” presupposed exactly the company and the servers the protocol has abandoned, and nothing in a pure peer-to-peer network can play that role. How a persona is named, authenticated, and carried across realms — and what stops one realm forging another’s personas — is not yet specified. The decentralised-identity work below is the relevant prior art.

Important things to consider#

You are not your character and vice versa. Playing a character in a role-playing game gives you wonderful opportunities to explore ideas and concepts outside what you would normally experience in your day to day life. You can explore a different job, a different ethnicity, change the particulars of your social status, and a host of other wild and crazy ideas in a role-playing game. Embrace the differences you can explore and see where the game takes you.

Similar concepts and prior art:

See also#

Backward Peer-to-Peer Network Portal Forward