Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Volume 1, Number 1 - Virtual Worlds Past, Present & Future

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research Volume 1, Number 1 July 2008 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” ISSN: 1941-8477 Table of Contents

• Editor’s Introduction o Jeremiah Spence, Editor, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research • Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information o Dr. Michael L. Benedikt, ACSA Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin • Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination o Maria Beatrice Bittarello, Independent Researcher • Meeting in the Ether: A brief history of virtual worlds as a medium for user-created events o Bruce Damer, President and CEO, DigitalSpace Corporation, Founder, Contact Consortium.

• The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat o Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer; Independent Researchers • Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards o Howard Rheingold, UC Berkeley, Stanford • Inductive Metanomics: Economic Experiments in Virtual Worlds

o Stephen A. Atlas, Tufts University -Economics Department • Virtual World and Real World Permeability: Transference of Positive Benefits for Marginalized Gay and Lesbian Populations o Dr. Jonathan Cabiria, Professor of Psychology, Baker College, Flint, Michigan.

• Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! o James Elliott, Elliott Security Group • Towards a Theoretically-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models and Applications: Analysis of Ventures in Second Life o Kelly Lyons, University of Toronto • A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions o Paul R. Messinger, School Business, University of Alberta; o Eleni Stroulia, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta; o Kelly Lyons, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto.

• Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres o Eiko Ikegami, Department of Sociology, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research o Piet Hut, Program of Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute for Advanced Study .

• Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds” o Mark W. Bell, Indiana University • How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds o Francis X. Taney, Jr. Shareholder, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC • From a Video Game in a Virtual World to Collaborative Visual Analytic Tools o Theresa A. O’Connell, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA

o Yee-Yin Choong, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA o John Grantham, Systems Plus , Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; o Michael Moriarty, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA o Wyatt Wong, Forterra Systems Inc., San Mateo, California, USA • Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments o Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Volume 1, Number 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future”

Editor’s Introduction

By Jeremiah Spence, Editor, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research; Doctoral Student, Department of Radio, TV & Film; Graduate Trainee, Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research on the theme of “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present and Future”. The launch of the Journal and the publication of this first edition builds on the efforts of a large team of researchers and collaborators spread across the world. We have a fantastic collection of articles that provide the foundation for the transdisciplinary field of virtual worlds research.

I would like to take a moment to thank all of the individuals who have contributed to the foundation of the Journal, either directly or indirectly: Axel Bruns, Allucquere Rosanne ‘Sandy’ Stone, Joseph Straubhaar, Joseph Lopez, Drake Wilson, Brandon Wiley, Nancy Baym, Edward Castronova, James Gee, Steve Jones, Jorge Peña, Kathleen Tyner, Natalie Wood, Andrea Muñoz, Roque Planas, Jackie Zahn, Josiah Spence, Elena Zoubanova de Jesus, Gilok Choi, Mark Bell, Sun Sun Lim, Suely Fragoso, Joe Sanchez, Amanda Salomon, Henry Segerman, Yesha Y. Sivan, Stephanie Smith, Caja Thimm, Robert Shephard, and many others.

Keywords:

virtual worlds, open journal systems, research

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information

By Dr. Michael L. Benedikt, ACSA Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for American Architecture and Design,University of Texas at Austin Abstract Published in 1996* but not widely read, this article argues that space and information are so deeply related that the universe at every moment is exactly and only as large as it needs to be to “contain” the information it in fact is. Using three thought experiments—one about data visualization, one about cellular automata and consciousness, and one about the analysis of architectural space using isovists, each experiment blurring (or rather, uniting) the phenomena of psychological and physical space, the article argues that what we experience as “space” is that set of dimensions which provides the largest capacity for the world’s other qualities, objects, and events to express their variety most fully. The natural universe is incompressible, expanding only as, and because, it becomes richer in information (i.e. cools and evolves).

Imaginary and virtual worlds obey the same rule: they are “naturally” as big as they are rich in information. But the possibility exists in cyberspace—as it does not in nature—to choose which dimensions will serve as the spatial framework, and which will become/appear as properties of the things themselves. Data visualizers know this well.

One wonders why virtual worlds to this day look so similar to ours, then, rather than to the one envisaged by William Gibson in 1984 and 1986 and which he called “cyberspace.” A failure of architectural nerve? A constraint upon computation? Or has cyberspace proper yet to evolve?

Keywords: cityspace, cyberspace, virtual worlds, architecture, information. * With minor modification as “The Information in Space is the Space in Information,” in Anders Michelson and Frederik Stjernfeld, Eds., Billeder fra det Fjerne/Images from Afar, (Oslo, Norway: Akademisk Volrag, 1996), 161-172.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

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Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information

By Dr. Michael L. Benedikt, ACSA Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for American Architecture and Design,University of Texas at Austin The concept of space has been critical to architectural theory for over seventy years now.i It remains, however, an elusive idea, on the one hand meaning and referring to everything, on the other hand meaning and referring to nothing.

Why? Is it because “space,” like “time,” is a category outside of which thinking itself seems to be impossible, just as Kant asserted? Is it simply one of those irreducible, universal givens without which the world as such would cease to be in any sense, let alone be thought of, or perceived by, sentient beings?

Certainly to suggest that space itself is an active, causative agent of some sort risks opening up that discussion to universalizing of the most extreme and vacuous kind. For if I am not to be a dualist, positing a separate, a-spatial and a-temporal realm for thought and feeling, then what in the real world, I can easily ask, occupies neither space nor time? What is it that cannot be reduced, be analyzed, or be spoken of finally in the language of position, duration, connection, inclusion, transformation, and so forth? Nothing.

If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature” of “space itself” then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance.

And what is this “substance?” Information.

And what does information require? It requires us. And it requires architecture.

With this proposition we are plunged very quickly into deep abstraction. I see no other way, however, to make progress with the question that ultimately confronts us––namely, of how space-dissolving technologies such as telecommunications on the one hand, and space-making technologies such as computer-graphical poeisis in cyberspace on the other, restructure and reprioritize the ordinary space of the city––than to address the abstract foundations of the concept of space directly. For most occurrences of the word “space” in architectural and urban theory are either redundant or metaphorical, hardly more than figures of speech. These occurrences, finally and at best, allow us to refer to the symmetries, repetitions, enclosings, similarities and differences between entities that we experience as existing co-temporally. Moreover, we find that there is no space per se––architectural space or urban space––that is not really “space for...” or “space of...,” “space in....” or “space around...” something tangible and/or perceptible. Indeed, without the concept of space we cannot have, think, or see plurality and identity, size and simultaneity, counting and grouping, position and disposition. And this observation is critical.

For with “space” (and time) there is the room, so to speak, for the items of experience to array themselves maximally, without loss of uniqueness or variety...in short, without loss of information. In this sense, “space” and “information” are, if not identical, then reciprocal in

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relation. All space is space for…the information of things to disport itself. Space both is, and is composed of, information.ii More of this argument soon.

One of the intentions of this paper is to inhabit the border zone, as it were, between the informal though useful employments of the concept of space in architecture and urbanism, and a stricter, information-theoretic rendition. It is from this ideational interzone, from this glimpse of a new discipline—a new study to which we ought to give the name spatiology—that I will try to address the radical continuity in one sense and discontinuity in another sense of cityspace, defined as the physical space of our streets and buildings and natural landscapes, and “cyberspace,” defined as the electronic space of data and representations generated, organized, and presented consistently to all viewers connected to a set of globally-networked computers.

The continuity of these two kinds of space, I will argue, is that they are both ultimately constituted by information, information spread through space and seeking, almost of itself, to maximize its own complexity and organization. The most basic discontinuity between cityspace and cyberspace exists because cityspace is bound up with the principle of least action, with energetics, with friction, gravity, occlusion, and mechanical contact. Cyberspace and what happens there is all but free of these constraints. Of particular interest to me, however, is this fact: because each space can—indeed must—be experienced at some level spatiotemporally, cyberspace, like cityspace, can be inhabited, explored, and designed. Indeed, I am going to argue that community, economy, art, design, commerce, recreation, and other urban amenities are possible in both worlds, in the real and the virtual, in cityspace and in cyberspace.

The reader may already be wondering why, with cyberspace, we need to go to such extremes—to the very edges of science fiction—to look for “urban amenity.” Why not keep our attention focused on what architects and urbanists haven taken upon themselves to do historically, namely, to design and to manage the built environment, making real places for real people? God knows, our cities need all the attention they can get on this score, and the communication, entertainment, and computer industries seem to be taking care of themselves handsomely.

I offer two reasons.

First, because, the very phrase New Urbanism invites consideration of a braver future, one in which questions of space, information, meaning, work, value, and the “good life” have been re-thought from the ground up and quite agnostically with respect to whether these occur in cityspace or cyberspace or both. After all, it is not beautiful cities per se that people want, or nice houses and cars, but meaningful, interesting, sustainable, long, and pleasurable lives. Together.

Who can prejudge the forms such lives might take in the future, or the venues in which “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” might continue?

The second reason we ought to be open to cyberspace as urbanists is because cyberspace already exists, if in precursory form. We are in cyberspace every time we are “on the phone,” every time we use a cash machine or log into a networked computer. We are there every time we drift through a magazine, go to a movie, listen to the radio, or watch television. Indeed, virtual worlds in the form of communities of interest and of the imaginal lives of institutions like corporations and religions have long captivated our attention as fully as has the real and “unmediated” world. Not to live simply and attuned, animal-like, to every forest sound and passing scent, but, rather, to be caught up in human intention, invention, and conversation is in

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large part what it means to be civilized. To be civilized necessitates the having of memories and plans and dreams, unphysical things all three.

Today, and for better or for worse, Walkman-fitted heads float deep into this human-made æther. Just as they once did from the unconscious of medieval man, urgings and provocations, stories of dread and desire, fragments of music, news ideas, data, gossip, pour out of the dark of the electromagnetic spectrum—from screens and speakers, from every urban surface—and into streets and parks, homes and workplaces…penetrating our consciousness as perhaps never before. With recorded images duplicated and transmitted everywhere at the speed of light it is simply a fact that we hardly need head-mounted displays and gloves, the technology of “virtual reality,” to experience the irrelevance of spatiotemporal distance, to understand what it means to dwell in a global sea of pure information and to come to believe implicitly, indeed pragmatically, that “I plug (or tune or log) in, therefore I am.” Nature and old buildings stand silently by.

And if cyberspace is already with us in this contemporary form, then what might we say of the coming reality of cyberspace in its yet fuller, Gibsonian expression? What might we say, that is, of a time when super-fast computers, singly and together, generate and sustain totally absorbing virtual worlds, populated and teeming with avatars and scoundrels and gigantic, dizzying databases tilting like drunken electric pyramids…when, in the silicon banks of machines whirring in stuffy rooms there breathe whole alternative cities, the sites of a delirious new urbanism entire?

I would refer the reader to my book (Ed., 1991)iii for some descriptions, studies, and prognostications of cyberspace and its burgeoning reality.iv But I would also refer the reader to his or her daily newspaper, generally in the “Science” and “Business” pages, where the infrastructure of cyberspace can be watched being put into place satellite by satellite, optical cable by optical cable, computer chip by computer chip, interface innovation by interface innovation, software company by software company, and alliance by alliance of global telecommunications, entertainment, and computer corporations. Cyberspace is on its way as surely as a freight train heard two valleys away.

Having outlined the major themes and claims, I am now, finally, going to begin this article. After a brief review of the history of concepts of space, I launch into three thought experiments, each seeking to clarify the relationship of space to information at a fundamental level. Without this understanding we would be hard pressed to negotiate the complex cleavages and continuities between the information in cyberspace and the information in cityspace with any objectivity or confidence. I will then return to the question of telecommunications’ impact on the form and condition of the city, first as propounded by Manuel Castells’ notion of the space of flows, and then in terms of what cyberspace offers as the structural complement, and perhaps alternative to the space of flows, namely, the space in flows. I end with some specific advocations.

“Space” in Historical Perspective Positive space, negative space, Baroque space, Modern space, urban space, domestic space, architectural space, pictorial space, abstract space, inner space and outer space, secular and sacred space, phase space, parameter space, color space, psychological space, auditory, tactile,

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personal, and social space…what are the adjectives qualifying exactly? No one knows. Thinking about the problem has vexed philosophers since Plato. A quick review is instructive.

For Plato, space was the totality of geometric relations possible, i.e. the totality of numerical facts applicable to distances and directions, and vice versa; in short, proportion. The attention to proportion that characterizes classical architecture to this day, as well as the link that still exists between ratio as a comparison of two quantities and ratio- as the prefix to words denoting reasons itself, derive from this Platonic definition.

For Aristotle, space was nothing other than place, or the generalized sum and place of all places. If Plato’s definition was geometrical, Aristotle’s was more topological: (the) place (of something), he said, was the inner surface of the first stable, environing container. The place of a chair is the room it is in, the place of a river is the riverbed, the place of the moon is the nextoutward celestial sphere.

The Medieval period saw these views commingled; but a new and spiritual element was added. Space was light, or Spirit, or God Himself. Whence, and why else, the apparent infinitude, insubstantiality, immanence, and permanence of space? (Henderson, 1983) By the time Descartes put his mind to the problem, space per se had become an impossibly mystical notion. Descartes brought back to it a dynamic and mechanical aspect. In classifying space and everything physical as “extension” and by opposing this to “thought,” Descartes reasoned that space was simply that which permitted mechanical motion. One atom impinged upon the other directly, like so many ball bearings but without any empty space between them. Vacuum, void, was impossible; space was full of atoms-in-contact. Rather than specify what space is, he specified what it did: space allowed motion.

Dissatisfied with only mechanical terms, Leibniz was to extend this kind of operational definition further. Space, he argued, was that which permitted not only atoms and motion but the very existence of identity and simultaneity as such. Without space, he argued, things could be neither unique nor countable. Everything would be collapsed to a single “point,” to one thing, which is to say, to no-thing, since there would be no room for an-other thing to distinguish itself from the first. Moreover, in order to introduce change, such as motion, and in order for there to be more than one object in motion, not only simultaneity, but also an object-identity-thatsurvives-motion is required so that the motion can be said to have happened at all. With his principle of the “Identity of Indiscernibles”—as this doctrine is called, and which we will discuss presently—Leibniz probably came closest to what we could call an information-theoretical view of space.

Newtown, for his part, thought of space as pure vacuum, Absolute and unmoved, a plenum of nothing but positions—points—continuous and empty in every direction. This view remained largely intact for a hundred years. But by the twentieth century, space could no longer be thought of without time. After Einstein in particular, the project enlarged to understand spacetime as the four-dimensional, fundamental “unified field” providing both the totality of all cosmic frames of reference in relative motion as well as the “substance” of reality itself as the ultimate weaving of light with gravity.

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Now, the physicists’ and philosophers’ idea of space-time was to have enormous impact on artists and architects of the twentieth century, as we know. We also know that this impact had little to do with what Einstein was getting at with his theories of relativity. (Collins, 1965) Rather, space-time and “relativity” were taken as invitations to investigate the extremes of openness, “multiperspectivalism,” dematerialization, and mobility as worthwhile aims for the design of buildings and cities. To this very day, ACSA surveys report that the text thought by architecture teachers to be the most important for students to read is Siegfried Gideon’s 1941 Space, Time, and Architecture, surely one of academe’s most mistaken explications of Einstein’s ideas.

It is quite beyond the scope of this article to rehearse the concepts of space as propounded by architects and architectural scholars during this long history, except to note that it was not until the 1750s that the notion arose that space as such had anything to do with architecture, (Lefebvre, 1974/1991) and primarily did was “shape space.” Consider these passages: …though we may overlook it, space affects us and can control our spirit; and a large part of the pleasure we obtain from architecture…springs from space. The architect models in space as a sculptor in clay. (Geoffrey Scott, 1915) Space and Time are reborn to us today. Space and Time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed. (Antoine Pevsner, 1920). …the new reality that is space instead of matter. (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1943) To get a hold of space, to know how to see it, is the key to understanding buildings. (Bruno Zevi, 1957) (This) is easier for architects because they are used to dealing with the slippery impalpable stuff. (Sinclair Gauldie, 1969) (Walls) tightly stretched by the pressure of the continuously open spaces inside them… (T)he interior space, maternally rounded and swelling… (Vincent Scully, Jr., 1961) It only becomes possible to perceive and experience space when it is enclosed by architectural forms. (Miles Danby, 1963) In the writing of architect-planners, from Camillo Sitte in the 1890s to Rob Krier in the 1970s, these same ideas abound. Streets and plazas are outdoor rooms; their shaping “control(s) our spirit.” Far from exempt from the European discourse on space, the American highway and gridiron city, the skyscraper and strip, were seen as simply another kind of space. As early as 1908, Hendrik Berlage, scorning nostalgia for the picturesque space of the European street, square, and plaza, wrote: “Feeling for space: only those equipped with that feeling can understand the beauty of the American city.” And most recently, under the impact of postmodern realities, theorists have pushed beyond the essentially aesthetic discourse that has preoccupied architects. “Space is political and ideological,” proclaimed philosopher Henri Lefebvre, inspiration of many architect-planners today. “It is a product. It is a product filled with ideologies.”v

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Oh, what a load space must carry! Every responsibility devolves upon it: from supporting the innocent play of geometry to being answerable for our well being, from providing the ground of physical reality to accounting for political and economic evolution. Clearly there is more being asked of the concept of space than space alone could possibly supply. Indeed, as we look over this sample of what modern architects and urbanists have propounded about space, we are reminded strongly of the medieval identification of space with pure spirit, with geist, one might even say with “raumgeist,” inextricably bound up with zeitgeist. And what is geist if not information? What is an ideology if not information?

As for the accounts offered by modern philosophers and scientists: for all their precision they offer us no real alternative. They prove also to rely upon acts of measurement, perception, feeling, counting, referring, and knowing…cognitions all, “spirit” all, information all. Even the infinite, absolute, empty night of Newtonian space presupposes a plenum of radiation and gravity with differences in their distribution enough to locate “points,” in principle, anywhere (and to locate someone or something to take note of these points anywhere as well).

The question naturally begins to arise: is information in space, or is space in information?

I submit that this is a pivotal question. In fact, we are ready to take the next step, which is to explore the more radical idea that space and information are one and the same “thing.”

Consider: Thought Experiment I We have a computer with which we wish to represent a body of numerical data to ourselves graphically. The data consists of a set of N strings of n numbers, with N ≥ 3, and n ≥ 1. We have no idea what these numbers represent. We intend to explore the best way to render apparent whatever patterns of organization lurk in data, and to ignore no data in the process.

(The reader may recognize this sort of task as belonging to the field of endeavor called “scientific visualization.”)

We set up a Cartesian coordinate system with the usual axes X, Y, and Z. The positions of n points (more precisely, of n dots) in the abstract space created can take care of representing three of the strings.vi But what if there are two or more data-points (i.e. number triplets) that are the same, and that therefore compete, as it were, for the same dot location? And what of the (N – 3) remaining strings? What do we do with them? Thinking about the second question helps with the first.

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figure 1

One approach would be to generate N/3 coordinate systems, arranged like adjacent rooms, and join the dots in one to corresponding dots in the next, and the next, with n multiple segmented lines. The constituent slopes and lengths of each N/3-times-articulated line would then represent one N-dimensional “data-point” (or row of N numbers) in the original data.

Another approach would be to devise a way to encode some or all of the remaining (N – 3) strings of numbers as some perceptible quality intrinsic to the dot itself, such as, say, its color.

Color could take care of three more strings in the form of three intrinsic dimensions, “redness,” “greenness,” and “blueness,” which are independent in principle from each other and from the three extrinsic or positional dimensions X, Y, and Z. Informationally, a dot without intrinsic dimensions in N-dimensional space is equivalent to a dot with M intrinsic dimensions in an (N – M)-dimensional space. In addition to color, or instead, we might give each dot other intrinsic, essentially a-spatial qualities such as spin, or vibration frequency, or even sound.

Now both of these approaches can quite handily attack the problem of how to represent n N-dimensional data-points. Both can minimize the occurrence of competition for a position, but neither can guarantee that a certain number of identical data-points competing for a particular dot or line in the abstract space(s) will not remain. To obviate this last problem we would have to introduce time, or add yet another dimension, intrinsic or extrinsic, to our representation in order to reflect the actual ordering of the numbers in the strings.

Now in all this we can see a deep and important principle at work. It was a principle known to Leibniz, who gave it the name of the “Identity of Indiscernibles.” If the differences between two points, dots, lines, atoms, cats, whatever…he reasoned, are indiscernible, then we do not have two but one point, dot, line, atom, or cat. Whatever things we see two or more of, therefore, are ipso facto different from each other in some dimension. There are really no two identical objects even when they seem “identical” in all but spatiotemporal location; nature produces no real twins. Indeed, the three dimensions of “space” and the one of “time” are simply that handful of dimensions of our much-greater-than-four-dimensional reality that forms the most capacious coordinate system; the one, that provides the greatest number of opportunities for the identities of things with further inherent qualities to “express” themselves. Space and time minimize the loss of uniqueness and variety that would otherwise occur amongst the myriad things that, in some sense, want to be in our universe. The inhabitants of some other

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multidimensional universe would call whichever subset of their world-dimensions that serve this information-preserving purpose their “space” and “time,” and they would probably regard the ineluctability and universality of these dimensions with the same mystified awe that we do ours.

With our modest thought experiment we found ourselves engaged in increasing the amount of space (or time) available in order to lose no data to limited intrinsic dimensions. To the extent that each N-dimensional data-point was unique—if only by one numerical value on one dimension—we sought to maximize the display of its uniqueness. If the conservation of information necessitates the conservation of space, then the production of new information in addition necessitates the production of new space.

How exciting it was, then, for physicists to discover this space-making law actually at work in nature, and this some 250 years after Leibniz intuited it. Wolfgang Pauli’s “Exclusion Principle” of 1925 states that no two fermions (e.g. electrons) that have the same quantum state (spin, charge) can occupy the same orbital of a given atom at the same time. This single principle explains why the world we know is not condensed to a single, infinite-intrinsic-dimensioned point. Atoms build up shells and layers of electron orbitals “in space” quite literally because there is only “room” for one electron of a kind in a given orbit. The structure of the periodic table and the existence of matter as we know it—all matter—is the result of this kind of limitation, and atomism is nothing other than the name of the two thousand year-old project to explain all natural phenomena while at the same time reducing the number of nature’s intrinsic dimensions necessary to their explanation to one binary-valued dimension: existence/nonexistence. The idea of room and the fact of space, then, are entirely the outcome of nature attempting to resolve her own, evolving, particulate complexity to the utmost degree extrinsically. It is as though the Matrix—the Mother—wished to represent herself to herself— through us—entirely and without omission; as though Reality were a cosmic “scientific visualization” of itself, expanding only because it is growing more complex.vii Need I point out to the reader the parallels here between the informational spatiologic of nature and that of cyberspace? Consider: Thought Experiment II Another area of scientific inquiry which can throw some light on the issues that concern us is a new subdiscipline situated at the intersection of biology and computer science. It goes by the name of Artificial Life (AL), or Cellular Automata (CA) theory, the latter term going back to John von Neuman’s ground-breaking work in the 1950s. In both, life processes such as reproduction, group interaction patters, and evolution are simulated by allowing a computer to “play out” simple programs assigned to “cells” over time. Each cell’s behavior always depends not only on its inner, given program, but on the condition or state of its neighboring cells. As the immediate environment of each cell changes, the cell responds by changing its state or behavior accordingly. It thereby constitutes part of the altered environment of the cells to which it is neighbor in turn.

En masse, results are often marvelous and unpredictable. When each cell is represented by a group of pixels, large-scale patterns can spontaneously develop on the computer screen.

Whorls and waves, clusterings, migrations, and dispersals develop. Individual digital “creatures” evolve and die off, to be replaced—in certain systems—by smarter ones. There are predators and

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parasites, eras of calm, eras of warfare…etc. etc. And all this, as I noted, can come about with rather elementary beginning programs – programs in the order of twenty to forty lines of code assigned to each cell. Complexity not apparent at the start develops over time by leaps and bounds, and all the more so if the initial cell programs are revisable by certain events in the cell’s history.

Now, for many people it would be too far-fetched to draw parallels between cells in an AL/CA system and individuals in a society. There may be some analogy to termite behavior perhaps, they would say, but not to humans! The far-fetchedness of an analogy depends, however, on the specificity of its claims. In this case, I believe, something rather interesting and relevant can be said about all social organizations before the limits of plausibility are reached.

For example, consider some simple informational accounting: Let B be the number of behaviors (or states) that a cell can display both to us, as observers, and to its neighbors in “screenworld.” Let X be the number of cells in the effective neighborhood of any given cell. If the particular behavior of a given cell depends on the combined behavior of the ones around it—i.e. the ones in its effective neighborhood—then each cell must have, by virtue of its program, the capacity to perceive, remember, and process the Bx possible states of its effective neighborhood in order to decide what to do next. Now if X > 1 and B > 1, then clearly Bx is a quantity greater than B – easily much greater. From this we learn that no cell can behave in as many distinct ways as the ensemble of its similarly adept neighbors can.

Each cell(’s program) therefore must engage in some sort of decision-making, filtering, or blurring process that reduces Bx to B. Each cell must be able to register Xlog2B bits of information, manipulate it—condense it, add it up, average it, even discard parts of it—and then produce log2B bits of information for display.

figure 2

What does this mean for us? Think of a cell as a human individual. The greater the number of behaviors she allows herself and others to engage in and display (“B”), and the greater the number of friends, neighbors, and objects she interacts with (“X”), then, quite precisely, the

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possible complexity of the environment she must deal with is exponentially greater (“Bx”). And if “Thought Experiment I” holds any water, then greater too is the amount of space required for that information to exist.

Space? Just where is this space? What is this space?

It is not the space of “screenworld.” Screenworld acts out another, global history (which is interesting enough). It is, rather, the space locked up, as it were, in the domain of each cell, in the imagination of each mind. Seen from above, from outside, the abstract motion of data-points within intrinsic dimensions is visible as “behavior” of log2B bits in complexity. But inside, the remaining (X – 1)log2B bits are at play.viii I am in an open-air market in Rome. It is April. Heaps of fruit and vegetables— tomatoes, squash, red peppers, no two the same—shine in raw wooden boxes under yellow canvas awnings. Water glistens, black, between the cobblestones under me. The air is filled with the sounds of traffic and voices, each from a unique direction. The smell of fresh fish wafts in a wayward breeze, and then the smell of coffee. To my right is a fountain and sculpture in white marble: figures caught in ecstatic agony, struck in sunshine against a shady Baroque façade, and in the blue, blue sky I see the contrail of a jet headed west, away from the sun. Why do I see all this, this excess of detail that I can do nothing about? Precisely because I can do nothing about it! I am a dam, a delay; and this information is accumulated behind me and in me like a lake. A world is constituted in me because the world cannot flow through me unjudged, unreduced. I can respond with actions and thoughts to a vanishing fraction of the welter of information I can perceive, and I “perceive” only because I cannot respond fast enough. Think: were it not this way, were I to have a specific and instant response for every bit of data entering my system, then I would be nothing but a “throughput” device with a passive display; I would be like a billionstringed puppet, a crazed switchboard, a rail-yard of lightning-quick trains, like a pile of mirrors or a glass chandelier in the sun…each quite beautiful perhaps, but quite dead, without consciousness. There would be no world in me, pooled in me, circulating, evaporating, being filtered. The street market that is in my head is a holding action. In other words, just as stomachs make it possible for creatures not to eat all the time, so consciousness makes it possible for us not to react all the time, to hold a world behind my eyes and posit it before my eyes…while I decide what to do next.

In sum: the production of spatiotemporal consciousness of a “world” is a consequence— though no mere consequence—of surfeit, of the surplus of information that surrounds each one of us relative to our capability of answering to it: Bx >> B. Our second “Thought Experiment,” then, is not about data representation alone, but about its accumulation and processing. Both of these require not just sufficient neurological/computational complexity—a question of hardware—but also, phenomenologically, sufficient imaginal room to take place.

Moreover, as time goes by in an evolving CA system, the whole system grows rapidly in complexity. If cells’ programs are revisable, then the short-cuts, summaries, and decision routines that the first programs employed and which capitalized upon the redundancy in any given cell’s environment, soon cease to be effective. No longer can they hold and conserve and distill all the information about the environment that they need to. Rather, if the cell is to survive and proliferate, these programs are obliged to become longer and more complex; in other words, “smarter.” And they do. As screenworld—and, dare I say now, as society—complexifies in its

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external, spatiotemporal dimensions, and as individual (cell) behaviors increase in number and complexity and range of perceptibility, then so too, and ever faster, must the internal world of each individual cell expand in order to embrace the new information.ix In all, this is a model of space producing itself as a correlate of the proclivity of complex, dynamical systems to generate more complexity, more information, in themselves. It is also, I think, a model of what Henri Lefebvre wants to call social space, i.e. the space that exists chiefly by virtue of minds in a nexus of information exchange with one another, and that exists chiefly in those minds rather than in the physical world. (This is not to say, of course, that figures in physical space cannot be inscribed by figures in social space, just as screenworld may display some patterns fractaly similar to patterns found within each cell’s “imaginal realm,” were we to display that intrinsic activity.)

Now, the reader may wonder why I have gone to such lengths and technicality to elaborate upon what amounts to the quite modest claim: that as environments become more complex, and as effective neighborhoods (as defined) become larger and/or more complex, individuals within them are apt to have, and to need to have, “more on their minds.” Indeed. To this self-evident insight I am adding only the notion that “more on our minds” means more in our minds, and that this means more space in the world in a very important sense. For if we can say that “the world” either reduces to, or that it contains as part of itself, the set-theoretic union of all inner worlds, we need only now relax our strictures as to the legitimacy of sources of information to see that cyberspace, which Gibson once called “a consensual hallucination,” is but a pattern woven into the same informational tapestry as the one that caused in me the experience of the marketplace in Rome.

Thought Experiment III “Thought Experiment III” is less a thought experiment than a real one, for a good portion of what I will relate to the reader here has been tested empirically. Also, rather than dealing with abstract space, it deals directly with physical space—with cityspace and our perception of it. I bring it to the reader’s attention because it involves a rather unique treatment of the topic, one that shows as fundamental the fact that the “shape of a space” is itself (a) the information in that space, and (b) the space in that information.

Space itself can have no shape of course; light scattering objects and surfaces can, and certainly this is what is really involved when architects and urban designers work so hard “to shape a space.” Walls and ceilings, buildings and trees, are positioned in such a way as to modulate experience: not just the experience of those very walls and ceilings (and buildings and trees), but the experience of the people and signs, images and machines, and so on, that move about and populate the room or cityscape. In other words, the disposition of enclosures, screens, and plays of elevation and light, etc., do more than make architectural spaces, they regulate the presentation of the rest of the world’s contents to its inhabitants, pacing it, segmenting it, ordering it in importance, controlling its density. Any “grammar of forms” that would hope to help designers do their job would have to be one that took into account both of these functionalities: space as form(ed) qua space, and space as a medium of information transmission, where that information is itself sedimented in space in a way that tells of its sources-where they are, what they are, and even why.

To this end, the “Theory of Isovists” was developed. (Benedikt, 1980 & 1979; Benedikt & Davis, 1979) Stated most simply, an isovist at x, denoted Vx, is the set of all points in an

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environment of opaque surfaces that are visible to a given point, x. (The spherical limit of the isovist is an artificial one, as shown in Figure 1, functioning something like a horizon in the absence of any other intervening surfaces.)

Isovists have a shape and a size, and every point x in an environment generally has, belonging to it, a uniquely shaped isovist. Even in a perfectly convex room, where isovist shape and size do not change with observer position in the room, the position of x relative to the isovist boundary does, and this affects various informational “measures” we are interested in. What are some of these measures? (For simplicity’s sake we will think of two-dimensional isovists, in plan, being horizontal sections through full, three-dimensional isovists.)

Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2. To fully understand these measures, their computation, and their meaning, the reader is referred to the references in Note 13. Here, necessarily, I shall be very brief.

figure 3

It is clear, for example, that as we move around cityspace from street to square to lobby to elevator to office and so on, the size of our isovist changes. Conversely, one might say that an elevator interior is characterized by low values of A, and an urban plaza by high values of A. Similarly, a forest is characterized by high values of Q, and a ballroom, which may have a comparable value for A, will have a low value for Q even a Q of zero if there are no columns, corners, or obstructions. A tight enclosure, open only on one side like a cave, has very high M3, while on top of a mountain or on an outside corner of a building M3 is very low, even negative in value. Near the walls of a room, no matter what its shape, the values of M2 and M3 rise steeply, like a meniscus. And so on. In short, spaces, and locations within them, can be more and more closely characterized by (1) the absolute values of these five measures at that location, (2) by how these five values change with arbitrarily small motion of the observer in any direction, and (3) by how these values are distributed, field-like, throughout space. A, P, Q, M2, and M3 are intrinsic

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dimensions of x, values within which happen to be indexed the disposition of surfaces in the (visual) environment around x (itself a point in space whose extrinsic dimensions are X, Y, Z, and T.) Are we sensitive to any or all of our five measures of isovist shape and size walking about in the real world? Or are they all mere mathematical inventions? Between 1979 and 1982, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, perception psychologist Clarke Burnham and I tried to find out. The specific research question was this: can our judgment of spaciousness be affected, and hence predicted, by any or all of the isovists in an enclosed architectural space of arbitrary shape? The answer was, and is, most decidedly: yes. Our impression of spaciousness is evoked by high A, low P, low Q, and high M3 (M2 seemed to make little difference.) Cityspaces and parts of them that have these characteristic values—relative to the local norm—will be perceived as more spacious than those with any other combination. (Benedikt & Burnham, 1984, chap. 6) Prior to our research, a number of preliminary studies had been carried out. Where would a solitary guard in a museum place his chair? Surely where A and /or P was highest and Q lowest. Indeed, calculations based upon drawings and a visit to the Michener Museum on my campus found the guard and his chair within feet of the predicted spot.

If you ask people to point to landmarks they cannot see (from where they are), their mispointing is predictable from an analysis of the radial distribution of Q. If you wish to see but not be seen, choose high A and positive M3, if you wish to see and be seen, choose high A and negative M3.

What do we consider a “good view?” High A, M3 and Q. Where is the best place to hide? Low A, low Q, high M3. Which apartment can I safely break into? Low A, low P, high M2 and M3.

A classical “architectural space” is merely a region of the isovist information field where the rate of change of A, P, and Q is relatively low; a “threshold” is one where these rates of change are high. Modern architectural space, “restless” and “flowing,” is characterized by sustained high levels of Q and M2, while rates of change A and P are moderate. And so on.

It is easy to accept that football players must see “isovistically” quite directly as they negotiate the changing array of depths and proximities around them. So, as hunter and hunted judge their relationship to each other and the world, so do most animals, and indeed, so do we most of the time. The “painterly eye” and, with it our pictorial or cinematographic understanding of space, was a long time in evolving. Billennia, in fact. As J. J. Gibson argued, the world is seen first (i.e. most immediately) in terms of the dynamic and volumetric play of depths and distances from us; only secondarily, only derivatively, is it seen in terms of a static pictorial layout of surfaces across our vision. It is as though seeing were sonar or radar—extended touch—before it was seeing in the camera-image sense. Isovist information lies deeper and more salient to us than its pictorial transforms.

With the theory of isovists, we have a description of the world in its spatial aspects that permits us to study experience over time and with motion. More than this, however, isovists

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provide us with a way of understanding space itself as neither logically prior nor subsequent to isovists and the information they contain. Isovist measures constitute a class of information about (visual) space. But it is equally true to say that (visual) space is partially constituted by the structure of, and in, isovistic information. Extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions turn out, in this case, to mirror one another. We can neither trust one more than the other, nor claim one to be more real than the other. Isovist information is embedded in/at every point in space, as “that point in space,” as space.

Whether, then, we look at the positioning of architectural surfaces from outside, in a neutral Cartesian manner, as when we look at plans and sections and try to predict the experience of the space and its contents from within it, or whether we look at fields of isovist data not knowing or seeing the surfaces that “caused” them; whether we watch a movie of motion through that space or whether we experience that space in VR or in reality, the results can be the same.

The results can be the same because the information is the same, and the information is the same because, ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.

Cyberspace and Telecommunications What are “telecommunications?” Typically we associate the term with the transmission of information via electronic and electromagnetic means from one point on the surface of the earth to the other (although with space flight, the latter constraint is jettisonable). We mean telegraph, telephone, television, radio, and so forth, as well as their new recombinations, Of course, information traveled across large-scale geographical space by report, rumor, and letter, in minds, boxes, and satchels, long before telecommunications made it so fast and easy. To this day, human agents on foot, horseback, boat, plane, and truck deliver vast amounts of information in discrete (and usually discreet) parcels or packets whose inscription method resisted the information’s natural tendency to entropic dissolution. Important to note is that unlike information that is “broadcast”—from the voice of a town crier and the peal of bells to the sight of a poster and commercial (pre-cable) television—much of the information physically transported in parcels does not exist in the space between those parcels. It cannot be picked up at any time and/or over a continuously extended region. Rather, one must be in direct receipt of the relevant parcel somewhere specific, for example, at one’s “address” or “phone number.”

Moreover, unlike direct vision and direct sound and unlike, to a lesser extent, broadcast TV and shortwave radio, there is a very small penalty for distance from the source, even less for direction from the source, and little or no interference from geographic “blockages.”x This means that whatever imaginary spaces unfold from within the parcel, be it from a videotape, or book, or photograph, they remain both located in local geographic space and largely independent of it. One can read a novel (almost) anywhere: the story does not know where it is being read, or by whom. Over smaller regions ditto the radio. When one is “on the telephone” one is…where?

Real space—cityspace—neither affects nor is affected by such re- or dis-located information except by what I would call cognitive occlusion. For, as argued earlier, it is simply not the case that we live in this physical world only. With limited attention and with limited lifetimes, we live in information and, much as architects would have it be otherwise, only a small portion of this information is about, or comes from, the people, streets, and buildings present around us. A video camera set up in one place in the city and cabled to a monitor in a second

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place in the city (or to another city, for that matter) can so channel our attention that consciousness of the second place is occluded by the first. We have already made mention of the Walkman. How much neglect of the physical environment has to do with our living less and less of our lives in it in the informational sense is something we shall want to discuss.

The ability of dis-located information to cognitively occlude one’s surroundings is a function of only two factors: (1) the relative salience of the dis-located (and dis-locating) information, and (2) its sensory dominance. A lack in one factor can fairly substitute for a lack in the other.xi An intriguing postcard and a boring movie can, on balance, be equivalent in their environment-occluding effect.

With all this put on the table, it is time now to turn to those two latest developments in information technology, namely, the networked computer, and the technology that goes by the name of “virtual reality” or VR. The first excels at salience, the second at sensory dominance, and the two together could significantly displace reality as we know it.

Begin with the Internet. It consists of roughly 2,600 U.S. and 600 foreign complete networks of computers linked to each other worldwide, each with several “gateways” to all the others. The traffic is already staggering: some 5 to 10 million people worldwide are personally connected through the Internet, sending e-mail, messages, data, pictures, and sounds about Godknows-what to each other. Traffic on the Internet alone is growing at a rate of 20% per month.

One of these nets, a fairly fast one NSFNet, is now being expanded to carry commercial traffic.

A non-profit called Advanced Network is completing a network that will transfer data at 45 million bits a second, 30 times as fast as NSFNet. By next year, this rate will be 622 million bits/sec. However, this is still slower than the future terabit network now being developed with federal support. This will transfer data at a billion bits/sec, and more. The Federal Communications Commission recently licensed regional telephone companies to transmit commercial television and video information services for the first time via optical fiber. More deregulation awaits us. This will mean the end of cable company monopolies and the beginning of a new era of computer integrated interactive entertainment, consumerism, and education.

Hardly a week goes by without a major alliance formed between communication, computer, and entertainment companies.

What we are witnessing is not just the connecting of real places, cityspaces, together—as with plumbing or wiring—but the creation of a new medium entirely where real geographical place is irrelevant. More than just sensorially connecting distant real places, that is--with pictures and sound, and various telepresence VR systems, therefore making these places adjacent to each other, or even interchangeable—information in the quantities we will be dealing with, enables the creation of fictional, consistent, wholly electrical “third” spaces, places that exist nowhere and everywhere, whose light shines only in eyes and not on trees or streets. Rather than what Manuel Castells, following Henri Lefebvre, calls “the space of flows,” referring to the flow of money and information through telecommunications, this is the space in flows sensorially reconstituted as space: urban space, architectural space, cityspace, and abstract space all together…reconstituted, namely as cyberspace. There may well be hundreds of cyberspace domains someday with unique cultures and purposes, like countries.

And of what do these “flows” consist? Of information, to be sure, but effectively— phenomenologically—of power, money, symbols, news, the presence of other people, decisions,

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proposals, reports, linkages, references, affirmations, measurements, laws, entertainments, conferences, classes, stories, real and imaginary images…where shall I stop? As I have tried to demonstrate with my three thought experiments, information is intrinsically spatio-temporal, and cyberspace is merely the name given to information spatiotemporalized in a specific way.

Add to this now head-tracking 3-D video monitors, position-sensing large scale and headmounted displays, “data gloves,” “data suits” and all the other paraphernalia of VR that allow electronically generated worlds to take sensory dominance over the local architectural environment.

In The Informational City (1989), Castells makes note of the enormous expenditure on telecommunication equipment by U.S. business creating geographically nondescript landscapes of anonymous office buildings. “This is the best example,” he writes, “of the direct relationship with location in a given place as a means (only) of access to the placeless communications network.”xii He is right of course, except that with cyberspace that “communications network” is no longer placeless, or rather need not be. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988), makes a similar point: computerization cuts people off from each other, from place, physical intuition, and sensory reality. Once again, this is only true until cyberspace and VR technology can reconstitute and recover the space hidden, as it were, in the dimensions of pure information.

As an architect, I am interested in my profession and its future, and I think one can safely say this: cyberspaces will require constant planning and management. The structures proliferating within it will require design, and the people who design these structures will be called cyberspace architects. Schooled along with their brethren “real-space” architects and urban designers, cyberspace architects will design electronic edifices that are as fully complex, functional, unique, involving, and beautiful as their physical counterparts, if not more so, and the ways that these are disposed in the electronic landscape. Theirs will be the task of visualizing the intrinsically non-physical and giving inhabitable form to society’s most intricate abstractions, processes, and organs of information. And all the while they will be re-realizing in a virtual world, in cyberspace, many vital aspects of the physical world, in particular those orderings and pleasures which have always belonged to architecture and the artifactual landscape.

No architect has ever yet designed a bank, or a university, for that matter. They have designed only the physical shell that houses them. Banks and universities have an informational structure and content more marvelous by far than any architect can depict or has yet needed to.

From the viewpoint of the discipline and art of architecture itself, cyberspace can be seen as extending an inexorable process that began a long, long time ago and which gained new impetus earlier this century, namely, the dematerialization of buildings. Indeed, architecture’s most progressive practitioners and theorists of the day are already approaching the limit, the last steps, of the conversion of architecture’s proper constructional and material discourse into its purely intellectual, graphical, and logical content. It is with the development of virtual reality technology and high speed computer networks that these “last steps” of architecture, rather than regrettable can be welcomed, not as last steps at all, but as the first unwitting steps into a new, parallel, and alternative architecture, into a new, parallel, and alternative realm for Being called cyberspace.

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In Conclusion: Notes on Urban Growth As the planner Richard L. Meier analyzed in 1962, much of the raison-d’etre of cities historically was the cultural and economic profitability of the increased density of communications that they could support. (Meier, 1962) At a time when information, like material goods, traveled slowly over land and sea and what did not was transmitted face-to-face or face-to-document, ever-denser urbanization was the only avenue to economic development.

Through specialization and the sheer multiplicity of connection, complexity provided endless employment and business opportunities. Complexity was almost its own virtue. Through education and competition, it created ever more sophisticated products. Increasing complexity also required increasing organization, ever more subtle and more considerable regulatory structures in the form of bureaucracies. And not insignificantly, as victors celebrated and victims sought solace in this burgeoning system, so did intoxication, crime, and entertainment become major businesses.

The story of urban growth is not without its ups and downs, its tensions and resolutions.

With the advent of telecommunications, however, the physical pattern of this development process, with its recognizably urban outcomes, began to change…change to the point that today we can seriously contemplate cityspace and cyberspace as complements, if not alternatives, in providing the medium of communication between people, the site of co-presence, and the repository space for the bulk of our cultural and economic data.

This trend has not been lost on popular commentators. Certainly, to assess the future impact of mass media and modern telecommunications upon everyday life by comparing it to the transportation-based explosion of urban and suburban development at the beginning of this century, as is fairly often done, is already to have discerned the parallels between cityspace and cyberspace, parallels which this paper has tried to investigate more deeply.xiii So let us look into the comparison as given, and see whether we are in a position to take it further.xiv Henry Ford sold his first Model T in 1908. By 1916 he had sold 15 million units and the price had halved. The city, with its industrial stenches, noises, and social pathologies, was something to be escaped; the middle class would follow the rich into the countryside. Realtors, car dealers, tire makers, gasoline refiners, road builders, and homebuilders organized to lobby loudly for new roads. By 1921, government spending on the highway system reached $1 billion per year. No longer would it take a train and two trolleys to visit Aunt Maude, no longer would Harry and his family have to live near the plant. The automobile seemed to be the Constitution’s promise of freedom made real. With new sewers, power grids, bridges, tunnels, airports, and freeways, America’s infrastructural growth bent itself to the task of suburbanization, a task in the conveyance of material and energy to ever larger and more thinly populated areas, a task which is not yet complete. Mail service aside, the transmission of information—all but weightless—was left to private enterprise.

In this context, from this metaphor, Vice President Gore’s “National Information Superhighway” is no empty concept. Members of the Clinton Administration are convinced that the future of our economy lies in the production efficiencies brought about by electronic connectivity, and in our global mastery of communications technology itself. They may be right.

The price of computing power is dropping faster than did the price of Model T’s. Already, with little or no Federal help, message traffic on computer networks such as the Internet is exploding.

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Thousands of miles of better cable—wider roads—are being laid monthly. Giant electronics, entertainment, telephone, cable TV, and software companies are falling over themselves to establish strategic partnerships. At stake is future hegemony over the form and contents of the new media landscape and, eventually, of cyberspace proper.

However, there is a key difference between the infrastructure constituted by highways and power grids, and the infrastructure constituted by copper wire, microwaves beams, and optical fiber. The old highways went somewhere: to Aunt Maude’s house, to the Grand Canyon, to California. America was waiting, populated, structured in space and time, and rich in natural resources from iron ore to beautiful vistas and with many cities already configured. Not so cyberspace. Cyberspace must be made: it cannot simply be discovered or gotten to. Cyberspace is a geography constructed of information, a new planet with an atmosphere no less breathable for being imaginary. Its topography is undeveloped, as yet still locked into the intrinsic dimensions of its nodal points. It lies compressed and unrealized in or vaults of tapes and discs of data, in our books and dreams, in the very way we appear to each other on screens, pages, and telephone lines. To unfurl and organize all this, to bring it to light in cyberspace, spatiology must complement archeology, and immersion must complement observation.

To be sure, left to itself, the new entertainment/communication/computation nexus will bring us five hundred channels of interactive television some day, as promised. But five hundred channels to choose from do not make cyberspace unless the places they depict and the things they do are coordinated and arranged in a pattern that no one person can change at will.

Similarly, forty million simultaneous phone calls, with or without video, do not make cyberspace unless the people making the calls can hear or not hear each other, see or not see each other “isovistically,” as a function of position and orientation in a virtual space given by the system itself. Design is required. Architecture is required; and not just to cope with the impact of cyberspace on the surface of the earth, but to give shape to the spaces flowing out of the information flowing between real places and real people.

Ultimately, then, I have a double advocacy: First, I advocate an aggressive return by architects to the material reality of their buildings, to the questions of tectonics, ecology, and economy, to the art of construction, and to the romance of inhabitation in cityspace. Here alone lie the nuances of water and wind, of sun and stone, and roof and sail, the taste of food and the touch of a lover. These are things whose value only increases as they are threatened, and it is up to us to both celebrate and profit from this fact.

Second, and simultaneously, I advocate a bold advance by some architects into the realm of the unreal, into cyberspace, to reclaim the space and the community now lost, squandered, latent, in flows of information through wires, cables, and fibers world over. Architecture has always managed the information in space; now it must manage the space in information.

Finally, this is what cyberspace is about. It is, in a way, the revenge of the architects, urbanists, and environmentalists upon the media moguls, computerists, and developers. Even as the world we know becomes placeless under their ministrations, and even as we fight to preserve and enrich it, so we must construct another one which we have not yet fully seen, a world in

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another image and from a material that is actually the universe’s oldest and only material: information itself.

i

I take as a significant beginning, at least in the English-speaking world, Sir Geoffrey Scott’s perennial The Architecture of Humanism (1914/1974). ii And so, while one must concede that describing information as that “…substance: not aether, but thought-substance, a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine…,” does tend to dissolve the phenomenal world’s luscious specificity and palpable solidity into a single, magical gruel, we might remember that magical indeed is that gruel. The entire set of specifications for building a human child, for example, is given in a single molecule consisting of (roughly) three billion pairings of the molecules adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T), A to T and G to C only, in sequence. The score for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony runs 50 pages, and its every performed nuance can be imprinted on a small and circular plastic disc called a CD. The sequence of ink marks that are these words, slithering by under your eyes and filling you with that mild dread of things-about-to-get-moredifficult…is information. It is nothing but information, and a hair’s breadth away from a thousand ones and zeros. iii See also Rheingold, 1991; Woolley, 1992; Heim, 1992; Gelernter, 1991. The reference to Gibson is to William Gibson’s triology Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1987). iv One cannot help thinking here of Louis Kahn’s sentiments about Form. v Interestingly, as we shall see, the size of the space need only be n3. vi For a complementary perspective on this principle see Barbour (1989). vii (X-1)log2B is a very conservative number of course, something of a minimum, since it excludes the contents of memory as well as the process of self-perception. viii It is, of course, a hopeless quest: Bx is always greater than B, and we do not have the space here (!) to go into the various strategies that people actually use subjectively to balance the equation; nonetheless, this in order to live without the feeling of being overwhelmed or incompetent. ix Once again, my aim is to demonstrate ways in which the everyday world can profitably be thought of as information as well as “the world” as it appears to us so compellingly. There is a certain strangeness in adoptng this perspective, of course. The theory of information is a great leveler. Like space, everything turns out to be information…if we define information broadly enough.

This universality, this danger of indifference to specific content, felling, form (“hey, it’s all information to me”) is, however, more apparent than real. As general as it is, the concept of information is a considerable few rungs “higher” than that of space or time alone. The very definition of “information” presupposes a sentient observer who is able to assess likelihoods and to have expectations, someone or some creature that is sensorially and temporally connected to, and part of, the world he or she (or it) is perceiving. The concept of information leads very naturally to concrete ideas about order, organizaiton, complexity, knowledge, and even value, for example. Space and time themselves cannot. x Interestingly, cellular telephone, which due to its operating frequencies is particularly susceptible to real geographic constraints, overcomes them precisely by creating a network of multitudinous receiver/transmitters, as little as a few hundred feet apart in cities, and connected

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information 21

via microwave links to geostationary satellites in order phenomenologically to simulate a noiseless and lossless broadcast medium impervious to geographical distance and circumstance. xi Though neither can go to zero without having the information vanish from consciousness entirely. xii My parenthesis and emphasis. xiii There is another historical parallel to cyberspace to be made, which I do not take up here; namely, the “opening” of the West to railroad access a hundred years or so earlier than the establishment of the national highway system. For a most eloquent and insightful analysis of the comparison, see Lapham (1994, p. 7-11). xiv Some of the material in the next three paragraphs appears in similar form in my article “Unreal Estates” (1993, p. 56).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information 22

Bibliography Barbour, J. (1989). Maximal Variety as a New Fundamental Principle in Dynamics. Foundations of Physics, 19, p. 1051-1073.

Benedikt, M. (1979). To Take Hold of Space: Isovists and Isovist Fields. Environment and Planning B, 6, p. 47-65.

----------. (1980). On Mapping the World in a Mirror. Environment and Planning B, 7, p. 367378.

----------. (Ed.). (1991). Cyberspace First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

----------. (1993, November). Unreal Estates. Architecture New York.

Benedikt, M.& Davis, L. (1979). Computational Models of Space: Isovists and Isovist Fields.

Computer Graphics and Image Processing, 11, p. 49-72.

Benedikt, M. & Burnham, C. (1984). Perceiving Architectural Space: From Optic Arrays to Isovists. In W. H. Warren & R. E. Shaw (Eds.), Persistence and Change. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), chap. 6.

Castells, M. (1989). The Informational City: Information Techonology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Collins, P. (1965). Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1759-1950. Montreal: McGill University Press.

Gelernter, D. (1991). Mirror Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.

----------. (1986). Count Zero. New York: Ace Books.

----------. (1987). Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Ace Books. 1987.

Heim, M. (1992). The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Henderson, L. (1983). The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lapham, L. (1994, January). Notebook: Robber Barons Redux. Harpers, p. 7-11.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974).

Meier, R. (1962). A Communication Theory of Urban Growth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual Reality. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Scott, Sir G. (1974). The Architecture of Humanism. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1914).

Woolley, B. (1992). Virtual Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books.

Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination1

By Maria Beatrice Bittarello, Independent Researcher

Abstract In her article “Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination” Beatrice Bittarello performs a reappraisal of the issue of Virtual Worlds using an interdisciplinary approach. She argues that Virtual Worlds existed before the introduction of the Internet. To back up her argument she outlines a history of literary and visual pre-Internet Virtual Worlds, all of which represent an alternative, mythical, and (often) religious space. She goes on to argue that finding a way of “reaching” Virtual Worlds is the key to the re-conception of (online) Virtual Worlds today. Many elements of literary Virtual Worlds can thus also be linked to contemporary examples of Virtual Worlds on the Internet. She stresses the importance of visual aspects, even though the imagination and the mythopoeic activity of the players play a key (and integral) role in Virtual Worlds on the Internet.

Keywords: virtual worlds, cyberspace, myths, imagination This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research .

1

This is an expansion of a paper originally published in 2008 in the Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 3, p. 246-266.

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Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination

By Maria Beatrice Bittarello, Independent Researcher Technology experts define “virtual worlds” as digitally constructed environments where peer-to-peer interaction can take place. This means that virtual worlds have been created only after the introduction of computers, Computer-Aided Design, and the internet. Other scholars give the expression “virtual worlds” a different meaning, and argue that virtual worlds have always existed in literature, religion, and art. (Wertheim 1999; Ward 2000) According to the first interpretation, the most important aspects of a virtual world are visual; according to the second, the use of imagination is prominent. Both interpretations reflect and are based upon different readings of philosophical problems pertaining to the definition of what is actual and what is virtual, of what is original and what is a copy (simulacrum). Such discussions are rooted in Plato's distinction between the actual world of simulacra and the Empyrean world of “Ideas.”

This paper reappraises the issue of virtual worlds by using an interdisciplinary approach which draws upon methodologies and theoretical elaborations from the fields of classical studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. The first part of the paper points out how literary and visual aspects have always co-existed by examining virtual worlds in ancient and medieval religious texts, and in fictional literature (especially utopian thinking, science fiction and fantasy). Then, I examine virtual worlds in cinema (and cinema itself as virtual world), noting that the visual aspects of virtual worlds have become dominant with the introduction of this medium. The second part of the paper highlights how virtual worlds, whether portrayed in religious or fictional texts, have the features of mythic spaces. The “mythic” overtones found in descriptions of the internet emerge from a comparison between cyberspace and pre-internet virtual worlds. The conclusion is that re-creation of myths and imagination play a key role in the online virtual world.

Virtual Worlds in Ancient and Medieval Religious Texts and Art There is a long tradition of describing and representing virtual worlds in ancient literatures—particularly in myths (sacred stories) and religious texts. In this regard, the story of the journeys of the hero Gilgamesh is exemplar. According to the texts reconstructed by archaeologists and philologists from cuneiform tablets, Gilgamesh sets out to reach the immortal Utnapishtim, who lives in the land of Dilmun, in the garden of the sun. Dilmun is located far away, and it takes a long time for Gilgamesh to reach that place. Also, Dilmun presents features of “paradise” in Mesopotamian mythologies.

Another famous example is in the Bible, where the “Garden of Eden” is described in detail. According to the Genesis book, the garden is located in the east. Beautiful and prodigious trees grow there, providing edible fruits (including the dangerous fruit that gives the knowledge of good and evil), and there is a river which is the source of all the rivers in the world. (Genesis 2:8) Like Dilmun, this place is connected to the promise of immortality; once Adam and Eve have been exiled, cherubs will guard the road that leads to the Garden and to the tree of life.

(3.24) The Bible also describes the New Jerusalem, a utopian place, where the lion and the lamb

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live peacefully together. Not too different are Greek and Roman descriptions of the Golden Age, when “men” lived as gods, knowing no misery, pain, death.2 In the ancient Greek literature, the Odyssey is the most ancient example of a poem describing virtual worlds. The hero, Odysseus, accesses several (virtual) worlds such as the remote island of the nymph Calypso,3 or the country inhabited by the sorceress Circe.4 He also visits the exceedingly fertile island of the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants; that governed by Aeolus, lord of the winds; the land of the Lotus-eaters, who have neither memory nor pain or anxiety;and the “other world” par excellence, the Land of the Dead.5 (Homer, trans. 1995) In the Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas also reaches the Otherworld by entering a deep chasm near the place where the Sybilla of Cuma lives. (Virgil, trans. 1915, p. 237-269).

There are several representations of virtual worlds in ancient art. Greek temples host representations of wars fought by heroes and gods against the Amazons, the Giants, or the Centaurs,6 as well as images of other fantastic creatures located in far away places.7 What is particularly interesting is that such representations were not confined to religious sacred spaces (temples, sanctuaries, and statues located in public spaces; i.e. state/society-controlled spaces), but are also found on Greek vases, (i.e. on objects used at home, in everyday life). Ceramists painted representations of mythical stories and portrayed gods, heroes, and fantastic (often monstrous) creatures.8 (Charbonneaux, Martin & Villard 1970/1988a, p. 315-361) Far from being confined to religious spaces, in antiquity gods, satyrs, nymphs, heroes, and monsters formed the “background” of everyday life, though, of course, not all the virtual worlds reached the complexity of the famous Vase François, the ancestor of comic books. (607, Fig. 64) Mythological scenes, such as the meeting between Odysseus and the Laestrygonians, are often found on the walls of ancient Roman houses. (Charbonneaux, et al. 1968/1988b, p. 168, Fig. 171172) Such examples could be easily multiplied and confirm how the imaginary worlds described in myths and visually represented by artists have never been confined to separate spaces, but have always been an important part of everyday life since antiquity.

The Christian tradition re-read the virtual worlds inherited by the classical tradition and imagined several new virtual worlds. Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell were described and represented in detail, both in religious and literary texts. Dante Alighieri's Christian poem, the Divine Comedy describes the poet's journey through the tripartite Otherworld; a Renaissance 2

Hesiod describes the life of the men (women are not mentioned) of so-called golden race. They never experienced pain or concerns, were always young, free from diseases, had every material good they could desire, and spent their days banqueting, until they died of a death that was as sweet as sleep. See Hesiod (trans. 1914, p. 109-116).

3 The island, named Ogygie, is the “navel of the Ocean” and is described as an idyllic place.

4 Aeaea is located in the farthest east of the world (135-545).

5 The underworld is located in the land of the Cimmerians (14-21). The Odyssey describes several other imaginary worlds inhabited by mythic creatures: the fabulous palace of Alcinous (86-132) in the blessed island of the Phaeacians, Scheria (262-272); the country of the cannibal Laestrygonians (80-124); the island of the Sirens (39-46), and the island where Helios (the sun) keeps his golden cattle (261-269).

6 Amazonomachies are common from the seventh century BCE on, particularly in Athens. The fight of the gods and Giants is represented in the Archaic treasury of the Siphians at Delphi and on the Hellenistic altar of Pergamum. See Price & Kerns, Eds. (2003, p. 228). The war between the Lapiths and the Centaurs is shown on the Parthenon (106).

7 Such as the Gorgons (Virgil, p. 231) and other extraordinary beings, which are sometimes borrowed from other cultures (such as the Sphinx).

8 From Hercules fighting against the serpentine god Acheloo to Gaia half-emerging from the soil to several winged goddesses in archaic Greek art. (Charbonneaux, Martin & Villard 1988a, 315, 354, n. 361, n. 407; Price & Kerns, 225)

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painter, Hieronymus Bosch represents imaginary places that highlight the 'horror' of sin;9 and imaginary and symbolic landscapes dominate both Medieval and Renaissance paintings, staging realities that never existed in the physical world.

Virtual Worlds in Fiction Literature The stories examined above were parts of religious traditions and claimed to be true.

Since antiquity, however, we find other virtual worlds, which are not described in religious literature. A writer living in the Hellenistic period, Lucian of Samosata, represented the Otherworld in his dialogues, and, in the True Story, a number of virtual, fantastic worlds, including the Moon, which is inhabited by rather peculiar creatures.

There is a key difference, however, between heroes such as Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, whose stories are myth (i.e. in the ancient world, sacred history), and Lucius, who is an ordinary man, whose story is not intended to be believed.10 We might say that Lucian of Samosata completes the transition from myths (religious, must be believed) to fiction (untrue, aims at entertaining). In literature, art, and, later, cinema, we find both kinds of imaginary worlds represented. For instance, in the Christian Medieval age the imaginary worlds described in the Arthurian and the Holy Grail cycle are openly fictional, and do not claim to represent religious truths.

Utopian writers have also created a number of imaginary worlds, from the ideal and perfectly regulated cities imagined by Thomas More (Utopia), or Tommaso Campanella (City of the Sun). Other well-known virtual worlds are those described by the Renaissance writer François Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels – where he portrays imaginary societies such as that of Lilliput or that of wise horses (the Yahoo) – or by Voltaire in Micromégas (1752) or Candide (1759). Drawing upon these traditions, fantasy writers have later created and described in detail a number of imaginary worlds. The most famous example is Middle-Earth, portrayed in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Tolkien's corpus of writings on Middle-Earth has given rise to a fantasy subgenre, which describes, in detail, languages and customs of several different imaginary peoples – their histories, legends, and deeds. In Silmarillion, Tolkien describes the cosmogonic phase and the Golden Age of Arda (the Earth), long before the "awakening" of humankind, when elves and other beings ruled and shaped the world. Several fantasy novels also deal with a long forgotten prehistory and with "lost cities", such as the mythical Atlantis originally described by Plato in his dialogues. (Plato 1971, p. 24, 109) Science fiction writers have often described virtual worlds, which they locate in remote regions of the Earth, (Doyle 1912) or in the unexplored space (i.e. on other planets). (Van Vogt 1951) Sometimes, imaginary worlds are located in a different time, usually in the future, and can be reached by using technological devices.11 Science fiction novels or short stories portraying realities that temporally coexist are especially interesting,12 particularly because some 9

As in the paintings completed around 1500 CE and portraying the garden of earthly pleasures (now at the Prado Museum in Madrid).

10 The title True Story is ironic and points to the deceptive nature of Lucian's work.

11 See Wells (1895) (where the main character reaches the Earth of the future, inhabited by Eloi and Morloch, both descending from human beings), Asimov (1955), and a number of TV series (e.g. Doctor Who).

12 As in Leinster (1934) or Brown (1948).

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writers postulate that those multiple realities are indeed "intercommunicating,” and can be reached by using specific technological devices. (Williamson 1988) Virtual Worlds and Cinema The invention of cinema, at the end of the nineteenth century, has added a new dimension to the history of virtual worlds. This section examines two different aspects of the relationship between virtual worlds and cinema. The first refers to the definition of cinema as virtual world, the second to how cinema portrays virtual worlds.

Cinema itself is an example of alternative reality,13 if we take into account two different aspects that are closely related. The first is that cinema can be considered as an alternative reality, identifiable with special places, around which the media have cast a mythological aura, such as Hollywood or Bollywood. Cinema is "consumed" in a peculiar environment (in the dark of a theater) and at set times. In a movie theater, one comes into contact with worlds that appear to exist on an alternative plane of reality, inaccessible outside the cinema theater.14 The second aspect relates to the celebrity status acquired by many of those involved in the making of films, especially actors, directors, and musicians. Their lives are purposefully represented by the global media industry as belonging to a particular sphere, normally inaccessible to most people.

Luxury houses and cars, plastic surgery, fashionable clothes, travels and “dream” parties – not to mention transgression as way of life. The existence of Hollywood “stars” truly belongs to a plane of reality presented as different from that where everyday life takes place. Therefore, the cinema industry ends up being perceived as a desirable, though dangerous, world, inhabited by fantastic, if not monstrous, creatures.

Cinema also visually represents (i.e. makes visible) “imaginary worlds,” and has helped to construct a common visual imaginary all over the world. I will not dwell upon here on the important issue of the imperialistic nature of cinema, which emerges when certain countries and cultures manage to impose their specific imaginary upon other cultures.15 In the past, paintings and statues have played a similar function, but their influence was usually limited to “educated” elites. The preponderance of visual aspects, particularly in the first phase of the history of cinema, is particularly important in this regard, since it has had an astounding influence on contemporary popular culture.

Rather than focusing on specific virtual worlds represented in specific movies,16 it is worth examining how different cinema genres follow specific representation rules and thus how each genre can be considered as a virtual world.17 Science fiction cinema deals with the themes developed by science fiction literature, popularising, adapting, and visually re-shaping for a 13

The same interpretative key can be applied to television, television stars, and television series. The latter also represent imaginary worlds in great detail. Star Trek is an outstanding example of a contemporary fictional mythology that becomes embodied in real life via the phenomenon of conventions.

14 Analogies could be drawn between the ritualized consumption of films, which takes place in secluded, set-apart spaces and at set moments in time, and religious rituals in both old and new religions.

15 Neither will I explore here the key role played by the cinema industry in contemporary consumerist society.

16 Since the examples of virtual worlds presented in films are innumerable, I will just mention here early films such as Lang's Metropolis (1927), which staged an imaginary world.

17 I will not draw upon the innumerable studies on genre cinema and its functions here, since the focus is exclusively on cinema genres as virtual worlds.

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mainstream audience specific topoi elaborated by science fiction writers. Science fiction films propose alternative realities and imaginary worlds, which express either utopian or dystopian visions, all somewhat opposed to/opposing everyday life. Science fiction cinema is more closely related to fantasy cinema than it is often believed;18 however, while fantasy worlds are generally set in a mythic, magic past, science fiction films are usually set in the future and the stress is on science (or technology).

The horror genre stages a supernatural reality and plays with the unexplained, with hidden forces and fantastic creatures.19 It suggests that there is something hidden behind our everyday agreed reality, an alternative reality that coexists and risks creeping into everyday reality.

Detective films play with the desire to discover and solve mysteries by using rational means; comedy alters the established meaning of reality by recurring to exaggeration and absurdity.

This very brief survey indicates that virtual worlds are portrayed in both myths and fictional works, can be described or visually represented, and are an important part of human societies' shared knowledge. The next section explores the common features found in imaginary worlds as portrayed in religious texts and in fictional works. Then, the paper argues that cyberspace itself is ascribed today the same features found in pre-internet virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds as Mythic Spaces Do fictional virtual worlds--i.e. creations of the imagination that do not pretend to be believed as true, such as Lucian's Moon, the kingdom of the Fisherman King, Lilliput, or MiddleEarth--share common features with those virtual worlds described in religious texts and that, therefore, are expected to be considered as truthful representations of reality--such as the Garden of Eden, Hell, or the New Jerusalem?

Scholars studying classical literary texts have outlined the main features of mythic countries and spaces, as described in religious and literary texts. According to such studies, mythic countries present, in ancient Greek and Roman authors, some key features. (Jouan & Deforge, Eds. 1988) In the first place, mythic space is intrinsically different from that of everyday life, because it is either inhabited by monstrous or fantastic creatures or because prodigies happen there, or because people's customs are different. Secondly, it is located far away, often to the farthest limits of the earth, so that it can be reached after a long and usually perilous journey—or by using unusual means (e.g. flying). In sum, mythic space is the opposite or reversal of the real world—it can be portrayed as a utopia (Paradise), or a dystopia (Hell).

Virtual worlds as present the same features plane of reality or in a prodigious creatures, and

represented in literary works are constructed in the same way, and of mythic space. They are located far away, sometimes on a different different time. Such places are inhabited by monstrous, divine or where marvellous events take place.

A third key aspect shared by mythic spaces and fictional virtual worlds pertains to how virtual worlds can be reached. If we go back to the religious and literary texts examined, we find that there are several different ways to reach virtual worlds. The first mode is dream (i.e. “you” 18

As the Star Wars saga, located on the borderline between science fiction and fantasy, clearly exemplifies.

One can think of films about vampires, monsters, and evil creatures or forces. Superhero movies stage, instead, a desired reality (superpowers are desirable).

19

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enter a virtual world while dreaming) or vision (i.e. your state of consciousness is different from that of daily life). The second mode is travel. Visitors of imaginary worlds often ride or walk through deserts, forests, or other inhospitable places.20 Often they use devices such as ships, spaceships, or other means of transport.21 There is, however, a third way of reaching a virtual world, through a “gateway” to another world or alternative reality. This can be conceived of as a mirror, (Borges 1970; Williamson) or as some other sort of technological device. (Wells; Asimov) In some cases there are no devices, rather a mysterious, instantaneous transition from a reality to the other,22 an expedient already used by Dante Alighieri in his Divina Commedia. At the beginning of the poem, Dante finds himself (“mi ritrovai”) in a dark forest, where he meets three dangerous wild beasts. Leaving aside the metaphoric meaning of Dante's description, what emerges is that we are not told how he found himself there, nor how Virgil guides him to the entrance of Hell.23 Dante, and with him all his readers, are suddenly projected in the midst of action, which suggests that there has been an instantaneous transition from this world to the virtual world (or, rather, that the two occupy the same space).

We can conclude, then, that virtual worlds are conceived of as being located on a different (metaphysical) plane of reality. They are places where the rules are different from those of everyday life, located far away, and, therefore, unreachable without using a specific (often technological) device (a ship, a spaceship, or Elias' chariot).

Cyberspace, Mythic Spaces, and Virtuality As all those whose personal computer has crashed at least once know very well, cyberspace is not a space that you can access if you do not possess the appropriate hardware and software—i.e. the appropriate technological devices (or transport means). Where is then cyberspace?

As Patrice Flichy has noted, there exist a number of purposefully hyped representations of the internet (an internet imaginaire), which tend to represent a technological object for example, as a space, or as the solutions to all the problems of society. (Flichy 2007) Several commentators, scholars, and users have portrayed cyberspace as a new Heaven—as the gateway to a magic, alternative world.24 In other words, there are often religious overtones in the way cyberspace is represented. Not only has Graham Ward defined cyberspace as “the scientific solution to the death of God,” (Ward, p. 247) but in Margaret Wertheim's view:

20

In the Orlando Furioso Astolfo flies to the Garden of Eden on the hippogriff, a half horse and half griffin creature (34.48-52). He then flies to the Moon, which is imagined as a sort of immense "lost property office," on the prophet Elias' chariot. (Ariosto 1973, p. 34, 48-52, 68-69) 21 Doctor Who used the TARDIS, which looked like a telephone box.

22 See Leinster or Brown. In some cases, such transition can be explained as an anomaly in the space/time continuum.

23 The instantaneous transition from a world to the other is a device the poet uses several times in the Divine Comedy, where the character(s) is (are) projected into different realities instantaneously. Moreover, a transition from one situation to the other is obtained because Dante—narrator and main character—suddenly faints and wakes up in a different place.

24 As documented in Graham (2001, p. 71-73)) and Wertheim (151).

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the “spiritual” appeal of cyberspace lies in precisely this paradox: it is a repackaging of the old idea of heaven but in a secular, technologically-sanctioned format. The perfect realm awaits for us, we are told, not behind the pearly gates, but beyond the network gateways, behind electronic doors labeled “.com,” “.net,” and “.edu.” (Wertheim, p. 21) In Wertheim's reconstruction of the history of space in the West, she argues that the reduction of space to exclusively physical space has had important repercussions: The very homogenization of space that is at the heart of modern cosmology’s success is also responsible for the banishment from our world picture of any kind of spiritual space. In a homogeneous space only one kind of reality can be accommodated, arid in the scientific world picture that is the physical reality of matter. In medieval cosmology, the accommodation of body and soul had been premised on the belief that space was in homogeneous. By rendering obsolete the old division between terrestrial and celestial space modern cosmologists forced their own metaphysical band and reduced reality to just one half of the classical body-soul dimorphism. Moreover, once this physical space was itself extended to infinity, there was no “room” left for any kind of spiritual space… once the physical world became infinite, where could any kind of spiritual realm possibly be? By unbounding the physical realm, the Christian spiritual realm was thereby squeezed out of the cosmic system. That excision precipitated in the Western world a psychological crisis whose effects we are still wrestling with today.25 (Wertheim, p. 149-150) Wertheim's reconstruction is particularly interesting because she argues that: from the late seventeenth century on, the new physicalist vision has been invoked as a powerful epistemic scythe to hack off anything that could not be accommodated into the materialist conception of reality. Increasingly over the past three centuries, reality has come to be seen as the physical world alone. Thus as I stated at the start of this work, it is a complete misnomer to call the modern scientific world picture dualistic; it is monistic, admitting the reality only of physical phenomena.26 (151) In sum, Wertheim has convincingly argued that cyberspace represents the return of metaphysical space in Western culture; and one must agree that “cyberspace” can be conceived of as a space that coincides with physical space though it cannot be located in the physical world.27 It is also true that cyberspace has been constructed by many users and by some scholars as a technological substitute of Heaven, where human beings are “finally” freed from the weight of the body; several examples are in Flichy's book. However, based on the history of virtual 25

Emphasis in the original text. Wertheim notes that this "is a specifically Western problem. The reason we lost our spiritual space, as it were, is because we had linked it to celestial space. We had “located” it, metaphorically speaking, up there beyond the stars. When celestial space became infinite, our spiritual space was thereby annihilated."

26 Ibid: 151. Emphasis in the original text 27 While it is possible to locate web-pages, back-up memories and hardware, it is not possible to physically locate “cyberspace” as such.

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worlds examined in this paper, a somewhat different interpretation of the way participants construct and play with online virtual worlds could be proposed.

People do not seem to use virtual worlds as a form of escapism, creating a second, vicarious life online. On the contrary, we have an integration of life online and life offline, because both are (obviously) experienced via the body. There does not seem to be a desire to transfer one's life on the Web, but rather to experiment in and with this "other" plane of reality.

Therefore, we could talk of osmosis, to use a biological metaphor, rather than of mechanic separation between the two realities (the digital and the physical).

My interpretation is based upon what has emerged from the survey of literary and visual pre-internet virtual worlds, in particular in relation to the interplay between the world of the imagination (a world of possibility) and the “real” world (a world of actuality). My argument draws upon several recent re-conceptualizations of key concepts such as that of virtuality (Doel & Clark 1999), on studies on sociomental bonds (Chayko 2002), on performance of religious identity on the internet (Cowan & Dawson 2005), and of the way we experience cyberspace as embodied beings (De Vall 2002).

We have seen that Wertheim argues that cyberspace brings back an old dualistic conception of space (physical space/metaphysical space). The key point is that the existence of an infinite number of coexisting realities (as theorised by contemporary physicists) implies that people could slip from one reality to the other. Such an idea has several consequences. Not only there is not a stable, fixed reality, which is the only “real,” “actual” reality—i.e. there is this world and “other” virtual worlds can be imagined, but if multiple realities coexist they are interchangeable. In other words, if one can slip from one reality to another one, how can you tell that one world is real and the other one is virtual?

The situation presented in a film by David Cronenberg, eXistenZ (1999), which stages a virtual reality game, illustrates this point well, since the key idea of the movie is that one can shift from one reality to another. The film plays a game of Chinese boxes and seems to suggest that all reality is virtual (or simulation). This is somewhat analogous to the situation presented in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985); however, while in Allen's film the fictional characters come into “our” physical reality, what is new in eXistenZ is that it thematizes the increasing interpenetration of reality and simulation, our bodily involvement in a variety of virtual worlds and the bewildering sense of losing one’s grip on what is really happening and what is only faked. (De Vall, p.

142) The virtual world, in this case, can be reached only by using a technological device that guarantees an instantaneous transition from “this” reality to a different one, thus becoming a substitute for travel, dream, or Dante's sudden fainting. The central point is, nonetheless, as Cronenberg points out in his voiceover comment to the DVD version of the film, that the virtual reality is experienced via the body. This is an important point, since, in other literary and

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cinematic descriptions of cyberspace, characters access virtual worlds by leaving behind their bodies.28 Virtual Worlds on the Internet This section examines the structural features of digitally created virtual worlds online, and compares these features to pre-internet virtual worlds. I do not examine in detail specific examples of virtual worlds—rather, I focus on the features of virtual worlds online as they emerge from scholarly literature.

Until now, we have seen how people could share common imaginary worlds by reading the same book or observing the same painting or movie. Each medium, (book,29 visual art, cinema) had its own specific features. I have argued that literature, art, and cinema have represented virtual worlds, that imagination has a central role in all of them, and that they constitute a reality alternative to everyday life—though the two realities are not simply intercommunicating but in an “osmotic” relationship.

Cyberspace shares certain features of literary, visual, and cinematic virtual worlds, while presenting specific traits. Since the 1990s, programmers and scholars have begun to focus their attention on the development of virtual worlds online. Richard Bartle, one of the creators of MUD1 (Multi User Domain/Dungeon), describes the key features of a virtual world as follows: underlying rules (or physics), user representation (i.e. graphical representations, called avatars, of each participant), real time interaction (by using interactive chat tools such as a writing pad window), a shared world, and world persistence. (Cf. Bartle 2004) In sum, they present fullyfledged alternative realities; the only, new key element is interactivity.

The use of avatars (cartoon-like figures) in digital environments is particularly interesting because the term “avatar” has been borrowed from Hindu mythology, where it indicated the incarnation/manifestation of a god (or goddess). The avatar was independent from the god/goddess, but also constantly participating in his/her real (divine) nature; this is somewhat analogous to the relationship between the embodied player, who is in an actual place, controls his/her avatar, and watches it while it moves in a digital “space”—separated from, though connected to, the person it represents.

The 2D or 3D digital environment is a later development, since virtual worlds were originally text-based. They have soon begun to be used as social meeting places, where several activities take place. They have attracted early the attention of social scientists and other scholars, such as economists (Castranova 2001), psychologists, education experts,30 and students of religion. Social scientists have begun to track human behaviours in virtual worlds, using them as environments to study human interactions and even to solve social problems. As an early study has noted, users preferred to design their own culture in virtual worlds (Morningstar & Farmer 1991, p. 273-302); in other words, what is taking place in virtual worlds is mythopoeic activity – for example, the creation of imaginary cultures that do not exist outside the virtual world.

28

As in Neuromancer (1982), or in the Matrix (1999).

It is worth noting that radio is the medium that first brought back storytelling in contemporary world.

30 See, for instance, Dickey (2005, p. 439-451) on Active Worlds and distance learning activities.

29

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Studies on religion in virtual worlds started at the end of the 1990s. One of the first studies on virtual environments used for religious activity focused on the behaviour of the participants who both tried to adapt rituals and to find new ways to perform rituals online (Schroeder, Heather & Lee 1998).31 Once again, the creativity of online interaction emerged as one of the key components of virtual worlds. Also, in their description of virtual worlds Schroeder, Heather, and Lee highlight a key element, the presence of both visual aspects ("three dimensional space with buildings and landscapes") and written words ("users can interact with each other via text windows"). Cyberspace, then, brings together texts and images, in a way which is analogous to that of medieval manuscripts. Other more recent examples are that of the “Church of Fools,” whose experience has been self-reflexively described by Simon Jenkins, one of the organizers of the virtual church, and analysed by scholars using a range of approaches.

The Church of Fools offered a basilica designed in a 3D environment, where people could attend collective (and ecumenical) Christian services. The key element that emerges from Jenkins' account, and from Kluver and Chen's analysis is that, in the end, the most important (and lasting) aspect for those who participated was “the experience” and the relationships formed online (Jenkins 2008, p. 95-115; Kluver & Chen 2008, p. 116, 138); in others words, the key element in this particular Virtual Church was the experience gained (and I include in this definition the relationships established, the performance of identity, the wider knowledge acquired). Other websites, such as the Virtual Church and the Virtual (Hindu) Temple examined by Stephen Jacobs offer either synchronous or a-synchronous forms of online practice in 2D environments.

(Jacobs 2007, p. 1103-21) Websites reconstructing sacred places that so not exist anymore, or offering virtual access to sacred spaces and events otherwise inaccessible to those who do not belong to a specific religion can also be considered as religious virtual worlds (examples in Helland 2007, p. 12). A number of religious places have been set up in Second Life by people belonging to several different religions. Second Life's Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Wiccan, Hindu, and Buddhist clusters are places for the practice of religion that do not exist in the physical world, but can be reached in that 3D environment. (Radde-Antweiler 2008, p. 174-211).

All such examples suggest that virtual environments where religious practice is performed by using technological devices may be considered virtual worlds in that they require the participants' active use of imagination to fill in the voids. And the participants testify in online surveys, interviews, and blogs that they felt the experience was meaningful to them. Such experiences, then, could be defined as a form of “serious play,” in the sense that participants “played,” but at the same time they demonstrated a remarkable level of religious commitment.

Conclusions: What Are Virtual Worlds for?

The paper has examined how a number of different “virtual worlds” have been created before the internet, arguing that cyberspace itself is conceived of as a virtual world. Virtual environments designated as “virtual worlds” on the internet have also been examined. The final question to address is what are virtual worlds for? What has emerged from the analysis of realities as different as ancient literary and religious texts, genre literature, cinema, and cyberspace?

31

An earlier study of online rituals in text-based virtual environments by O'Leary (1998, p. 781-807) has now become a classic text on the topic.

Journ al of Virtu al Wo rlds R ese arc h - Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination 12

First, we have established that virtual worlds, i.e. spaces that are intrinsically different from the actual reality we experience everyday, are unreachable without the help of a device.

This device can be a dream, the guided use of imagination (through techniques such as visualization, that help to shift from an everyday state of consciousness to another), or a technological device, such as a ship or a computer. Second, we have begun to see that, in preinternet virtual worlds, characters experience such places without leaving behind their body, whether they visit the land of the dead (as Odysseus, Aeneas or Dante), or other worlds.

Third, a virtual world is a space for freedom, as Cronenberg's comments on the “promise of freedom” made by Allegra Geller to Pikul in eXistenZ underline. Some authors writing on cyberspace, such Howard Rheingold, also stress this aspect. However, it is important to define more precisely what “space for freedom” means. Experience made in mythic spaces is useful because it becomes a sort of training that will be helpful in everyday life. Experiencing a virtual world, therefore, can be life-changing for participants; even if they cannot bring anything back from there, the experience of a virtual world has real effects on players. In other words, you cannot bring an apple from a virtual world into the “real world,” but what you experience there becomes part of you and, thus, has real effects in the physical world.

The fourth key element is particularly important. What do players do in a virtual world in cyberspace? One may be surprised to learn that they perform very ordinary actions: they walk, they sit down and stand up, they talk and chat, they pray and kneel, they eat, they have discussions and flirt. If we consider what heroes and travelers do in their virtual worlds we find that they travel (navigate a ship, ride a horse or walk), have conversations, eat, sleep, pray, fall in love and have sex, participate in races, discuss, kill animals (to procure food), and, in some cases, fight. These are not extraordinary actions, but, rather, ordinary actions in an extraordinary context. Therefore, characters in a virtual world ride, but not a horse: a hippogriff; they “have a chat,” but with nymphs, gods, aliens, and they fight against giants and monsters.

This situation presents a surprising analogy with the activities taking place in online virtual worlds. As sociologists have begun to show, the new virtual space is used as a place where surfers experiment with possibilities and perform different identities—they do ordinary things in a “virtual” space. We can consider how users shaped one of the first virtual worlds, such as Habitat, which was an entertainment-oriented environment and provided the participants with the opportunity to experiment real life roles (wife/husband; man/woman; adherent to a new religion; businessman), and several identities. (Cf. Morningstar & Farmer, p. 273-302) Virtual worlds, whether literary, visual or technological, are learning places—even when we watch a film it is natural to think, “What would I do in that situation?” Cyberspace offers precisely this possibility: to explore possibilities and mythopoeically re-creating one's reality, by integrating into one's (everyday, actual) experience what is experienced in the virtual world.

In other words, criticism of virtual worlds such as that expressed by Haywood, who is rightly concerned about the potentially exclusive and disengaged nature of cyberspace (Cf. 1998, p. 29-30),32 does not take into account precisely the aspects pointed out above. The point is not that "we will have forgotten how [the real world] works," (50) as Haywood forecasted; on the 32

"Remote means remote, and while occasional remoteness may corrupt, absolute remoteness will corrupt absolutely…to be effective for all citizens, including those left outside the electronic club, [networking] has to be followed up by action in the real space which they inhabit."

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contrary, virtual worlds have always been an attempt to engage with reality (mythopoeically): they can be read as a sort of “training place.”

The new element is, paradoxically, that the stress on embodied experience is today even stronger than it has ever been. In saying this, I argue against several scholars who define cyberspace as a disembodied, often alienating experience. We could rather usefully adopt the analogy of the gym. Hours spent at the gym are not set aside, but rather integrated in daily life.

In this I follow Doel & Clarke, who have argued that reality is (actuality-virtuality)—thus cyberspace is not a simulacrum, a false copy of reality. It is, rather, “something else,” something that, as we have seen through the examples examined in this paper, has always existed and has been expressed through different media (story-telling, literature, art, cinema). Also, there is not, for most users, a temptation to leave behind the body, and not only because we can never leave behind our bodies when "going to cyberspace." I substantially agree with De Vall's thesis: I suggest that the phenomenological characteristics of cyberspace are not only determined by the technological possibilities of existing hardware and software to create virtual worlds but also by the conditions of the reception of these worlds.

Rather than speaking of virtual as opposed to real spaces, I would speak of a plurality of spaces that are all in different degrees partly real and partly virtual.

(De Vall, p. 147) The survey of pre-internet virtual worlds confirms this interpenetration of spaces and realities, in which the human body-mind is located. The ability to interact with others, to establish with unknown people what Mary Chayko calls "sociomental bonds," is a faculty that is not new.

When we feel moved by what happens to someone we never met, or write a letter to a pen pal, we show that we have established a bond with either completely imaginary beings or with someone we might never meet. (Chayko, p. 1-5, 127, 148) Freedom, exploration, experimentation, visual representation, yes—but integrated into daily life. Unfortunately, a masculinist way of constructing and presenting cyberspace, virtual worlds on the internet and virtual reality technologies aimed at widening the supposed independence of mind and body, reflecting a deep suspicion of the body that has often conditioned studies on cyberspace (and virtual worlds). Besides Flichy's work on the internet imaginaire, other studies have acknowledged the existence of such rhetorical attitude. (Graham, p. 71-73; Bingham 1999, p. 250) As Hindmarsch notes: This rhetoric seems to have been adopted almost uncritically within many sociological accounts of “virtual” technologies. If we focus on accounts of VR for example, sociologists have argued that a major appeal is the ability to “park” the flawed human body, to transcend the limits of the flesh, to create and explore new identities, to be free the body from social and physical constraint and so on and so forth. (2006, p. 797, emphasis added) It is worth reminding that imagination is not disembodied, but it is rooted in our overall (physical) experience of the world. We can create myths (religious or not) that are the reversal, or enhancement, of the reality we experience. Such myths give meaning, re-inscribe, and reorient that reality. Virtual worlds have always proposed alternative realities, which were always

Journ al of Virtu al Wo rlds R ese arc h - Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination 14

qualitatively different from the actual world, i.e. not copies of that world.33 And this is the reason why the two coexist, i.e. because, as Doel and Clark have argued, reality is the interplay of virtuality and actuality: reality is not the actualisation of a set of possibilities in a given time and space, an actualisation that would unfold a serial exhaustion of the world's possibilities reality equals actuality, or, if you prefer, a given reality is only one of the world's stock of possibilities… Reality is the immanent twofold of actuality-virtuality.

Such a twofold is never given in advance, like the matrix of possibility is supposed to be; it always has to be created and worked over in situ. (Doel & Clark, p. 279).

33

Ibid: 797: "Research has been driven by a commitment to build environments and interfaces through a complex array of technologies which aim to provide the illusion of, simulate, or are even indistinguishable from the physical world. Although such rhetoric has more recently been downplayed amongst the VR community, there persists an overriding concern with the factors that influence the sense of “presence” in virtual worlds." The authors also noted that "Indeed similar statements of intent regarding the pursuit of graphical realism foreshadowed the proliferation of television, film and photography" (815, n 1).

Journ al of Virtu al Wo rlds R ese arc h - Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination 15

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Vol.1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future�

July 2008

Meeting in the Ether A brief history of virtual worlds as a medium for user-created events

By Bruce Damer, President and CEO, DigitalSpace Corporation, Founder, Contact Consortium.

Abstract Virtual worlds, shared graphical spaces on the Internet, are an exciting new medium of human presence for the 21st Century. This article explores the origins, evolution and future of the virtual world medium from their humble beginnings in multi-player games to their use in education, business, science and engineering. Our focus will be on the development of social virtual worlds including environments such as Habitat, Active Worlds and Second Life.

Keywords: virtual worlds, avatars, multi-user, 3D environments

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 2

Meeting in the Ether A brief history of virtual worlds as a medium for user-created events

By Bruce Damer, President and CEO, DigitalSpace Corporation, Founder, Contact Consortium.

If the telephone, radio, film, and TV helped to define life in the twentieth century, the virtual world is the one true new medium of the twenty-first century. The virtual world combines aspects of all of these earlier technologies, creating something novel in human experience. This article is dedicated to a brief exploration of the origins of this profound new medium and its use as a space where users create their own meetings and events.

If we define the virtual world as “a place described by words or projected through pictures which create a space in the imagination, real enough that you can feel you are inside of it,” then the painted caves of our ancestors, shadow puppetry, the seventeenth-century Lanterna Magica, a good book, theatre play, or movie are all technologies to create virtual worlds. The digital computer, a new tool eminently capable of dealing with words and pictures was destined to become a purveyor of virtual worlds but with a new twist: the computer and the network in which it lives can host virtual worlds which are inhabited and co-created by people participating from different physical locations.

The Origins of Virtual Worlds in Digital Computing and Networks Text-based role playing games that operate on timesharing systems prefigured the explosion of imaginative word-built worlds of Adventure, Avatar, and other games on PLATO, the first MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), and other online environments of the 1970s and 1980s.

As the age of affordable graphical computing dawned in the mid 1980s, there was a natural instinct to create visual versions of these experiences (with the unintended forfeiture of the imaginative contribution of written language). The new-born medium of the graphical, digital virtual world experienced a “Cambrian Explosion” of diversity in the 1980s and 1990s, with offspring species of many genres: first person shooters, fantasy role-playing games, simulators, shared board and game tables, and social virtual worlds.

The Social Virtual World Here we will focus on the last genre, social virtual worlds, in which the primary purpose is the creation of meaning through the manipulation of the world and communication with others within the world. Game-play worlds, while also supporting social interaction and user-created content, have as their primary purpose structured play. For the most part, in a social virtual world users are asked to “make it all up” for themselves.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 3

Figure 1. Maze War - running on an early 1970s Imlac PDS1, as featured in a 2004 Digibarn Computer Museum restoration project.

Figure 2. Maze War (Ted Kaehler, c.1980).

Maze War, created first on two networked Imlacs PDS-1 vector graphics workstations (Figure 1) at NASA Ames Research Center in 1974, was the first software to fill the niche of the first-person shooter (users travelled around a 3D maze shooting at each other), but it also set the stage for the very concept of being “in-world” (a term that I coined in 1995 to describe the act of being, well, “in a world”). The cartoon drawn by Ted Kaehler around 1980 (Figure 2) shows a player of the Alto version of Maze being told “Hi, I’m looking for Bob Flegal…” and hearing the response “I believe he’s hiding right over in this corner here…” (i.e.: in-world rather than simply down the hall). Maze also created many of the innovations that would later come to define the virtual worlds medium: instant messaging, non-player robot characters, levels, and in-world building. Players would often simply use Maze to have a chat. Maze also created the online interaction dichotomy between static documents and dynamic interaction still present today in the relatively static document Internet of the World Wide Web versus the dynamic inhabited Internet of chat rooms, shared video and audio, multi-player games, and virtual worlds.

Figure 3. Habitat (1986).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 4

Imlacs or Altos were too large and expensive to leave the laboratory for lives in suburban homes, but with the arrival of affordable color-graphics capable personal computers such as the Commodore 64 and low speed dialup network interfaces, the stage was set for the first graphical, social virtual world – Habitat (Morningstar & Famer, 1991), created by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer working at Lucasfilm in the mid 1980s. The Habitat screen capture (Figure 3) shows users (for the first time referred to as “avatars”) interacting through text chat and moving around a built environment that could change through time. Users bartered objects and eventually created self-government independent of the server operators—the social virtual world had arrived.

The First Generation of Social Virtual Worlds on the Internet

Figure 4. Worlds Chat (1995).

As CPU and system performance increased through the early 1990s, it became possible to run real-time, textured 3D graphics on a consumer PC. In the spring of 1995, a company called Worlds Incorporated launched Worlds Chat, a 3D space station where users “teleported” in and could navigate in a rich sound and spatial experience and, of course, exchange text chat (Figure 4). Three months later, the same company launched Alphaworld, an experimental platform to allow users to build in-world using prefabricated objects.

Figure 5. Alphaworld (1995 and 1998).

Alphaworld was a key proving ground of the social virtual worlds medium. My two organizations, the Contact Consortium and DigitalSpace, carried out several years of experiments,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 5

including group meetings and shared building in the earliest Alphaworld versions (ground zero gathering in summer 1995, Figure 5, left) all the way to a full cyber-conference with thousands of attendees (“Avatars98,” Figure 5, right). Other important platforms of this period included WorldsAway (successor to Habitat), which expanded the realm of barter and an object economy; Onlive Traveler, which pioneered voice and lip synching avatars for intimate social interaction; and The Palace, which allowed any Palace user to easily create and host their own 2D shared “room” utilizing a simple image backdrop, which catalysed a viral spread of distributed worlds.

My book (Damer, 1997) is a good guide to this first generation of social virtual worlds on the Internet.

Meeting in the Ether: the Invention of Large Scale Events in Virtual Worlds

The Contact Consortium The Contact Consortium, a not-for-profit organization based in Northern California, was founded in 1995 to serve as a community center and instigator of experimentation in the nascent medium of virtual worlds. The Consortium held two physical conferences in San Francisco (“Earth to Avatars” in 1996 and “Avatars 97”) before deciding to move its event in-world, attempting a full-scale convention within the medium of virtual worlds in the fall of 1998.

“Avatars98,” held for 4,000 attendees dialing in over slow modem connections into a single shared 3D space was a resounding success. Over the subsequent years, seven annual “cyber conferences” were held, each pushing the limits of design and experience of the virtual worlds medium as a space for gatherings, performance and presentations, art and personal expression.

We will now take a closer look at the steps that lead up to the holding of “Avatars98” and how the event was built, organized, and delivered to a pioneering avatar audience.

First Baby Steps: Worlds Chat and Sherwood Forest Towne When Worlds Chat appeared online in May of 1995, the Consortium membership tried it out as a cyber-gathering space. There were several “meeting rooms” but they were so much like bland windowless office conference rooms that users studiously avoided them, preferring the chaotic but social hub or scenic pods and viewpoints. Consortium members met with the group that produced Worlds Chat and pleaded for an environment where they could build our own content.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 6

Figure 6. Alphaworld as “seen from space” at the end of 1996, Sherwood Forest Towne in inset.

Our prayers were answered when Alphaworld came online two months later and allowed any user to build by simply picking and placing pre-built objects (a concept that contributed to the success of Second Life years later). Figure 6 shows the explosion of construction in a viewpoint “from above” with our first project in the inset. With Alphaworld, the Consortium was then ready to carry out its first experiment: Sherwood Forest Towne.

Figure 7. “Welcome to the Talking Circle” in Sherwood Forest Towne, Alphaworld, Spring 1996, the first in-world experiment hosted by the Contact Consortium.

Sherwood Forest Towne was our first attempt to recruit a team of builders to create a purpose-built space in the “explosion of architecture” that Alphaworld represented. We wanted to build a town to a plan with a theme (Olde English) and characters with roles (Robin Hood, a prankster, and so forth), and to create something small scale with structures close together, in contrast to the huge complexes typical of early Alphaworld builders. Sherwood was a fascinating first step for the organization and went on to win an award at the Austrian “Ars Electronica”

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 7

conference in 1997. Above (Figure 7) you can see the purpose-built space we conceived to hold project meetings, the “Talking Circle.” As Alphaworld allowed both a first-person and thirdperson “bird’s-eye view,” we used this second mode to be able to read the chat from every attendee's point of view. The pots provided a context and boundary and the central water pattern a point for the person “holding the talking stick.” In early Alphaworld there was no separate chat window so this was the only way to guarantee that all shared the conversation. This primitive meeting space, at the gates to Sherwood, was used frequently and led to a series of interesting experiments, including the first events described next.

Figure 8. Garden Party and Virtual Poetry Reading (Summer 1996).

The first event, “Mix it Up! Avatar Party in Digital Space” (Figure 8), was held in July 1996 and featured a garden party in Sherwood Forest Towne, a first-ever avatar poetry reading by noted Santa Cruz poet JJ Webb in a virtual Redwood Grove, and simultaneous bashes inside The Palace (a costume ball) and Black Sun’s Pointworld. This gave us the confidence to hold more in-world events and set the stage for the Avatars Cyberconferences.

The Avatars Cyberconferences

Figure 9. Design sketch for the “Avatars98”: Inside Cyberspace event in October 1998, the first in-world conference hosted by the Contact Consortium.

The Contact Consortium hosted its first conference, “Earth to Avatars,” in October 1996, at a hotel in San Francisco with over 500 attendees. Our second conference, “Avatars 97,” held at the Multimedia Studies Program at San Francisco State University, drew 400 attendees. We

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Meeting in the Ether 8

realized for the 1998 event that it was going to be difficult to find an affordable venue and that we were missing our constituency – the citizens of virtual world cyberspace – so we opted to “walk our talk” as an organization and move the event fully in-world. Hence “Avatars98: Inside Cyberspace” was born. On a trip to the UK to meet Consortium architect Stuart Gold (a real architect who moved his practice inside virtual worlds), we conceived of the design of the “Avatars98” conference space while sitting inside a Heathrow terminal. We decided to create a large, open hall with areas to the north, south, east, and west of the “ground zero” landing area.

Figure 9 shows my design for these spaces as well as the "discussion pods" and exhibit hall booths that Stuart's database interface would automatically build for speakers and exhibitors.

Avatars98 also had parallel events in other popular platforms of the day including Blaxxun, Traveler, The Palace, and WorldsAway. However, our main efforts focused on the Active Worlds platform due to its flexibility in building and managing events.

Figure 10. “Avatars98” Exhibit hall booths, all assembled from parts via a web-based database.

The next month was packed with frantic activity as we recruited object modelers, built web interfaces and assembled the Avatars98 staff and spaces. By sticking with a simple, wellunderstood metaphor of a single convention hall with exhibits in one direction and the other activities in the other three, we felt we would guarantee attendees at least a cognitively simple landscape. Beyond that, we were loading up the event with more than any virtual world had

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carried before: dozens of booths all built by a web page/database and “bot” interface (Figure 10), a wall of multiple webcams showing different “nodes” or physical event sites around the globe, an art gallery and “Avvy Awards” stage with images of contest entries displayed by bot (an automated program inside the world). The event would also probably break attendance records for users entering a single avatar space running on one server. So how did it all turn out?

Opening Day

Figure 11. “Avatars98” Ground Zero as the conference opened, note the webcam in the web interface to the right broadcast from the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica, California, and the webcam on a screen inworld broadcast from Ancient Oaks Farm in Northern California.

Opening Day, November 21, 1998, was a tense moment. “Avatars98” had been featured the night before on CNN, which had brought a crush of additional users into the space. As this was in the era before broadband most of us were dialing in on modem connections on first or second-generation Pentium machines. The entire event was run off a single Sun server hosted by the Active Worlds Company in Newburyport Massachusetts. The Consortium ran an event node and “jacking in” location from Ancient Oaks Farm in Boulder Creek, California. There were twodozen other official “nodes” worldwide including the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica, California, Michael Nesmith’s Video Ranch in New Mexico, and a big art museum in Helsinki, Finland. The event population started early in our morning time here in California to climb to well over 300 people in the single space. As the image above shows, the entry space got crowded and we had to use the “public speaker” facility to reach beyond the two dozen or so closest users’ avatars that could be rendered at a time. Taking cues from theme parks like Disneyland, we had built a series of clear walking paths and quicker “warpers,” which would carry users away from the entry area to the four sectors, to help distribute the population and reduce crowding.

Wandering the exhibit hall, users were greeted by staff manning individual booths. Artists were well represented in the Out of this World Art Gallery. A key activity was to attend talks.

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Figure 12. “Avatars98” Speaker pods for VLearn3D session. Pods built by database and slide images displayed by bot command.

Talks were presented in areas called “pods” that were “sound isolated” from the main conference area by being located at specific distances from the main conference area. In Figure 12 we can see Margaret Corbit of the Cornell Theory Center, presenting a session about her projects in the Vlearn3D inaugural track on educational uses of virtual worlds. Each pod was built and configured automatically for each presenter by web database from pre-set assets such as slide images, text, and an audio microphone to tie in live voice through the Hearme online service.

Linking eight hours and six tracks of talks together was the “big board” interface, a giant navigable program guide that with a single click would warp users’ avatars to the appropriate pods throughout the hall (Figure 13).

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Figure 13. “Avatars98” Big Board. One click warped users to speaker pods throughout the hall.

The two prior in-person conferences had concluded with a “come as your favorite avatar” costume party, which featured a stage show where the best avatars of the year in a number of categories were shown and selected. Bringing this event in-world allowed us to distribute judging and to create a “people's choice” award managed by a vote-bot. The scene in Figure 14 is from the 1998 Avvy Awards at the moment the overall winner was presented onscreen. In this case she was “Summer” an avatar clothed only in butterflies. Note that although only the two dozen closest users’ avatars are shown, there were over 450 people present at the ceremony.

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Figure 14. Avatars98 Avvy Awards ceremony, the Grande Finale.

“Avatars98” had its moments when users complained of very slow object loading and “jerky” performance as their local area was overloaded with avatars and other content.

However, throughout the entire event not a single problem occurred with the server and we ran our computers nonstop for 20 hours, capturing chat logs and helping to run the event with volunteers spread around the world. There were a number of stories in the press about “Avatars98” including coverage in Wired News and other magazines and a number of academic journals. By our estimates tracking the number of unique entries, “Avatars98” served several thousand visitors and provided a new benchmark for what an user-built, large-scale event could achieve in virtual world cyberspace. We had come a long way from the modest Talking Circle in Sherwood Forest Towne two and a half years earlier and hoped this would help future generations create fun, educational, and well-structured in-world events in the future. Other events of note held during this time frame included “TheU: A Virtual University” (an architecture competition in virtual space), “A Virtual Walk on the Moon with Apollo Astronaut Russell Schweickart,” and “Virtual Gathering with Terence McKenna.” (Gold, 1997c; Damer, 1999 & 1999b).

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The Years of the Avatars Cyberconferences: 1999-2004

Figure 15. Badges from all eight Avatars conferences (six being held online as Cyberconferences).

Based on our positive experience with “Avatars98,” the Consortium decided to iterate the experience and produced half a dozen subsequent annual Avatars cyberconferences (Figure 15).

Each had a different theme and we experimented with many different layouts of virtual space, from a complex of interconnected domes (Figure 16), to a space station (Figure 17), to scenes from a popular film (Figure 18) and book (Figure 19).

Figures 16 and 17. The spectacular settings of two other Avatars cyber-conferences: avatar attendees journey through connected “millennium domes” in “Avatars99,” and a surprise ending to “Avatars 2000” happens when the space station which held the conference was destroyed, casting attendees through a “wormhole.”

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Figures 18 and 19. The opening space in “Avatars 2001, a Cyberspace Odyssey,” is a parody of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001 A Space Odyssey and “Avatars 2002” brings a book to life in a reconstruction of Middle Earth from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The “Burning Man of Bits” Ultimately the Avatars events were described as a kind of “Burning Man of Bits” (in reference to the annual user-built arts festival in the Nevada desert). Like Burning Man, Avatars were constructed from the bottom-up by users, based on a plan to a yearly theme, and then carried on as a festival of many parallel events, concluding with a “grand finale” event. The Avatars events had shown that the medium of user-built, socially-inhabited virtual worlds could have life as large scale event and performance spaces. That life was to return as a defining feature of virtual worlds in the early twenty-first century.

The “Winter of Virtual Worlds” and Their Second Coming The companies and investors who bankrolled the early adopter phase of Internet social virtual worlds ran out of cash and patience by the end of the 1990s and most firms changed hands or vanished, even before the “dotcom crash” of 2000. Only the original Alphaworld, which became Active Worlds, survived relatively intact. A “winter” period followed during which it was unclear whether social virtual worlds were a viable medium or an evolutionary dead-end. The Avatars cyber-conferences came to an end in 2003 and it felt like the party was over for the exciting early-adopter phase of the medium.

At about this time, the rise of social-networking software (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Tribe.net, LinkedIn), texting and graphics on mobile devices (SMS, DoCoMo, Cyworld), voice and video over IP (Skype, YouTube), and collective literary constructions (Wikipedia) created a whole new awareness “massively multi-player online games” from Everquest (1999) to today’s World of Warcraft was a financial driver for vastly better 3D graphics hardware and network infrastructure, including consumer broadband.

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The Show Must Go On Incubating within this winter period were firms like Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), and There, Inc (creator of the virtual world There), which emerged to re-energize the social virtual world space. Second Life and There each launched a public beta in early 2003. Second Life was built on two key concepts from the first generation virtual world platforms of the 1990s: the user-empowering in-world building techniques of Alphaworld and the object economy of Habitat/WorldsAway that created a marketplace of objects (bought and sold in a currency called Linden Dollars). Thus there emerged a large community of object makers, builders, and marketers.

Figure 20. The author greets you wearing an avatar garment of his own design in Second Life, May 2007.

A fascinating extension to the object economy was the ability of users to clothe avatars in configurable animated garments (Figure 20), creating a fashion industry that attracted a whole new clientele. In Second Life, virtual land was purchased and rent is due, much like a webhosting service, ensuring that spaces stayed actively maintained and that Linden Lab secured a revenue stream.

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Figure 21. Meetings in Second Life today, showing a kind of “Talking Circle” as well as an auditorium for interviews. Events in Second Life continue to grow in size and scope today.

Today, with the second coming of the avatar/social virtual worlds medium, predictably it is meetings and larger events from interviews on stage to fashion shows that are a driving force behind the growth and attraction to life in-world (Figure 21). The energetic Second Life user community has started organizing large physical gatherings to complement their lives in-world, in a sense bringing the concept of “meeting in the ether” full circle.

The Future of the Virtual Worlds Medium Today, avatars and social spaces are propagating everywhere, from IMVU’s small and intimate 3D instant-message themed avatar rooms to social enclaves appearing on game consoles where users can interact and create personalized home worlds for use while outside game play.

Mobile phones are now scaling the performance and pixel density curve and will soon host rich social worlds, perhaps using the lip synching voice avatar heads pioneered by Onlive Traveler.

These devices are connected to GPS and may ultimately yield a mixed-reality view of the virtual and physical worlds. Searching for friends in a New Year’s Eve crowd in Times Square in 2012, you might simply peer into your personal virtual worlds-capable device and there, in the milling parallel reality crowd of avatars, would be everyone present from your social network.

Let us finish with a quotation from Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 visionary novel about a future ubiquitous social virtual reality. Stephenson’s term for virtual worlds was the Metaverse: Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it.

(Stephenson, 1992, p. 24)

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Bibliography Damer, B. F. (1996a). Earth to Avatars - Contact, Culture and Community in Digital Space. http://www.ccon.org/events/conf96.html.

Damer, B. F. (1996b). Garden Party Event in Sherwood Forest. http://www.ccon.org/events/mixalpha.html.

Damer, B. F. (1997a). Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet.

Berkeley: Peach Pit Press.

Damer, B. F. (1997b). Avatars 97 - The Human Race in Cyberspace. http://www.ccon.org/conf97/index.html.

Damer, B. F. (1999a). A Virtual Walk on the Moon with Apollo Astronaut Russell Schweickart. http://www.digitalspace.com/worlds/apollo/jul20event.html.

Damer, B. F. & Gold, S.G. (1997c). Sherwood Forest Towne. http://www.ccon.org/events/sherwood.html.

Damer, B. F. & Gold, S.G. (1998). Avatars98 and the Other Avatars Cyber-Conferences through 2003. http://www.ccon.org/events/index.html.

Damer, B. F., McKenna, T., & McKenna, F. (1999b). Virtual Gathering with Terence McKenna. http://www.digitalspace.com/worlds/fan-terencem/index.html.

Damer, B. F. & Thompson, G. (2004). Maze War 30 Year Retrospective - Digibarn Computer Museum. http://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/index.html.

Gold, S. G. (1997c). The Virtual University and Architecture Competition. http://www.ccon.org/theu/index.html.

Morningstar, C. and Farmer, R. (1991). The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat. In Benedikt, M. (Ed.). (1991). Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books.

Further Reading DigitalSpace and Contact Consortium publications on virtual worlds, 1995-2007. http://www.digitalspace.com.

Virtual Worlds Timeline history project. http://www.vwtimeline.org. This project chronicles the origins, evolution and current trends in the virtual worlds medium, from its beginning in the 1970s through the early adopter phase of the Internet-based environments of the 1990s to the mainstream platforms of the 2000s. The project is supported by the Contact Consortium, DigitalSpace, multiple academic partners including Umea University in Sweden, Stanford University in the USA and the Web History Project.

Vol.1. No.1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future�

July 2008

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat1

By Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer; Independent Researchers Abstract Habitat is a "multi-player online virtual environment", created by Lucasfilm Games, a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, in association with Quantum Computer Services, Inc. It was arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment in 1985. The system we developed could support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace.

Habitat presented its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users could communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.

Our experiences developing the Habitat system, and managing the virtual world that resulted, offer a number of interesting and important lessons for prospective cyberspace architects. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of these lessons. We hoped that the next generation of builders of virtual worlds can benefit from our experiences and (especially) from our mistakes.

Keywords: Habitat, Lucasfilm, virtual worlds, virtual environment, cyberspace.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

1

This paper was presented at The First International Conference on Cyberspace held in May 1990 at the University of Texas at Austin. It was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (Ed.). (1991). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 2

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat2

By Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer; Independent Researchers Lucasfilm's Habitat was created by Lucasfilm Games, a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, in association with Quantum Computer Services, Inc. It was arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment. A far cry from many laboratory research efforts based on sophisticated interface hardware and tens of thousands of dollars per user of dedicated compute power, Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive—some would say "toy"—home computer to support user interaction. In spite of these somewhat plebeian underpinnings, Habitat is ambitious in its scope. The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.

The Habitat project proved to be a rich source of insights into the nitty-gritty reality of actually implementing a serious, commercially-viable cyberspace environment. Our experiences developing the Habitat system and managing the virtual world that resulted, offer a number of interesting and important lessons for prospective cyberspace architects. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of these lessons. We hope that the next generation of builders of virtual worlds can benefit from our experiences and (especially) from our mistakes.

Due to space limitations, we will not be able to go into as much technical detail as we might like; this will have to be left to a future publication. Similarly, we will only be able to touch briefly upon some of the history of the project as a business venture, which is a fascinating subject of its own. Although we will conclude with a brief discussion of some of the future directions for this technology, a more detailed exposition on this topic will also have to wait for a future article.

The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented. While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies—DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on—both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We cannot help having a nagging sense that it is all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they 2

This paper was presented at The First International Conference on Cyberspace held in May 1990 at the University of Texas at Austin. It was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (Ed.). (1991). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 3

encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the details of the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, are of relatively peripheral concern.

What is Habitat?

Habitat is a "multi-player online virtual environment" (its purpose is to be an entertainment medium; consequently, the users are called "players"). Each player uses his or her home computer as a frontend, communicating over a commercial packet-switching data network to a centralized backend system. The frontend provides the user interface, generating a real-time animated display of what is going on and translating input from the player into requests to the backend. The backend maintains the world model, enforcing the rules and keeping each player's frontend informed about the constantly changing state of the universe. The backend enables the players to interact not only with the world but with each other.

Habitat was inspired by a long tradition of "computer hacker science fiction", notably Vernor Vinge's novel, True Names (Vinge, 1981), as well as many fond childhood memories of games of make-believe, more recent memories of role-playing games and the like, and numerous other influences too thoroughly blended to pinpoint. To this we added a dash of silliness, a touch of cyberpunk (Gibson, 1984; Sterling, 1986), and a predilection for object-oriented programming (Sussman and Abelson, 1985).

The initial incarnation of Habitat uses a Commodore 64 for the frontend1 Figure 1 is a typical screen from this version of the system. The largest part of the screen is devoted to the graphics display. This is an animated view of the player's current location in the Habitat world.

The scene consists of various objects arrayed on the screen, such as the houses and tree you see here. The players are represented by animated figures that we call "Avatars". Avatars are usually, though not exclusively, humanoid in appearance. In this scene you can see two of them, carrying on a conversation.

Avatars can move around, pick up, put down and manipulate objects, talk to each other, and gesture—each under the control of an individual player. Control is through the joystick, which enables the player to point at things and issue commands. Talking is accomplished by typing on the keyboard. The text that a player types is displayed over his or her Avatar's head in a cartoon-style "word balloon."

Figure 1 -- A typical Habitat scene (Š 1986 LucasArts Entertainment Company).

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The Habitat world is made up of a large number of discrete locations that we call "regions". In its prime, the prototype Habitat world consisted of around 20,000 of them. Each region can adjoin up to four other regions, which can be reached simply by walking your Avatar to one or another edge of the screen. Doorways and other passages can connect to additional regions. Each region contains a set of objects that define the things that an Avatar can do there and the scene that the player sees on the computer screen.

Some of the objects are structural, such as the ground or the sky. Many are just scenic, such as the tree or the mailbox. Most objects, however, have some function that they perform.

For example, doors transport Avatars from one region to another and may be opened, closed, locked, and unlocked. ATMs (Automatic Token Machines) enable access to an Avatar's bank account2. Vending machines dispense useful goods in exchange for Habitat money. Many objects are portable and may be carried around in an Avatar's hands or pockets. These include various kinds of containers, money, weapons, tools, and exotic magical implements. Table 1 lists some of the most important types of objects and their functions. The complete list of object types numbers in the hundreds.

Many objects are portable and may be carried around in an Avatar's hands or pockets.

These include various kinds of containers, money, weapons, tools, and exotic magical implements. Listed here are some of the most important types of objects and their functions. The complete list of object types numbers in the hundreds.

Object Class Function ATM Avatar Bag, Box Book Bureaucrat-in-a-box Change-o-matic Chest, Safe Club, Gun, Knife Compass Door Drugs Elevator Flashlight Fountain Game piece Garbage can Glue Ground, Sky Head Key Knick-knack Magic wand Paper Pawn machine Plant, Rock, Tree Region Sensor Sign Stun gun Teleport booth Tokens Vendroid

Automatic Token Machine; access to an Avatar's bank account Represents the player in the Habitat world Containers in which things may be carried Document for Avatars to read (e.g., the daily newspaper) Communication with system operators Device to change Avatar gender Containers in which things can be stored Various weapons Points direction to West Pole Passage from one region to another; can be locked Various types; changes Avatar body state, e.g., cure wounds Transportation from one floor of a tall building to another Provides light in dark places Scenic highlight; provides communication to system designers Enables various board games: backgammon, checkers, chess, etc.

Disposes of unwanted objects System building tool; attaches objects together The underpinnings of the world An Avatar's head; comes in many styles; for customization Unlocks doors and other containers Generic inert object; for decorative purposes Various types, can do almost anything For writing notes, making maps, etc.; used in mail system Buys back previously purchased objects Generic scenic objects The foundation of reality Various types, detects otherwise invisible conditions in the world Allows attachment of text to other objects Non-lethal weapon Means of quick long-distance transport; analogous to phone booth Habitat money Vending machine; sells things

Table 1 -- Some important object classes

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 5

Implementation The following, along with several programmer-years of tedious and expensive detail that we will not cover here, is how the system works: At the heart of the Habitat implementation is an object-oriented model of the universe.

The frontend consists of a system kernel and a collection of objects. The kernel handles memory management, display generation, disk I/O, telecommunications, and other "operating system" functions. The objects implement the semantics of the world itself. Each type of Habitat object has a definition consisting of a set of resources, including animation cels to drive the display, audio data, and executable code. An object's executable code implements a series of standard behaviors, each of which is invoked by a different player command or system event. The model is similar to that found in an object-oriented programming system such as Smalltalk (Goldberg and Robson, 1983), with its classes, methods, and messages. These resources consume significant amounts of scarce frontend memory, so we cannot keep them all in core at the same time.

Fortunately, their definitions are invariant, so we simply swap them in from disk as we need them, discarding less recently used resources to make room.

When an object is instantiated, we allocate a block of memory to contain the object's state.

The first several bytes of an object's state information take the same form in all objects, and include such things as the object's screen location and display attributes. This standard information is interpreted by the system kernel as it generates the display and manages the runtime environment. The remainder of the state information varies with the object type and is accessed only by the object's behavior code.

Object behaviors are invoked by the kernel in response to player input. Each object responds to a set of standard verbs that map directly onto the commands available to the player.

Each behavior is simply a subroutine that executes the indicated action; to do this it may invoke the behaviors of other objects or send request messages to the backend. Besides the standard verb behaviors, objects may have additional behaviors which are invoked by messages that arrive asynchronously from the backend.

The backend also maintains an object-oriented representation of the world. As in the frontend, objects on the backend possess executable behaviors and in-memory state information.

In addition, since the backend maintains a persistent global state for the entire Habitat world, the objects are also represented by database records that may be stored on disk when not "in use".

Backend object behaviors are invoked by messages from the frontend. Each of these backend behaviors works in roughly the same way: a message is received from a player's frontend requesting some action; the action is taken and some state changes to the world result; the backend behavior sends a response message back to the frontend informing it of the results of its request and notification messages to the frontends of any other players who are in the same region, informing them of what has taken place.

The Lessons In order to say as much as we can in the limited space available, we will describe what we think we learned via a series of principles or assertions surrounded by supporting reasoning and

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 6

illustrative anecdotes. A more formal and thorough exposition will have to come later in some other forum where we might have the space to present a more comprehensive and detailed model.

We mentioned our primary principle above: • A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cyberspace.

It is our deep conviction that a definitive characteristic of a cyberspace system is that it represents a multi-user environment. This stems from the fact that what (in our opinion) people seek in such a system is richness, complexity, and depth. Nobody knows how to produce an automaton that even approaches the complexity of a real human being, let alone a society. Our approach, then, is not even to attempt this, but instead to use the computational medium to augment the communications channels between real people.

If what we are constructing is a multi-user environment, it naturally follows that some sort of communications capability must be fundamental to our system. However, we must take into account an observation that is the second of our principles: • Communications bandwidth is a scarce resource.

This point was driven home to us by one of Habitat's nastier, externally-imposed design constraints, namely that it only provided a satisfactory experience to the player over a 300 baud serial telephone connection (one routed, moreover, through commercial packet-switching networks that impose an additional, uncontrollable latency of 100 to 5000 milliseconds on each packet transmitted).

Even in a more technically advanced network, however, bandwidth remains scarce in the sense that economists use the term: available carrying capacity is not unlimited. The law of supply and demand suggests that no matter how much capacity is available, you always want more. When communications technology advances to the point were we all have multi-gigabaud fiber optic connections into our homes, computational technology will have advanced to match.

Our processors' expanding appetite for data will mean that the search for ever more sophisticated data compression techniques will still be a hot research area (though what we are compressing may at that point be high-resolution volumetric time-series or something even more esoteric).

(Drexler, 1986) Computer scientists tend to be reductionists who like to organize systems in terms of primitive elements that can be easily manipulated within the context of a simple formal model.

Typically, you adopt a small variety of very simple primitives which are then used in large numbers. For a graphics-oriented cyberspace system, the temptation is to build upon bit-mapped images or polygons or some other graphic primitive. These sorts of representations, however, are invitations to disaster. They arise from an inappropriate fixation on display technology, rather than on the underlying purpose of the system.

However, the most significant part of what we wish to be communicating are human behaviors. These, fortunately, can be represented quite compactly, provided we adopt a relatively abstract, high-level description that deals with behavioral concepts directly. This leads to our third principle:

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• An object-oriented data representation is essential.

Taken at its face value, this assertion is unlikely to be controversial, as object-oriented programming is currently the methodology of choice among the software engineering cognoscenti. However, what we mean here is not only that you should adopt an object-oriented approach, but that the basic objects from which you build the system should correspond, more or less, to the objects in the user's conceptual model of the virtual world, that is, people, places, and artifacts. You could, of course, use object-oriented programming techniques to build a system based on, say, polygons, but that would not help to cope with the fundamental problem.

The goal is to enable the communications between machines take place primarily at the behavioral level (what people and things are doing) rather than at the presentation level (how the scene is changing). The description of a place in the virtual would should be in terms of what is there rather than what it looks like. Interactions between objects should be described by functional models rather than by physical ones. The computation necessary to translate between these higher-level representations and the lower-level representations required for direct user interaction is an essentially local function. At the local processor, display-rendering techniques may be arbitrarily elaborate and physical models arbitrarily sophisticated. The data channel capacities required for such computations, however, need not and should not be squeezed into the limited bandwidth available between the local processor and remote ones. Attempting to do so just leads to disasters such as NAPLPS (ANSI, 1983; Alber, 1985) which couples dreadful performance with a display model firmly anchored in the technology of the 1970s.

Once we begin working at the conceptual rather than the presentation level, we are struck by the following observation: • The implementation platform is relatively unimportant.

The presentation level and the conceptual level cannot (and should not) be totally isolated from each other. However, defining a virtual environment in terms of the configuration and behavior of objects, rather than their presentation, enables us to span a vast range of computational and display capabilities among the participants in a system. This range extends both upward and downward. As an extreme example, a typical scenic object, such as a tree, can be represented by a handful of parameter values. At the lowest conceivable end of things might be an ancient Altair 8800 with a 300 baud ASCII dumb terminal, where the interface is reduced to fragments of text and the user sees the humble string so familiar to the players of text adventure games, "There is a tree here." At the high end, you might have a powerful processor that generates the image of the tree by growing a fractal model and rendering it three dimensions at high resolution, the finest details ray-traced in real time, complete with branches waving in the breeze and the sound of wind in the leaves coming through your headphones in high-fidelity digital stereo. And these two users might be looking at the same tree in same the place in the same world and talking to each other as they do so. Both of these scenarios are implausible at the moment; the first because nobody would suffer with such a crude interface when better ones are so readily available, the second because the computational hardware does not yet exist. The point, however, is that this approach covers the ground between systems already obsolete and ones that are as yet gleams in their designers' eyes. Two consequences of this are significant. The first is that we can build effective cyberspace systems today. Habitat exists as ample proof of this principle. The second is that it is conceivable that with a modicum of cleverness and foresight you could start building a

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system with today's technology that could evolve smoothly as tomorrow's technology develops.

The availability of pathways for growth is important in the real world, especially if cyberspace is to become a significant communications medium (as we obviously think it should).

Given that we see cyberspace as fundamentally a communications medium rather than simply an user interface model, and given the style of object-oriented approach that we advocate, another point becomes clear: • Data communications standards are vital.

However, our concerns about cyberspace data communications standards center less upon data transport protocols than upon the definition of the data being transported. The mechanisms required for reliably getting bits from point A to point B are not terribly interesting to us. This is not because these mechanisms are not essential (they obviously are) nor because they do not pose significant research and engineering challenges (they clearly do). It is because we are focused on the unique communications needs of an object-based cyberspace. We are concerned with the protocols for sending messages between objects; that is, for communicating behavior rather than presentation and for communicating object definitions from one system to another.

Communicating object definitions seems to us to be an especially important problem, and one that we really did not have an opportunity to address in Habitat. It will be necessary to address this problem if we are to have a dynamic system in the future. Once the size of the system's user base has grown modestly large, it becomes impractical to distribute a new release of the system software every time one wants to add a new class of object. However, we feel the ability to add new classes of objects over time is crucial if the system is to be able to evolve.

While we are on the subject of communications standards, we would like to make some remarks about the ISO Reference Model of Open System Interconnection (ISO, 1986). This 7layer model has become a centerpiece of most discussions about data communications standards today. It is so firmly established in the data communications standards community that it is virtually impossible to find a serious contemporary publication on the subject that does not begin with some variation on Figure 2. Unfortunately, while the bottom 4 or 5 layers of this model provide a more or less sound framework for considering data transport issues, we feel that the model's Presentation and Application layers are not so helpful when considering cyberspace data communications.

Figure 2 -- The 7-layer ISO Reference Model of Open System Interconnection.

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We have two main quarrels with the ISO model. First, it partitions the general data communications problem in a way that is a poor match for the needs of a cyberspace system.

Second, and more importantly, we think that the model itself is an active source of confusion because it focuses the attention of system designers on the wrong set of issues and thus leads them to spend their time solving the wrong set of problems. We know because this happened to us. "Presentation" and "Application" are simply the wrong abstractions for the higher levels of a cyberspace communications protocol. A "Presentation" protocol presumes that at least some characteristics of the display are embedded in the protocol. The discussions above should give some indication why we think that such a presumption is both unnecessary and unwise. Certainly, an "Application" protocol presumes a degree of foreknowledge of the message environment that is incompatible with the sort of dynamically evolving object system we envision.

A better model would be to substitute a different pair of top layers (Figure 3): a Message layer, which defines the means by which objects can address one another and standard methods of encapsulating structured data and encoding low-level data types (e.g., numbers); and a Definition layer built on top of the Message layer, which defines a standard representation for object definitions so that object classes can migrate from machine to machine. One might argue that these are simply Presentation and Application with different labels. However, the differences are so easily reconciled. In particular, we think the ISO model has, however unintentionally, systematically deflected workers in the field from considering many of the issues that concern us.

Figure 3 -- A possible alternative protocol model.

World Building There were two sorts of implementation challenge that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology—developing the animation engine, the objectoriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64 (the backend system also posed interesting technical problems, but its constraints were not as vicious). The second challenge was the creation and management of the Habitat world itself. It is the experiences from the latter exercise that we think will be most relevant to future cyberspace designers.

We were initially our own worst enemies in this undertaking, victims of a way of thinking to which we engineers are dangerously susceptible. This way of thinking is characterized by the conceit that all things may be planned in advance and then directly implemented according to the plan's detailed specification. For persons schooled in the design and construction of systems based on simple, well-defined and well-understood foundation principles, this is a natural attitude to have. Moreover, it is entirely appropriate when undertaking most engineering projects. It is a

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frame of mind that is an essential part of a good engineer's conceptual tool kit. Alas, in keeping with Maslow's assertion that, "to the person who has only a hammer, all the world looks like a nail," it is a frame of mind that is easy to carry beyond its range of applicability. This happens when a system exceeds the threshold of complexity above which the human mind loses its ability to maintain a complete and coherent model.

One generally hears about systems crossing the complexity threshold when they become very large. For example, the Space Shuttle and the B-2 bomber are both systems above this threshold, necessitating extraordinarily involved, cumbersome, and time-consuming procedures to keep the design under control—procedures that are at once vastly expensive and only partially successful. To a degree, the complexity of a problem can be dissolved by "throwing money" at it: faster computers, more managers, more bureaucratic procedures, and so on. However, such capital-intensive management techniques are a luxury not available to most projects. Furthermore, although these "solutions" to the complexity problem are out of reach of most projects, alas the complexity threshold itself is not. Smaller systems can suffer from the same sorts of problems. It is possible to push much smaller and less elaborate systems over the complexity threshold simply by introducing chaotic elements that are outside the designers' sphere of control or understanding.

The most significant such chaotic elements are autonomous computational agents (e.g., other computers). This is why, for example, debugging even very simple communications protocols often proves surprisingly difficult. Furthermore, a special circle of living Hell awaits the implementors of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents of all, groups of interacting human beings. This leads directly to our next (and possibly most controversial) assertion: • Detailed central planning is impossible. Don't even try.

The constructivist prejudice that leads engineers into the kinds of problems just mentioned has received more study from economists, philosophers, and sociologists (e.g., Popper 1962, 1972; Hayek 1973, 1978, 1989; Sowell 1987) than from researchers in the software engineering community. Game and simulation designers are experienced in creating closed virtual worlds for individuals and small groups. However, they have had no reason to learn to deal with large populations of simultaneous users. Each user or small group is unrelated to the others and the same world can be used over and over again. If you are playing an adventure game, the fact that thousands of other people elsewhere in the (real) world are playing the same game has no effect on your experience. It is reasonable for the creator of such a world to spend tens or even hundreds of hours crafting the environment for each hour that a user will spend interacting with it, since that user's hour of experience will be duplicated tens of thousands of times by tens of thousands of other individual users.

Builders of today's online services and communications networks are experienced in dealing with large user populations, but they do not, in general, create elaborate environments.

Furthermore, in a system designed to deliver information or communications services, large numbers of users are simply a load problem rather than a complexity problem. All the users get the same information or services; the comments in the previous paragraph regarding duplication of experience apply here as well. It is not necessary to match the size and complexity of the information space to the size of the user population. While it may turn out that the quantity of information available on a service is largely a function of the size of the user population itself, this information can generally be organized into a systematic structure that can still be maintained

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by a few people. The bulk of this information is produced by the users themselves, rather than the system designers. (This observation, in fact, is the first clue to the solution to our problem.)

Our original, contractual specification for Habitat called for us to create a world capable of supporting a population of 20,000 Avatars, with expansion plans for up to 50,000. By any reckoning this is a large undertaking and complexity problems would certainly be expected.

However, in practice we exceeded the complexity threshold very early in development. By the time the population of our online community had reached around 50 we were in over our heads (and these 50 were "insiders" who were prepared to be tolerant of holes and rough edges).

Moreover, a virtual world such as Habitat needs to scale with its population. For 20,000 Avatars we needed 20,000 "houses", organized into towns and cities with associated traffic arteries and shopping and recreational areas. We needed wilderness areas between the towns so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place. Most of all, we needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit -- and since they can't all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit -- and things to do in those places. Each of those houses, towns, roads, shops, forests, theaters, arenas, and other places is a distinct entity that someone needs to design and create. Attempting to play the role of omniscient central planners, we were swamped.

Automated tools may be created to aid the generation of areas that naturally possess a high degree of regularity and structure, such as apartment buildings and road networks. We created a number of such tools, whose spiritual descendents will no doubt be found in the standard bag of tricks of future cyberspace architects. However, the very properties which make some parts of the world amenable to such techniques also make those same parts of the world among the least important. It is really not a problem if every apartment building looks pretty much like every other. It is a big problem if every enchanted forest looks the same. Places whose value lies in their uniqueness, or at least in their differentiation from the places around them, need to be crafted by hand. This is an incredibly labor-intensive and time consuming process.

Furthermore, even very imaginative people are limited in the range of variation that they can produce, especially if they are working in a virgin environment uninfluenced by the works and reactions of other designers.

Running The World The world design problem might still be tractable, however, if all players had the same goals, interests, motivations, and types of behavior. Real people, however, are all different. For the designer of an ordinary game or simulation, human diversity is not a major problem, since he or she gets to establish the goals and motivations on the participants' behalf and to specify the activities available to them in order to channel events in the preferred direction. Habitat, however, was deliberately open-ended and pluralistic. The idea behind our world was precisely that it did not come with a fixed set of objectives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own internal inclinations.

It was our intention to provide a variety of possible experiences, ranging from events with established rules and goals (a treasure hunt, for example) to activities propelled by the players' personal motivations (starting a business, running the newspaper) to completely free-form, purely existential activities (hanging out with friends and conversing). Most activities, however,

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involved some degree of planning and setup on our part. We were to be like the cruise director on a ocean voyage, but it turned out we were still thinking like game designers.

The first goal-directed event planned for Habitat was a rather involved treasure hunt called the "D'nalsi Island Adventure". It took us hours to design, weeks to build (including a 100region island), and days to coordinate the actors involved. It was designed much like the puzzles in an adventure game. We thought it would occupy our players for days. In fact, the puzzle was solved in about 8 hours by a person who had figured out the critical clue in the first 15 minutes.

Many of the players hadn't even had a chance to get into the game. The result was that one person had had a wonderful experience, dozens of others were left bewildered, and a huge investment in design and setup time had been consumed in an eyeblink. We expected that there would be a wide range of "adventuring" skills in the Habitat audience. What was not so obvious until afterward was that this meant that most people did not have a very good time, if for no other reason than that they never really got to participate. It would clearly be foolish and impractical for us to do things like this on a regular basis.

Again and again we found that activities based on often unconscious assumptions about player behavior had completely unexpected outcomes (when they were not simply outright failures). It was clear that we were not in control. The more people we involved in something, the less in control we were. We could influence things, we could set up interesting situations, we could provide opportunities for things to happen, but we could not predict nor dictate the outcome.

Social engineering is, at best, an inexact science, even in proto-cyberspaces. Or, as some wag once said, "in the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases."

Propelled by these experiences, we shifted into a style of operations in which we let the players themselves drive the direction of the design. This proved far more effective. Instead of trying to push the community in the direction we thought it should go, an exercise rather like herding mice, we tried to observe what people were doing and aid them in it. We became facilitators as much as designers and implementors. This often meant adding new features and new regions to the system at a frantic pace, but almost all of what we added was used and appreciated, since it was well matched to people's needs and desires. As the experts on how the system worked, we could often suggest new activities for people to try or ways of doing things that people might not have thought of. In this way we were able to have considerable influence on the system's development in spite of the fact that we did not really hold the steering wheel— more influence, in fact, than we had had when we were operating under the delusion that we controlled everything.

Indeed, the challenges posed by large systems in general are prompting some researchers to question the centralized, planning-dominated attitude that we have criticized here and to propose alternative approaches based on evolutionary and market principles. (Miller and Drexler, 1988a, 1988b; Drexler and Miller 1988) These principles appear applicable to complex systems of all types, not merely those involving interacting human beings.

The Great Debate Among the objects we made available to Avatars in Habitat were guns and various other sorts of weapons. We included these because we felt that players should be able to materially

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effect each other in ways that went beyond simply talking, ways that required real moral choices to be made by the participants. We recognized the age-old storyteller's dictum that conflict is the essence of drama. Death in Habitat was, of course, not like death in the real world! When an Avatar is killed, he or she is teleported back home, head in hands (literally), pockets empty, and any object in hand at the time dropped on the ground at the scene of the crime. Any possessions carried at the time are lost. It was more like a setback in a game of "Chutes and Ladders" than real mortality. Nevertheless, the death metaphor had a profound effect on people's perceptions.

This potential for murder, assault, and other mayhem in Habitat was, to put it mildly, controversial. The controversy was further fueled by the potential for lesser crimes. For instance, one Avatar could steal something from another Avatar simply by snatching the object out its owner's hands and running off with it.

We had imposed very few rules on the world at the start. There was much debate among the players as to the form that Habitat society should take. At the core of much of the debate was an unresolved philosophical question: is an Avatar an extension of a human being (thus entitled to be treated as you would treat a real person), or a Pac-Man-like critter destined to die a thousand deaths, or something else entirely? Is Habitat murder a crime? Should all weapons be banned? Or is it all "just a game"? To make a point, one of the players took to randomly shooting people as they roamed around. The debate was sufficiently vigorous that we took a systematic poll of the players. The result was ambiguous: 50% said that Habitat murder was a crime and should not be a part of the world, while the other 50% said it was an important part of the fun.

We compromised by changing the system to allow thievery and gunplay only outside the city limits. The wilderness would be wild and dangerous while civilization would be orderly and safe. This did not resolve the debate, however. One of the outstanding proponents of the antiviolence point of view was motivated to open the first Habitat church, the Order of the Holy Walnut (in real life he was a Greek Orthodox priest). His canons forbid his disciples to carry weapons, steal, or participate in violence of any kind. His church became quite popular and he became a very highly respected member of the Habitat community.

Furthermore, while we had made direct theft impossible, one could still engage in indirect theft by stealing things set on the ground momentarily or otherwise left unattended. And the violence still possible in the outlands continued to bother some players. Many people thought that such crimes ought to be prevented or at least punished somehow, but they had no idea how to do so. They were used to a world in which law and justice were always things provided by somebody else. Somebody eventually made the suggestion that there ought to be a Sheriff. We quickly figured out how to create a voting mechanism and rounded up some volunteers to hold an election. A public debate in the town meeting hall was heavily attended, with the three Avatars who had chosen to run making statements and fielding questions. The election was held, and the town of Populopolis acquired a Sheriff.

For weeks the Sheriff was nothing but a figurehead, though he was a respected figure and commanded a certain amount of moral authority. We were stumped about what powers to give him. Should he have the right to shoot anyone anywhere? Give him a more powerful gun? A magic wand to zap people off to jail? What about courts? Laws? Lawyers? Again we surveyed the players, eventually settling on a set of questions that could be answered via a referendum.

Unfortunately, we were unable to act on the results before the pilot operations ended and the version of the system in which these events took place was shut down. It was clear, however, that

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there are two basic camps: anarchists and statists. This division of characters and world views is an issue that will need to be addressed by future cyberspace architects. However, our view remains that a virtual world need not be set up with a "default" government, but can instead evolve one as needed.

A Warning Given the above exhortation that control should be released to the users, we need to inject a note of caution and present our next assertion: • You can't trust anyone.

This may seem like a contradiction of much of the preceding, but it really is not. Designers and operators of a cyberspace system must inhabit two levels of "virtuality" at once. The first we call the "infrastructure level," the level of implementation where the laws that govern "reality" have their genesis. The second we call the "experiential level," which is what the users see and interact with. It is important that there not be "leakage" between these two levels. The first level defines the physics of the world. If its integrity is breached, the consequences can range from aesthetic unpleasantness (the audience catches a glimpse of the scaffolding behind the false front), to psychological disruption (somebody does something "impossible," thereby violating users' expectations and damaging their fantasy), to catastrophic failure (somebody crashes the system).

When we exhort cyberspace system designers to give control to the users, we mean control at the experiential level. When we say that you can't trust anyone, we mean that you can't trust them with access to the infrastructure level. Some stories from Habitat will illustrate this.

When designing a piece of software, you generally assume that the software is the sole intermediary between the user and the underlying data being manipulated (possibly multiple applications will work with the same data, but the principle remains the same). In general, the user need not be aware of how data are encoded and structured inside the application. Indeed, the very purpose of a good application is to shield the user from the ugly technical details. While it is conceivable that a technically astute person who is willing to invest the time and effort could decipher the internal structure of things, this would be an unusual thing to do as there is rarely much advantage to be gained. The purpose of the application itself is, after all, to make access to and manipulation of the data easier than digging around at the level of bits and bytes. There are exceptions to this, however. For example, most game programs deliberately impose obstacles on their players in order for play to be challenging. By tinkering around with the insides of such a program—dumping the data files and studying them, disassembling the program itself and possibly modifying it—it may be possible to "cheat." However, this sort of cheating has the flavor of cheating at solitaire: the consequences adhere to the cheater alone. There is a difference in that disassembling a game program is a puzzle-solving exercise in its own right, whereas cheating at solitaire is pointless, but the satisfactions to be gained from either, if any, are entirely personal.

If, however, a computer game involves multiple players, then delving into the program's internals can enable one to truly cheat, in the sense that one gains an unfair advantage over the other players, an advantage, moreover, of which they may be unaware. Habitat is such a multiplayer game. When we were designing the software, our "prime directive" was, "The backend shall not assume the validity of anything a player computer tells it." This is because we needed to

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protect ourselves against the possibility that a clever user had hacked around with his copy of the frontend program to add "custom features." For example, we could not implement any of the sort of "skill and action" elements found in traditional video games wherein dexterity with the joystick determines the outcome of, say, armed combat, because you could not guard against someone modifying their copy of the program to tell the backend that they had "hit," whether they actually had or not. Indeed, our partners at QuantumLink warned us of this very eventuality before we even started—they already had users who did this sort of thing with their regular system. Would anyone actually go to the trouble of disassembling and studying 100K or so of incredibly tight and bizarrely threaded 6502 machine code just to tinker? As it turns out, the answer is yes. People did. We were not 100% rigorous in following our own rule. It turned out that there were a few features whose implementation was greatly eased by breaking the rule in situations where, in our judgment, the consequences would not be material if some people "cheated" by hacking their own systems. Darned if some people didn't hack their systems to cheat in exactly these ways.

Care must be taken in the design of the world as well. One incident that occurred during our pilot test involved a small group of players exploiting a bug in our world database which they interpreted as a feature. First, some background. Avatars were hatched with 2,000 Tokens in their bank account and each day that they logged in the received another 100T. Avatars could acquire additional funds by engaging in business, winning contests, finding buried treasure, and so on.

They could spend their Tokens on, among other things, various items for sale in vending machines called Vendroids. There were also Pawn Machines, which would buy objects back (at a discount, of course).

In order to make this automated economy a little more interesting, each Vendroid had its own prices for the items in it. This was so that we could have local price variation (i.e., a widget would cost a little less if you bought it at Jack's Place instead of The Emporium). It turned out that in two Vendroids across town from each other were two items for sale whose prices we had inadvertently set lower than what a Pawn Machine would buy them back for: Dolls (for sale at 75T, hock for 100T) and Crystal Balls (for sale at 18,000T, hock at 30,000T!). Naturally, a couple of people discovered this. One night they took all their money, walked to the Doll Vendroid, bought as many Dolls as they could, then took them across town and pawned them. By shuttling back and forth between the Doll Vendroid and the Pawn Shop for hours, they amassed sufficient funds to buy a Crystal Ball, whereupon they continued the process with Crystal Balls and a couple orders of magnitude higher cash flow. The final result was at least three Avatars with hundreds of thousands of Tokens each. We only discovered this the next morning when our daily database status report said that the money supply had quintupled overnight.

We assumed that the precipitous increase in "T1" was due to some sort of bug in the software. We were puzzled that no bug report had been submitted. By poking around a bit we discovered that a few people had suddenly acquired enormous bank balances. We sent Habitat mail to the two richest, inquiring as to where they had gotten all that money overnight. Their reply was, "We got it fair and square! And we're not going to tell you how!" After much abject pleading on our part they eventually did tell us, and we fixed the erroneous pricing. Fortunately, the whole scam turned out well, as the nouveau riche Avatars used their bulging bankrolls to underwrite a series of treasure hunt games which they conducted on their own initiative, much to the enjoyment of many other players on the system.

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Keeping "Reality" Consistent The urge to breach the boundary between the infrastructure level and the experiential level is not confined to the players. The system operators are also subject to this temptation, though their motivation is expediency in accomplishing their legitimate purposes rather than the gaining of illegitimate advantage. However, to the degree to which it is possible, we vigorously endorse the following principle: • Work within the system.

Wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community. This admonition applies to both the technical and the sociological aspects of the system.

For example, with the players in control, the Habitat world would have grown much larger and more diverse than it did had we ourselves not been a technical bottleneck. All new region generation and feature implementation had to go through us, since there were no means for players to create new parts of the world on their own. Region creation was an esoteric technical specialty, requiring a plethora of obscure tools and a good working knowledge of the treacherous minefield of limitations imposed by the Commodore 64. It also required much behind-the-scenes activity of the sort that would probably spoil the illusion for many. One of the goals of a next generation Habitat-like system ought to be to permit far greater creative involvement by the participants without requiring them to ascend to full-fledged guru-hood to do so.

A further example of working within the system, this time in a social sense, is illustrated by the following experience. One of the more popular events in Habitat took place late in the test, the brainchild of one of the more active players who had recently become a QuantumLink employee. It was called the "Dungeon of Death." For weeks, ads appeared in Habitat's newspaper, The Rant, announcing that that Duo of Dread, “Death” and “The Shadow, were challenging all comers to enter their lair. Soon, on the outskirts of town, the entrance to a dungeon appeared. Out front was a sign reading, "Danger! Enter at your own risk!" Two system operators were logged in as “Death” and “The Shadow,” armed with specially concocted guns that could kill in one shot, rather than the usual twelve. These two characters roamed the dungeon blasting away at anyone they encountered. They were also equipped with special magic wands that cured any damage done to them by other Avatars, so that they would not themselves be killed. To make things worse, the place was littered with cul-de-sacs, pathological connections between regions, and various other nasty and usually fatal features. It was clear that any explorer had better be prepared to "die" several times before mastering the dungeon. The rewards were pretty good: 1000 Tokens minimum and access to a special Vendroid that sold magic teleportation wands. Furthermore, given clear notice, players took the precaution of emptying their pockets before entering, so that the actual cost of getting "killed" was minimal.

One evening, one of us was given the chance to play the role of Death. When we logged in, we found him in one of the dead ends with four other Avatars who were trapped there. We started shooting, as did they. However, the last operator to run Death had not bothered to use his special wand to heal any accumulated damage, so the character of Death was suddenly and unexpectedly "killed" in the encounter. As we mentioned earlier, when an Avatar is killed, any

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object in his hands is dropped on the ground. In this case, said object was the special kill-in-oneshot gun, which was immediately picked up by one of the regular players who then made off with it. This gun was not something that regular players were supposed to have. What should we do?

It turned out that this was not the first time this had happened. During the previous night's mayhem the special gun was similarly absconded with. In this case, the person playing Death was one of the regular system operators, who, accustomed to operating the regular Q-Link service, had simply ordered the player to give the gun back. The player considered that he had obtained the weapon as part of the normal course of the game and balked at this, whereupon the operator threatened to cancel the player's account and kick him off the system if he did not comply. The player gave the gun back, but was quite upset about the whole affair, as were many of his friends and associates on the system. Their world model had been painfully violated.

When it happened to us, we played the whole incident within the role of Death. We sent a message to the Avatar who had the gun, threatening to come and kill her if she did not give it back. She replied that all she had to do was stay in town and Death could not touch her (which was true, if we stayed within the system). OK, we figured, she's smart. We negotiated a deal whereby Death would ransom the gun for 10,000 Tokens. An elaborate arrangement was made to meet in the center of town to make the exchange, with a neutral third Avatar acting as an intermediary to ensure that neither party cheated. Of course, word got around and by the time of the exchange there were numerous spectators. We played the role of Death to the hilt, with lots of hokey melodramatic shtick. The event was a sensation. It was written up in the newspaper the next morning and was the talk of the town for days. The Avatar involved was left with a wonderful story about having cheated Death, we got the gun back, and everybody went away happy.

These two very different responses to an ordinary operational problem illustrate our point.

Operating within the participants' world model produced a very satisfactory result. On the other hand, taking what seemed like the expedient course, which involved violating the world-model, provoked upset and dismay. Working within the system was clearly the preferred course in this case.

Current Status As of this writing, the North American incarnation of Lucasfilm's Habitat, QuantumLink's "Club Caribe," has been operating for almost two years. It uses our original Commodore 64 frontend and a somewhat stripped-down version of our original Stratus backend software. Club Caribe now sustains a population of some 15,000 participants.

A technically more advanced version, called Fujitsu Habitat, has been operating for over a year in Japan, available on NIFtyServe. The initial frontend for this version is the new Fujitsu FM Towns personal computer, though ports to several other popular Japanese machines are planned.

This version of the system benefits from the additional computational power and graphics capabilities of a newer platform, as well as the Towns' built-in CD-ROM for object imagery and sounds. However, the virtuality of the system is essentially unchanged and Fujitsu has not made significant alterations to the user interface or to any of the underlying concepts.

Future Directions

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 18

There are several directions in which this work can be extended. Most obvious is to implement the system on more advanced hardware, enabling a more sophisticated display. A number of extensions to the user interface also suggest themselves. However, the line of development most interesting to us is to expand on the idea of making the development and expansion of the world itself part of the users' sphere of control. There are two major research areas in this. Unfortunately, we can only touch on them briefly here.

The first area to investigate involves the elimination of the centralized backend. The backend is a communications and processing bottleneck that will not withstand growth above too large a size. While we can support tens of thousands of users with this model, it is not really feasible to support millions. Making the system fully distributed, however, requires solving a number of difficult problems. The most significant of these is the prevention of cheating.

Obviously, the owner of the network node that implements some part of the world has an incentive to tilt things in his favor. We think that this problem can be addressed by secure operating system technologies based on public-key cryptographic techniques. (Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, 1978; Miller et al, 1987) The second fertile area of investigation involves user configuration of the world itself.

This requires finding ways to represent the design and creation of regions and objects as part of the underlying fantasy. Doing this will require changes to our conception of the world. In particular, we do not think it will be possible to conceal all of the underpinnings to those who work with them. However, all we really need to do is find abstractions for those underpinnings that fit into the fantasy itself. Though challenging, this is, in our opinion, eminently feasible.

Conclusions We feel that the defining characteristic of cyberspace is the sharedness of the virtual environment and not the display technology used to transport users into that environment. Such a cyberspace is feasible today, if you can live without head-mounted displays and other expensive graphics hardware. Habitat serves as an existence proof of this contention.

It seems clear to us that an object-oriented world model is a key ingredient in any cyberspace implementation. We feel we have gained some insight into the data representation and communications needs of such a system. While we think that it may be premature to start establishing detailed technical standards for these things, it is time to begin the discussions that will lead to such standards in the future.

Finally, we have come to believe that the most significant challenge for cyberspace developers is to come to grips with the problems of world creation and management. While we have only made the first inroads onto these problems, a few things have become clear. The most important of these is that managing a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service. Instead, it is more like governing an actual nation. Cyberspace architects will benefit from study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science. We advocate an agoric, evolutionary approach to world building rather than a centralized, socialistic one.

We would like to conclude with a final, if ironical, admonition, one that we hope will not be seen as overly contentious:

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 19

• Get real.

In a discussion of cyberspace on Usenet, one worker in the field dismissed Club Caribe (Habitat's current incarnation) as uninteresting, with a comment to the effect that most of the activity consisted of inane and trivial conversation. Indeed, the observation was largely correct. However, we hope some of the anecdotes recounted above will give some indication that more is going on than those inane and trivial conversations might indicate. Further, to dismiss the system on this basis is to dismiss the users themselves. They are paying money for this service. They do not view what they do as inane and trivial, or they would not do it. To insist this presumes that one knows better than they what they should be doing. Such presumption is another manifestation of the omniscient central planner who dictates all that happens, a role that this entire article is trying to deflect you from seeking. In a real system that is going to be used by real people, it is a mistake to assume that the users will all undertake the sorts of noble and sublime activities which you created the system to enable. Most of them will not. Cyberspace may indeed change humanity, but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.

Notes 1: One of the questions we are asked most frequently is, "Why the Commodore 64?" Many people somehow get the impression that this was a technical decision, but the real explanation has to do with business, not technology. Habitat was initially developed by Lucasfilm as commercial product for QuantumLink, an online service (then) exclusively for owners of the Commodore 64. At the time we started (1985), the Commodore 64 was the mainstay of the recreational computing market. Since then it has declined dramatically in both its commercial and technical significance. However, when we began the project, we did not get a choice of platforms.

The nature of the deal was such that both the Commodore 64 for the frontend and the existing QuantumLink host system (a brace of Stratus fault-tolerant minicomputers) for the backend were givens.

2: Habitat contains its own fully-fledged economy, with money, banks, and so on. Habitat's unit of currency is the Token, reflecting the fact that it is a token economy and to acknowledge the long and honorable association between tokens and video games. Incidently, the Habitat Token is a 23- sided plastic coin slightly larger than an American quarter, with a portrait of Vernor Vinge and the motto "Fiat Lucre" on its face, and the text "Good for one fare" on the back; these details are difficult to make out on the Commodore 64 screen.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the contributions of some of the many people who helped make Habitat possible. At Lucasfilm, Aric Wilmunder wrote much of the Commodore 64 frontend software; Ron Gilbert, Charlie Kelner, and Noah Falstein also provided invaluable programming and design support; Gary Winnick and Ken Macklin were responsible for all the artwork; Chris Grigg did the sounds; Steve Arnold provided outstanding management support; and George Lucas gave us the freedom to undertake a project that for all he knew was both impossible and insane. At Quantum, Janet Hunter wrote the guts of the backend; Ken Huntsman and Mike Ficco provided valuable assistance with communications protocols. Kazuo Fukuda and his crew at Fujitsu have carried our vision of Habitat to Japan and made it their own. Phil Salin, our boss at AMiX, let us steal the time to write this paper and even paid for us to attend the First Conference

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 20

on Cyberspace, even though its immediate relevance to our present business may have seemed a bit obscure at the time. We would also like to thank Michael Benedikt, Don Fussell, and their cohorts for organizing the Conference and thereby prompting us to start putting our thoughts and experiences in writing.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Lessons of Habitat 21

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Goldberg, A. & Robson, D. (1983). Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Miller, M. S.; Bobrow, D. G.; Tribble, E. D.; & Levy, D. J. (1987). Logical Secrets. In Shapiro, E. (Ed.). Concurrent Prolog: Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Miller, M. S., & Drexler, K. E. (1988a) Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspective. In Huberman, B.A. (Ed.). The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.

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The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.

Popper, K. R. (1971/1962). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Rivest, R.; Shamir, A., & Adelman, L. (1978, February). A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems. Communications of the ACM 21, p. 120-126.

Sowell, T. (1987). A Conflict of Visions. NY: William Morrow.

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future�

July 2008

Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards

By Howard Rheingold, UC Berkeley, Stanford

This is an essay originally published in Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987.

Reprinted in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol.1, issue 1 by permission of author.

Keywords: vitual communities, communication tools, information.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Virtual communities 2

Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards

By Howard Rheingold, UC Berkeley, Stanford

Introductory remarks by Howard Rheingold, April 2008.

This article is the first known publication of the term "virtual community." I'm fairly certain about this because a Princeton librarian had the task of ascertaining the first use of the term, and this article is the earliest he could find.

I used to write a lot for the Well community online -- for free. KevinKelly was editor of the Whole Earth Review and one of the founders and designers of the Well. He tried to get me to write for Whole Earth Review, but I was trying to make my living as a writer, and I couldn't afford to trade an article's worth of my time for $250. I lived near the WER/Well offices. Once in a while, Kevin would stop by my house. Not for the first time, he provoked an argument about whether or not you could call what we were doing on the Well a "community." After I ranted at him, he said "Write down what you just said, and I'll pay you $250." Which I did. $250/hr is good. Over the years, an entire discipline of critical cyberculture studies has grown up, and ever cyberculture critic, as part of the initiation ceremony, has to take a whack at something I wrote in this article. I've changed my mind about some things, which seems entirely natural to me, given the time that has passed and the experiences that I've lived through since then. Minds change, times change, people change.

I remember what provoked the rant. It was the idea that most people would say, back in 1987, that only a subculture of probably pathologically antisocial computer geeks would spend their time communicating through computer networks. What else but "community" to apply to the friendships, support groups, marriages made and broken, births and deaths, parties and rituals that were happening among the people I knew online -- a group that included, yes, pathologically antisocial computer geeks, but also schoolteachers, newspaper columnists, Baptist ministers, activists, futurists, artists proto-environmentalists, radio producers?

Let's just say that the world of online sociality has become more complicated, empirical data is no longer non-existent, and the picture of what it all means has become more nuanced.

BECAUSE I am a writer, I used to spend my days alone in my room with typewriter my words, and my thoughts. On occasion, I ventured outside to interview people or to find information. After work, I would reenter the human community, via my neighborhood, my lamity. My circle of personal and professional acquaintances, But I was isolated and lonely during the working day, and my work did not provide any opportunity to expand my circle of friends and colleagues.

For the past two years, however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding, and often intensely emotional exchange with dozens of new friends and hundreds of colleagues. And I still spend my days in a room, physically isolated.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Virtual communities 3

My mind, however, is linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not-solike-minded) souls: my virtual community. If you get a computer and a modem, you can join us.

A virtual community is a group of people Who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. Like any other community, it is also a collection of people who adhere to a certain (loose) social contract, and who share certain (eclectic) interests .It usually has a geographically local focus, and often has a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of my virtual community, The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (aka "The WELL') is the San Francisco Bay Area; the Wider locus consists of tens of thousands of other sites around the world, and hundreds of thousands of other Communitarians, linked via exchanges of messages into a meta-Community known as the Usenet.

The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty years ago by J-C. R. Licklider, who set in motion the research that resulted in the creation of the first such Community, the ARPAnet: "What will on-line interactive communities be like?" Licklider wrote, in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically separated Members, sometimes mes grouped in small clusters and sometimes Working individually, They will be Communities not of common location, but of Common interest . . . " My friends and I are part of the future that Licklider dreamed about, and we can attest to the truth of his prediction that "life will be happier for the online individual because the people With whom one intracts most strongly will be Selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity."

I work with a computer now, instead of a typewrite, so it is easy for me to drop into my electronic watering hole without leaving my chain MY community is both a sacred place, in the sense that I visit it for the sheer pleasure of communicating with my newfound friends, and a practical instrument in the sense that I use it to scan and gather information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring importance, from childcare to neuroscience, technical questions on telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or spiritual subjects, It's a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop: I don't have to move from my desk, there's a certain sense of place to it. It's a little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred ongoing conversations with people who don't care what I look like or sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate. And it's a little like a group mind, where questions are answered, support is given, inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before, and whom I may never meet face to face.

Virtual communities have several advantages over the old-fashioned communities of place and profession. Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race, gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated - as transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or not walking and not talking). Don't mistake filtration of appearances for dehumanization: words on a screen are quite capable of moving one to laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of creating a community from a collection of strangers.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Virtual communities 4

In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then getting to know them. In virtual communities, you can get to know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know people whom you might never meet on the physical plane. In the traditional community, we search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find people who share our values and interests. We then exchange information about one another, share and debate our mutual interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our particular interests are being discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions. In this sense, the topic is the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three-year-old daughter or a 30-year-old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously unknown people you find in that conference. You win find that your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group.

Virtual communities can help their members cope with information overload. The problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much information available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are useful and interesting to us as individuals.

Dreamers in the Artfficial Intelligence research community are trying to evolve "software agents" that can seek and sift, filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000 pages of related information. In my virtual community, we don't have software agents (because they don't exist yet), but we do have informal social contracts that allow us to act as software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, l come across items that don't interest me but which I know one of my group of online friends appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer to the key datum or discussion.

This social contract requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something.

I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my own purposes. And with twenty other people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping others: A perfect fit of altruism and selfinterest. For example, I was invited to join a panel of experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment. The subject of the assessment is "Communication Systems for an Information Age." Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a conference in The WELL and invited assorted information-freaks, technophiles, and communication experts to help me come up with something to say.

By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200 pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to garner that much knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or industrial career, and it took me (and my virtual community) six weeks. The same strategy can be applied to an infinite domain of problem areas, from literary criticism to software evaluation.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Virtual communities 5

Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to faceto-face communication, and these disadvantages must be kept in mind if you are to make use of the advantages of these computermediated discussions. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race or age of a participant also prevents people from communicating the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that constitute the "invisible" but vital component of most faceto-face communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but allimportant nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when all you can see of a person is a set of words on a screen. This lack-of-communication bandwidth can lead to misunderstandings, and is one of the reasons that "flames" or heated diatribes that normally wouldn't crop up often in normal discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in computer conferences.

Other disadvantages stem from the asynchronous and one-to-many nature of online communications. When you talk to somebody on the phone, you know your audience is getting your message right then and there. Electronic mail eliminates telephone tag, but adds a degree of uncertainty When you send someone electronic mad you are never sure when your intended audience will get your message, and when you post a response in a computer conference, you are never sure who is going to get the message. Another advantage that can turn into a disadvantage is the unpredictability of responses: if is refreshing and fun to find all the unexpected angles and digressions people can come up with in response to a question or statement; it is frustrating when the specific you seek is lost in "item drift."

The way to build a virtual community, and to use it effectively, is to spend time to make time. At the beginning there are unknown commands to learn, and new procedures and customs to absorb.

This is the steep part of the learning curve, and many people simply give up, because computer conferencing is not as simple as picking up a telephone or addressing a letter. It can be much more rewarding, however, and there are always people willing to help, which leads to the key advice for building and using a virtual community: don't be afraid to ask questions, and don't hesitate to answer questions. Once you learn your way around, don't be afraid to pose new topics of discussion: plant informational seeds and watch discussions grow around them, and study the ways knowledge emerges from discourse. Use pointers to data or discussions that might interest others - send them and ask for them. Use all the communication tools available to your community: private electronic mail for one-to-one communications and for making arrangements to meet people face-to-face, public computer conferences for one-to-many questions and discussions, planfiles and biographies (your own and others) can help you and your community discover what kind of person you are and where your interests lie; and don't forget that telephones and face to face meetings are still appropriate ways to cement and extend the friendships you make online.

COPYRIGHT 1987 Point Foundation

Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future�

July 2008

Inductive Metanomics: Economic Experiments in Virtual Worlds

By Stephen A. Atlas, Tufts University -Economics Department Abstract This research investigates the viability of gaining insights about the real world through conducting economic experiments in virtual worlds. This paper reviews the relevant metanomics literature, discusses the challenges and benefits of establishing a virtual experimental economics lab, and outlines the major issues associated with applying data collected in virtual worlds to answer questions about real-world behavior. Virtual experimental infrastructure enables a dramatically larger and more diverse sample than typical lab-based experiments studying college students, which can enable a more robust analysis within a given budget. However, while anonymity, variance in perceived social norms, and a low prevailing wage make virtual worlds a compelling place to study social and behavioral research, these features simultaneously limit induction of virtual data to provide insight into similar phenomena outside virtual worlds.

Keywords:

virtual worlds, metanomics, immersionist, augmentationist, experimentalist.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 2

Inductive Metanomics: Economic Experiments in Virtual Worlds

By Stephen A. Atlas, Tufts University -Economics Department

Introduction to Inductive Metanomics Virtual worlds provide a wealth of opportunities for economists and other researchers who seek to generalize insight into individual behavior and decision-making. Enabled by the rise of the Internet, widespread adoption of powerful personal computers, and continuously increasing bandwidth speeds, a number of virtual worlds have emerged over the past decade.

Today, a number of immersive online environments exist, ranging from middle-earth fantasy (World of Warcraft, Everquest), intergalactic combat (Entropia, Eve Online) or postmodern daily life (The Sims, Second Life, There) (Bloomfield 2007). Every day, millions of individuals make very real decisions about their virtual selves, known as avatars, and apply judgment about whether to cooperate with the individuals they encounter.

As virtual worlds become increasingly mainstream, researchers have begun to document the economic forces at work in virtual worlds as the field of “metanomics,” the study of the economics of the metaverse. Accounting Professor Robert Bloomfield, of Cornell University Johnson School of Management divides the field of metanomics into three areas. Immersionist research refers to research within virtual worlds from the residents’ perspective.

Augmentationist research explores how real-world enterprises and individuals use virtual worlds to achieve their strategic goals. Finally, experimentalist research, which encompasses this thesis project, includes carefully controlled tests conducted within virtual worlds ranging from subtle language adjustments that induce framing effects to the tantalizing prospect of exogeneously adjusting macroeconomic variables at reduced risk (Bloomfield 2008).

The classic example of immersionist metanomics research is Indiana Telecommunications Professor Edward Castronova’s 1999 article "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 3

Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.” Wisconsin-trained economist Castronova’s article applies the exchange of virtual goods for real money to calculate the value of Norrath’s economy despite its existence only as bytes on a server farm in San Diego, CA. Consequently, he was able to determine that in Norrath, the nominal hourly wage is $3.43/hr, the unit of currency is valued at $0.0107 and the GNP per capita lies somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. As the first example of rigorous analysis of virtual economies, this article paved the way for economic analysis of virtual worlds. As virtual economies are storehouses of billions of dollars of value, analyzing the economic forces within these worlds is itself a relevant subject in its own right. However, aside from analysis of real-money-transfer (RMT), economists have been heavily underrepresented in contributing research about this space.

In contrast with immersionist research, augmentationist metanomics studies how individuals and organizations leverage virtual worlds to meet their real-world objectives. One example of this type of research is Robert Bloomfield’s weekly virtual talk show, Metanomics, which explores the business and policy issues of virtual worlds such as the fallout from Linden Labs’ abrupt change in banking regulations made in January 2008. Industry research includes a recent Gartner publication that concluded that 90 percent of corporate virtual world projects fail within 18 months due to lack of clear objectives and poorly defined user requirements, but over time virtual worlds could have as large an impact on organizations as the Internet (Gartner 2008).

Arguably all individuals active in virtual worlds, even the most diehard role-players, are there for some augmentationist reason. Indeed, though individuals flock to virtual worlds for a variety of psychological reasons, all such motivations still reflect a conscious decision to log on and an ongoing choice to continue to spend time and effort to participate in virtual worlds.

Bloomfield’s final category of metanomic research is experimentalist, which includes measuring the effects of the deliberate exogenous changes on agents’ decisions. However, as experimentation is really a method rather than an approach, one could further divide such research as either immersionist experimentation or augmentationist experimentation.

Immersionist experimental research is descriptive of behaviors within a specific virtual world and augmentationist experimental research seeks to leverage the benefits of virtual world experimentation to provide insight about real-world behavior. Though immersionist experimental research is valuable in its own right to explore how individuals behave in virtual settings, greater scientific significance results when virtual worlds can contribute to the dialogue about real-world behavior by replicating known experiments in the new setting with a more diverse population, or designing experiments that leverage the unique properties of virtual worlds to study questions difficult to measure in physical labs.

While several notable academics such as Robert Bloomfield and Ted Castronova have called for experimentation through virtual worlds, few true economic experiments have been conducted. One notable exception is a 2007 article by Chesney, Chuah, and Hoffman, who chronicle their experience replicating classic economic experiments including the ultimatum, dictator, public goods, minimum effort, and guessing game. Using sample sizes between 4 and 30 pairs, their experiments are more concerned with replicating classic experiments rather than leveraging the technology to drastically increase the amount of data collected. Their results are generally consistent with findings from physical labs, attributing discrepancies to demographic differences of virtual and undergraduate populations.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 4

Additionally, David Abrams and John List of the University of Chicago are reportedly currently conducting research quantifying the differences between experiments conducted virtually and in labs. According to the July 6, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education, List, who often runs field experiments in microeconomics, says that if he sees people in some tests behaving the same in real-world and virtual environments, he will consider doing more studies in virtual worlds, because they are more cost-effective. “For certain types of games, like bidding and auctions, I think that will generalize quite easily across the virtual world to the lab,” he says. Other studies, though, may work only in face-toface laboratories. “Behaviors are influenced by whether people can link your identity to your behavior,” says Mr. List. “In the virtual world, I think, you're virtually free of these reputational concerns, so you might get people acting in a more self-interested way.”

A phone conversation with Abrams confirmed that their work involves 1) experiments such as testing the same set of subjects both in Second Life (SL) and in a lab to see if their choices differ, 2) testing changes in the physical environment, such as the color of walls or wording of instructions, to see how this influences agents’ choices, and 3) manipulating the subject pool within the virtual worlds to determine how that affects the outcome. Abrams reports that he is interested in creating contracts that offer proper incentives for completing transactions in virtual worlds in the absence of an effective authority to mediate disputes (Personal Interview, 2008).

While Bloomfield provides a useful framework in order to interpret recent economics research, some research appears to fall outside the boundaries of these three categories. Simple demographic studies of virtual world residents or more subjective psychographics used by marketing researchers do not fit in Bloomfield’s paradigm. Additionally, virtual worlds could provide insight into a host of social science research questions through econometric analysis of the terabytes of related data automatically collected by their servers. However, all of these research areas appear to fall outside his metanomics framework unless we expand experimentalist metanomics to include non-experimental metanomics research studying realworld issues. Perhaps a concept such as “inductive metanomics” would suffice to refer to the application of data obtained from virtual worlds to provide insight about the real world. In this context, experimental metanomics is but one method to provide such intuition.

In the process of conducting inductive metanomic research in the form of virtual experimentation, it is worth emphasizing the abundance of unanswered questions limiting the insights carried from the virtual world to the real world. While internal validity issues are paramount in developing meaningful research methods for both immersive and augmentationist inductive metanomics, ecological validity is particularly important in assessing whether observations from virtual worlds are appropriate to provide any insight to reality.

Motivating a Virtual Experimental Economics Lab Experimental economics poses the significant obstacle that researchers must develop their own data sets in order to explore individual economic behavior. One constraint is the high cost of providing test subjects with sufficient payment that not only compensates them for their time but also offers additional incentives to drive their decisions in the experiment. This has impaired the pace at which economic theory has adapted the neoclassical economic assumptions

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 5

driving many models with observations from other social science fields. Recruiting and compensating participants from virtual worlds at a lower cost presents an opportunity to leverage experimental funding for a more robust analysis, made possible through a larger data set drawn from a more diverse pool as compared to the typically sampled college student population.

Using traditional lab based methods, even a short experiment is expensive to finance. At $15 per subject, a $1,000 budget can be expected to finance at most 66 participants that produce 33 observations. It is worth noting that many previous studies suffer from a small sample size due, in part, to cost constraints. In contrast, this study creates a ‘virtual lab’ infrastructure to collect data from nearly 1,500 participants. The methodological key element is the use of a novel recruitment and compensation strategy that exploits the fact that a large number of users in the virtual online platform, Second Life, are willing to participate in return for the virtual currency, called Lindens, which is exchanged with the US dollar at an exchange rate of 265 to one.

Acting in virtual worlds defined by player created content, online ‘gamers’ explore a virtual environment embodied as an avatar, their in-game ‘self.’ As network technology evolves, online games can connect more users simultaneously while faster Internet transfer speeds allow more robust fantasy worlds. This provides an increasingly engrossing environment for gamers, who often work for hours to acquire money that exists outside the virtual world only as bytes in a computer server. Meanwhile, through established virtual-to-real currency exchange vendors, it is possible to buy a large amount of in-game currency. By stimulating participants using this inexpensive in-game currency, a research budget can be applied to answer behavioral questions by motivating gamers to react to experimental incentives as if they were in a lab setting, but at a fraction of the cost.

Constructing the Virtual Lab Developing a virtual lab for conducting economic experiments presented a number of practical considerations not typicalfactors in an experiment’s design, including the selection of an appropriate virtual world, selecting a site, and developing the experimental apparatus. Once these issues were addressed, the study could turn to the more common methodological specifications such as recruiting participants, compensating them, and executing the substance of the experiment.

Virtual World Selection A variety of available virtual worlds presented an important strategic decision in conducting this study. Virtual worlds vary widely by demographics, culture, structure, and economic integration. While demographic and cultural considerations were not important factors in the selection of the world, structure and economic integration were crucial factors in meeting IRB - Institutional Review Board’s ethics requirements as well as developing lab infrastructure fully integrated with the virtual world.

“Structured” worlds, such as Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW) are driven by content created by developer. Conducting an automated experiment in a structured world required either the development company to create content specifically for the purpose of the experiment or for interactions to occur strictly outside the virtual world in a website. As the

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 6

World of Warcraft economy is officially closed, subjects’ payments would be delivered through informal currency vendors operating against the wishes of Blizzard Entertainment. The IRB required that the research plan could not violate the Terms of Service (ToS) of the virtual world provider, which in effect prevented the use of World of Warcraft because it lacked a sanctioned real-money trading (RMT) mechanism. Consequently, if the experiment had been implemented in this space, it could have subjected participants to significant unnecessary risks such as account termination. Thus, World of Warcraft presented a unsatisfactory environment for conducting experiments through a virtual lab.

Alternatively, the “unstructured” world of Linden Labs’ Second Life is defined by the content created by the users themselves. This allowed for the creation of a virtual lab with all subject-facing content existing inside the virtual world without the necessity of involving the game developers themselves. Additionally, the ethical concern present in WoW was eliminated by the fact that the Second Life economy was “open” through sanctioned RMT transfers of the virtual currency, Lindens (L$). In fact, the scripting language used in Second Life allowed for the automatic payment of subjects. The combination of these factors presented a much more promising environment for developing a virtual lab infrastructure. Therefore, Second Life was selected as the site of the Tufts University Virtual Experimental Economics Lab. Selecting and Constructing a Site The diversity of environments available in Second Life provides an abundance of choices for the selection of a virtual lab site. Spanning over 65,000 acres and constantly expanding, the environment of Second Life is limited only by the imagination of its residents, including private beachfront residences, shopping malls of an urban metropolis, zombie-infested streets of a twisted future, or the hallowed lecture halls of academia (Linden Labs, 2008).

The ideal environment of a lab would be a dedicated island in which the terrain is built from the ground up and the entire space can be defined according to the needs of the researcher.

However, such a construction would not be possible without a larger budget: after a 50% discount given to real-world academic institutions, islands are priced at $840 for 16 acres, plus $150 monthly land fees (Linden Labs, 2008). In the absence of access to such great resources for what amounts to an exploratory study, we are left with the option of renting space within the established islands of Second Life.

For the purposes of conducting exploratory research in a foreign space, one of the most critical elements of conducting research was the availability of a local community who could assist with the practical tasks associated with constructing the lab. Etopia Island emerged as a suitable location with an appropriately sized office space in which to construct the lab. The owner of Etopia Island, Williamthewise Goodman, describes Etopia as “Second Life’s premier environmental eco-village showcasing real-life examples of sustainable development, renewable energy, organic living and authentic community.” The particular draw to Etopia was the members of the community, most notably Jojogirl Bailey, who willingly answered the experimenter’s “noob” questions about navigating Second Life’s notoriously painful user interface. Additionally, Etopia was home to a labor force of talented “builders” such as Prim Chemistry, who helped convert the office space to include the décor of a virtual lab, complete with fluorescent lighting. Meanwhile, for the island’s managers, the lab presented an important

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 7

revenue stream and a way of drawing traffic to their community which they continually aspire to grow.

For the purposes of an exploratory study, the objective was to develop a functioning lab.

It is certainly not the case that Etopia Island was the only available option. One could rent a kiosk at a virtual shopping mall, but that comes with a greater loss of control over the stimuli exposed to subjects. Additionally, researchers could rent a variety of other spaces according to their needs; most would probably find a more isolated location to be more appropriate to their needs once they become comfortable with Second Life development tools. Below, images of the Tufts Experimental Economics Lab. Developing the Experimental Apparatus

Figure 1

In order to interact with Second Life residents and automatically collect data, a script was developed through the expertise of Stefan Bornhofen, a computer science doctoral student at the University of Paris. Using Linden Script Language (LSL), a C/Java-style language, we developed a “chair” (see figure 1) with an internal script that automatically 1) confirms that participants are at least 18, 2) displays and captures consent to participate, 3) ensure avatars participate only once, 4) administers different versions of the instructions to comprise several treatments, 5) asks a series of follow-up demographic questions, 6) automatically compensates participants, and 7) sends the data to a centrally managed SQL -Structured Query Language database.

The ability of our apparatus to communicate with users was limited to either text at the bottom of the screen or a blue box at the upper right. While both options could be fashioned to collect the desired data, the blue box seemed to be a better choice. In contrast with the standard chat text used to communicate with other players, the blue box conveyed greater anonymity of players’ selections and had user-friendly buttons instead of requiring a more complex syntax to “whisper” with the device. The picture below shows the typical appearance of this interaction method with users.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 8

In the figure 2, above, we see a screenshot of the apparatus interacting with the user through the blue box in the upper right corner.

Recruiting and Compensating Subjects Subjects were recruited through the placement of classified advertisements in Second Life. Classified ads are browsed by users looking for new areas to explore in Second Life. The full announcement read: Earn L$100-400 in Academic Study Interested in earning some quick Lindens? Come to our economic research lab to participate in a 15-minute academic research study on virtual decisionmaking. If you are over 18, you can earn L$100-400. This project is sponsored by Tufts University and is part of a master's thesis - your responses will not be used for marketing purposes. Places are limited, so come now to ensure you do not miss this opportunity!

(Some keywords: test subject, test subjects, experiments, free lindens, research, linden, earn, job, work, participate, win, clothes, clothing, furniture, skins, skin, pay, buy, sell, event, newbies, newbie, events, shop, new year, cheap, deal, sale, easy job) These keywords are included in the recruitment ad to help increase the frequency it is viewed. SL residents search the classifieds by keyword and the results are sorted by the amount of money paid by the advertiser. Bidding around L$5, 000 per week (around $18) ensured a prominent placement. Once subjects read the announcement, they followed a link that teleported their avatar directly to the lab.

Compensation occurred automatically based on decisions made by the subjects and their counterpart. Participants were exclusively paid in Second Life’s virtual currency, which carried

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 9

an exchange rate of roughly 280 Lindens per USD. It is worth emphasizing that the offer of L$100-400 has an explicit value between 35 cents and $1.40 for 15 minutes of time.

Nevertheless, this is a relatively well-paying job in Second Life. Consequently, demand to participate in the experiment was exceptionally strong; a test of the apparatus with only one available chair exhibited such an abundance of willing participants fights broke out between avatars over who could participate in the experiment next, with subjects ejecting each other from the apparatus.

To keep up with demand, three chairs were included in the full implementation of the virtual lab. This raised a host of additional questions, most notably how to ensure that participants do not participate more than once. Solving this problem required communication between the scripts and a central SQL database. The final version of the script confirmed that the avatar had not participated on another chair previously.

Discussion Limitations This experiment was rife with potential sources of experimenter bias because of its automated construction and lack of a present administrator. On many occasions test subjects spoke to each other or reported that they thought they knew who their partners were. While it was soon corrected by adding additional chairs, some data could have been compromised due to conflict over who was next to use a single available apparatus. In one known instance, a male subject was propositioned for sex while participating in the experiment, with ambiguous consequences. Further experiments could benefit greatly from starting with a more established virtual lab, by hiring a monitor (or simply chat logging) to better document such incidents, and by running experiments in a larger space that allows participants greater privacy.

One major methodological concern with collecting online data is the impact of truthtelling. Theoretically, users are induced to be honest about their preferences regarding their economic decisions with actual fiduciary consequences, as was the case with the main experimental question. However, it is unclear how users valued the virtual currency relative to its real world value, which could distort their choices. Additionally, in contrast with the main experiment question, whether participants accurately provided their demographic information remains a mystery. As David Garman commented while reviewing such data, "I think there is information in the first life answers, but I don't know that it corresponds to the truth." This could conceivably be investigated, in part, by providing a list of avatar names as well as their birth dates and gender to contacts at Linden Labs, the producer of Second Life, who may be willing to report aggregate levels of accuracy of these responses. However, this verification would require modification of the consent form, which is not possible after the fact.

Another method is to infuse demographic questions to include extremely unlikely options to help flag users who may be providing inaccurate demographic data. While the data has not been cleaned for such unreliable demographic data, it would be important to remove the "junk data" before conducting a more rigorous analysis of the provided demographic data.

Additionally, there may be some selection bias present due to users who did not complete the experiment or completed it multiple times. The fact that over 80% of users who started the

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 10

15-minute experiment continued to participate through the end is a promising sign about the former concern. As for the latter, users were prevented from participating more than once with the same avatar, but as their identity was not verified, they could not be prevented from participating again under the guise of another avatar. However, while the large sample size most likely corrects for internal validity issues, overrepresentation in the group who did not complete the experiment could limit its external validity in generalizing to the broader Second Life population.

In sum, there is a lot more research that can be completed by establishing best practices in virtual experimentation and stimulating truth-telling, and this study attempts to help build that foundation.

Answering the Critics Prior to this research being presented, published, or discussed openly, debate had emerged over the use of this methodology. Most notably, John Duffy of the University of Pittsburgh Economics Department has written a working paper criticizing the reliability of data collected from experiments in virtual worlds, citing heavily the lab developed for this research as his case study (Duffy, 2008). Certainly, there are some unresolved methodological concerns with gathering data in online settings. However, it is important to weigh these costs against the benefits of online research.These methods allow us to test the external validity of general principles by experimenting on a different subject pool than the usual undergraduates; additionally, the combination of automated data gathering scripts and a population who are willing to participate at a fraction of the normal cost allows samples to be dramatically larger.

The end result was that online methods allowed the collection of over 1,200 data points over two months on a graduate student budget, realizing a 95% cost savings compared with more traditional laboratory methods. This allowed evaluation of five treatments on this subject pool and the teasing out of more subtle factors that influence behavior that might not be detected in a smaller sample.

Duffy's objections to the virtual experimental methods used in this study appear to be: 1.

Data accuracy. Subjects can be dishonest about their demographic information and are more likely to do so compared with real life.

2.

Selection Bias. There is little control over people who show up to participate and their knowledge of economics, and the low stakes nature of the experiment may result in some subjects dropping out prematurely.

3.

Identity Mapping. "There is little control over whether the same individual is logged in on multiple machines, under different identities, perhaps playing a two-person game with himself."

It is important to note that even if the demographic data may not be perfectly accurate, the substance of the experiment was about subject's behavior during the trust game. On this issue subjects were making decisions with real (in virtual terms) stakes about which they would be truthful. For example, while Duffy did not feel compelled to be accurate about his age and gender, he indeed answered the core experiment question on trust with what he truly believed to

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 11

be the "best" course of action. Other participants’ selections provided results that were consistent with the trust and reciprocity effects observed in the 1995 Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe experiment, in contrast with the subgame-perfect equilibrium expected by neoclassical economic assumptions.

What remains of questionable data integrity, however, are the 28 demographic and background questions that followed the experiment. Indeed some (17%) of participants did not choose to complete the experiment and followup questions. These "partial" data points were dropped from the resulting analysis. Whether patterns in peoples' decisions to drop out prematurely does indeed affect the outcome is a matter that could be tested by further experiments and data analysis.

While the followup questions were indeed not for "extra payment," it is not accurate to say that there was no incentive to complete the survey aspect of the experiment because subjects were required to complete the questions in order to receive any earnings from the prior question.

Nevertheless, Duffy's concerns about the accuracy of subjects' responses is noted and is a real practical consideration in the design of experiments in any setting. In online experiments (both in virtual worlds and in web-based experiments), the absence of an authority could result in users providing inaccurate information on their demographics. One possible way to assess the accuracy of the demographic data would be to verify aspects of the data with previous data provided to Linden Labs (though this was not possible in this study due to the limitations of the confidentiality agreement provided to subjects. Hence I suggest that future experimenters insert a clause into such agreements that would allow them to share the data with the virtual world management company for validation purposes). However, this does beg for further research into mechanisms to elicit truth-telling in anonymous online settings.

Duffy's final concern is that "there is little control over whether the same individual is logged in on multiple machines, under different identities, perhaps playing a two-person game with himself." In anticipation of this, our script prevented individual avatars from participating in the experiment more than once. We also used a delay mechanism between matched players so subjects would not know the identity of their counterpart. These two features made a two-player game with oneself practically impossible.

Underlying this concern, however, there is a legitimate issue about players' use of alternate characters, known as "alts," to participate in the experiment multiple times using different avatars, a practice described earlier as experiment farming. This can sometimes be manually cleaned by noticing obviously duplicated avatars with names such as "Po Potez," "Po1 Potez," etc. My experience is that such experiment farming is most prevalent when participants are offered a large reward for participating in a relatively short experiment.

In closing, Duffy has identified some very real concerns to be addressed in designing effective virtual experiments. In truth, I think he is just scratching the surface about the issues that virtual experimentation needs to overcome. However, to invalidate these methods while in such a nascent state would be an overreaction. I believe the solution is to expand academic inquiry into experimentation in virtual worlds and develop better tools for collecting online data.

In the meantime such confounding issues should certainly be addressed by researchers, and the field is wide open for the design of experiments to demonstrate the dimensions along which subjects behave differently in virtual worlds and the real world.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 12

Opportunities for Further Research Based on the experience gained during this thesis project, a number of open research threads are currently available. These can be broadly categorized into 1) improving small-scale virtual lab infrastructure to eliminate confounds and reduce bias, 2) determine the dimensions by which virtual decision-making departs from decisions in physical labs by replicating established experiments in virtual settings and comparing outcomes, and in this context, 3) applying new technology to answer questions impossible or unethical to investigate in physical labs.

The first area of open research in virtual worlds is in improving the virtual lab infrastructure to support higher quality experiment design. It is suggested that data collected through virtual lab infrastructure embody the following improvements in the design executed in this research project: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Randomize between treatments on each chair, or at least cycle between them in a manner to increase consistency.

Hire "Observer" / "Monitor" to greet participants and document potential incidents.

However, I note that including a monitor introduces a new variability that cannot be scripted practically nor documented fully. My future experiments will likely have a chat logger in use to catch the most egregious incidents.

Explicitly assure users of the anonymity and confidentiality of responses. Ask separate questions for "Second Life" and "Real Life" demographic info.

Provide full assurance that participants are not partnered with anyone currently in the lab.

Also, when dealing with a large group, be extremely clear as to exactly when subjects will be paid.

Repeat their answers at the end of the experiment for subjects to confirm their answers.

To the extent possible, it is advantageous to have cubicles to seclude subjects’ avatars from others in the lab. While they could still conceivably communicate with each other or send instant messages, this more clearly communicates our expectations for silence and prevents unwanted intrusions during the experiment.

Additionally, further virtual experiments could draw on the best practices of the marketing community. Market Truths Ltd. Managing Director, Dr. Mary Gordon, mitigates the effects of those who provide inaccurate answers online through a variety of methods, with the most applicable practices including: 1.

2.

3.

Require that people had been in Second Life for at least 30 days.

Require respondents to have a verified account.

Apply quality control checks, such as consistency checks across multiple small samples and algorithms to identify and remove points of likely "junk" data, as the majority of inaccurate data is provided by a small portion of survey participants.

While developing more consistent methods of conducting virtual experiments in the context of inductive metanomics, one topic that deserves special mention is the virtual behavior bias. This includes the fact that there is a different population in virtual worlds than the real world, as well as the possibility that individuals behave differently online. Consequently, it is yet unclear how an individual’s judgment and decision-making processes differ when mediated through technology. For example, there is some initial evidence that social distance is negatively

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 13

associated with reciprocity (Charness, Haruvy, and Sonsino 2006) but there remain other aspects of virtual association that are yet unexplored. Better understanding of the dimensions of these differences have immediate payoffs in modeling consumer behavior, and also provide enhanced context for additional research to address the heavy external validity issues when engaging in inductive metanomics.

The final area of open inquiry, applied inductive metanomics, is the most intriguing and unbounded. This includes the development and application of new technology to answer questions impossible or unethical to investigate in physical labs. Nick Yee’s research on the Proteus Effect is an excellent example of research leveraging the unique properties of virtual worlds to provide insight into real-world questions. He showed an association between perceived body size and aggressiveness after controlling for actual body size by disconnecting subjects’ perception of their avatar’s height and its actual height (Yee 2007). Another example is that while ethical considerations preclude a trust game experimental design with partners known and present in physical labs due to the threat of fights, virtual worlds could help investigate this effect while mitigating the risk to participants. The above examples would utilize the avatar as the key technological enabler, but other elements of virtual worlds could be similarly utilized for scientific inquiry. Perhaps the most exciting applications will arise from the array of political, economic, and macroeconomic questions that could be explored through the abundance of willing test participants motivated cost-effectively through the virtual currency premium.

It is too early to determine whether virtual world experiments emerge as a revolutionary tool or an interesting diversion. Certainly, there are benefits to be gained from the fact that virtual worlds reduce barriers to conducting experiments. At the very least, virtual labs can provide a pre-test to investigate novel theories without a large expense. Similarly, with the proper guidance, students could design and execute experiments of their own as a class exercise, through the use of virtual world methods. However, the key issue of establishing data collected in virtual worlds as a valid laboratory for testing real-world theories will take a significant amount more research into developing virtual research methods, understanding virtual behavior, and crafting novel research questions to best utilize virtual experiments.

Acknowledgements This project was funded through a generous grant from Tufts’ Graduate School Research Award program. Additionally, I am deeply appreciative of the support of a number of individuals without whose contributions this research would not have been possible. Many thanks to the economics master’s thesis committee, Enrico Spolaore (Tufts), Louis Putterman (Brown), and David Garman(Tufts), for their flexibility and enthusiasm for exploring this new frontier of economic experimentation. As I embarked on a thesis project that blurred the line between the virtual and the real, I was pleasantly surprised by an outpouring of support and advice from the Second Life research community. In particular, Sarah Robbins, Mark Bell, David Abrams, Christina Bolas, Robert Bloomfield, and the residents of Etopia Island were particularly helpful in providing the proper context for conducting academic research in Second Life. Expert technical assistance and advice was provided by University of Paris computer science doctoral candidate Stefan Bornhofen, who wrote outstanding code underlying the data collection apparatus.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 14

Bibliography Abrams, D. (2007). A Primer on the Economics of Virtual Worlds. Working paper, University of Chicago Law School..

Bloomfield, R. (2008). Blast from the Past: Metanomics 101, Revisited. Metanomics 2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Business and Policy in the Metaverse. Jan 29 2008. < http://www.metanomics.net/29-jan-2008/blast-past-metanomics-101-revisited > Bloomfield, R. (2008). Worlds for Study: Invitation; Virtual Worlds for Studying Real-World Business (and Law, and Politics, and Sociology, andâ&#x20AC;Ś). Working paper, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

Castronova, E. (2001). Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. Working paper, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University Bloomington.

Castronova, E. et. al. (2008). Synthetic Worlds as Experimental Instruments. Video Game Theory Reader II. Routledge. Spring.

Charness, G.; Haruvy, E. & Sonsino, D. (2007, May). Social Distance and Reciprocity: An Internet Experiment. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 63.1 : 88-103.

Chesney, T.; Chuah, S. & Hoffmann, R. (2007). Virtual World Experimentation: An Exploratory Study. Working paper, Nottingham University Business School.

Duffy, J. (2008). Trust in Second Life. Working paper, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh.

Gartner Inc. (2008). Gartner Says 90 Per Cent of Corporate Virtual World Projects Fail Within 18 Months. Press Release. May 15, 2008. < http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=670507&format=print >.

Gordon, M. (2008). Follow Up Comments. Griefers in Virtual Research and the Truth Serum.

Metanomics. March 2008. < http://metanomics.net/25-mar-2008/griefers-virtual-research-and-truth-serum#comments >.

Linden Labs. (2008, Feb.). Land: islands. Second Life I Land: Islands. < http://secondlife.com/community/land-islands.php >.

Linden Labs. (2008, Feb.). The World. Second Life | The World. < http://secondlife.com/whatis/world.php >.

Linden Labs. (2008, Jun.) Private Region Pricing. Second Life | The World. < http://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php > Yee, N. & Bailenson, J. (2007). The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed SelfRepresentation on Behavior. Human Communication Research, 33, 271-290. < http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20&%20Bailenson%20%20Proteus%20Effect%20(in%20press).pdf >.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Inductive Metanomics 15

Recommended Resources 1.

Virtual-Economy.org carries an extensive bibliography on academic papers on virtual economics, with a focus on real-money trade and virtual property.

http://virtual-economy.org/bibliography 2.

Rob Bloomfieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Metanomics is a weekly broadcast about business and policy issues affecting the metaverse. http://metanomics.net/

3.

Terra Nova often carries articles and discussions of interest to virtual economic researchers. http://terranova.blogs.com/

4.

Second Life Research Listserv (SLRL) and Virtual Worlds Research Listserv (VWRL) are mailing lists of virtual world researchers. These links are

http://list.academ-x.com/listinfo.cgi/slrl-academ-x.com and https://utlists.utexas.edu/sympa/info/vw-research

Vol. 1. No. 1.

ISSN: 1941-8477 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Futureâ&#x20AC;?

July 2008

Virtual World and Real World Permeability: Transference of Positive Benefits for Marginalized Gay and Lesbian Populations

By Dr. Jonathan Cabiria, Professor of Psychology, Baker College, Flint, Michigan.

Abstract This study looks at how marginalized gay and lesbian people experience social pressures to conform to hetero-normative culture, how those pressures may lead to negative states, and how positive experiences in online virtual worlds would provide benefits over time and, presumably, become transferable into real life. I will show that engagement with Second Life can be a positive experience and that this positive experience can extend beyond the virtual world to provide lasting benefits in real life.

The implications for educators are impressive. In creating virtual world communities, educators, psychologists, and other researchers can provide a safe harbor in which marginalized people can more fully explore their identities and develop the positive coping skills needed to deal with real world stigmatizing influences, which originate within the social environment. For scientists and technology innovators, the creation of virtual world communities and gaming/training programs would be an exciting path to explore, especially for those interested in social justice concerns.

Keywords:virtual worlds, marginalization, positive, gay, lesbian, psychological development, broaden-and-build, educational technology.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Virtual World and Real World Permeability 2

Virtual World and Real World Permeability: Transference of Positive Benefits for Marginalized Gay and Lesbian Populations

By Dr. Jonathan Cabiria, Professor of Psychology, Baker College, Flint, Michigan.

In constructionist studies, the idea that there is an objectively identifiable truth about an individual and his or her social life gives way to other concepts about multiple identities that fluidly maneuver among various socio-cultural settings. This means that behaviors and values within certain social groups cannot be effectively studied by comparing them only with a more universal norm (Cerullo, 1992; Gergen & Davis, l985). Constructionism asks that we suspend belief about commonly accepted understandings and invites us to challenge the objective basis of conventional knowledge.

Social construction looks at the ways in which people account for who they are and how they interact with other people. It is concerned with how social phenomena evolve from the social environments in which they occur. A social construction will appear as a normal occurrence to those within a particular social group, but may appear as strange, or even perverse, to those not within that group. Social constructions are generally defined as artifacts of human activities and philosophies rather than as inherent natural laws (Hacking, 1999;Wilson & Gutierrez, 1995).

Identity is typically understood as the central psychosocial construction of the adolescent or young adult who seeks to understand who he or she is and how he or she fits into the adult world (McAdams, 1988). During the identity-forming stages of adolescence, any number of factors can influence how oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of self is formed. For those who feel marginalized, a sense of place in the world can be wrought with difficulties in the struggle to successfully deal with developmental stages and emerge with a more or less intact identity of self.

Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s self-esteem and their self-concept change in sheer reaction to the kinds of people among whom they find themselves, and change even more in response to the positive or negative remarks that people make to or about them (Gergen, l982). For marginalized people, withdrawal from society or anti-social behavior is a strategy of accommodating to the cultural status quo. Individuals choose these behaviors to manage what is considered a deviant identity; it makes possible social respect and integration, even if it may cost the individual his or her sense of personal integrity and well-being (Seidman, 2002).

Gay and Lesbian Identity Construction Isolation was cited as the most frequently presented problem at a New York City services center for gay and lesbian people (Hetrick & Martin, 1987). The researchers noted that this isolation "was often quite extensive and was realized in three major areas: social isolation, emotional isolation, and cognitive isolation" (p. 31) and that "suicide ideation and attempts are sometimes major results of the almost total isolation suffered by homosexual youth" (p. 33).

Plummer (1989) adds that the absence of positive role models and the development of the negative self results in social stressors that contribute to the sense of isolation and difference.

These stressors are often reported by gay and lesbian people as they come to terms with their sexual orientation (Hershberger & Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Augelli, 2000).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Virtual World and Real World Permeability 3

The result of a neglected and devalued basic part of a gay or lesbian person’s personality leads to a loss of self-esteem (Gonsiorek, 1995). The author notes that researchers theorize how those with severe narcissistic injuries constitute the bulk of gay and lesbian people with histories of suicide attempts, alcohol and drug use, and increased use of mental health services (Gonsiorek, 1995). As in heterosexual people, self-esteem has been consistently found to be crucial for healthy identity development. However, gay and lesbian people may hold the same stereotypical views of themselves as might the general society, and they may have internalized these often negative views without awareness (Hershberger & D’Augelli, 2000).

Self-acknowledgment of one’s same-sex orientation is considered one of the most important developmental tasks for a gay or lesbian person (D’Augelli & Patterson, 1995; Garnets & Kimmel, 2003). In an ideal world, one’s same-sex orientation would become positively integrated into the developmental process. However, this process is made difficult because of a host of negative feedback upon revelation to others: potential parental rejection, peer rejection, internalization of society’s prejudice, and the lack of good role models (Isay, 1996). These very real systems of suppression and exclusion cause the “suppressed and excluded to unconsciously believe in the evil image which they are made to represent by those who are dominant” (Erikson, 1980). For the gay or lesbian person struggling with a stigmatizing sexual identity, dealing with all of the life issues surrounding one’s sexual identity can be a process of conflict and distress.

With pressures from family and peers to be heterosexual, gay and lesbian people face unique hurdles in their efforts to develop a healthy sense of self (Savin-Williams, 1995). As we shall see, there is a place for virtual worlds in positive developmental processes, which I refer to as developmental redirection, identity redirection, and identity reconstruction.

The Importance of Community A person strengthens one’s social identity through either the expression of important personal values or the expression of values and beliefs of the group from whom one desires approval and acceptance (Herek, 1994). Ultimately, the social identity function of attitudes serves to increase feelings of self-esteem (Luchetta, 1999). Additionally, national surveys find that when someone claims to have five or more friends with whom they can discuss important problems, they are 60% more likely to say that they are “very happy” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997).

The path to a happy adulthood depends upon a young person’s ability to build authentic relationships in which they can freely discuss and explore their own sexual identities. It is clear that having access to a community that provides the support and companionship to build healthy relationships and increase self-esteem is an important factor in achieving and/or maintaining good mental health for the gay or lesbian person.

Research in social psychology has revealed different motivations for individuals to join groups. According to Social Identity Theory (Hogg & Hains, 1996; Tajfel, 1978; Turner, 1978, 1985), people form a social identity that is constructed from the values, attitudes, and behavioral intentions of the social group to which they aspire to belong. These motivations for joining traditional, face-to-face groups upon which much of past research has focused can be extended to examine membership in virtual world communities (Ridings & Gefen, 2004).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Virtual World and Real World Permeability 4

Virtual World Communities Over the past two years, there has been a dramatic rise in participation in virtual world communities such as Second Life, and a similar increase in social groups in these venues. What has not been adequately studied is the effect of participating in virtual world communities on their members, or whether participation in virtual world communities can be a recommended activity to ease the harmful effects of real life marginalization.

In my research, I examined the differences and similarities that study participants indicated when describing their real world and virtual world life experiences. I paid particular attention to narratives that indicated changes in loneliness, isolation, depression, self-esteem, and optimism/pessimism. I attempted to arrive at theories regarding the usefulness of virtual world environments for marginalized people, especially gay and lesbian populations. I anticipated that virtual world communities could serve as safe harbors for identity exploration and that likely positive benefits derived from virtual world experiences could be transferred to real world situations.

One place that gay and lesbian people now spend a considerable amount of time is in online settings, and these online venues have been linked to identity exploration (Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Turkle, 1995). Identity is often characterized as one's interpersonal characteristics (Calvert, 2002) and involves a sense of continuity of self-image over time (Grotevant, 1998).

With sexual maturation come changes in the roles that one is expected to assume with members of the opposite sex, and for the young person it is increasingly expected to assume a sexual identity, one of the markers and anchors of a mature identity (Erikson, 1993; Grotevant, 1998).

While physical constraints such as the body, biological sex, race, or age can have a profound effect on self-definition and self-presentation (Collins & Kuczaj, 1991), these attributes become flexible in virtual worlds. In fact, the anonymous nature of virtual world environments allows more flexibility in exploring identity through the persona one assumes in the form of a self-constructed avatar (Calvert, 2002; Huffaker & Calvert, 2005).

During adolescence, sexual orientations often emerge (Grotevant, 1998). While the challenges of assuming a mature sexual identity occur for all youth, these challenges may be particularly difficult for those who are gay or lesbian. Historically, gay and lesbian people encountered discrimination, disparagement, and even punishment (Foucault, 1978). Even now, gay and lesbian youth face sexual identity issues that they may not be able to discuss with their families and peers (Grotevant, 1998). However, in a virtual world, adolescents may feel more comfortable expressing their sexual orientation and exploring their sexual identity. Disclosing one's sexual identity online may also provide a way for gay and lesbian youth to find others who share their sexual identity (Huffaker & Calvert, 2005).

The structure and design of virtual worlds allows users to freely explore many facets of their personalities in ways that are not easily available to them in real life. The â&#x20AC;&#x153;Artâ&#x20AC;? of virtual reality environments provides users with carefully structured opportunities to allow them to explore, strategize, and generally feel some sense of control over what they are doing (McMahon, 2003). This is an important design element that allows for social problem-solving and is well-suited for young people looking to re-socialize as gay or lesbian people. Studies concerning virtual worlds have found such worlds to have great significance to players for

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Virtual World and Real World Permeability 5

identity and community (Turkle, 1995). In fact, it appears that virtual worlds, such as Second Life, can function as a therapeutic tool. Research to date has shown that those with few friends in real life feel happier as they spend more hours in Second Life (de Nood & Attema, 2006).

Theory of Positive Emotions I have seen in the narratives within my research study how gay and lesbian identity construction could have been obstructed in real life. It is conceivable that, in Second Life, it can be reformulated. Expressions of relief, sense of belonging, and feelings of authenticity, among others, provide positive affects that encourage the participants to seek out ways in real life to maintain and/or increase these good feelings that they have found in Second Life. This brings me to the theoretical underpinning of this research project, the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.

The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions proposes that resilience and coping within stressful and negative environments can be brought about through small positive experiences. Researcher Barbara Fredrickson hypothesized that when people are exposed to negative experiences, they tend to direct their focus onto the problem (Fredrickson, 2001). This prevents them from accessing the wealth of cognitive associations that lie outside of the narrow focus, essentially reducing their ability to creatively solve the problem or to see it in a different light. Conversely, Fredrickson noted that when people are exposed to positive emotions, they tend to make better use of their cognitive associations, and are more able to engage in discovery and innovation, and to apply more creative positive solutions to their problems or situations. In this way, the person within a negative state, when exposed to a meaningful positive stimulus, can react in a manner that causes him or her to explore potential solutions that may lie outside of the problem itself. Once a solution has been achieved, the positive benefit of that solution engenders further solution-creating capabilities to be applied to other negative affects and situations.

In this study, the evidence to support this theory is quite compelling. Repeatedly, participants note how the positive experiences they gain in Second Life make their way into real lives. Some mention how they have gained hope for a better real life; others note how they found a lost part of themselves and now plan to incorporate that desirable lost part into their real lives. For some, the effects are dynamic; for others, the effects are only just now starting to become evident. Given the relatively brief duration of this study, it is not possible to predict how lasting these positive benefits would be, but it appears, at least for some participants, that real life changes are happening.

Empirical support for the utility of positive emotions has come from a multitude of studies. For example, an impressive research program (Isen, 1990) has shown that positive emotions facilitate creative problem solving. Furthermore, research has shown that the psychological processes of people experiencing positive emotions are characterized by a global rather than a local focus (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; Gasper & Clore, 2002; Kimchi & Palmer, 1982), suggesting that positive emotions help to broaden the scope of attention (Fredrickson, 2003). This perspective on positive emotions might help explain why those who experience positive emotions, even during stressful situations, are able to benefit from their â&#x20AC;&#x153;broadenedâ&#x20AC;? outlook and regulate their negative emotional experiences (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). It is likely that engagement in virtual world communities, for some gay and lesbian people, would provide positive emotions as described by Fredrickson and others.

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Research Questions This study specifically looked at the virtual world known as Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world community that is built by its members. The activities that occur in Second Life are as varied as those in real life, and the purposes for which people use Second Life are also diverse. Of these many activities and purposes, I analyzed how my study participants utilized virtual world resources to help them deal with real-life issues. I anticipated that gay and lesbian people who experienced multiple negative effects in real life as a result of their sexual orientations would find therapeutic benefit by engaging in online virtual world social communities. I explored whether or not these benefits could then be transferable to their real lives.

In this project, I wanted to discover, using grounded theory methods, whether there was meaningful opportunity for, and support of, change in affective states for gay and lesbian people in a virtual world space, and if this led to positive emotions that could be transferred to the real world. Such investigations typically necessitate gathering “… intensive and/or extensive information from a purposively derived sample, and they involve interpretation of unstructured or semi-structured data” (Bazely, 2007). The goal was to suggest ways in which psychologists and educators could help marginalized people, such as gay and lesbian people, to discover ways in which they might explore healthy identity formation, thus opening the door toward increased capacity for cognitive improvements as a result of reduced negative affect, as theorized by Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.

Methodology This study utilized qualitative research methods to bring to light the value that a social outlet like Second Life provides. It sought to uncover the meaning that could be derived from the virtual world experiences of the participants. A grounded theory approach guided the analysis utilizing software analysis tools and manual coding for category creation. When exploring which methodological approach should be considered for this study, I looked at the existing literature, the study participants, the context within which the participants interacted, and the goals of the study. To help guide my decision-making, I utilized a checklist by Marshall and Rossman that indicates qualitative research is an appropriate choice because the following conditions exist (Marshall & Rossman, 2006): • • • •

Research that elicited multiple constructed realities, studied holistically Research that elicited tacit knowledge and subjective understandings and interpretations Research that delved in-depth into complexities and process Research on little-known phenomena or innovative systems (p. 53)

The data was collected from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The analysis of individual questionnaire responses helped to shed more light on the meaning that participants gave to the intersection of their real and virtual world lives, and content analysis of the interviews and questionnaire open-ended responses helped me to discover emerging themes during the process of comparing and contrasting participant responses. There is a significant body of work that describes mixed qualitative analysis methods for qualitative research, as well as support for each individual component.

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Data Generation One hundred and thirty participants were in the initial population, from which thirty-two were selected to continue through the first phase of the study. Of these, fourteen participants were asked to complete the full study. All participants in the study filled out three questionnaires during various points in the process, and agreed to participate in a minimum of two, one-hour interview sessions. Once the participants had filled out the questionnaires, the data were downloaded from the survey website into an Excel spreadsheet document. The open-ended questionnaire responses were exported to a text analysis software program, SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys, for content categorization, and the demographic questionnaire responses were analyzed using SPSS for Windows v15 to show descriptive statistics. The text transcripts from the interviews were exported to SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys for extraction of meaningful terms and categorization. The text was also hand-coded. The results of hand-coding and software coding were compared and contrasted as the analysis progressed in the search for emergent themes and theories.

Data Analysis In qualitative research activities, it is important that steps be tracked through every phase of the study. This provides the transparency that allows other researchers to understand how conclusions are made. Called an audit trail, the recording of my actions included process notes, intentions notes, personal reactions notes, and instrumentation notes. In addition to the journal and memo notes, the textual transcriptions of the interviews were interpreted. The textual data were combined into one composite text and analyzed. They were also analyzed individually.

Grounded theory is an iterative process in which interviewing, coding, and analyzing will occur in overlapping phases as new data become available. Once the initial data have been collected, it is analyzed for emergent themes. Participants were selected after an initial screening, and the interview process was adjusted in order to further explore the ongoing analysis, broaden the explanation, and to deepen details through a process known as saturation.

Saturation occurs when no new substantial information about a topic is revealed through the interview and analysis process.

Summary of Results This study looked at two areas of the participants’ lives – their real world experiences as gay or lesbian people and their virtual world experiences as gay or lesbian people. The purpose of the real world study was two-fold: 1) to see if the participants’ experiences as gay or lesbian people were similar to those reported in various studies conducted over the past few decades, and 2) to establish a point-of-reference in comparing real and virtual world experiences. The results of the real world portion of this study indicated that the participants’ experiences were in line with prior accepted studies, and that these experiences led to the expected emerging themes of loneliness, isolation, depression, low self-esteem, withdrawal, lack of authenticity, and lack of useful information. Specifically, these expected results dealt with developmental obstruction, negative psychological affect of being in the closet, the power of hetero-normative forces, and compartmentalization, to name a few. While not every participant indicated all seven emergent themes, each participant experienced multiple effects in meaningful ways, as demonstrated by the representative excerpts from the interview transcripts and the questionnaire responses.

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The purpose of the Second Life portion of the study was also two-fold: 1) to see if there was any difference between stated real world and virtual world experiences with regard to being gay or lesbian, and 2) to see if the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions had applicability. It appeared from the analysis that there were several differences between real and virtual world experiences, and that seven main themes emerged from the data, namely belongingness, connectedness, improved well-being, higher self-esteem, optimism, sense of authenticity, and evidence of transferable positive benefits.

In addition, I found a clear juxtaposition in constructs of real and virtual when several participants indicated feeling more “real” in their “artificial” lives and more “artificial” in their “real” lives. I also found evidence to support the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions when participants indicated how discrete positive events in Second Life empowered them to seek positive change in their real lives. Overall, the research questions, which served as the foundations of the development of the questionnaires, semi-structured interview process, and analysis process, were well-served by this study. I wanted to discover, using grounded theory methods, whether there is meaningful opportunity for, and support of, change in affective states for gay and lesbian people in a virtual world space, and if this leads to positive emotions that can be transferred to the real world.

Many of the real world responses indicated a sense of loneliness, isolation, and depression as a result of being closeted. Additionally, due to the negative attitudes of society toward gay and lesbian people, many of the participants indicated through their stories low selfesteem. Several of the participants noted in the general comments boxes in the real life questionnaire how reflecting upon their real lives as gay or lesbian people (when answering the questions) was causing them to feel increasingly sad or depressed. However, there is a clear change in attitude when discussing Second Life effects.

The data appear to show some very compelling evidence that there are significant changes in affect when many of the participants are discussing their real world lives and their virtual world lives. Part of the reason for this appears to stem from a sense of personal authenticity that seems to be missing in their real lives. In fact, it was such a major emerging theme throughout all of the questionnaires and interviews that I wanted to address it separately.

The theme of authenticity can be seen as the instigator for the other emerging themes, such as sense of belongingness, connectedness, higher self-esteem and better sense of well-being. In fact, all of the participants note, at various points in their narratives, words and phrases that are implicit or explicit in meaning with regard to acting unauthentically or authentically. Even those who have heavily compartmentalized their lives in order to have some level of comfort in a hetero-normative society had expressed how authentic they feel in Second Life.

Along with this expression of authenticity are the positive effects some of the participants indicated as a result of their Second Life experiences. Not only do we see the participants acknowledging positive effects and making explicit remarks about how these effects are not present in their real lives, we also see indications of comparisons between their real and virtual world lives, including a few very telling statements that seem to juxtapose the real and the virtual.

The participants’ expressions of authenticity, positive benefits, and juxtaposition of real and virtual events also convey their desire to experience Second Life not as a unidirectional

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source of real life improvement (from Second Life into real life), or as a unidirectional source of real life escape (from real life into Second Life), but as a bidirectional experience in which there is constant transference of benefit from and to each.

Implications In the real world, it is not always possible for some people to either gain easy access to gay and lesbian communities, or they are just simply too afraid to make face-to-face connections in what may seem like a very hidden and unfamiliar culture. Certainly, those who work with marginalized populations have a variety of suggestions and resources that they can provide to them to help ease them into a supportive environment. For some, Second Life may be a good intermediary step toward the goal of living wholly and authentically. I have seen how some of the participants entered Second Life, timid and non-committed, only to eventually embrace what it offered them. Some of the stories showed how they evolved from thinking about their sexual orientations as behaviors, only to emerge from their Second Life experiences with a sense of healthy identities.

The positive benefits that participants gained, and which they have carried over into their real lives, suggests a certain degree of permeability between the two environments. As a study participant implied, perhaps I should not be thinking in terms of two unconnected places, real and virtual, because it creates a social construction that places an artificial membrane between the two. Perhaps, due to the high permeability, I should consider real life and Second Life as simply â&#x20AC;&#x153;one life.â&#x20AC;?

Ultimately, this is a study about positive media effects and their influence on marginalized populations. Many research studies and discussions about online social communities focus on negative effects. They discuss findings that deal with addictive behavior, anti-social engagements, violence, sexism and racism, distraction from other learning opportunities, the decline of meaningful social interactions, and concern about the blurring of real and virtual, to name just a few. However, in Second Life, there is a strong and active group of educators and researchers, almost 6,000 strong, who are looking at the use of online social environments from a positive perspective. Because it is a new environment, there is much research to still take place before we can conclusively argue its value over other forms of social interaction and learning, and its functionality as a means of social interaction and learning.

While this study presents some initial conclusions, it is by no means definitive. There is further need for more research and for research that approaches the same issues from a variety of perspectives and methodologies.

Recommendations for Future Research Based upon this study, I propose that some gay and lesbian populations would find positive benefit from engagement in Second Life and other virtual worlds as it pertains to their developmental paths. Additionally, I offer that engagement in Second Life or other virtual worlds can provide the means to live a more authentic life, and can reduce real world stigmatizing effects of loneliness, isolation, depression, low self-esteem, and pessimism. I would theorize that Second Life, due to the safe harbor it offers gay and lesbian people, sets up an environment in which positive effects such as sense of belonging and connection, enhanced wellbeing and self-esteem, and transferability of positive effects can occur.

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Research into the effects of virtual world experiences on marginalized groups, such as gay and lesbian populations, is in its infancy. To my knowledge, as of this date, there has been no formal research exploring the positive benefit of the redirection of their developmental paths using virtual world environments, or of the transferability of their positive effects from their virtual world to their real world lives. This current study is just the beginning step. As future researchers build upon this information, the collective body of research will, at some point, be able to claim findings that are generalizable to larger populations, as well as provide insights into the uniqueness of each individual experience. Of special interest would be studies looking at other marginalized populations, including stigmatized students with learning difficulties, geographically isolated groups, differently-abled persons, and those with social disorders, to name a few.

The self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

-- Thomas Szasz (1920- ) American Psychiatrist

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar!

By James Elliott, Elliott Security Group

Abstract Virtual worlds are fantastic places for people all over the world to come together and collaborate, socialize, as well as buy and sell goods. Unfortunately, criminals have discovered that virtual worlds can be used to commit crimes and violence against the citizens of the virtual worlds. This paper reviews many of those crimes and steps users must take to protect themselves from becoming a victim of fraud or other crimes that occur in Second Life.

Keywords: second life, virtual crimes, griefing, phishing.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! 2

Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar!

By James Elliott, Elliott Security Group Fraud, Violence, Theft – Just the Beginning As history shows, criminals have always been eager to take advantage of unsuspecting victims using any means available. When the internet emerged, criminals quickly sprung into action to take advantage of this new media. Criminals have carried out Nigerian e-mail scams (419), auction fraud, hacking into websites to steal information, credit card fraud, phishing, stock “pump and dump” scams, and the list goes on and on.

Criminals see that millions of people are online and are easy targets to exploit. Bank robbers are an excellent example case study. These criminals realized that instead of walking into a bank, holding up a gun, and demanding money, it was much less risky to hire a person with computer skills to sit thousands of miles away and hack into the bank’s infrastructure. The bank robbers were effectively still robbing the bank, except instead of walking away with physical cash (and probably a dye pack), the robbers were obtaining account numbers, social security numbers, and other valuable personal information. This information could then be converted into cash through re-selling or purchasing goods online. Criminals knew it would be much harder to be prosecuted if thousands of miles away from where the crime was committed.

On top of this, not all law enforcement agencies are technically savvy and many do not have the manpower to investigate computer crime; and this does not even take into consideration cyber legislation and potential extradition issues.

Activist groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have also recognized the power of the internet. Instead of having to round up thousands of people to go out and protest in public, they have found it is easier to create “electronic disturbances” (Earth Liberation Front, 2007). Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is attack software that has been widely utilized by these as well as other groups to launch crippling attacks on many organizations’ websites. These attacks have caused tremendous financial losses to the victim organizations.

Linden Labs (LL) was founded by Philip Rosedale in 1999. LL’s mission is “to connect us all to an online world that improves the human condition” (lindenlab.com, 2007). LL’s major development was Second Life (SL), a virtual world that began in June 2003. It is not a game, but a place to socialize, build local and regional environments, and engage in a virtual economy (Mennecke, Terando, Janvrin & Dilla, 2007). SL users interact through “avatars,” also known as “residents,” a computer representation of oneself that can be customized. Registering and creating an avatar is an anonymous process unless a membership is purchased (not required). In December 2005, the 100,000 registered user milestone was reached. At the time of this writing, SL’s website shows that there are approximately 1.3 million members that have logged in within the last 60 days (lindenlab.com, 2007). SL purports that there are more than 12 million registered avatars. This number can be misleading because some are inactive and individuals may have multiple accounts or avatars. The official currency used is called Lindens; the exchange rate is approximately US$1 to L$265 to EUR$.678 (Reuters, E., 2007). Approximately $1.2 to $1.7

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! 3

million US Dollars are exchanged for Linden Dollars on a daily basis within this virtual world.

Figure 1 shows the volume of Lindens exchanged during the last 27 months (Second Life, 2008).

Figure 1 – LindeX Market Volume (Second Life, 2008)

Corporate use of SL to sell goods and services includes external research, marketing and communications, and internal and external collaboration. All of these bring additional security risks to the organization and users must exercise caution in uncontrolled virtual worlds, such as SL. All communications are transmitted over public networks, even if meetings are held in “private” locations (Carr, 2007; Prentice, 2007). Current business uses of SL include IBM, once they decided to use SL, they had more than 3,000 employees in-world in less than 3 months (Kirkpatrick, 2007); a job fair was held for real-life jobs recruiters from Accenture, EMC Corporate, GE Money, and US Cellular (Schalch 2007); BP has developed a program for employee ethics and compliance in SL (Monahan, Harvey, & Ullberg, 2007); the medical community is using SL with people suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, often referred to highfunctioning autism, to help with their condition (Phillips, 2008); and Zora, another virtual experiment was used to foster civic engagement in participants aged 11-17 (Bers & Chau, 2006).

Just a few of the other businesses that currently participate in SL include: Adidas, American Apparel, Circuit City, Cisco, Dell, Reuters, Sears, Starwood Hotels, Sun Microsystems, Sundance, and Toyota (Hemp, 2006; LaPlante, 2007; Stein 2007). Educational institutions are also involved in SL; Cheal (2007) found that SL is not just a fad, but part of a continuum of instructional technology. Educational examples of SL include practice nursing at Tacoma Community College (Carnevale, 2007), public health preparedness at University of Illinois Chicago (Ullberg, Monahan, & Harvey, 2007), economics lectures at Chicago’s law school (Foster, 2007), and architecture classes by Terry Beaubois at Montana University (Newitz, 2006). Many other universities have a presence, including University of Idaho, New York University, Vassar, La Cittadella, Bowling Green State University, DePaul University, and University of Southern Denmark. Politicians are also getting involved in SL. Hillary Clinton has an avatar, both a democratic headquarters (place) and republican headquarters (place) have been established, and a Dick Cheney Hunt club (group) has even been set up.

Recognizing there is money to be made and disturbances to cause, criminals and attackers have entered into virtual worlds such as SL. These malicious users have quickly caused many problems. From carrying out thefts, fraud, pyramid schemes, and even a form of denial of service attacks called “griefing,” these users are causing headaches for LL and for the virtual

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! 4

residents of SL (Weslander, 2006). Unfortunately, there appears to be no fix in sight for stopping many of these crimes. The types of crimes being carried out will be described in the next section.

Types of Crimes, Fraud, and Disturbances in Second Life As noted in the previous section, online attackers have found SL to be a fantastic place to steal, cause disturbances, and commit various crimes. Some of the crimes being carried out in SL are described below.

Griefing. Griefing is defined as “purposefully engaging in activities to disrupt the gaming experience of other players” (Mulligan & Patrovsky, 2003) or “a player of malign intentions… will hurt, humiliate and dishevel the average gamer through bending and breaking the rules of online games… want glory, gain or just to partake in a malignant joy at the misfortune of others” (Rossingol, 2005). Accidentally bumping or pushing other avatars are not included as a griefing, although it often happens unintentionally with new users (Gregson, 2007). As noted in multiple SL Herald articles, griefing incidents have risen drastically over the past year (Ludwig, 2006).

One simply needs to review the SL Police Blotter to see that the number of incidents involving harassment, vandalism, and specifically griefing are up tremendously (Second Life Website, 2007a).

Griefers have even formed “invasion groups” that work to cause public disruption and annoyance (Griefing in Second Life, 2007). A few examples of recent griefing attacks performed by the SL Invasion Group include: • Blocking the exit doors on a disco’s private rooms and filling the dance floor with an annoying large box.

• Building walls containing swastikas.

• Detonating nuclear bombs in crowded areas.

• Using a weapon called “the Cosby Block” which fills an area with hundreds of posters of Bill Cosby.

• Mario mosh pit – an attack that floods an area with images of Nintendo’s Mario character.

Images showing these attacks are available by visiting Griefing in Second Life, 2007 reference Need this reference here. Without a required registration process that involves users entering a credit card or other mechanism that validates user id’s, these attacks will continue to occur.

Phishing. Phishing is a combination of a real world and virtual crime. There are now approximately 12 million SL avatars at this time and criminals have found that the established technique of phishing is working well. Phishing is described by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (2007) as:

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! 5

using both social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials. Social-engineering schemes use 'spoofed' e-mails to lead consumers to counterfeit websites designed to trick recipients into divulging financial data such as credit card numbers, account user names, passwords and social security numbers.

To “phish” end users, criminals will e-mail potential victims, posing as a LL employee and ask the user for their username and password for SL. Many times, users receive an e-mail stating there is a problem with their account and that they must click on the link provided by the attacker to validate their account. Once the user does this, they have effectively provided the attacker with their credentials. Now that the attacker possesses the user’s credentials, the attacker can transfer funds out of the end user’s account, assume the user’s identity, change their avatar, or perform any other action as if they are that person (for example, committing crimes).

Money laundering. Although a virtual world, SL has a real economy in which users can buy and sell items using Linden Dollars (lindenlabs.com, 2007). As noted on the SL website, there are several online resources that allow residents to convert Linden Dollars into US Dollars or other currency, and vice versa. Rates fluctuate based on supply and demand. Currently, no Federal agency like the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is monitoring transactions being converted from Linden Dollars to other currencies (Koster, 2007). This provides an excellent back channel for terrorists, organized crime, and even regular business owners to transfer funds to parties undetected. The scenario that Kenneth Rijock suggests is just one example of how criminals can use virtual worlds to funnel money illicitly (Rijock, 2007).

The scenario starts by first opening 15 to 25 accounts at SL’s website, all with counterfeit identification. Next, fund the accounts with narcotics proceeds, all patiently deposited at the available ATMs by smurfs and then purchase some virtual real estate from a co-conspirator.

This co-conspirator is just one of the bogus identities. Next, funnel all the virtual purchase money into this account and then the "seller" can access these funds, either through ATMs or through a bank. Perhaps the criminal can open a small bank account, using a bogus ID, and obtain cashiers' checks with the now-converted "virtual" profits (Rijock, 2007).

LL realizes that there are many legitimate Linden dollar exchanges and has developed an Exchange Risk API in an attempt to cut down on fraud (Second Life Website, 2007b). However, the Federal regulating bodies such as FinCEN need to start reviewing money transfers conducted in virtual worlds such as SL. Pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes or “Ponzi” schemes have been around for many years. In a Ponzi scheme, the promoter promises huge returns to investors on short term investments. The scheme works by paying older investors with funds from newer ones. The first few people who invest in a Ponzi scheme usually receive the interest promised, but Ponzi schemes eventually collapse as they do not actually generate money and require an ever increasing number of new investors to keep up the interest payments owed. A virtual bank called Ginko Financial emerged in SL and through much investigation, was found to be running a pyramid scheme. The bank promised 0.10 percent daily accrued interest, which works out to approximately a 44 percent annual return. Interviews conducted by Reuters with the bank’s owner, Nicholas Portocarrero (avatar name), have exposed the fact that Portocarrero will not answer questions clearly as to whether or not his bank is a pyramid scheme (Reuters, A., 2006a).

As noted in Wired Magazine recently, Ginko Financial finally ceased operations, causing losses

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Help – Somebody Robbed my Second Life Avatar! 6

of approximately 750,000 US Dollars to SL residents that had invested in the bank (Gardiner, 2007). After many complaints regarding fraudulent banks in SL, LL announced the following statement on their blog (Linden, 2007): it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.

While this statement may deter some miscreants, this traditional scheme will most likely continue to emerge as more and more avatars inhabit SL’s virtual world.

Money transfer fraud .This type of fraud occurs when goods or services are promised in exchange for money. The buyer “wires” or transfers money to the seller and then the seller is expected to deliver the promised goods. SL has now experienced multiple cases of wire fraud being reported. In some of the instances, a seller will create a shop and will collect funds from buyers but will not deliver goods. Real estate is another area where this fraud has occurred. A seller promises a parcel of land in exchange for money, but when the money is wired, the rights to the land are not transferred. These cases are quite interesting for they are spilling out from the virtual world into the real world. The fraud may have been committed in a virtual world, but the money is real and the court systems are starting to hear their first cases that involve crimes being committed in virtual worlds (Millstone, 2007).

Vandalism and theft. Vandalism is defined as “willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property” (Merriam-Webster, 2007). Vandalism has been carried out in SL, with users defacing buildings, placing obscene structures in public places, and even building walls with swastikas on them. John Edwards’ campaign headquarters was recently vandalized in SL and the “Gay Yiffy,” a virtual nightclub for homosexuals, was also vandalized (Brownlee, 2007). While mainly a minor annoyance, vandalism can quickly spawn into a more serious problem.

Theft has also proved to be an issue. Kevin Alderman, owner of Eros LLC, tracked down the real person that illegally copied and sold SexGen Platinum, violating copyright and trademark protections. SexGen allows purchasers to have realistic body parts and sexy moves (Wolfe, 2007).

Attacks on the Second Life grid. Multiple attacks have occurred on the SL grid, leaving the virtual world inaccessible and forcing SL administrators to kick off all users until they are able to restart the grid (a process that can take up to three hours). These attacks are becoming more widespread and, as noted in the griefing section above, can cause major headaches.

One of the biggest attacks to hit SL was dubbed the “Grey Goo Attack” (Lemos, 2006).

As noted by The Register, this attack filled SL with golden rings and the distinctive two-tone ding of Sega's popular Sonic the Hedgehog games. As a result of the attack, LL’s servers responded slowly causing a variety of side effects, including unreliable account balances, disappearing clothes, and an inability to teleport (Lemos, 2006).

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The LL security team has reduced the time it takes to get the grid up and running again after a major attack but security will be a major issue as more users join SL. The LL team has stated that they referred the Grey Goo attack to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) for investigation, but LL is spending more time researching for ways to combat viruses and malicious code that is unleashed to disrupt the SL. Slot machine fraud / game tester fraud. This scam preys on new users in SL that are unaware of how fraud is carried out. In this case, the scammer approaches a new SL user in a free area, such as a junkyard. The scammer will ask the user if they will assist in testing a slot machine game they have created. Then they will place a slot machine down next to the new user and instruct them to pay the machine. While the machine will make noises and sound like the new user has won money, the machine will not pay out and the scammer will have taken money from the new user (Panther, 2007).

The slot machine scam as well as minor deviations of this scam are very common and there is no way to stop them other than by banning the scammer. This action only temporarily stops the scammer as they can register another avatar and continue to carry out the fraud.

Fake Second Life Exchange Terminals. This fraud occurs when an attacker places a fake terminal over an actual SLExchange Terminal. Once this is done, the attacker sits back and waits for victims to use the terminal. The victim comes along and deposits money in what they believe is their SLExchange account. Instead, the money is deposited into the attacker’s account and the victim does not know about this until the money is long gone. This attack has also been labeled as the “Invisible Prim Over Vendor” scam by Panther (2007). While not the most creative attack, many users have become victims. Users should pay close attention when using SLExchange Terminals to ensure that they are not using a fake terminal.

Linden Labs Responds to Crimes and Disturbances in Second Life LL does have an acceptable use policy that is required of all new residents, however, most criminals ignore this. LL has the daunting task of trying to stop crimes and disturbances in SL. Unlike the real world that has a police force, SL has no authoritative body to crack down on crimes, fraud, and disturbances being committed. At the present time, when a report is received of suspicious activity from a SL user, the LL team may choose to temporarily suspend the offending user for a set period of time. This does not stop the crime, for the perpetrator can simply obtain a new avatar and continue to carry out crimes.

LL has begun to issue a police blotter which highlights the following information pertaining to incidents (Second Life Website, 2007a): • Date of incident • Violation • Region • Description

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• Action Taken by LL Overall, the policing system in effect in SL emulates the neighborhood watch concept.

The virtual world relies on its citizens to protect each other and to be on the lookout for potential problems. Without a police force or authoritative mechanism to crack down on crime, crimes will continue to be carried out in SL. Steps for Protecting Yourself From Becoming a Victim Since there is no formal police force or authoritative body monitoring the virtual world of SL, it is up to you to protect yourself and ensure you do not become a victim of fraud. The following is a checklist of recommended actions that will reduce your risk of becoming a victim if properly followed: • Never give out your username, password, account numbers, or personal information • If an offer is too good to be true, it is (don’t take it).

• Read security blogs associated with SL to be educated about current illegal activities such as http://slcaveatemptor.blogspot.com.

• Read the SL newspapers to keep abreast of new and emerging issues http://www.secondlifeherald.com.

• Use caution and good judgment when making purchases, using exchange terminals, and so on.

Most importantl, report issues and crimes to LL immediately. If LL does not know about a fraud being committed, they cannot take action to stop it. Incidents can be reported by sending an e-mail to support@lindenlabs.com.

Conclusion Virtual World crime is here to stay. Criminals have found a new viable way to swindle electronic users and steal real world money. LL needs to take a hard look at crimes being committed in SL to ensure that its virtual world citizens are educated and protected from becoming victims of crimes. LL should also partner with existing law enforcement agencies (FBI, USSS, for example) to work together to reduce virtual crime and disturbances that have severely affected the SL grid. Failure to do so could result in users no longer visiting the virtual world and the eventual collapse of SL.

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Bibliography Anti-Phishing Working Group Website. Retrieved November 17, 2007 from http://www.antiphishing.org/ Bers, M. U. & Chau, C. (2006). Fostering civic engagement by building a virtual city. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, 11, 748-770.

Brownlee, J. (2007, March 3). John Edwards meets Second Life 'Feces Spewing Obscenity.’

Wired Blog. Retrieved March 30, 2007, from http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/03/john_edwards_me.html Carnevale, D. (2007, November 13). To save a Second Life. The Wired Campus. Retrieved January 17, 2008, from http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2541 Carr, D. F. (2007, March 1). Second Life: Is business ready for virtual worlds? BaselineMag, Wired. Retrieved January 19, 2008 from http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2098902,00.asp Cheal, C. (2007). Second Life: Hype or hyperlearning? On the Horizon, 15(4), 204-210.

Denning, D. E. (2007) Activism, hacktivism, and cyberterrorism: The Internet as a tool for influencing foreign policy. Retrieved December 30, 2007, from http://www.iwar.org.uk/cyberterror/resources/denning.htm Earth Liberation Front Website. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.earthliberationfront.com/main.shtml Foster, A. L. (2007). Virtual worlds as social-science labs. Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(44), A25.

Gardiner, B. (2007, August 15). Bank failure in Second Life leads to calls for regulation.

Wired. Retrieved January 9, 2008, from http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2007/08/virtual_bank Gregson, K. (2007, October). Bad avatar! Griefing in virtual worlds. M/C Journal, 10(5).

Retrieved December 15, 2007, from http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/06gregson.php Griefing in Second Life. (2007, March 5). Retrieved December 3, 2007, from http://news.com.com/2300-1043_3-6163932-1.html?tag=ne.gall.pg Hemp, P. (2006, June). Are you ready for e-tailing 2.0? Harvard Business Review, DOI: F0610F .

Kirkpatrick, D. (2007). It’s not a game. CNN Money, 155(2), 56. Retrieved January 19, 2008 from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/02/05/8399120/ Koster, R. (2007). Is Second Life being used for money laundering? Could it be? Retrieved on January 3, 2007, from http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/01/is_second_life_.html LaPlante, A. (2007) Second Life opens for business. Information Week, Wired February 24, 2007. Retrieved on January 15, 2008 from http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197008342

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Lemos, R., (2006, November 24). Second Life plagued by 'Grey Goo' attack. Retrieved January 5, 2008, from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/24/secondlife_greygoo_attack/ Ludwig, F. (2006, August 23). Negative coordinates: Griefing in the unverified age. Second Life Herald. Retrieved November 23, 2007, from http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/08/negative_coordi.html Lindenlab.com (2007). What is Linden Lab? Retrieved December 15, 2007 from http://s3.amazonaws.com/download.grid.secondlife.com/Fact_Sheet_LL_Overview.pdf Linden, K. D. (2008). New policy regarding in-world ‘Banks.’ Retrieved on January 8, 2008, from http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/08/new-policy-regarding-in-world-banks/ Mennecke, B. E. Terando, W. D. Janvrin, D. J. & Dilla, W. N. (2007). It’s just a game, or is it?

Real money, real income, and real taxes in virtual worlds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 20, 134-141.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. (2007). Retrieved on December 14, 2007, from http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/vandalism Millstone, K. (2007, March 8). Pixilated property dispute a real issue in court. Retrieved on January 8, 2008, from http://www.azcentral.com/ent/vgames/articles/0308vglaw0308.html Monahan, C., Harvey, K., & Ullberg, L. (2007). BP tries Second Life for employee ethics and compliance. Second Life Education Workshop, August 24-26, 2007, 93-95.

Newitz, A. (2007). Your Second Life is ready. Popular Science, 269(3). Retrieved January 17, 2008 from http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/7ba1af8f3812d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcr d.html Panther, M. (2007, October 10). Second Life terminal fraud. Caveat Emptor - Buying & Selling in Second Life. Retrieved on March 23, 2007 from http://slcaveatemptor.blogspot.com/ Phillips, A. (2008, January 15). Asperger’s therapy hits Second Life. ABC News. Transcript available at http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4133184 Prentice, S. (2007). Enterprises face security and risk management issues in virtual worlds.

Gartner, Inc. July 13, 2007, ID number: G00149677.

Reuters, A. (2006a, October 12). Interview: Ginko CEO Nicholas Portocarrero. Retrieved on October 14, 2007, from http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/10/12/nicholasportocarrero/ Reuters, A. (2006b). Outcry as ‘copybot’ threatens copyright protection. Retrieved on October 14, 2006, from http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/11/14/outcry-as-copybotthreatens-copyrightprotection/ Reuters, E. (2007, December 18). Second Life performance improves, but residents don’t feel it. Retrieved on January 8, 2008, from

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http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/12/18/second-life-performance-improves-butresidents-dont-feel-it/ Rijock, K. (2007, January 2). Virtual money laundering now available on the World Wide Web. Retrieved on January 2, 2008. Available http://www.worldcheck.com/articles/2007/01/02/virtual-money-laundering-now-availableworld-wide-/ Rossignol, J. (2005, November 15). A deadly dollar. The Escapist. Retrieved on December 15, 2007, from http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_19/121-ADeadly-Dollar Schalch, K. (2007, August 22). Virtual recruiting for real-world jobs. NPR. Retrieved January 15, 2008 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13851345 Second Life. (2008) LindeX market data. Retrieved January 4, 2008, from http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-market.php Second Life Website. (2007a). Community: Police Blotter. Retrieved January 20, 2008, from http://secondlife.com/community/blotter.php Second Life Website. (2007b). Linden Labs exchange risk API. Retrieved on January 23, 2008, from http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/api/risk Stein, J. (2006, December 16). My so-called Second Life. Time, 168(26), 76. Retrieved on January 14, 2008 from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570827,00.html Ullberg, L., Monahan, C., & Harvey, K. (2007). New face of emergency preparedness training: Using Second Life to save first lives. Second Life Education Workshop, August 24-26, 96-99.

Warner, D. E. & Raiter, M. (2005). Social context in massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs): Ethical questions in shared space. International Review of Information Ethics, 4, 46-52.

Weslander, Eric. (2006, November 12). Virtual-Reality crimes present literal challenge for real life police. Retrieved November 30, 2006, from http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/nov/12/virtualreality_crimes_present_literal_challe nge_re/ Wolfe, A. (2007, October 28). Second Life lawsuit over cybersex toy theft. Information Week.

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Towards a Theoretically-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models and Applications: Analysis of Ventures in Second Life

By Kelly Lyons, University of Toronto Abstract Second Life has emerged as the de facto virtual world for immersive business.

However there is no de facto guideline or even corpus of knowledge about how to build an immersive business. We address this opportunity by presenting work that will lead to a theoretically-grounded evaluative framework for immersive business models and applications. We identify high profile examples from Second Life and analyze them using two theories that explain why a user may choose between ‘clicks,’ ‘bricks,’ or immersive: Rich Media Theory and Task Closure Theory. We then state propositions about characteristics of successful immersive business models and applications, and conduct an exploratory study of proposed Second Life business plans to identify and support the most appropriate propositions for future empirical enquiry. Finally, we conclude our study by positing the following characteristics of potentially successful immersive business models and applications: (a) feedback and interactions between users are not dissipated, (b) productive tasks can be started and closed within the virtual world, and (c) users are compelled to form a social presence, which is then leveraged.

Keywords: virtual worlds, immersive business, Second Life, Media Richness Theory, Task Closure Theory.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

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Towards a Theoretically-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models and Applications: Analysis of Ventures in Second Life

By Kelly Lyons, University of Toronto In 2006, Time magazine named You as the Person of the Year (Grossman, 2006): “look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace." This statement is a landmark recognition of the enabling technologies that contribute to Web 2.0. It also serves as a reminder that only roughly ten years removed from when everyday people started using the World Wide Web, its next version is now touted as nothing less than a harbinger of cultural and social revolution. We see the interest in Web 2.0 as a call to ask and investigate what is next; in short, to envision a Web/Internet 3.0. We believe that a significant piece of this vision will be the 3D Internet—a Web of threedimensional, computer simulated virtual worlds, which are visited by real people who interact with others and are served by businesses hosted in these worlds (Hof, 2007; Shankland, 2006).

There are numerous virtual worlds (Book, 2006) on the Internet. Most fall under the category of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. These are capable of supporting thousands or even millions of players connected via the Internet, playing simultaneously in a persistent world where events occur continuously and the effects of player actions persist (Book, 2005). The largest ones are fantasy role-playing sites such as World of Warcraft, GuildWars, and RuneScape; as of June 2007, these sites had nine, three, and one million subscribers, respectively (Blizzard Entertainment; Runescape.com; Sinclair).

Similar in scale in terms of the number of subscribers is Second Life--a virtual world whose raison d’etre, in part, is commerce (Linden Lab, 2007). Second Life debuted in June of 2003, and is the creation of the privately owned company Linden Lab. It is often described as a game in the broad sense that its users participate because they enjoy it, but unlike, for example, World of Warcraft, there are no competitions or points to be won. It is intended to provide its participants with a “second life”—an alternate world in which an avatar (an animated incarnation of the user) explores, mingles, chats, shops, and works.

Many of these activities, especially shopping, represent commerce opportunities. With numerous small entrepreneurs and multi-national corporations involved, Second Life is the ideal place within which to evaluate and test out virtual, or immersive, business models and applications. Said a representative from American Apparel, a retailer who had created a presence in Second Life: “There’s a gap between the current online shopping experience and the next generation. A virtual world can at least bring you closer to the store experience without actually bringing you there. I’m not convinced Second Life is that answer, but it is a step along the path” (Tedeschi, 2007).

So, as in the early days of e-commerce, norms are being extemporaneously developed, which means that currently there is no generally widely accepted, academically-oriented framework for assessing immersive business applications and models. We view this situation as a truly exciting research opportunity, and present, in this paper, our pursuit towards developing an evaluating framework grounded in established management theories.

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The goal of this study then is to develop propositions and initial insights that will serve as a starting point for a framework for evaluating business models and applications in an exemplification of a virtual world, Second Life. To that end, the paper is structured as follows. In Part 1, we describe Second Life in more detail. In Part 3, we present a simple typology to classify Second Life ventures. In Part 4, we progress toward a framework based on theories from the Management Information Systems field and state preliminary propositions based on the theories and exemplar evidence. In Part 5, we identify those propositions most appropriate to be translated as hypotheses for empirical enquiry by conducting an exploratory analysis of case studies comparing the propositions against twenty student business plans for Second Life ventures. Finally in Part 6, we present concluding remarks and outline future work that will help converge toward an evaluative framework for immersive business. This paper is an elaboration of work presented at a conference to an audience with interests in services and system science.

Part 1: Second Life Second Life provides users with the experience of participating in a virtual world as animated avatars, which can be customized in various ways. In addition to their more mundane abilities like walking, these avatars are also provided with the ability to fly, drive vehicles, and teleport. Importantly, Second Life is a social experience, with users able to see and communicate with each other, both publicly and privately, through media including instant messaging and a voice communication system (Nuttal, 2007).

Figure 1: Second Life Homepage (www.secondlife.com)

Second Life has enjoyed considerable attention from both the news media and from real world businesses. Much of the attention paid to Second Life has been propelled by its embrace of open source software, which allows its users to design their own environments and virtual goods, and to retain intellectual property rights for their creations. Goods and services can be traded in both Linden dollars (which have as of May 2008 a currency exchange of about L$270 to one US dollar) and in real world currency. Several users have become Second Life entrepreneurs,

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models 4

making a real world living by selling virtual goods and services, such as clothing, furniture, legal advice, and sex (Harkin, 2007).

The extent to which users can customize their experiences is attractive to businesses and public figures as well. In the public sector, for example, Sweden has created a virtual embassy in Second Life, Democrat contenders Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have opened campaign offices, and extremist French politician Jean-Marie LePen provoked a virtual riot when avatar protesters attacked his Second Life office (Grossman, 2006). Educators have also noted its potential and schools including Harvard have conducted classes in Second Life (Lagorio, 2007).

Companies have invested in a variety of business models and applications in Second Life, despite a lack of any clear, indisputable evidence that a Second Life presence will lead to a healthy return on investment (ROI). Among the businesses that have established a presence are American Apparel (which at one point sold both virtual and real clothes), Dior (which unveiled a new line of jewelry), LaCoste (which held a voting contest among avatars to choose a new clothing model), and Vodaphone (whose Second Life center does not sell items but instead provides free virtual goods and an opportunity to explore the brand). For many, involvement with Second Life may be more an exercise in branding, or an opportunity to get a head start on the learning curve that they believe will be necessitated by a future demand for immersive online retail experiences. Several companies report that the opportunity to chat live with Second Life users is providing them with invaluable market research (Whitehead., 2007).

Whether the ROI of a business model or application can be directly measured or whether the effect of running marketing and advertising campaigns is more indirect, there needs to be a yardstick against which models and applications can be evaluated. However, practical evaluative frameworks on virtual worlds are not yet available. In the following section we take first steps towards such a framework by presenting a simply typology that classifies exemplar ventures from Second Life.

Part 3: Typology of Immersive Business The notion of immersive business is so new that practical frameworks have not yet been established for evaluating business ventures in virtual worlds. Here are some interesting and potentially successful business models and applications in Second Life: â&#x20AC;˘ Starwood Hotels: Starwood Hotels developed a Second Life version of its new concept hotels, Aloft. Though these new hotels did not physically open until recently (2008), the Second Life version opened in 2006. Their aim was to test-market the design, including observing the spaces and furniture to which people gravitate and avoid and to receive feedback from visitors. There is a physical replica of the hotel in White Plains, New York, for which aesthetic and architectural details are completed with the help of feedback and observations received from Second Life (Jana, 2006). â&#x20AC;˘ UC Davis Medical Center: University of California Davis used Second Life to develop simulations to train emergency response workers. In this case, workers simulated rapid setup of medical facilities in case of a national crisis (Linden, 2006). â&#x20AC;˘ American Apparel: As one of the early adopters in Second Life, American Apparel opened a now defunct virtual store. In this store, consumers could purchase virtual clothing for his/her avatar (at a price of less than $1US). They could also click

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through to American Apparel’s traditional e-commerce website in order to purchase reallife clothing. However, the virtual clothes greatly outsold real clothes (Jana, 2007).

• American Cancer Society: In 2005 the American Cancer Society launched an annual fundraising event within Second Life with the creation of a virtual Relay for Life, in which avatars--individually and in teams--navigate a course created by volunteers in the Second Life community. In 2005, they raised $5,000, which grew to $41,000 in 2006 and to $115,000 in 2007. Participants are from all over the world (Strohm, 2007).

• Cisco: After creating a building in Second Life that essentially did little more than present pre-existing web content, Cisco found that no one was bothering to visit their Second Life site. They then re-created their Second Life space as a meeting place for employees and customers, where spontaneous encounters could generate interesting, rich dialogues. There are also opportunities for technical support, product training, and executive briefings. Cisco has reported that they are now more satisfied with the level of interaction from Second Life (Hillis, 2007).

When we analyzed these examples with knowledge of efforts at companies like IBM that are on the cutting edge of virtual worlds, we arrived at the following simple typology to classify immersive business models and applications.

1. Immersive Prototyping. Using an immersive environment such as Second Life to prototype product or service concepts can be an effective way to receive feedback on a new product or try out new ways of delivering a service in order to improve implementation and delivery in a real environment. An example of a business model or application involving immersive prototyping is Starwood Hotel’s Aloft.

2. Immersive Event Simulation. Second Life can be used to simulate real world events in order to learn from people’s reactions to them. A big part of the service is to embellish the Second Life environment with customized features—for example, forklifts to be used in dealing with a disaster—to make the simulation as realistic as practicable. An example of immersive event simulation is the UC Davis emergency simulation.

3. Immersive Commerce. The very nature of the Second Life economy provides opportunities for companies and individuals to engage in commerce in Second Life.

In some cases, the goal is to exchange virtual goods for Linden dollars and, in other cases, the goal is to use the Second Life environment to increase commerce activity in real life. American Apparel, Cisco, and the American Cancer Society are examples of immersive commerce.

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of these types of immersive ventures, and can this analysis be done using some means that is not ad hoc, but rather rooted in academic literature on management? In order to begin to develop an evaluative framework for immersive business models and applications that is grounded in management research, we present literature relevant to answer this question, identify two theories that we believe are very germane, and state propositions about immersive business based on the theories.

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Part 4: Research Model and Propositions Theories It is reasonable to evaluate immersive business models and applications based on management research frameworks from the field of strategic management such as the Five Force Model (Porter & Millar, 1985) or Resource Based View (Barney, 1991), or from marketing, such as Mass Personalization (Friedman, 2005) or Services-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).

We motivate our evaluative framework from yet another perspective: management research in Information Systems. We do this for the following reason. The rationale for many immersive business models is that the immersive experience is superior to both the traditional e-business and traditional physical experiences; that is, the “immersive” is better than the “clicks or bricks.”

It would seem natural then to apply frameworks that were used in the incipient days of ebusiness to show when and how “clicks” would be superior to “bricks and mortar.” Many of these models and paradigms came out of the Information Systems field. In particular, we will explore two theories, Media Richness Theory and Task Closure Theory.

Media Richness Theory. Media Richness Theory (MRT) is a highly acknowledged theory for agents’ media choices that focuses on the fit between the task and the medium. For reviews of other research that focuses on task and medium, see (Rice et al., 1992; Sitkin et al., 1992). MRT is founded on the assumption that individuals, groups, and organizations process information to reduce uncertainty and unequivocality (Davis, 2006; Galbraith, 1977).

Uncertainty is “the difference between the amount of information required to perform the task and the amount of information already possessed,” and equivocality is defined as the ambiguity inherent in the task caused by conflicting and inconsistent interpretations and expectations.

When tasks entail processing highly equivocal information, as is required for example in collective bargaining, then the medium that supports communications and information processing must be rich. Therefore face-to-face meetings between participants may be necessary.

Conversely if processing of unequivocal information such as filling out a standard form is the task then a less rich medium such as an e-mail may suffice (Daft & Lengel, 1986). A face-to-face meeting is “rich” because gestures, facial expressions, surrounding contexts, and other sensory cues provide rich supplementary information beyond spoken or written words.

Richness is characterized by the ability to provide feedback, multiplicity of cues, variety of languages usable, and ability to provide personal focus. Of course, the cost of having a meeting is much more than that of e-mail, which does not require synchronization or co-location.

However, e-mail is devoid of much of what makes a face-to-face meeting “rich.” In MRT, a hierarchy is presented from the richest media, which is face-to-face; to telephones; to written, addressed documents; and to the least rich media, unaddressed documents (Daft et al., 1987).

MRT has been applied to explain preferences between e-mail and voice mail (El-Shinnawy & Markus, 1997), and between different technologies for computer-supported workgroups (Burke et al., 2001). More recently, there have been works that draw a relationship between the complexity of a product sold, bought, or exchanged over the Web, and the increasing richness in the media required for successful e-commerce (Jahng et al., 2007; Jahng et al., 2006).

Task Closure Theory. An alternative class of research focuses instead on the availability of communicators and social environments as determinants for media choice (Markus, 1987; Saunders & Jones, 1992). Important within this class is Task Closure Theory (TCT). This theory posits that the ability to effectively “close” or finish a task is a key driver for an individual’s

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media preference and adoption (Parrish, 2006; Straub & Karahanna, 1998). In particular, the availability of the recipient and the sense of social presence supported by the medium affect the perception that the task is closed. For instance, closure is achieved by clicking on the â&#x20AC;&#x153;sendâ&#x20AC;? button in e-mail. In contrast to MRT, face-to-face may not be a preferred mode of communication. If closure of a particular task is possible via e-mail or face-to-face, then the former is possible at the sole discretion of a single person, whereas the latter requires setting a meeting time such that closure cannot be achieved simply at the discretion of one person.

The basis of this theory is that enhanced ability to achieve closure will lead to lowered task fragmentation and job stress. The need for closure however may be moderated by the degree of social presence deemed required. For example, as much as it may be desirable to bring closure to an unpleasant task such as laying off an employee, it is not socially acceptable to do so via email or voice mail. TCT has also been applied to explain preferences and adoption of e-mail (Karahanna & Moez, 2000) and groupware (Robertson et al., 2001).

The Trade off between Media Richness and Task Closure. We can arguably generalize that physical commerce entails richness of media but at higher costs, whereas e-business facilitates task closure and drastically lowered costs but sacrifices media richness and social presence. The litmus test of an immersive experience is whether it leads to a more advantageous trade-off, for example, drastically lowered costs, with only a marginal decrease in perception of social presence. The graph in Figure 2 from 1997 illustrates an advantageous trade-off of ecommerce versus physical commerce. It denotes that sites like eBay and Amazon can reach significantly more customers than traditional merchants, but yet not greatly sacrifice richness of customization and interactivity (Evans & Wurster, 1997).

Technology Effect

Richness

Amount Customization

Traditional Trade-Off

Interactivity Reach

Figure 2: Reach/Richness Trade-Off of Traditional E-Commerce

By fusing elements from these two theories, we can distill the following factors that affect the success of business models and applications:

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From MRT • • • • •

Feedback capability Multiplicity of cues Language variety Personal focus Cost

From TCT • Recipient/participant availability • Social presence We can now evaluate the examples of Second Life business models and applications according to a lens rooted in Media Richness Theory and Task Closure Theory.

Propositions Feedback capability. A physical site with attentive sales representatives will generally provide greater interactive feedback capability than a Website. Because of the expectation that feedback will be heard, customers will more readily provide feedback, as opposed to clicking on the “Contact Us” button on a Website, an exercise which many customers believe is futile (Walker & Johnson, 2006). However, one of the advantages of a Website is the completeness and efficiency of archiving and searching textual feedback from customers. In contrast, a comment made to a service representative may not be acted upon and never recorded.

A successful immersive business model or application would offer both types of advantages such as the immersive prototyping demonstrated by the Aloft project from Starwood Hotels. There is the opportunity to provide feedback when and while the user is actually experiencing the hotel. To some extent, this opportunity is actually better than, for example, real world surveys since in Second Life, unlike Websites, there is a natural fluidity in switching between locomotion and dialogue. It would be the immersive equivalent of walking around the physical hotel, making comments, and having all of the comments recorded for later perusal.

Therefore we state the following proposition: P1: The capability to provide and record feedback has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Multiplicity of cues. Relative to virtual worlds, the physical world has many more cues and Websites have fewer. A successful immersive model or application should exploit the additional 3D cues possible over a Website. For example, evaluation of the aesthetics and functions of a hotel benefits greatly from immersing an avatar in a 3D hotel, as in the case of Starwood. For the American Cancer Society, the users experience a 3D race with their avatars, and enjoy the ability to use fantastical vehicles and creatures–like flying dragons–which are unique to virtual worlds. For UC Davis, the multiplicity of cues available in a 3D environment enhances the user’s sense that they are in a real disaster. Therefore we state the following: P20: The capability to provide more cues than a Website has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

However, for immersive business models in which the ultimate goal is the sale of real world items, a problem which arises from the multiplicity of cues is the potential to distract,

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confuse, or frustrate customers away from concluding a sale. Therefore, one of the functions for immersive business design should be to steer the user towards actionable cues but away from distracting ones. The challenge in doing this is one of the reasons why buying at American Apparel’s Second Life storefront was not compelling: “The user interface is not particularly intuitive. It took me a while to figure out how to buy something… We’ve all become accustomed to how an e-commerce site works, but on Second Life, those conventions haven’t really been established” (Tedeschi, 2007). As a result, buyers are not sure how to approach a transaction.

Until these issues are resolved, Second Life storefronts of large retailers may represent marketing and advertising opportunities, but not necessarily venues for direct monetization. Thus we modify our last proposition and state another as follows: P2: The capability to provide more intuitive cues than a Website has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

P3: An overabundance of non-intuitive cues has a negative effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Language variety. High language variety refers to the capability of a medium to support highly variable, expressive, and unstructured communications such as enabled by any natural language. Languages such as programming languages and database formats are of low language variety since they support minimal variability, and employ restrictive and structured grammar and vocabulary. Physical, e-business, and immersive models all support natural language communications to varying extents, and in fact immersive business and Websites offer the additional flexibility of use of structured data for automatable tasks. Therefore it is difficult to state that immersive models hold an advantage over physical commerce or e-business solely on this factor, and we state the following: P4: Language variety does not have an effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Personal focus. Innovations such as customer relationship management software, collaborative filtering, and even RSS feeds have helped establish the paradigm of mass personalization. Still, the most powerful way to convey personal focus is to actually have a company representative face-to-face, empathizing with and focused on a customer. An immersive application could use 3D cues to come close to face-to-face; that is, an interaction can be reasonably rich without requiring common physical presence, albeit the communication must be synchronous.

Cisco reports that it is now having rich dialogues with its customers in Second Life, populating its campus with employees who are available for discussions with visitors. However, the now-defunct American Apparel Second Life store was widely reported to be constantly empty, with often no employees available to assist those who did visit. Therefore we state the following: P5: A personal focus has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

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Cost. The ability to reduce costs is demonstrated by an immersive event simulation like the UC Davis Medical Center case. A real life simulation would be preferable but is likely to be substantially more expensive, for example, the cost of co-locating participants, and disruptive, for example, shutting down real city blocks to run a real world simulation of a terrorist attack.

However, in order for an immersive simulation to be compelling, what can be learned from a simulation cannot be substantially less than a real world simulation. In the case of UC Davis Medical Center, the lesson learned is how emergency workers react to and interact with each other in simulated scenarios. The simulation is a closed system within which feedback and interactions are not dissipated, but rather observed and recorded.

However, compared to traditional e-commerce sites, immersive sites can be much more expensive to create. For example, in the case of American Apparel, the cost of rendering a virtual store was costly to build and operate. While the experience and the publicity from the venture may have been useful to the company, the ROI from monetization and traffic pales in comparison to that of their Website.

Either way, it appears that the ROI for an immersive experience can be direct, selfevident, and in-the-now, and models that are justified on future monetization potential may be problematic. That is, to a pundit who argues that Second Life is so novel that ventures in it are experimental and should not be cost justified, one can present the cases of UC Davis and the American Cancer Society as successful ventures that are showing results now. We therefore state the following: P6: The inability to show direct and reasonable ROI has a negative effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Task closure. This is a powerful concept that explains in part the success of American Apparel in selling virtual clothing in Second Life, but also the constraints it faces in trying to sell real clothing via their storefront. American Apparel did not start off trying to sell virtual clothing; their customers demanded it. Yet they acknowledge that the effect of their storefront on real clothing sales was rather paltry (Tedeschi, 2007). If a potential customer is tasked with buying clothing, then that task cannot currently be opened and closed within Second Life.

Ideally, the customer would make the purchase at the virtual store and receive the shipped goods in a few days. However, since this is not yet possible in Second Life, the customer is routed to the American Apparel Website, where the goods may be bought and later shipped and received.

The task then entails crossing between virtual, e-commerce, and physical worlds with many opportunities for the task not to be closed. However, in a scenario of purchasing a pair of shorts for a customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s avatar, this task can be opened and closed entirely within Second Life. The problem there of course is that the nominal price of these shorts is less than a $1US. This is not a viable monetization model unless the volumes are enormous, and it is unlikely that Second Life users will create such a critical mass in the near future.

Task closure also explains why Second Life event simulations are often compelling. The task of learning one lesson in setting up an emergency response clinic can be opened and closed within Second Life. Likewise, the American Cancer Society has experienced increasingly successful fundraising fun runs in Second Life, by providing an experience which can be started and finished entirely within Second Life with no requirement to run in the real world. We state the following proposition:

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P7: The ability to start and finish tasks within the virtual world has a positive effect on the success of a business model or application.

Recipient/participant availability. The task of communicating with a business can be started and finished within Second Life, creating a greater likelihood of visitors producing such communications. The presence of avatars who can receive message in Second Life heightens the experience of task closure for message senders, since one can observe the communication arriving to the recipient in a way that is not possible with e-mail or voice mail. The ability for visitors to meet and have discussions with Cisco employees is an important factor in why Cisco reports its satisfaction with its Second Life site. The following proposition addresses this point: P8: The capability to make recipients/participants virtually available has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Social presence. Social presence may be a requirement to complete a task in a virtual world. For example, in order to play a game of full-court basketball, either virtually or in the real world, an adequate number of players must be present. In the case of Starwood Hotels, the company was able to exploit the large audience in Second Life visiting their site to receive feedback from community members who were interested or even trained in such subjects as architecture, design, and hospitality, and were willing to–and enjoyed–the process of voluntarily collaborating on the design for a new concept for hotels. Our final proposition then states: P9: The capability to leverage a social presence once a critical mass has been achieved has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Part 5: Case Studies: Exploratory, Qualitative Investigation of Second Life Business Plans So far we have presented two perspectives that support our propositions: (a), our application of existing theories—MRT and TCT—and, (b), our survey of noteworthy current business models and applications in Second Life. To further strengthen our propositions, we present case studies in the form of an exploratory qualitative investigation of business plans for proposed Second Life ventures. Effectively, this perspective allows us to triangulate our propositions—based on 1) theory, 2) survey of practice, and 3) empirical investigation—thus preparing them to be tested as hypotheses using larger scale qualitative studies in our future work.

Participants, design, and procedure. Eighty-eight third- or fourth-year students of an undergraduate management program in a large North American university, located in a large metropolitan city, took part in the study. In partial fulfillment for course credit, these students were organized into twenty-one groups, each of which developed a business plan for a Second Life venture. To develop these plans, students were instructed to create avatars that bore a reasonable resemblance to themselves and to immerse themselves into Second Life to research potential ventures. They were then instructed to produce a twenty-page comprehensive business plan.

The following are the ventures described in the students’ business plans: • • •

Store for virtual pets (3) Collaborative gaming (2) Dating site (3)

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• • • • • • • • • • •

Cooking school (2) Site to interact with virtualized stars and movie scenes (2) Management consulting to virtual ventures Tutoring service Virtual hospice Theme park Virtual home/condo designer Travel agent for vacations to virtualized cities (for example, Paris) Security guards in virtual worlds Sports bar Virtual bank

We now analyze our propositions with respect to these business plans. Our proposition P4: Language variety does not have an effect on the success of an immersive business model or application was difficult to test vis-à-vis the plans because the plans did not address a variety of languages. In addition, since the students were asked to present a profitable business plan, they all projected profitability after at most a couple of years so we cannot evaluate our proposition P6: The inability to show direct and reasonable ROI has a negative effect on the success of an immersive business model or application against these business plans. The rest of the propositions are evaluated below: P1: The capability to provide and record feedback has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

In the case studies, there are many models which aim to actively engage Second Life participants in providing and using feedback. Dating and tutoring sites, as well as those for collaborative gaming, interactive entertainment, and cooking schools, encompass feedback provision and display as important features. However, interestingly enough, none of the plans exploited the fact that touch-point opportunities for eliciting feedback occur more often than in a Website in an immersive environment. The examples below echo traditional Web capabilities.

After a match has been made, our dating service will help design and arrange the couple’s first date on Second Life… After each date, couples are welcome to provide feedback regarding dating logistics and their overall experience with their partner and our service.

Customer comments about certain recipes will be displayed publicly so that other consumers will be able to read the comments. Providing professional advice from expert chefs and setting up an active feedback system will be essential for our service.

While the student-proposed plans did not take full advantage of the feedback capability in immersive businesses, many plans recognized the need to provide appropriate feedback mechanisms.

P2: The capability to provide more intuitive cues than a Website has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

P3: An overabundance of non-intuitive cues has a negative effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

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The plans for gaming and design sites as well as interactive movie and celebrity sites present much richer three-dimensional and immersive visual experiences than traditional Websites. And Second Life also allows for complementary aural experiences. The business plans recognize the opportunities for providing intuitive cues and the pitfalls of providing nonintuitive cues when the quality of the experience is related to appropriate and intuitive utilization of spaces, and also evokes desirable emotions, thoughts, and memories through surrounding sights and sounds.

The key to our cooking school is that its ambiance is a haven for all things food related. The idea is that the participants will be invited into a world of state of the art stainless steel appliances, redwood cabinets, granite countertops, and subzero refrigerators… As avatars navigate through the dream kitchen, they are able to click on appliances and food items.

The focus of our park will be to transform all of the benefits of an actual theme park into a virtual one, thus encompassing world-class thrills, including a wide range of roller coasters and a water park, along with game booths and fast food vendors. It will be beautifully landscaped, with gardens, streams, waterfalls, and mountains.

Avatars will be exposed to specific movie scenes in the movie that has been complemented by sounds, effects, characters, moving objects as well as complete movie-like environment… The main benefit/value to our customer would be our differentiated immersive environment that offers unique experiences where people can actually feel being inside their favorite movie.

P5: A personal focus has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Personally-focused customization is mentioned in many plans. It can be customization of an experience such as made possible by the interactive celebrity and movie sites and the travel agency. Even when the plan entails customization of what seems like a product—for example, customization of a virtual pet, potential date, or tutor—customization usually extends to the experience as well, thus supporting proposition P5.

Along with regular pets (dogs, cats, hamsters, etc.), we will also offer more unique pets, like dragons and fairies and a customized multi-purpose experience… Along with allowing you to purchase or rent the pet of your dreams, the pet store will be part of a complex that will include an interaction area, a pet daycare, and a pet spa, where users can fulfill the needs of their pet(s).

Our dating site’s assortment of date packages allows each user to choose and customize their date experience. We will handle the location spotting, activity planning, and make all of the needed logistical arrangements for each package chosen by the user.

P7: The ability to start and finish tasks within the virtual world has a positive effect on the success of a business model or application.

There are many plans for which the experience or offering is exclusively in Second Life.

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An example is matchmaking and going on dates all within Second Life. However the related notion of performance of tasks that cannot be done elsewhere is the most compelling: Our hospice is a clinic and park designed to offer a support and information community to the terminally ill, disabled, and those suffering from chronic diseases… The clinic will allow interested individuals to get information about the issue that affects them or a variety of other issues in the official library… The park will provide a beautiful setting for social interactions and allow guests to partake activities that they are not able to do in real life due to their conditions.

Our venture will act as a “security force” offering security services to individuals and businesses in the Second Life community… There has been a recent trend in the need for security services as many events have gone interrupted. Our customer base will largely consist of businesses as these users require security services such as protection of real and personal property or surveillance of special events.

P8: The capability to make recipients/participants virtually available has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

All sites allow participants to interact despite geographical separation. Of these, the dating sites offer an intriguing value-added of actually avoiding face-to-face encounter: The anxiety and apprehension associated with the first blind date (that typically takes place in-person) would be eliminated as avatars would interact with one another, as if on a real date. Communication can be facilitated by headsets worn by both parties, allowing for real time voice communication. All the motions, from the gift of flowers when they meet to the first kiss can be done on their virtual date.

P9: The capability to leverage a social presence once a critical mass has been achieved has a positive effect on the success of an immersive business model or application.

Collaborative gaming such as Paintball, hospice, sports bar, and virtual travel are all examples of the use of virtual worlds for conducting group social activities.

By taking existing paintball technology within Second Life and improving and adapting upon the location and ease of use, paintball will become one of the newest and most exciting games to play with online friends… By creating groups to organize paintball tournaments, allowing individuals looking for a game to play immediately, or just have some target practice, as well as having instant games for guest groups who are ready to play, the ease and accessibility will increase dramatically.

Many people dream about world travel but seldom have the resources or ability to do it… Customers have the ability to take one of the guided tours or build their own tours to enjoy with their online friends.

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Though we need not dismiss our all propositions as a result of this exploratory study, the propositions about intuitive cues (P2 and P3), personal focus (P5), task closure (P7), virtual availability (P8), and critical mass of social presence (P9) seem to be the most promising for further investigation, as they can be used to describe the most compelling and potentially innovative aspects of the business plans. The proposition about feedback (P1) may also warrant further investigation because the plans frequently mention the use of feedback but generally in uses not different than in traditional Web use.

Part 6: Concluding Remarks and Future Work We believe that virtual worlds and the 3D Internet will serve as enabling technologies for the next generation of Internet and Web based business models, applications, practices, and innovations. We call this phenomenon immersive business. The ultimate objective of our research is to develop theories of immersive business, from which practical guidelines will emanate. What is required to achieve this objective are some means to evaluate different immersive business models and applications; however, because of the novelty of immersive business, there is no apparent framework for this evaluation. We take the first steps to address this research opportunity in this paper.

Though there are many virtual worlds, an obvious test-bed for developing this framework is Second Life, which has a participant base of several million that includes many corporations who have created storefronts and presences. We believe that immersive business models and applications in Second Life can be typed as immersive prototyping, immersive event simulation, or immersive commerce.

We explore Media Richness Theory and Task Closure Theory from the Information Systems field to take steps towards a more theoretically-grounded evaluation framework. We evaluate high profile exemplar Second Life ventures based on characteristics of different media—face-to-face, Website, and virtual, for instance, are different forms of media—that the theories posit are important which are: capability to provide feedback, multiplicity of cues, language variety, personal focus, costs, task closure, and social presence.

By applying these theories to the exemplar cases and analyzing proposed Second Life business plans, we develop propositions from which the initial and basic questions of our evaluation framework emerge: • Does the immersive business model or application provide the capability for customers and users to give, receive, and record feedback (based on P1)?

• Does the immersive business model or application provide more intuitive cues than a Website (based on P2)?

• Does the immersive business model or application avoid an overabundance of non-intuitive cues (based on P3)?

• Does the immersive business model or application provide a superior customer focus (based on P5)?

• Does the immersive business model or application provide the ability to start and finish tasks within the virtual world (based on P7)?

• Does the immersive business model or application make recipients and participants of communications virtually available even if they are not co-located (based on P8)?

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• Does the immersive business model or application require achieving a critical mass, and does it then truly leverage this critical mass (based on P9)?

In using this framework, ‘yes’ answers to most or all of these questions may bode well for the success of an immersive business model or application. Therefore, the following initial design principles may help organizations to formulate their immersive business strategies since organizations currently have very little else to guide their endeavors.

1.

Immersive business models and applications that create a closed system within which feedback and interactions are not dissipated have the potential to be successful.

This is because such models combine the rich opportunity to elicit feedback and support interactions, a positive feature of physical commerce, with the enhanced opportunity to record feedback and interactions, a positive feature of Websites.

2.

Immersive models and applications that productively support task closure have the potential to be innovative. In a closed system, those who can perform a task within the system stay and those who must leave to perform the task do not come back. Therefore there is an advantage to ensuring that tasks can be both opened and closed within the system. It must also be ensured that that task is worth supporting. For instance both UC Davis’ emergency response simulation and American Apparel’s storefront support tasks that can be opened and closed in Second Life. Yet, solely from the perspective of direct monetization (and not for its marketing benefits), selling of virtual clothing for a buck or less is not compelling.

3.

Immersive business models and applications that exploit the need for virtual social presence have the potential to be innovative. Another aspect that is common to Starwood Hotel and UC Davis cases is that they are able to build and exploit critical mass. The hotel prototype is limited in value unless large numbers of the desirable demographic group provide feedback. The task simulated should involve many people and create an environment which fosters complex, unanticipated interactions and effects between them.

Future work includes translating our propositions into hypotheses and empirically testing them to develop an evaluative framework, and exploring other theories that can enrich the framework. Eventually, we expect to be able to propose a theory of immersive business, and translate it into practitioner guidelines.

As for exploring other theories, one interesting direction is toward theories of social capital (Coleman, 1988; Lin, 2001)). In the case of the American Cancer Society, the organization was able to successfully leverage the large community available in Second Life for their annual virtual fun run. The 2300% growth they have experienced in the three years they have been offering this fundraiser clearly demonstrates the existence of strong social networks in Second Life. It is reasonable to assume that this growth is driven not only by the increasing numbers of participants in Second Life, but also by the excitement driven by strong word of mouth recommendations permeating social networks in Second Life. How social networking in virtual worlds compares to social networking in the real world and the Web (for example, Facebook and MySpace) is worth deeper exploration.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models 17

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions

By Paul R. Messinger,School Business, University of Alberta; Eleni Stroulia, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta; Kelly Lyons,Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto.

Abstract Virtual worlds constitute a growing space for collaborative play, learning, work, and e-commerce. To promote study of this emerging realm of activity, we suggest a typology adapted from C. Porter’s (2004) typology of virtual communities.

The five elements of the proposed typology include (1) purpose (content of interaction), (2) place (location of interaction), (3) platform (design of interaction), (4) population (participants in the interaction), and (5) profit model (return on interaction). We argue that this five-element typology facilitates identification of (a) the historic antecedents of virtual worlds in gaming and social networking, (b) future applications of virtual worlds for society, education, and business; and (c) topics for future research.

Keywords:

virtual worlds, typology, electronic gaming, online social networking.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 2

A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions

By Paul R. Messinger,School Business, University of Alberta; Eleni Stroulia, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta; Kelly Lyons,Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto.

Virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in the lives of many adults, teens, and children. According to one estimate, 20 to 30 million people regularly participated in virtual worlds in 2006, spending an average of almost twenty-two hours per week within these spaces (Balkin & Noveck, 2006). For those who participate in them, the names of these worlds are household words, including (adult worlds such as) Second Life, World of Warcraft, Kaneva, Entropia Universe, Google Earth; (children’s worlds, such as) Webkinz, Neopets, Club Penguin, Habbo, Whyville, TyGirlz, and RuneScape; (community-specific worlds, such as) Cyworld, HiPiHi; (media-focused worlds, such as) vSide; (and educational worlds such as) ActiveWorlds, there.com, and Forterra Systems.

Indeed, virtual worlds are believed to have implications that go beyond how we play, to also include how we buy, work, and learn (Bartle, 2006 and Balkin & Noveck, 2006).

According to research firm Gartner, Inc., “by the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a ‘second life’” (i.e., an avatar or presence in a virtual community like Second Life; Gartner, 2007). In recognition of the growing importance of avatars as 3D representations of people and their alter egos in virtual worlds, Google has a project underway to develop “universal” avatars that can move between virtual worlds (Lohr, 2007). Some authors even suggest that the 3-D Internet will become as important to companies in five years as the Web is now (Driver et al. 2008).

Yet, because of their newness, the study and application of virtual worlds is still in its infancy. Research questions are only now being formulated by scholars scrambling to come to terms with the implications of these new social environments. Suitable methodologies are only beginning to be selected, and technical support required to carry out these methodologies is only in the developmental stage. Similarly, the viability of various social and commercial applications of virtual worlds is only now being tested.

The purpose of this essay is to facilitate study of these worlds by proposing a typology of virtual worlds, adapted from C. Porter’s (2004) typology of virtual communities. We support the relevance of this typology by arguing that each of the five elements of the typology played critical roles in the historic evolution of gaming and social networking at pivotal times in this evolution. We then argue that recognizing these five elements is helpful for identifying future applications and research questions.

Section 1 begins by tracing the history of virtual worlds to its origins in gaming and social computing. Section 2 describes our suggested typology of virtual worlds. Section 3 argues why this typology is relevant to understanding the historical progression leading to virtual worlds. Section 4 suggests how this typology is useful for understanding the future implications

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 3

of virtual worlds, in terms of applications, possible new technologies, and future directions for research in social, business, and computing sciences. Section 5 concludes.

1. Antecedents of Virtual Worlds in Gaming and Social Computing Open or unstructured virtual worlds represent a blending of the elements of immersive 3D gaming environments, developed in the gaming industry over the last 25 years, together with elements of online social networking. This conclusion can be seen by tracing the development of electronic gaming since the 1970s, including (a) arcade games, (b) console games, (c) LAN games with more players, (d) games with Internet connectivity, (e) unstructured games with many players, (f) massive games with user-generated content, and (g) immersive 3D worlds with designer-provided objectives. Open virtual worlds combine the last three items with elements of web-based social networking. Open virtual worlds, thus, consist of massively multiplayer gaming platforms with unstructured objectives, user-generated content, immersive 3D virtual reality shared environments, and social networking elements used between people through their avatars. (For elaboration on the historical development of the electronic gaming industry see Castronova 2002 and Messinger et al. 2008. This section draws material from the latter source.)

1.1. Historical Progression We can trace the roots of virtual worlds by examining the historical development of the video gaming industry and of social networking sites.

Arcade Games. The video game industry is widely believed to have been launched when Pong was released by Atari Interactive in November 29, 1972 (Wiki/pong, 2008). While not the first entrant into this emerging market, it became the first highly successful coin-operated arcade video games (Herman et al., 2008), and was soon followed by Tank, Indy 500, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man (Winter, 2008). These games added the element of real-time video interactivity, which enhanced reflexes and provide the excitement of real activity, to the key elements of earlier games which involved (a) strategic and tactical objective-oriented problem-solving (e.g., chess, go, bridge, and poker; see Castronova, 2002, Figure 1) or (b) thematic and fantasy roleplaying (e.g., Parker Brothers Co.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Monopoly), or some combination of these (e.g. historic battle simulations, including D-Day, Midway, Bismarck, Stalingrad, and sports simulations, including Stratomatic Baseball and Football). Many of the earliest video games were single-player games played against the computer.

Console Systems. In 1986, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released across the U.S. (previously released as Famicom in Japan), featuring popular characters like Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, and Popeye (Herman et al., 2008). Many of these games were initially for a single player, but subsequent generations of games permitted players to compete against each other.

Sporting games had been a major success with users of the early console systems; popular fighting games subsequently elevated home console gaming to a new level with such releases as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Some modern forms of console systems, such as the Nintendo Wii system, include dynamic user interfaces for various physical games and electronic sports.

LAN Games. LAN (Local Area Network) parties provided yet another venue in which to experience social interaction through gaming. The games in these events were computer-based

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 4

instead of console-based. LANs required everyone present to load the same software, but then allowed for an essentially unlimited number of participants. Most of the games used in these sessions were first-person shooter (FPS) games, where the objective was to simply, and often (electronically) barehanded, wreak havoc (Jansz & Martens, 2005).

Internet Connectivity. In the mid-1990s, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony introduced more powerful consoles that used compact discs and 32- and 64-bit systems (Herman et al., 2008).

With time, Sega would drop out of the console race and focus solely on software development for the different gaming platforms. The next stage of modern gaming consoles took shape with the start of a new millennium. As Personal Computer (PC) and Internet technology grew at a rapid pace, so too did the video game consoles’ capabilities. Releases of the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox offered gamers the ability to connect to the Internet and play against and talk with other gamers. This completely redefined what types of games would be popular in the home. With a network of users able to join in on a game, the landscape of video games became much more expansive, not only geographically, but also in terms of the nature of the social interaction they enabled.

Unstructured Games. Subsequent game forms permitted freedom for the player to roam around a large world, rather than proceed along preset paths only. One particular genre of "god games" afforded the player an omnipotent role. Some games also introduced shared player contributions through the Internet. “Sandbox", "open”, or "unstructured" games introduced freedom into gaming that did not previously exist. The Grand Theft Auto series, though controversial, serves as an excellent example. These expansive settings and freedom of movement coupled with injections of realism into the surroundings — such as progression of daily time in a 1 second to 1 minute ratio — creates an immersive environment unlike structured gaming (Murray, 2005).

Games with Player Generation of Content. Some games took this trend one step further and presented the gamer with near-total freedom within the game environment, if not always total control over its behaviors. Peter Molyneux introduced the "god game" in 1989, where the player is quite literally near-omnipotent (Au, 2001). The massively successful The Sims, its sequels The Sims Online, The Sims 2, and the upcoming Spore, provided the player a certain amount of control of their environment and the ability to generate their own content (Kelly, 1994), including "skins" for the avatars, new types of decor for the homes, and new pieces of furniture. Indeed, Electronic Arts (the producer of Sims games) claims that over 80% of the game's content is made by users (Ondrejka, 2006). (This alone was not new; in 1996, Quake became the first multiplayer, freeform game that provided open standards which allowed for user contributions; Hinton, 2006). Nevertheless, despite the user-generated content, in these environments players are still playing a game with online components; they do not exist in a virtual world. New entrants changed this and took the potential of such Internet frameworks beyond the entertainment realm.

Worlds with Designer-Provided Objectives. In worlds such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes/Villains, and Age of Conan, avatars can wander where they wish, but also gain certain skills and strengths by earning experience points (Lastowka & Hunter, 2006). Some of these worlds are beautifully rendered, and players’ avatar identities are maintained and develop over time, responding, in part, to significant interaction with other people’s avatars. These massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 5

(MMORPGs) offer small "quests," or designer-provided objectives that serve as games within the larger game (Song & Lee, 2007). Some of the worlds have become very large in their scope and number of participants; World of Warcraft, for example, has over 10 million subscribers (Blizzard, 2008). Nevertheless, these MMORPGs reflect the designer-intended gaming tradition which also influenced earlier electronic games.

Social Networking Sites. Although not gaming, per se, social networking sites influenced the development of virtual worlds. These environments support members pursuing their own objectives of socializing and sharing of textual and pictorial content (and, increasingly, audio and video content). The first instance of a social networking platform was SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997 (according to Boyd & Ellison, 2007). These platforms allow members to (a) easily create “profiles” with information about themselves, and (b) support the differentiation of public vs. private information on members’ profiles, with authorized access to the private aspects of the members’ profiles only to their “trusted” circle of friends. Other common features include communication media such as blogging, instant messaging and chat, notifications when the profiles of one’s friends have been updated, introductions to friends of friends, reviewing of content and tagging with general comments, and content recommendations based on the members’ comments and reviews. The sites can be geographically-based assuming a particular language and cultural etiquette (e.g., Cyworld was initially launced in South Korea in 1999), demographically-based (e.g., neopets.com is for children, nexopia.com is for teens, and Facebook was originally for Harvard students), or activity-based (e.g., LinkedIn for professional introductions, YouTube for video sharing; Dogster and Catster to exchange pet information; hisholyspace.com for faith-based exchange). These environments bring together most elements that have come to be considered under the heading of “web 2.0” technologies in simple, highly usable ways for people who have little to no technical expertise. (For a thoughtful survey of the various social networking sites, together with a historical overview, see Boyd & Ellison, 2007).

Open Virtual Worlds. The distinctive feature of open virtual worlds is the social interaction among people and their avatars that occurs in a 3D immersive shared environment with user-chosen objectives, user-generated content, and social networking tools. Virtual worlds, thus, combine the previous four elements described above. In these worlds, people can form relationships as friends, romantic partners, virtual family members, business partners, team members, group members, and online community members. They can also create things, and save, give, or sell what they created to other people. And, as the objects that are created might be desired by others, they suddenly have value in the real-world economy (Lederman, 2007; Lastowka & Hunter, 2006). These various features make virtual worlds as desirable virtual spaces for collaborative play, learning, and work. According to Bartle (2006, page 31), "[f]rom their humble beginnings, virtual worlds have evolved to become major hubs of entertainment, education, and community." And further, according to Balkin & Noveck (2006) "[a]though the development of these virtual worlds has been driven by the game industry, by now these worlds are used for far more than play, and soon they will be widely adopted as spaces for research, education, politics, and work."

1.2. Outcome of this Historical Progression Gaming and virtual worlds have grown to be an important form of entertainment.

Historically, the gaming industry progressed through a sequence of developments involving arcade games, console games, LAN games with multiple players, games with Internet

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 6

connectivity, games with many players, massive games with user-generated content, and immersive 3D worlds with designer-provided objectives. Purely as a popular form of entertainment, gaming has grown to compete in size with the movie industry. By 2007, the computer and video game industry alone was able to generate $18.85 billion dollars in global sales, $9.5 billion in game sales, $9.35 billion in console sales (Bangeman, 2008). If the predictions for future growth within the industry are correct, this number should more than double by 2010 (Kolodny, 2006).

But beyond the realm of entertainment, much activity in virtual worlds is growing in the realms of business, education, and culture. Concerning advertising and promotions, S. Barnes (2007) provides a list of 126 prominent real life brands in Second Life as of August 31, 2007, including IBM, Mercedes, Pontiac, Nissan, Dell, BMG (in the media Sector), and PA Consulting (in management consulting). Concerning retailing and service businesses, in February 2007, there were 25,365 business owners in Second Life (DMD et al., 2007), most of whom owned stores, rented real estate, or managed clubs. Concerning education, over 150 universities have a presence in SL, and some of them actually use SL for classes and other education purpose (Graves 2008). Business, public organizations, and cultural groups are using the environment for conferencing, public meetings, delivering informational services, and performances or exhibits.

Because of the growth of activities in these worlds, it is increasingly important for us to categorize the differences between these worlds and to understand the implications of these differences in terms of how humans function in them and the resulting societal outcomes.

2. Typology of Virtual Worlds Given this history, our goal is to consider a typology of virtual worlds to promote further study and application of them. Virtual worlds are increasingly perceived as an opportunity for economic activity, and many retail and service organizations, as well as some governments, have established a presence in these worlds. Despite receptive coverage in the press, it is not yet entirely clear, however, what value virtual worlds add to more traditional e-commerce and egovernment, or how organizations and individuals can harness this value. One question involves identifying which virtual worlds are appropriate for which activities and why.

To help answer such questions, we follow C. Porter (2004), who proposed a five-element typology of virtual communities. We utilize the same five elements, but extend the typology to electronic games, social networks, or virtual worlds. Our addition is to modify what can be used as descriptors of the typology elements to make them applicable for these new contexts, as follows: 1. Purpose (Content of Interaction): Porter focuses on the specific type of information or content being communicated among the virtual community. We focus on (a) whether a game has a strategic, tactical, or thematic appeal, (b) whether the network is themed (has a specific purpose) or is open, and (c) for virtual worlds, whether there is an age focus, a content focus, or it is open.

2. Place (Location of Interaction): Porter focuses on whether the notion of place is completely, or only partially virtual. We also consider whether players are collocated or geographically dispersed.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 7

3. Platform (Design of Interaction): We follow Porter by focusing on synchronous communication, asynchronous communication, or both. In addition to looking at PC platforms connected by the Internet, we also include various gaming platforms.

4. Population (Pattern of Interaction): We follow Porter by focusing on the size of the group. Porter also considers the types of social ties; we consider distinguishing characteristics of the target user market.

5. Profit Model (Return on Interaction): Porter focuses on revenue or non-revenue generating environments. We elaborate on her taxonomy by examining whether the world supports (1) a single purchase price or registration fee (i.e., fixed fee); (2) fee per use (i.e., variable fee); (3) subscription based (and on what basis subscriptions are made); (4) advertising-based; (5) pay-as-you-go extras (virtual assets including clothing, land, and software); and (6) sale of ancillary products, such as real stuffed animals and accessories, which are accompanied by passwords for accounts in virtual worlds where virtual versions of the products enable combined real and virtual play.

Table 1 demonstrates how this typology is useful for distinguishing between various games, online social networks, and virtual worlds over the last few decades. The purpose varies according to whether the objective is strategic, thematic, open, educational, media sharing, or for socializing young people. The place of interaction differs on whether the players need to be collocated or whether they can be dispersed. The platform differs (in part) according to whether interaction occurs synchronously through the Internet, asynchronously, using a LAN, using a console system, or a board game (face-to-face). The population depends on whether there are two players, a few players, many players, and, if the latter, the nature of the user segment targeted. The last element describes the whether the business model associated with the platform is based on a fixed user-fee, subscriptions, advertising from sponsors, virtual extras sold to users, or real-world ancillaries.

Porter has argued that the five elements of this typology (purpose, place, platform, population, and profit model) meet five criteria for a good typology, established by Hunt (1991).

These criteria are as follows: (1) Is the phenomenon to be classified adequately specified? (2) Is the classification characteristic adequately specified? (3) Are the categories mutually exclusive? (4) Is the typology collectively exhaustive? (5) Is the typology useful?

In this section, Criteria 1-4 will be used to assess the adequacy and strength of the proposed typology. The final criterion of usefulness is considered most vital in an evaluation of a typology (Hunt, 1991). [Porter, 2004]

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Table 1. Typology Applied to Selected Games, Online Social Networking Sites, and Virtual Worlds*

Purpose

Place

Platform

Population

Profit Model

Strategic Objective Thematic Objective Tactical Objective Tactical Objective Strategic Objective Thematic Objective Tactical/Thematic Objective

Collocated Collocated Collocated Collocated Dispersed Dispersed

Board Game Board Game Console Systems LANs Synchronous Synchronous

Two Player 2 – 6 Players 1 – 4 Players 1 – 1,000+ Players 2 – 6 Players Mass Market

Dispersed

Synchronous

Mass Market

Fixed Fee Fixed Fee Fixed Fee + Extras Fixed Fee + Extras Variable Fee Free + Extras Fixed Fee + Subs + Extras + Ads

Dispersed Dispersed Dispersed Dispersed Dispersed

Asynchronous Asynchronous Asynchronous Asynchronous Asynchronous

Free+Ads+Extras Free+Ads+Extras Free+Ads+Extras Free+Ads+Extras Free+Ads+Extras

Subs+Extras+Ads Subs+Extras+Ads Subs+Extras+Ads Subs+Extras+Ads Subs+Extras+Ads Ancillaries +Extras Subs+Extras+Ads

Games Chess Monopoly FPS - Console FPS - LAN Internet Scrabble The Sims Online World of Warcraft

Online Social Networking Sites LinkedIn Hisholyspace.com Dogster, Catster Flixter YouTube

Themed Themed Themed Themed Themed

Network Network Network Network Network

MySpace

Open Network

Dispersed

Asynchronous

Facebook

Open Network

Dispersed

Asynchronous

Businesspeople Religiously Affil.

Children Interest Group Interested in Video Young Adults – Creative Young Adults

Education Education Open Teen Play Media Sharing Child’s Play Open

Dispersed Dispersed Dispersed Hybrid Dispersed Hybrid Dispersed

Synchronous Synchronous Synchronous Synchronous Synchronous Synchronous Synchronous

Mass Market Mass Market Chinese Plays &.Owners Young People Children Mass Market

Free+Ads+Extras Free+Ads+Extras

Virtual Worlds ActiveWorlds Forterra Systems HiPiHi Sony PlaySt. Home Vside Webkinz Second Life

*We apply C. Porter’s (2004) typology of virtual communities to games, online social networking sites, and virtual worlds, using our own descriptors for each of the five typology elements.

FPS = First Person Shooter Game Ads – Advertising

Subs – Subscriptions Hybrid – Both Collocated and Dispersed.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 9

We do not repeat the arguments for the first four criteria here, since the case has already been made in the context of virtual communities (Porter, 2004), and since virtual worlds are a particular form of virtual community. Instead, we assess the fifth criterion â&#x20AC;&#x153;Is the typology useful?â&#x20AC;? In the next two sections, we argue that the five-element typology is useful for (a) interpreting the historical progression leading to virtual worlds, and (b) identifying future applications and research topics involving virtual worlds.

3. Interpreting Historical Antecedents of Virtual Worlds We now argue that this typology provides insight into the historical progression leading to virtual worlds described earlier.

The engine behind development of virtual worlds ultimately has been new technologies embodied in successive platforms for participant interaction. This made possible participant interaction that was local or remote, covering potentially distant geographic locations (places).

More powerful platforms also made possible interaction between larger groups of people (populations). Furthermore, more complex interaction made possible, and even necessitated, more complex payment structures (profit models).

Most fundamentally, advances in communication and computing platforms facilitated diverse objectives of interaction (designed to meet different purposes). While new technology is the underlying causal agent, or catalyst, this is not necessarily simple logic between a single cause-effect pair. Rather, we encounter the process of technological enabling whereby new technology gives rise to new potentialities; and people and organizations achieve these potentialities in a succession of steps, as new practices are learned and new institutions are developed to facilitate collaborative use of these new technologies. Such a process occurred with the development of language, itself; the emergence of the printing press, and with more recent technological advances such as the telephone and radio (Leblebici et al, 1991). This process has recently occurred with the emergence of electronic gaming, social networking, and virtual worlds. In a nutshell, this summarizes our core argument about the historical development of virtual worlds (summarized in Section 1).

But the process of development has been somewhat more complex, whereby certain elements develop in parallel and others, occur in a clearer temporal sequence. The typology above provides a useful way of organizing some of these historical interactions. We accordingly give a sketch of the evolution of each of the five typology elements.

First, past innovations in games, social networks, and virtual worlds generally serve a new function or purpose. That is what makes them innovations. This consideration is described well by the first element of the typology, purpose. Early games were distinguished by whether the participantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s purpose was to play a game with a strategic objective or with a thematic objective. Early video games involved tactical objectives. New online social networks and virtual worlds either revolve around a particular theme or activity, or have open objectives, as determined by the participants. Indeed, many of the historical turning points in this set of industries (summarized in Section 1 and Table 1) revolve around uncovering and addressing new purposes for gaming and social networks (the first dimension of this typology).

Second, the above historical progression is marked by a shift from a platform that requires participants to be collocated, to a platform that allows them to be geographically

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 10

dispersed, by virtue of the Internet. This consideration is described well by the second element of the typology, place. (Place can also be used in a more detailed sense as describing the geographic target market, and, indeed, new online technologies, particularly those involving adaptation of different languages, permit increased geographic customization and targeting.)

Third, a key element that fundamentally distinguishes between online social networks and virtual worlds is whether the interaction with other users is asynchronous or synchronous.

This consideration is described by the third element of the typology, platform. Whether the interaction is asynchronous or synchronous determines whether communication is separated in both time and distance or whether social interaction takes a more immersive form. The psychological meaningfulness of these two forms of communication is potentially quite different, as well as the kinds of information that can be easily accommodated. The element â&#x20AC;&#x153;platformâ&#x20AC;? also can be used to distinguish between whether game players interact through the Internet, a LAN, a console system, or face-to-face (for a board game). A number of more specific features of the technology platform (in addition to those shown in Table 1) can also be used to distinguish between the offerings of different virtual worlds.

Fourth, a critical distinction between various virtual worlds, online networks, and games depends on the intended number of participants and the target segment of people from which to draw the participants. This is described by the fourth element of the typology, population. Early gaming progressed from two person games, to games for a few players, to multi-person games targeted at either children or adults. Larger games were also targeted to particular user segments, special interest groups, or open to permit and encourage diversity of people (as well as objectives). Typically, after a particular platform was proven, such as an electronic console game, an Internet-based game, an online network, or a virtual world, the environment experienced innovation in the form of new instances of these platforms targeted to different population segments.

Fifth, an important issue concerns the business model that supports the platform provider.

Most business models are based on (a) a fixed fee, (b) subscriptions, (c) advertising from sponsors, (d) virtual extras sold to users, (e) real-world ancillaries, or (f) a combination of these elements. This is well described by the fifth element of the typology, profit model. This element also influences the nature and sustainability of a particular world, network, or game.

Historically, many profit models began with a fixed fee. Online systems also permitted using subscriptions. But as platforms increasingly developed large networks of users, the possibilities for advertising by sponsors grew. Real-world ancillaries have always existed as a source for supplementary income for games, just as with movies. But worlds such as Webkinz turned this upside down, by making the purchase of the ancillary plush animal the key revenue generator and the entry-point into the world. Finally, online extras, by participants wishing to enhance their online experience, have become increasingly important as a source of revenue generation for such environments as Second Life, Battlefield Heroes, and the popular FIFA Soccer game in Korea. The extras in Second Life include real estate. The extras in Battlefield Heroes included armor and weapons. The extras in FIFA Soccer include virtual cleats and jerseys. Indeed, the newest edition of Battlefield Heroes was recently released on the Internet for free, with all revenues planned to come from subscriptions and on-line extras (Pilieci, 2008).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 11

We, thus, see that the five typology elements are useful for interpreting the historical progression of electronic gaming and online social networking that ultimately led to virtual worlds.

Indeed, the five elements (purpose, place, platform, population, profit model) focus on critical questions that journalists, marketers, and service providers are taught to ask: (1) For what purpose? (2) Where? (3) How? (4) Who? and (5) How much?

4. Identifying Future Applications and Research Topics We now argue that the five typology elements are also helpful for categorizing and examining the future of virtual worlds on several dimensions, including (1) applications for business, ecommerce, and education, (2) potential new technological features, and (3) future research topics in the social, business, and computing sciences.

Applications. Future applications of virtual worlds may be suggested by the proposed five typology elements. Some possibilities include uncovering new purposes for virtual worlds (e.g., mechanisms to facilitate supplier-manufacture or manufacturer-retailer relationships), new places for utilizing virtual worlds (e.g., mobile devices), new functionalities in the platform (e.g., improving avatarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gestures and facial expressions as a means of communication), new target population segments (e.g., new mothers), and new profit models (e.g., bundling virtual world memberships with Internet service).

In addition, because of the growth of consumer participation in virtual worlds, firms will need to learn to manage the utilization of these worlds for the following business decisions: (1) Choosing in which worlds to promote, advertise or engage in other communications; (2) Selecting in which worlds to open e-commerce stores, e-government activities, and virtual service offices; (3) Choosing in which worlds to offer classes; and (4) Choosing in which worlds to perform market research, such as focus groups, surveys, and test markets.

Toward this end, it will be useful for public relations agencies and communications scholars to compile data on (a) the demographics and psychographics of users in the different worlds, (b) the kinds of activities in which these users engage, and (c) the kinds of messages or products to which users of particular worlds are most amenable. Such data would go beyond Table 1 to include many extant virtual worlds. The typology advanced in this paper will facilitate categorizing data about the different virtual worlds in this way.

Technology. The above typology may be useful for helping to identify and project directions that future technologies might take in electronic gaming, online social networking, and virtual worlds. Ideas may be suggested by recognizing that the goal of new technology is to facilitate new purposes, reach new places, provide for new platform functionalities, target new population segments, and make possible new profit models.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 12

Research. Lastly, the five typology elements can also be helpful for organizing past research in the social, business, and computing sciences, and for identifying gaps for new research. Table 2 provides a detailed list of research topics organized around the typology described in this paper. For elaboration, see Messinger et al. (2008), who group these topics, instead, by research discipline. By comparison, our proposed typology has two benefits as an organizing scheme: (1) the typology is more economical with space and (2) the typology explicitly recognizes similar issues addressed by different disciplines. We think these are intriguing topics and encourage readers to peruse them.

Table 2. Virtual Worlds (VWs): Open Questions and Past Work

Typology Elements Purpose

Place

Platform

Population

Profit Model

Open Questions for Research and Application

Past Work

How can VWs be used? For video conferences? For corporate training? For virtual workspaces? To facilitate collaborative design? For education and distance learning? As a place in which to do market research or test markets?

What are people’s motivations within VWs?

Boulos et al. 2006, Bronack et al. 2006, Bugeja 2008, Dickey 2005, DiPaola et al. 2007, Driver et al. 2008, Edwards 2006, Graves 2008, Maher et al. 2005, Nebolsky et al. 2003, Roy & Kodkani 1999, Rosenman et al. 2007, Ragusa & Bochenek 2001.

Adrian 2007, Anderson and Bushman 2001, Balkin & Noveck 2006, Cole and Griffiths 2007, Christ & Peele 2008, Jansz & Martens 2005, Grabowski & Kruszewska 2007, Herman, et al., 2006, Hugues 2007, Mayer-Schoenberger & Crowley 2006, Melby 2008, Mennecke et al. 2007, Methenitis 2007, Nobel 2006, Ondrejka 2006, Sherry 2001, Smyth 2007, Whang and Chang 2004, Yee and Bailenson 2007, Yee et al.

2007.

Are standards of social behavior in VWs evolving differently from those in the physical world? What social values? Norms?

Etiquette? Gift-giving? Sexuality? Attitudes toward cheating?

Do behaviors and attitudes learned in VWs affect behaviors and attitudes in the real world? Do VWs influence attitudes toward violence, sexuality, and conservatism? Are cross-over effects present between in-world and real world retailing and service delivery?

Should VWs be regulated (as compared to regulation of ISPs)?

Are virtual casinos gambling? Will laws and regulation influence creativity and productivity in VWs? Are virtual profits taxable? By what government?

Is there a new form of art emerging in VWs? How does the nature of the platform influence people’s behavior?

Do synchronous and asynchronous forms of interaction differ in meeting people’s information needs, stimulating social interaction, or engendering trust? Does the monetary system in VWs influence behavior?

How can VW platforms be utilized for virtual service delivery and customer relationship management, electronic retailing, teaching, and libraries? What types of services, products, or courses are most suitable?

How should the appearance of an avatar sales agent or instructor be designed?

Are different platforms more or less conducive to selfgovernance within VWs? For media placement, what are the demographics, psychographics, geographic characteristics, membership sizes, and participation levels of various virtual worlds?

Do virtual worlds influence consumers’ self-concept?

Will VWs support themselves with a single up-front fee, periodic subscription payments, advertising, pay-as-you-go extras, or sales of ancillary products?

Farkas 2007, Goel & Mousavidin 2007, Hans et al. 2006, Hendaoui et al. 2008, Holzwarth et al. 2006, Kadavasal et al.

2007, Kim et al. 2008, Sipress 2006, Swanson 2007.

Barnes 2007, DMD et al. 2007, Edery 2006, Hans et al. 2006, Hemp 2006, Subrahmanyan et al. 2004, Yee 2006.

Leblebici et al. 1991, MacInnes 2006.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 13

4. Conclusion1 Overall, this paper considers a typology for virtual worlds consisting of (1) purpose, (2) place, (3) platform, (4) population, and (5) profit model. We have argued that this typology is helpful for interpreting the historical progression of innovations in electronic gaming, online social networking, and virtual worlds. We have also argued that the typology can assist in identifying (a) future applications for business, ecommerce, and education; (b) potential new technological features; and (c) research topics in the social, business, and computing sciences.

One limitation of the typology discussed in this paper is that, as the area changes, other emergent features may become worth incorporating into it. For example, an alternative way of categorizing virtual worlds could distinguish between types of engagement that people have with the virtual world. (http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=991). This would involve rethinking or adding to the “platform” element of the above typology.

Our hope is that this typology will be useful in the future development and application of virtual worlds, as well as for research and teaching. Virtual worlds permit rich interactions between users; they can exchange messages, objects, and money; they can communicate through voice over a headset and microphone; they can see each other’s avatars interacting with the environment, and they can “experience” the world through a variety of activities, including dressing, changing their avatars’ shapes, touching things, building and owning things, engaging in quests, doing sports, dancing, hugging, and kissing. No doubt, much of this activity is for entertainment, but many opportunities are created for education, e-commerce, and cultural development. In closing, as we consider future directions, we are only limited by our imaginations – and virtual worlds are expanding those as well.

1

The authors are indebted to Kristen Smirnov, Michael Bone, Annie Niu, and Stephen Perelgut for thoughtful comments and suggestions. Research funding for this work comes from IBM and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Initiative in the New Economy Research Alliance.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:-Typology of Virtual Worlds 14

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres By Eiko Ikegami, Department of Sociology, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research and Piet Hut, Program of Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute for Advanced Study .

Abstract Using the historical example of Tokugawa Japan (1603-1867), we point out how artistic circles provided a “virtual world,” a kind of early modern “second life.” This world gave their participants the opportunity to escape from the vertical, hierarchical, feudal structure through the creation of horizontal public spheres, in loosely coupled networks based on the strength of weak ties. In an often playful way, these aesthetic circles provided alternative forms of sociability to premodern Japanese people. This in turn had a serious impact on the formation of political modernity in Japan. We explore parallels with the virtual world of Second Life. There, too, new public spheres are being carved out, in equally playful and largel apolitical ways, that may yet have profound and unforeseen consequences for society at large. We illustrate our analysis with two novel examples of communicative spheres in Second Life, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics and a broadly interdisciplinary initiative called Play as Being. In conclusion, we see the need for a theoretical revision of the notion of “public sphere” beyond its conventional usage. As the virtual worlds of Tokugawa, Japan and Second Life illustrate, the strength of weak-tie networks can form the basis for public spheres in a surprisingly large spectrum of times, locations and cultures.

Keywords: virtual worlds, virtual communities, Second Life, Tokugawa, Japan.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Avatars Are for Real 2

Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres By Eiko Ikegami, Department of Sociology, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research and Piet Hut, Program of Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute for Advanced Study .

We can say that most of our companions in linked poetry sessions are just as close as cousins. Even when we are meeting them for the first time, once we get into the world of linked poetry together, we feel an intimacy with one another. It is only in this way of linked poetry that older people do not feel uncomfortable socializing with their juniors, and that those of noble birth do not shun their social inferiors.

Sōgi (1421-1502), one of the most distinguished poets of “linked poetry” in premodern Japan.

Avatar A: i feel i’ve gotten to know u both better than friends in real life.

Avatar B: yup, this is the place where I can really express myself.

Avatar A: even though we never met in real life….

Avatar C: … and we live in three different continents.

Avatar B: I keep being surprised how quickly newbies become oldtimers.

Avatar C: lol, took me a while, but now happy to be part of it all.

A conversation in Second Life (2008).

1. New Spheres of Communication Second Life is a virtual world that is exhibiting a new kind of existence, somewhere in between that of on-line video games and the real world, but having quite a different flavor from either of those two. Participants are called "residents" rather than "players." They are represented by graphical representations called avatars carrying fictive names, in a kind of role play. However, unlike on-line games where “roles” of avatars are usually prescribed (e.g. a warrior, a spaceship captain, etc.), participants in Second Life can choose and design everchanging roles for their own avatars.

At first sight, this virtual world may look strange, filled with funny looking people with costumes that you would not imagine wearing in real life. However, the role-playing aspect of Second Life does not imply a lack of seriousness: behind each avatar there is a real person and the emotions that this form of on-line communication triggers are very real indeed. In fact, this virtual land with avatar residents now harbors numerous small communities; casual, loose, and ephemeral, but yet lively enclaves of communicative spheres.

For example, avatars can sit side by side having “drinks” together while enjoying conversations. Furthermore, once getting into focused interactions in the sense of Erving Goffman (1963), avatar meetings in virtual worlds can carry a sense of co-presence that is

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stronger than that felt through other forms of electronic communication, such as email, instant messaging, or phone conversations. Even videoconferences, where voice is combined with streaming video images, do not allow the participants to walk around, or to interact in any other way than by waving to each other and holding up objects in front of the camera. In contrast, avatars in a virtual world are free to explore the totality of their joint spaces. The intimate sense of co-presence and being-togetherness has to be experienced to feel its full impact. (See, e.g., Castronova, 2007; Guest, 2007; Ludlow & Wallace, 2007; Au, 2008; Meadows, 2008; Boellstorff, 2008) The main theme of our paper is an analysis of Second Life as a new type of “public sphere.” The term public sphere is usually associated with sites of political discourse outside the realm of the political institution of the state. In Western Europe, during the last few centuries, the creation of public spheres has gone hand in hand with developments toward political modernity, civil society, economic changes, and in general the rise of a new kind of civility. Social theorists have been debating the nature of this social transformation because it was central to the development of modern democracy. (See, e.g. Habermas, 1989; Cohen & Arato, 1992; Calhoun, 1994) Traditional journalism uses its media in ways that fit the conventional image of public spheres. However, more recently we have seen the proliferation of various non-traditional types of cyber-based media. Many of these are sites directed at fun-loving ways of communication rather than at a more traditional kind of political discourse. Second Life is an especially complex example of such a novel type of a publicly accessible sphere of communication. Its distinctive style of communications begs to modify the theory of public spheres.

We consider that it might take a decade, at least, to see how this new type of sphere of communication will fully develop. As a first step towards an analysis of this process, in this paper we will attempt to draw some parallels to other spheres of communication in history. We will argue that Japan's history of the last few centuries, compared to European history, provides even more interesting comparison material for interpreting what avatar-based virtual worlds such as Second Life may be moving toward. The key here is the way in which Japanese art circles— fluid, casual, yet vibrant networks of non-political activities—effectively formed a “virtual world,” a kind of Second Life itself, within early modern Japan. This early virtual world unintentionally created a condition for developing political modernity in Japan by creating a culture of horizontal sociability.

The historical study of associational life, in particular the formation of voluntary and horizontal associations, has gained extensive interest in the social scientific literature because of its positive implications for the quality of civil society and democracy. (E.g. Putnam, 1992, 2000) For a long time, the emergence of voluntary associations of individuals formed outside the realms of the political institutions of the state and the primordial ties of the family have been considered to be necessary conditions for the rise of modern democracy. However, too little attention has been paid to the importance of “weak ties” in the sense described by Mark Granovetter (1985) and of opportunities for switching network connections.

It is crucial to shift our focus in this context to sites of public spheres that emerge on the basis of the more casual and flexible social interactions and to ephemeral voluntary human ties, which have historically provided society with increased flexibility by providing open circuits for

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communication. When strongly cohesive horizontal associations gain hegemonic power, they might impose suffocating disciplinary effects on their members while excluding others. In contrast, when a society harbors network connections that allow relatively casual forms of shifting and reconnecting, citizens can be empowered in more open and flexible ways. The sites of communications that temporarily allow people to decouple from existing strong ties might become precious spheres of sociability. (Ikegami, 2004, 2005a, 2005b) The premodern Japanese case highlights the power of such communicative sites built on numerous weak–tie connections and small groups.

The authors of this paper have become involved in Second Life from different angles.

Ikegami, a sociologist, studies historical and contemporary forms of public spheres, civility and associational activities. She also has initiated theoretical studies of political and cultural implications of weak-tie based relations and switching network connections. She became a “resident” of Second Life because of her interest in this new form of communication. She also has written extensively on Japanese aesthetic sociability and Japan’s distinctive route to political modernity (Ikegami, 2005a). Hut, an astrophysicist, originally developed his interest in virtual worlds because of their potential to provide interactive tools for scientific collaborations. After being invited to give a few lectures in Videoranch, based on Active Worlds, he established two Qwaq-based organizations, WoK Forums and the forerunner of MICA (see Hut : 2008 for references), during 2007. Starting in 2008, he shifted his main activities to Second Life, where he established PaB (see section 8). MICA is currently more broadly focused, covering applications in Second Life, Qwaq, and other virtual worlds, though its meetings all take place in Second Life (see section 7).

We present here a kind of interim report on the distinctive potentiality of virtual worlds based on on-line 3D technology, drawing on our own distinctive perspectives as well as our observations and experiences as “avatar-residents” in Second Life. In this paper we develop historical and sociological arguments showing the power of virtual sociability such as roleplaying in shaping basic structures in the real world, politically, culturally, and economically.

We illustrate our ideas and observations concerning Second Life with a comparative case study, in which we use Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868).

2. Freedom through Fluid Identities We have found from first-hand experience that the world of virtual avatars forms a fertile soil for a realistic sense of co-presence. And it is this strongly felt sense of co-presence that is critical for understanding the power of communication in virtual worlds. As we observed and walked around as residents in the community-like virtual world of Second Life, we have found that the current discourse on avatar-based virtual worlds has not yet spelled out some distinctive characteristics and communicative potentiality of virtual worlds based on interactive avatars. Neither the raw experience nor the interpreted sense of meaning of experiencing virtual worlds can be understood in terms of a simple dichotomy of the virtual versus the real.

Comparing Second Life and Japanese aesthetics may seem unusual, even surprising.

However, while the massively multi-player on-line 3D technology of Second Life is new, the human search for experimenting with alternative identities in a kind of “second life” is not new at all. Creating an alternative sphere of sociability through second social identities is not unusual, historically speaking. In fact, unlike the usage of the term “virtual” as signifying technologically

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created worlds, many sociologists and anthropologists consider that any culture, as such, embraces an aspect of the virtual that is deeply embedded in our understanding of social and physical reality. Specifically, both in Tokugawa Japan and in contemporary virtual worlds, we can find lively communicative activities based on casual, loose, weak-tie network connections with a sense of horizontal fellowship distinct from the outside “real” worlds.

There are several common characteristics of communication in these two cases of virtual worlds. For example, the two forms of communication entail a strong sense of co-presence that encourages focused interactions among members. Although there are different mechanisms at work, they are both “addictively” immersive forms of communication. In either case, they offer a sense of freedom through fluid identities. Furthermore, unlike the conventional idealized image of public spheres, they represent sites for “fun-loving” activities and their means of communication is characterized by artistic distillation rather than so-called “critical rational discourse,” a characteristic that Habermas (1989) once considered the hallmark of his idealized image of “the public sphere.”

All these playful and sometimes even quite silly activities may suggest a total irrelevance for society as a whole. However, such a conclusion would be utterly misleading. Tokugawa Japan’s historical experience indicates that the presence of numerous sites of alternative sociability as publically accessible communicative spheres can yield transformative power, unintentionally or intentionally, when it is coupled with appropriate social conditions. Below, we will have a closer look at the world of Tokugawa aesthetic sociability.

Figure 1. Poetry Meeting: A gathering for a comic poetry contest in early modern Japan. The participants, including three women, had various social backgrounds. A sense of horizontal fellowship characterized such a gathering. A circular seating was a tradition in poetry circles since the medieval period, ritualistically symbolizing the fact that there was no hierarchy among participants. (See Ikegami, 2005a, p.174).

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Figure 2. A meeting in Second Life: A group of avatars gathering outdoors to talk about the nature of reality in a playful way, as part of the “Play as Being” initiative discussed in section 8.

In the Tokugawa era, the formation of virtual sociability including role-playing profoundly changed the quality of communication in society at large and in fact has laid the foundations for the extraordinarily rapid political modernization and industrialization of Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912). Central to this transformation was the extensive popularization of circles and associations that shared interactive aesthetic and cultural pursuits such as poetry making, singing, and tea ceremonies. The procedures of interactive aesthetic productions including extensive uses of artist names were used effectively to create enclaves of virtual realities outside feudal norms that enforced hierarchical sociability.

The various ritual procedures of Japanese aesthetic pursuits in group settings are a case in point. The elaborate constructions of virtual worlds with their own norms, idioms, sensibility, and sociability was extremely attractive for its participants. In the middle of stifling feudal social structures, networks of people who engaged in interactive artistic and literary pursuits could provide much more freedom than “real life” could possibly offer, in a totally immersive and hence very “real” way. The result was an emerging cultural condition that prepared the population of premodern Japan for moving toward political modernity once the country opened up after the late nineteenth century.

The rise of modern polity hinged on the construction of a sense of commonality and fellowship among its citizens. Given that Tokugawa era of Japanese history was a time when the shogun and his vassal samurai dominated society and people were socially and politically divided by strict hierarchical codes of status distinctions. It was almost a miracle that Japan built a modern nationhood with modern political institutions so quickly. One of the main ingredients for this outcome, in our view, is Japan’s early form of a second life in the form of participatory art circles.

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3. Bonds of Civility in Virtual Worlds: Tokugawa Japan The premodern Japanese created amazingly robust associational activities centered on various cultural pursuits such as poetry-making, tea ceremonies, singing, and music playing. Samurai, merchants, craftsmen, peasants, the high and the low – such formal distinctions that were so important for their “first life” – could be hidden under the cloak of artistic names and hence forgotten temporarily. Thus, it was not unusual that cultured people had several artist names for different group activities.

Interestingly, people outside Japan who love haiku, the sharply distilled form of poetry composed of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively, are rarely aware of the fact that this form of poetry making was one of the most important drivers behind the creation of voluntary associational networks in premodern Japan. Through learning to compose and appreciate haiku poetry, men and women of humble backgrounds acquired their own forms of self-expression and extended their social networks.

A haiku was originally the first part of many stanzas of haikai-linked poetry. The most precious aesthetic moment of haiku-making was thus positioned at the place of interactive creation of chain poem-making, through the excitement and emotional sharing of aesthetic time spent in company with others. Haiku embodied its network poetry not only as a style of poetry, but as least as much as a form of social reality. Individuals who became a part of a poetry circle received cognitive associational as well as actual social networks connectivity.

What is more, once a person had become seriously involved in this form of poetry in their home town, he or she enjoyed automatic entry into other poetry networks anywhere in Japan, given the existence of numerous loosely connected poetry circles all over the country. Even women poets could travel easily and extensively by utilizing these poetry networks. They mingled and communicated addressing each other solely by their poet names. These pen names signified an alternative rule of sociability that made feudal status distinction temporarily null and void. In many cases, it would have been easy to trace the real identity of the players, but that was not the point: even when they knew each others’ formal identities, the key was to enjoy a shared stepping out of real life, leaving all that behind for the duration of the aesthetic enjoyment and creativity. (Ikegami, 2005a) These aesthetic circles and associational networks cut across classes and regions and thus provided alternative realities where people could develop a second life, not as samurai, merchants, or farmers, not as men or women in their prescribed roles, but as individuals liberated from status and gender restrictions. Each person could express his or her love of particular cultural pursuits, unhindered by their formal background. In this way, behind the façade of strict political repression, premodern Japanese people were able to successfully carve out spheres of communication that were effective enclaves of free and voluntary sociability.

Therefore, premodern Japan developed distinctive styles of art, the practice of which crystallized around gathering sites, dominated by a sense of co-presence. The interactive process of art production stood out as central and, as such, forms a stark contrast with its European counterpart, where the typical modern notion of arts and literature emphasizes individual artistic productions. In contrast, in premodern Japanese arts interactive processes formed the most meaningful aspects of aesthetic pursuits. For example, in linked poetry, all participants in a

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poetry-making session were simultaneously producers and consumers of poetry. The co-presence and collaborative synergy in spheres of interactions made this art style into a distinctive form of aesthetics and as a result provided important sites of sociability.

4. Getting Hooked.

Among the Tokugawa Japanese, many were deeply immersed into, and completely taken by, the excitement and interactional synergic energy bubbling up at the sites of collaborative arts.

It is known that the worlds of cultural pursuits were almost addictively seductive for these premodern Japanese people. In fact it was not so much the social function of horizontal fellowship but rather the immersive quality of interactive art forms that was crucial for the popularization of these circles’ activities.

In reaction to this seductive immersion, many treaties were written to warn Tokugawa people not to be taken too much by aesthetic hobbies—a direct indication of the addictive aspects of these arts. To give just one example, almost three centuries ago an elderly samurai wrote: When these men are able to sing popular songs (jōruri) well enough, they are given artist names by their teachers. The students feel honored by this treatment. Within their own circle, they address each other only by ‘—tayū’, these fake names. Their samurai names are deemed appropriate only for official public matters. In their private life, they use only their ‘—tayū’ names. How deplorable!1 This old samurai lamented the situation in which his contemporaries of samurai status were all too happy to be honored as entertainers in their private life. Although they were reared to devote their lives to public duties, they relegated their stuffy samurai names for use only in dull official occasions.

Singing samurai knew not only the pleasure of singing love songs, but also the power of creating a virtual reality for free group activities. Politically, Tokugawa Japan was a rigid feudal state. Socializing across status and regional boundaries was out of the question. Although participation in hobby groups was perceived as non-political, and largely harmless and ‘private’ by the authorities, such activities effectively created large spheres of ‘public ‘sociability outside the shogunate hierarchical order. Hence, behind the rigid formal rule, civic life in Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries saw large numbers of people effectively establishing a kind of “second life”. And most any one who has become a seasoned resident of Second Life will testify to its similarly seductive nature.

5. ‘Real Life’ and Other Lives.

Through tea ceremony and flower arrangement to haiku and the game of Go, Tokugawa citizens could escape political pressure and meet each other freely in the safe realms of the virtual worlds of art. In big cities as well as in the provinces—or even in small villages— numerous hobby circles emerged, which allowed people to experience alternative realities. Most

1 Mukashi Mukashi Monogatari (Stories of Olden Days, ca 1732) translated by Ikegami. For more detail, see Ikegami (2005, p. 144). Tayū was a suffix of an artist name in popular songs called jōruri.

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of these circles did not have high-flying ideals for horizontal fellowships or any puritanical aesthetic ideals. Some circles were organized by volunteer enthusiasts, but many professional artists also initiated such circles in order to collect fees from amateur students. Just like contemporary Second Life, numerous loose groups showed up, combining voluntarism and commercialism in a fluid mix of shifting forms.

Many hobby circles, in particular poetry circles, were quite loose and casual organizations with circuits that were open to outsiders. They also often organized activities that were accessible and appealing to the fun-loving general public (see figure 3). A non-purposive mingling just for fun might not resemble the conventional political model of civil society.

Nonetheless, through such activities, participants met people whom they would not have met in their real life. They would casually exchange their ideas as well as general information, often regarding issues that went quite a bit beyond what might be considered “just for fun.” For example, rumors about political situations could easily and efficiently spread through such weaktie networks.

In addition, whatever their initial motivations, those people who intermittently experienced alternative modes of sociability, unconsciously or consciously, began to recognize a crucial and subversive fact: the feudal mode of sociability that the shogun enforced was just one of many versions of reality. Thus, toward the mid-nineteenth century, fun-loving hobby circles had quietly changed the culture of sociability in Tokugawa society. So much so, that these networks eventually transformed the qualities of social relations by creating “bonds of civility without civil society,” a paradox when seen through the eyes of a conventional Euro-centric interpretation, but nevertheless an historical reality in Tokugawa Japan.

Figure 3.A scene from a sake-drinking party of Battle of Senju. Although there were many serious artistic and literary pursuits, playfulness also characterized the Tokugawa activities of cultural circles. The network formed by a literary circle thus could become a basis for organizing a fun event such as this sake-drinking contest with a shared sprit of comic poetry. (See Ikagema 2005a, p. 195-196)

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Figure 4: An example of a playful time in Second Life, with five avatars enjoying each other's company.

After an earlier, more serious discussion, one of them has handed out some bottles to the others to start a little drinking party. Another example of a scene from a “Play as Being” meeting.

There was an unintended consequence of Tokugawa virtual sociability in real life. The old samurai did not see the social power of second life in artistic names and simply considered singing samurai to be lazy bums. However, the constant identity-shifting from an official feudal identity to an artistic one made them realize that feudal distinctions were, after all, not the only kind of identity in the world. This realization was crucial for the post-Tokugawa situation. Japan in the late nineteenth century faced the difficult task of building a modern nation-state based on the commonality of its citizens in a society that had been divided by 260 regional daimyo polities, each of them with strict internal status distinctions. At this point, a sense of commonality nurtured in their virtual art worlds suddenly turned out to be important cultural capital for building a modern nation-state that required equalization of its citizens.

In only half a century, Japan succeeded in building a modern state with a constitution, parliamentary politics, meritocratic bureaucracy, and universal public education. At the dawn of the 20th century, Japan found itself to be the first non-western industrialized nation: a dramatic success story of a real world transformed through roots in virtual worlds. The strength of the many weak ties in their networks gave the Japanese the chance to mobilize an egalitarian counter culture powered simply by a desire for having fun.

6 . New Public Spheres in the Making Just as various types of Tokugawa aesthetic circles and networks cannot be described as a single unified public sphere, it is hard to describe Second Life as a singular sphere of communication. This virtual world with several hundreds of thousands of active residents now hosts numerous sites with diversified purposes. For example, there are numerous commercial establishments that sell fashion articles for avatars, there are show cases of large firms for

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advertisement purposes, there are university campuses that experiment with instruction given in cyberspace in various forms, and there are different kinds of museums. New inventive uses of Second Life emerge constantly, often from unexpected directions. Naturally, each site develops a different communication culture. Since Second Life hosts numerous small spheres of communication, it is not easy to describe the culture of Second Life as the whole.

In social scientific literature, a German philosopher and sociologist, Jurgen Habermas set up the current intellectual discourse on public spheres. He had a more restrictive view on this notion than we have, however. Habermas traced the origin of the bourgeois public sphere in late eighteenth-century Europe to the development of social institutions that fostered open debates, such as salons, coffee houses and reading societies. He also characterized his notion of the public sphere as spaces for rational critical discourse in the context of Enlightenment society. He viewed the rise of such enlightened discourse conducted outside the institution of the state as symbolizing the rise of expanding civil society and modern democracy.

To be sure, Habermas assumed “the public sphere” to be a single unified sphere of public discussions in which various small sites of communications were interlocked. We are not asserting that communications that are currently taking place in Second Life fit the model of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. In particular, when his theory of the public sphere is coupled with an emphasis on the rational mode of discourse, the unified image of the public sphere in a society that Habermas presents differs sharply from what we encounter in robust and diversified communicative activities in virtual worlds.

Rather, the realities of communication currently unfolding in Second Life are closer to the more culturally diversified model of public spheres with attention spread over multiple, flexible sites of communications presented by Ikegami (2000, 2004, 2005a, 2005b). We plan to discuss our notion of publics in the context of complex networks in virtual worlds elsewhere in more detail, in due time. In the current paper we only present a bird's-eye view of the various connections we have discerned, in particular between the kind of aesthetic artistic immersion in Tokugawa Japan and the experience that millions of people have had recently in Second Life.

Casual participants of Second Life might not realize the rich potential for interactive communication of this virtual world. When someone first enters Second Life and wanders around, it is easy to come across many “sims” where nothing seems to be happening. There are just lots of buildings, landscapes and commercial entities without any avatars in sight. Visiting only these sites is likely to convey an impression of walking around in a ghost town. There are various reasons for this, one being the fact that the major mode of transportation in Second Life is teleportation and, hence, roads are typically deserted. So one’s first impression may not give any clear feeling for the more intensely communicative sites that can be found plentifully once you know where to look. We found it fascinating to see the spontaneous emergence of many virtual sites with functions similar to those of salons, cafés, pubs, and dance clubs in real life.

Once an avatar starts chatting with others in such an open public space, it is common to find other avatars whose owners live in very different parts of the world and who come from very diverse backgrounds. Just like was the case in Japanese linked poetry sessions, avatar meetings also flatten age differences and social backgrounds.

In often joking and playful atmospheres, avatars exchange information, ideas, and rumors in such meeting places. They make new friends and meet old friends, and may end up finding a

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new group affiliation. Seasoned avatars tend to be members of many different “groups.” Most of these groups are casual and loose, but share certain kinds of interests, hobbies, or political views.

One’s group affiliations can be seen in the “profile” of each avatar, a function designed to promote interactions between like-minded individuals. By adding group affiliations to their public profiles, residents can carve out social identities as avatars in virtual worlds. Such smallscale group activities and their resulting tiny but active publics form the basis for the unique potentiality for creating new public spheres in the age of cyber-globalization.

In order to illustrate the formation of new kinds of communicative spheres in virtual worlds, we will briefly discuss two examples that we are familiar with through direct participation, one in astrophysics, and one broadly interdisciplinary.

7. The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics One example of a new public sphere is MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (see http://www.physics.drexel.edu/mica/). One of us (PH, Pema Pera in Second Life) started this institute in an informal way in order to explore the possibility of using the virtual world of Qwaq (see http://qwaq.com) as a research tool in astrophysics. Initially the idea was to create a virtual institute, like a university department, but independent of any existing university. While Qwaq was and still is the best virtual world as far as its office environment is concerned, with far superior application tools, its administrative structure, at least in 2007, was not ideal for providing a natural path of growth, putting too much of a burden on the administrator of the organization. (See Hut, 2008, for an overview).

Starting in April 2008, MICA moved its focus to Second Life and, from that moment on, the availability of existing networks in Second Life provided the needed impulse to let MICA grow in a sustained way. We now have daily "coffee time" meetings, every morning from 7:30 till 8:00 am, SL time, and several weekly activities, ranging from journal clubs and simulation school sessions to popular talks. In addition, we have started to use the OpenSim open-source equivalent of Second Life to implement some of our astrophysics simulations directly on the physics engine in OpenSim, starting with the work of OpenSim developers Jeff Ames and Adam Johnson, members of the genkii team2.

One big difference between MICA and a university department is the fact that in MICA professional astronomers and amateurs freely mingle with each other and with professional scientists with backgrounds outside astronomy. In real life, these three groups hardly intersect.

For a computer scientist or biochemist to walk into an astronomy department is a rare event. The physical distance between the different buildings by itself already forms a barrier, which is amplified by the widespread academic culture of compartmentalization. And for an amateur astronomer to walk into a departmental coffee chat in an astronomy department is unheard of. It is just not done, even though many astronomers might well enjoy such mingling, as well as in the case of serious amateurs who might be able to offer skills, time and energy.

In contrast, Second Life as a new world does not have these types of cultural barriers, separating astronomers from other scientists, and separating professional astronomers from

2 http://www.genkii.com

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amateur astronomers, or from ex-astronomers who have turned to an industrial job, for that matter. In MICA we find plenty of individuals from all these groups who, together, form a new type of public sphere, which has not received any name yet. We could call it an “augmented astronomy department,” but even that may be far too modest a name. An “astronomy marketplace” may be a better term, but that does not do justice to the permanence and staying power of MICA as an institute. Perhaps MICA will even develop into a type of “astronomy village.” We will have to see how its history will play out.

MICA is an example of the distinctive characteristic of avatar-based virtual worlds as new kinds of public spheres, in that it carries a strong flattening effect: participants whose social backgrounds in real life vary greatly treat each other like buddies, all more or less on a similar level. In addition to overriding status differences, virtual worlds also make regional barriers disappear. Participants to MICA come from all over the world, including Canada, the US, the UK, Holland, Belgium, Germany, India, Iran, and Japan.

8. Play as Being Another example of a newly created public sphere is the initiative called Play as Being,” (PaB), which was started in April 2008 by one of us (PH). After having spent more than a decade organizing broadly interdisciplinary discussions on web sites (see http://www.kira.org and http://www.waysofknowing.net), as well as in the real world (as the head of the program of interdisciplinary studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, see http://www.ids.ias.edu/), he explored similar possibilities in virtual worlds (Hut, 2008).

Unlike the astronomy example above, PaB is not a virtual counterpart of a real life activity. Instead, PaB combines researchers interested in scientific explorations of the nature of knowledge, as well as those with a more philosophical bent, and also individuals with a serious background in contemplative studies. In some sense, PaB could be seen as an initiative at the intersection of science and religion and philosophy. However, instead of the usual lectures and discussions that can be heard in conferences on science and religion, in our case we focus on a more experiential approach.

Taking the basic idea of meditation and contemplation, but distilling its essence from the usual curriculum of years of practice for an hour or more per day, PaB advocates very short ninesecond explorations of the nature of reality, but very frequently, typically every quarter of an hour, as a kind of one percent time tax. Treating their own life as a lab in that way, participants in PaB get together four times a day, in ever changing configurations, depending on who has time to come in. During the PaB meetings, some of the discussions are focused on reports of experimental findings, together with attempts at interpretation and further guidance of sustained experiential explorations. At the same time, many discussions are far more playful and lighthearted and, in fact, a typical meeting several times switches between a deeply serious and a far more jocular atmosphere.

PaB also forms a new kind of public sphere, even more radically different from existing public spheres than MICA already is. There is no resemblance with academic departments. The meetings have in some way a flavor of neighborhood café get-togethers; in some way they resemble laboratory meetings, they also have a kind of hobby club atmosphere, and they even resemble monastic meetings. Yet, it is not a café in a particular neighborhood as participants

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come from all corners of the globe. It is also not an academic institution although some of us are scholars and scientists. And even though participants often talk about their personal view of spirituality, it is also far from any particular religious sect, church or philosophical tradition.

The informal, friendly, and casual nature of gatherings where individuals are represented by their avatar names invites participants to temporarily decouple from their own existing views and this may make it easier for them to explore different ways of seeing our often unquestioned reality. In fact, as one resident who frequently participates in PaB meetings mentioned to Hut, “PaB allows me to combine elements of monastic practice and lay practice: it is possible to partake in meetings several times a day, as in a monastery, in this virtual world, while still having a family in the real world and holding a regular job there as well.”

9. Virtual Roots for Public Spheres in Virtual Worlds The two cases mentioned above illustrate only a small part of the very rich spectrum of communicative possibilities in virtual worlds based on interactive avatars. Nonetheless, the vibrancy of communication taking place in these two spheres, MICA and PaB, though for totally different purposes, is striking. It has led us to reflect on the distinctive nature of interactive communication in virtual worlds.

So far, Second Life has been largely attracting public attention as a tool for certain specific economic, political, or educational “purposes” for organizations already existing in real life. Large firms usually see Second Life as a means for public relations, advertisement, and market research; some organizations have also started to use virtual worlds for facilitating communications among employees. Public organizations in real life such as NASA are extensively exploring possibilities for using virtual worlds as a means of educating the public.

Although all these applications are all interesting means of using virtual worlds, they are externally driven. By and large, they are not produced by indigenous organizations that have emerged from within Second Life. As such, these activities all have an aspect of the real world colonizing virtual worlds. Interestingly, most of these “colonizing” attempts have backfired.

Many of the big firms that moved into Second Life early in 2007 have built magnificent sets where almost nobody ever visits. In contrast, home-grown apparel manufacturers are often wildly successful. Small shops run by housewives and students frequently outcompete large real world firms for attention by avatar residents. Through word-of-mouth even small shops can quickly become known in a world full of dense weak-tie networks. And most importantly, these shops cater to the avatars with full understanding of what their needs and interests are, clothes being far more important than, say, show cases for sports cars.

The two examples that we have discussed above can be analyzed in similar ways. MICA, to the best of our knowledge, is the first organization within second life that has been set up by professional scientists as a purely in-world organization. This stands in sharp contrast to attempts by existing real-world universities and government organizations to establish branches within Second Life. MICA is not a branch of any external agency. Rather, it is created, maintained and directed by residents within Second Life. Most of them are professional astrophysicists in real life, but their network connections within Second Life are independent of their real-life affiliations. It is purely a shared interest in exploring new tools for their work that makes them collaborate, not any existing outside structure.

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Similarly, and even more strikingly, PaB has emerged totally from within Second Life.

No institution in the real world comes even close to resembling its nature and structure. Unlike existing special interest groups that have formed branches in Second Life, the eclectic body of its participants reflects the novel and wildly experimental character of PaB. While it is far too early to even guess how successful this initiative will be, the early signs are certainly encouraging.

Within two months after its start, with hardly any form of advertising, meetings are being held four times a day, once every six hours, with a typical attendance of more than half a dozen avatars. Among those, most of them had never met and would probably never have met where it not through the new kind of public sphere that PaB has started to provide.

The homegrown nature of these two organizations is reflected also by the fact that both of them are currently holding their meetings on virtual “land” that is kindly made available by two other all-volunteer organizations. For the time being, until MICA and PaB establish their own buildings on their own land, MICA's main meeting room3 is located on the premises of the International Spaceflight Museum and PaB's main meeting place4 is located on the land of the Zen Retreat. Both of these other organizations are fully non-profit and both originated as grass roots organizations within Second Life itself, independent of any outside organization in real life.

The fact that MICA and PaB itself sprung up on virtual “land” owned by organizations that were themselves similarly indigenous, is a sign that Second Life is now developing an ecology that is for a large part based on the strength of weak ties in the many overlapping Second Life networks.

In Tokugawa Japan, too, what started as spontaneous circles and associations developed in an unplanned way into a conglomeration of loose networks – an example of the strength of overlapping weak-tie networks. (Ikegami, 2005a) Second Life may be just beginning to show signs of this kind of strength, as a spontaneous development of emergent complexity.

Some of the key elements of all these activities that are successful and indigenous are the important role of volunteers coupled with a strong sense of sharing and interacting. As such, there are important parallels with the “open source” communities that have been able to produce competitive software, such as the Linux operating system. The value of interactions between peers in an atmosphere in which collaboration is celebrated has parallels with Tokugawa Japan.

As a start illustration of this, we can listen to the words expressed more than three hundred years ago by Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), the most famous haiku poet in history. He strongly valued the sharing of collaborative spirits at the moment of co-presence. The interactive dynamic of collaboration was the element that Bashō cherished most—as is reflected in his dictum that poetry is “only garbage once it is taken away from the collaborative linked-verse table.”5 Fortunately, what was seen as garbage by this master poet was in fact published, both in his own time and till the day of today, and millions of people world-wide continue to enjoy his poems. So while there is no doubt an element of exaggeration in his saying, it does reflect the central value that Bashō assigned to joint production in free collaboration within a kind of virtual world of his day. Clearly, what we are now witnessing in the new medium forms of virtual worlds has historical precedents in unexpected and unexpectedly venerable places.

3

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/153/205/59 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rieul/230/203/74 5 This saying was cited by Bashō’s disciple, Dohô’s “Sansansasshi.” See Ikegami (2005a).

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10. Second Lives, Past, Present, and Future We have observed and analyzed sociability in virtual worlds both past and present. Our example of Japan is just one of many that could be used. We should note that while the massively multi-player on-line 3D technology of Second Life is new, the human search for experimentation with a form of second life, through creating alternative spheres of sociability, goes back many centuries. For example, various types of monastic orders offer spaces for alternative realities, by encouraging individuals to decouple from secular social relationships, culture and values. Such alternative spheres of sociability have been often coupled with people’s search for the possibility of creating a new social order built on the horizontal association of free individuals rather than on structures of vertical integration. The distinctive characteristic of Tokugawa Japan’s aesthetic circles is that participation to these circles did not imply the abandonment of one’s social affiliations and identities in real life. Rather, participants acquired the option of opening up their usual routine of social interactions by entering circuits of social networks existing in a kind of virtual world. It is in this sense of providing sites for switching network connections through weak-tie interactions that we consider the particular similarity between the case of premodern Japanese aesthetic circles and the case of Second Life.

Given the historical precedents that we have discussed here, it behooves us to watch the current growth of on-line virtual worlds with more than passing interest. The collection of many different virtual worlds that are now sprouting up allows millions of people globally to interconnect and to form a very dense and strong global tapestry of interwoven networks based on weak ties. These virtual worlds have rich potential for creating unconventional sites for new types of public communications. We still have to wait a while to see whether further careful cultivation of this potential can bring about positive social impact. However, if we want to influence this process and improve the odds for positive results, the time to do so is now, while everything is still so very much in flux.

In several places in this article we have pointed out how a powerful aspect of virtual avatar communications lies in the fact that participants are prompted temporarily to decouple from existing ties. This reminds us of the current global situation in which the democratic process of many polities are malfunctioning due to the fact that people cannot get out from the grip of their narrow group interests. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many intellectuals once became optimistic about the future of democracy and, indeed, there has been a significant worldwide expansion of the introduction of democratic institutions such as choosing top leaders through elections. Soon, however, it became clear that the expansion of mechanical systems of democracy does not guarantee the quality of democracy and the health of civil society in political processes. We now observe many polities violently divided by strong loyalties to various seemingly more primordial ethnic and religious ties.

Could it be that virtual worlds, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, can offer citizens in a global world new forms of freedom from the tyranny of local interests? Technology alone cannot provide an answer to such a major question. Nonetheless, opportunities such as a decoupling from existing ties and freedom in switching one’s identity in virtual worlds without inccurring a penalty in the real world might well form promising seeds for developing a new culture of global civility. And could these new freedoms, at first resembling a make-believe world of play, actually have a profound impact on future global developments?

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We do not know what the consequences will be for the world. But if history teaches us anything, these consequences may be monumental and quite a bit farther reaching than most of us are willing to entertain. Current journalistic discourse on virtual worlds tends to focus far too much on the business potential of this new technology. Nonetheless, the distinctive characteristics of animated avatar based communication only recently has received scholarly attention. Second Life, and its fledgling sister worlds, deserve a second look by all of us. Their real potential may be to galvanize the real world in ways that nobody can yet foresee.

Acknowledgements: We very much appreciate the presence of our many friends in Second Life, their generous help, and their participation in many vibrant activities including the MICA and PaB projects mentioned in this paper. We thank our fellow SL residents who gave us feedback on a draft of this paper, especially Stormerne Hunt (Storm Nordwind in SL) for his detailed comments. We are grateful for receiving a grant from the Fetzer Foundation, to Piet Hut and Steven Tainer, for the study of virtual worlds in the context of modern contemplative approaches.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Avatars Are for Real 18

Bibliography Au, W. J. (2008). The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World. NY: Collins.

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Calhoun, C. (Ed.). (1994). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Castronova, E. (2007). Exodus to the Virtual World. NY: Palgrave.

Cohen, J.& Arato, A.. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings.

NY: Free Press.

Fine, G.A. & Harrington, E.B. (2004). Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society.

Sociological Theory, 22, 341-56.

Granovetter, M.. (1985). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 136080.

Guest, T. (2007). Second Lives. NY: Random House.

Habermas, J. (1989). (Thomas Burger & Frederick Lawrence, Trans.). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hut, P. (2008). Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds, in Dynamical Evolution of Dense Stellar Systems. In E. Vesperini, M. Gierz & A. Sills (Eds.), Dynamic Evolution of Dense Stellar Systems: Proceedings of the 246th Symposium of the International Astrological Union Held in Capri, Italy September 5-9, 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(See http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1655.)

Ikegami, E. (1999). Democracy in an Age of Cyber-Financial Globalization: Time, Space, and Embeddedness from an Asian Perspective. Social Research, 66, 887–914.

———. (2000). A Sociological Theory of Publics: Identity and Culture as Emergent Properties in Networks. Social Research, 67, 989–1029.

———. (2004, August). Civility as the Grammar of Weak-Ties Social Interactions: A Historical Prelude to Cultural Citizenship. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of American Sociological Association.

———. (2005a). Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 2005a.

———. Bringing Culture into Macrostructural Analysis in Historical Sociology: Some Epistemological Considerations. Poetics, 33, 15–31.

Ludlow, P. & Wallace, M.. (2007). The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Meadows, M. S. (2008). I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life.

Peachpit.

Putnam, R. D. (1992). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. NY: Simon & Schuster.

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”

By Mark W. Bell, Indiana University

This is a brief essay, we call "think-pieces", designed to stimulate a discussion on a particular topic. The topic for this series of essays is "defining virtual worlds".

Keywords: virtual worlds, network, synchronous, persistent, avatars.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Toward a Definition 2

Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”

By Mark W. Bell, Indiana University In a Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, many authors will use the term “virtual world”, and a common definition would help avoid misunderstandings. There is currently no agreedupon definition, however, and the term is used in different ways at different times by academics, industry professionals and the media. Chesebro (1985), analyzing the general functions and uses of definitions, argued that a definition should “name the outstanding and structural ingredients of a situation.” Several authors have offered their own views about the ‘outstanding and structural ingredients’ of virtual worlds, as an ancillary part of larger arguments they were trying to make.

These tentative definitions do not agree with one another in all parts, however. This paper will review the existing definitions and attempt to find a common ground among them.

1. Prior Definitions While many scholars have sketched out informal definitions, formal definitions have been more rare. Three stand out as particularly influential. Richard Bartle, creator of text-based virtual worlds in the 1970s and 1980s, defines the “world” part of “virtual worlds” this way: “a world is an environment that its inhabitants regard as being self-contained. It doesn't have to mean an entire planet: It's used in the same sense as "the Roman world" or "the world of high finance" (Bartle, 2003). This addresses the notion of world, but does not address what makes a world “virtual”. Raph Koster, an experienced developer of virtual worlds in the 1990s, argues that “a virtual world is a spatially based depiction of a persistent virtual environment, which can be experienced by numerous participants at once, who are represented within the space by avatars” (Koster, 2004). Koster begins to draw out some of the essential characteristics of a virtual world (persistence, numerous participants), but lacks the explicit mention of the technology needed to bring these environments into existence. Edward Castronova, a virtual worlds researcher, defines a “virtual world” as “crafted places inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people” (Castronova, 2004) Castronova’s definition contains the technological element lacked by Koster but does not include the ideas of persistence or synchronous communication. Using Castronova’s definition, a chatroom or a shared document would be a “virtual world.” Finally, while these definitions refer to shared spaces, they do not explicitly identify the people and their social network (which must always result from any sharing) as essential to the definition. This may be an essential component. Without users, a virtual world would be an empty data warehouse.

2. Toward a combined definition Combining elements from these three definitions and including an emphasis on the essential element of people, a new definition results: A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Toward a Definition 3

3. Discussion Each of the terms in the proposed definition is understood in a specific way and makes a specific, unique contribution, as discussed below.

Synchronous: Shared activities necessitate synchronous communication. A turn based or non-real time virtual space is more like a delayed email thread than a world. The notion of a “common time” allows for mass group activities and other coordinated social activities. Virtual worlds also offer an awareness of space, distance and co-existence of other participants found in real life spaces giving a sense of environment. The concepts of “near” and “far” are difficult to apply to something like CNN.com, but not Second Life. The greatest difference between these entities is that pages of a website, even when shared, do not constitute a navigable landscape, but rather a walled finite space. Virtual worlds however, regardless of scale, offer participants a sense of geography and terrain.

Persistent: A virtual world cannot be paused. It continues to exist and function after the participant has left. Persistence separates virtual worlds from video games such as Pac-Man or Galaga. This persistence changes the way people interact with other participants and the environment. No longer is one participant the center of the world but a member of a dynamic community and evolving economy. A participant has a sense the systems in the space (environment, ecology, economy) exist with or without a participant’s presence.

Network of people: People are central to virtual worlds. Participants communicate and interact with each other and the environment. It is an ecosystem in which the actions of a participant ripple through the world affecting every other part of the system. Participants can form short term and long term social groups (Williams et al., 2006) but it is not needed to still be an active part of the ecosystem. A user can go into the World of Warcraft and not speak to anyone but still interact with the environment. Even these solitary actions affect the world for every other participant.

Represented as avatars:. An avatar is any digital representation (graphical or textual), beyond a simple label or name, that has agency (an ability to perform actions) and is controlled by a human agent in real time. thereforeSo, a textual description of a character in MUD-1 would be an avatar. A fully graphical character, a player creates in Age of Conan, is an avatar. In contrast, a Facebook profile does not have agency beyond its creator (the agent). The roles of avatar and agent are represented by how we communicate actions to others. One can say, “My avatar rides into the castle and slays the dragon.” Those are separate actions being done by the avatar. Conversely, one can’t say “My Facebook profile is emailing you.” Avatars function like user-controlled puppets. Users command the actions of the avatar, but it is the avatar itself which performs the action. Even forms of communication which come more directly from the user, such as voice chat, are presented as actions taken by the avatar.

Facilitated by networked computers: Without networked computers, the combined definition could describe a world that is similar to a virtual world.. A well managed game of Dungeons and Dragons could be seen as a synchronous, persistent network of people represented by avatars. The difference between a D&D game and a virtual world is how data and communication are facilitated through networked computers. No pencil and paper game could allow the data management of all the objects, environments, interactions, and transactions,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Toward a Definition 4

storing them all indefinitely that is made possible through networked computers. Also, the computer keeps track of all the conversations, social connections and networks of people allowing them instant communication across national and geographical boundaries. No matter how much money or time players applied to a standard pencil and paper role-playing game it could never attain the levels of complexity and persistence made possible through networked computers. Networked computers allow the scale of the worlds to expand past horizons of imagination.

4. Applying a combined definition So using the combined definition, a video game like MarioKart is not a virtual world. In the game, there can be synchronous action (multiple players) in an environment, but no persistence. The Mario characters are a representation of agent but there is no network of people persistently connected to the player in real time. Social networks, such as like Facebook, are also not virtual worlds. A social networking site has persistence but no sense of synchronous environment (and therefore no sense of space). There are no avatars on Facebook, only descriptions of agents.

Also, the inclusion of avatars and networked computers separates “virtual worlds” from real world social environments, like a bar or restaurant. Virtual worlds may be an extension of these things, but avatars and networked computers give “virtual worlds” different characteristics than their real world counterparts. Environments that are virtual worlds include MUD-1, NeverWinter Nights, Second Life, World of Warcraft and the upcoming Hello Kitty Online.

The purpose of creating a combined definition is to create a common framework, to be built on. Exposing the definition to a wider audience will allow new ideas and tighter construction to be added. The definition is the beginning of a further process of defining that must go on in the area and become part of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research’s work.

Note: Thanks goes to Edward Castronova, Sarah Robbins-Bell and the members of the Synthetic World Initiative (Including Matt Falk, Travis Ross, Jim Cummings and Robert Cornell) for comments on this paper.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Toward a Definition 5

Bibliography

Bartle, R. (2004). Designing virtual worlds. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing.

Castronova, E. (2004) Synthetic worlds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Chesebro, J. (1985). Definition as rhetorical strategy. The Pennsylvania Speech Communication Annual. (41).

Combs, N. (2004, January 07) A virtual world by any other name? Message posted to http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/06/a_virtual_world.html Koster, R. (2004, January 07) A virtual world by any other name? [Msg 21] Message posted to http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/06/a_virtual_world.html Williams, D., Ducheneaut, N., Xiong, L., Zhang, Y., Yee, N., & Nickell, E. (2006). From tree house to barracks: The social life of guilds in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 1 (4), 338-361.

Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds

By Francis X. Taney, Jr. Shareholder, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC

Essay produced for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Keywords:

virtual worlds, software, copyright.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds 2

How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds

By Francis X. Taney, Jr. Shareholder, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC

Open source software has been and continues to be a transformative force within information technology. Indeed, open source software competes with proprietary software across a full spectrum of applications.

Virtual world platforms and applications are no exception. Linden Research, Inc., provider of the Second Life virtual world platform, has released the majority of its client-side code under the GNU General Public License ("GPL"). There are also a number of other open source projects, such as Open Simulator, Multiverse, and realXtend, that offer open source software designed to enable users to launch their own virtual worlds. In addition, there are an increasing number of open source software applications available for particular items of functionality that are of potential use in the virtual world that developers may incorporate into open source and non-open source virtual world platforms.

From a technical standpoint, open source will likely accelerate the development of virtual world technology, and lead to a proliferation of virtual worlds and a corresponding expansion of the volume of virtual worlds related commerce. From a legal standpoint, the intersection of open source and virtual worlds promises to raise a host of legal issues, some of which this article will explore.

Copyright Law as Applied to Virtual World Technology and "Virtual Objects" Given the nature of software, and open source software in particular, the rise of open source software in virtual world platform development will inevitably involve a host of copyright law issues. Copyright protection extends to original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

17 U.S.C. ยง 102. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be the original work of an author, i.e., not copied from a preexisting work, and exhibit a minimal amount of creativity. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). The creativity requirement is not very difficult to satisfy; even a slight amount of creativity will suffice. Id. A copyright owner has the exclusive right to, among other things, display, copy and distribute the copyrighted work. 17 U.S.C. ยง 101. A copyright owner also has the right to create modified versions or "derivative works" based on the original work. 17 U.S.C. ยง 101.

The software used to operate virtual world platforms, as well as most of the so-called "virtual" objects and other content created and sold by the merchants and content creators within Second Life and other virtual world platforms, are copyrightable subject matter under established copyright principles. For example, courts have long recognized that the computer graphics associated with video games satisfy the fixation requirement in 17 U.S.C. ยง 102, in that the graphics are embodied in the memory devices of computers, from which the graphics may be perceived with the aid of other components that interact with the memory devices. See, e.g.,

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds 3

Williams Electronics, Inc. v. Artic Intern., Inc., 685 F.2d 870 (3d Cir. 1982). Graphics resulting from the operation of virtual world platform software, and individual virtual objects created or placed in a virtual world, are therefore potentially copyrightable as visual or audiovisual works.

In addition, courts have also long recognized that the object and source code underlying an item of software is copyrightable as a literary work. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983). In appropriate cases, copyright protection may extend beyond the literal elements of a computer program to the non-literal structures of the program. Computer Associates Intern., Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992).

There is no reason to believe that courts will treat the code underlying virtual world platform software and individual virtual objects any differently than the courts in these prior cases. As in other areas of the law, we can expect that an increase in the volume of commerce around virtual worlds will be the catalyst for the development of a body of case law specific to virtual worlds. To date, there has simply not been the volume of commerce necessary to generate a sufficient number of disputes of enough magnitude to generate precedent. By making virtual worlds technology more accessible to would be entrepreneurs, open source promises to accelerate the growth of virtual world commerce, and with it the development of virtual worlds law.

Open Source Software Licensing Many technologists and information technology industry observers think of open source software as mainly a class of technology. In reality, open source is as much a legal and business innovation as it is a technological one.

Most commercial software companies, with few exceptions, make their software available to their customers by way of a non-exclusive license. This is because in most cases, software companies derive their revenues in large part from licensing the same software, or slightly modified versions of the same software, to a multitude of clients. Conveying a nonexclusive license to use the software ensures that the software owner is free to convey licenses for use of the same software to more than one customer.

Typically, these licenses (hereinafter "commercial" licenses) contain numerous restrictions on the manner in which a customer may use the software. Common restrictions include limits on the number of machines on which the software may be deployed, the number of people who may use the software as well as the purpose or purposes for which customer may use the software. Of equal significance, commercial software licenses typically preclude customers from redistributing the software, or from modifying or creating derivative works based on the software.

Open source software licensing has developed as an alternative to traditional commercial software licensing. Many users of open source take issue with the philosophy behind commercial software licensing, and believe instead that software creators should not restrict the use of the software they distribute in the manner typically done through commercial software licenses.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds 4

To facilitate freer use, modification and distribution of software, open source software adherents make software available to users pursuant to so-called "open" licenses that differ significantly from commercial software licenses. While there are numerous so-called open licenses in use, most of the open licenses allow free use, modification, copying and distribution of the applicable software. Many provide for access to the source code for the software, which is the human readable version of the code that developers can use to determine how the software was written. Two of the most widely used open source software licenses are the GPL and BSD licenses.

Often there are communities of developers contributing to the development of particular open source applications. Open source advocates point to this community effort as a reason why one can expect open source software projects to progress at least quickly and efficiently as commercial software applications. Because developers can access open source software for free, and at the same time save development time and cost, open source software can be very attractive to software developers.

Distribution of Open Source Software Despite the commonalities in philosophy and relative freedom of use common to many open source software licenses, not all of the licenses are the same, and many of the licenses have attributes that can complicate commercial use and distribution of open source software. A significant number of the licenses, including the GPL, provide that if a user combines code subject to the GPL with code that is not subject to the GPL, the user must release the source code to the entire body of code in connection with any distribution of the code. Commentators have referred to this feature of the GPL and similar licenses as "viral," meaning that the including the GPL code in the overall code base "infects" the overall code or application.

While the requirement to release the source code to the entire application may not concern some open source software users, an unwary company that intends to sell or license software or a device with imbedded software by way of a traditional commercial license may experience an unpleasant surprise if its developers had included GPL code in the software or application. If the company could not re-engineer its software or device to remove the GPL code, the company would be forced to release the source code to the entire application in connection with any distribution of the application. This source code release requirement may or may not be consistent with the company's strategy to commercialize its software, and in fact, may completely nullify the company's strategy.

Moreover, failure to release the source code in connection with distribution of software subject to the GPL license, or similar license, can expose a company to a copyright infringement lawsuit from the creator of the software. Items of relief potentially recoverable or obtainable under the United States Copyright Act include disgorgement of profits derived from the infringing conduct, attorneys' fees, injunctive relief, impoundment of infringing articles, and/or statutory damages as much as $150,000 per item infringed in the case of willful copyright infringement. This is more than an academic matter, as the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization the advocates the use of open source software, has in the last year brought a number of well-publicized lawsuits on behalf of copyright owners against companies that had used open source software in their commercial offerings without complying with the license's requirements with respect to the release of source code.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds 5

Another complication that may arise from the use of open source applications is that, as noted previously, there are a large number of different open source licenses, and the terms of these licenses can differ significantly. Licensing problems may arise when a company combines several open source applications subject to competing open source licenses into a combined body of code. This is because some licenses, known as "strong copyleft" licenses, require that anyone using the software may only redistribute the software pursuant to the same license, or a license that places no additional restrictions on the use or redistributions of the software. In a situation in which portions of an application are subject to two or more conflicting open source software licenses, distribution of the code cannot occur in compliance with any of these licenses. This condition could subject companies attempting to distribute such applications to exposure for copyright infringement as well.

These issues have significant potential import for the coming proliferation of virtual world platforms and virtual world commerce. As more would-be platform owners develop competing virtual world platforms, or go to market with software applications useful for virtual worlds, it is all but inevitable, given the substantial inroads open source has already made in the virtual world space, that many of these platforms and applications will use open source software.

Because there is not a particularly high corporate awareness of the prevalence of open source software and the copyright issues it poses, it is likely that a significant number of these enterprises will attempt to distribute applications containing open source software in a manner inconsistent with the licensing requirements.

Patent Issues The rise of open source software affecting virtual worlds promises to raise issues in areas beyond copyright. One such area is patent law.

Computer programs consist of algorithms. The United States Supreme Court has held that algorithms and other mathematical formulas are akin to laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas, which are not patentable in and of themselves. Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978).

In Diamond v. Diehl, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), however, the Supreme Court held that where a process incorporated a computer program as one step in the process, the computer program may be patentable subject matter when used as part of the process. In State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1093, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that where the inventor is claiming protection in an application of an algorithm that produces a "useful, concrete and tangible result," as opposed to protection in the algorithm in the abstract, the invention is potentially patentable. In AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc., 172 F.3d 1352, the Federal Circuit applied the State Street test to a business method incorporating an algorithm.

The increasing role of open source in virtual world development will mean that development will proceed in a decentralized fashion, in many locations, often simultaneously.

This will increase the potential for patent infringement claims and litigation. This is because unlike copyright law, independent creation is not a defense to an infringement claim. If a developer creates code that infringes on a business method patent, that developer is liable for patent infringement regardless of the fact that the developer did not copy or refer to the code 5

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds 6

with patent protection, or otherwise was acting innocently. By contrast, in the copyright context, the fact of independent creation would be fatal to an infringement claim.

Another complicating factor is that, in contrast to the prevailing practice in the commercial software industry, open source software licenses almost never carry with them any warranties of any sort, including warranties of title or non-infringement. Enterprises that use open source are not going to have the benefit of any warranty or indemnification from the creator of the software they are implementing. Further, while some open source software licenses grant explicit patent licenses of varying scope to practice inventions inherent in modifications that the recipient of the open source software make subsequently make, many other licenses do not. This means that in some cases, companies that use and modify open source software may be subject to patent infringement claims from the persons or entities from whom they received the code, if those persons or owners separately and previously created inventions relating to the same subject matter.

It should be noted that sellers and users of commercial software are prone to much the same exposure for patent infringement, and in that sense, the patent infringement exposure issue described above is not unique to open source applications. However, as the virtual world industry enlarges and diversifies, it is reasonable to expect that one or more of the emerging competitors will attempt to gain a competitive advantage through patent protection and/or litigation. The decentralized nature of the software development that will likely occur in the virtual worlds space promises to complicate the picture and impact any such patent based strategies.

Conclusion The application of open source software licensing and development to virtual worlds platform development involves the intersection of two transformative technological forces. This intersection will cause explosive commercial growth and, over time, create a body of law specific to virtual worlds, both with respect to intellectual property issues, which this article has explored, and otherwise. The development of this body of law will, in turn, affect the course of the industry in a substantial way, both in terms of determining the individual winners and losers, and in providing all of the participants in the industry with the rules by which the game must be played.

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 “Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future” July 2008

From a Video Game in a Virtual World to Collaborative Visual Analytic Tools By Theresa A. O’Connell and Yee-Yin Choong, National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; John Grantham, Systems Plus , Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; Michael Moriarty, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA; Wyatt Wong, Forterra Systems Inc., San Mateo, California, USA.

Abstract We investigated collaboration during a riddle-solving video game in a virtual world that drew elements from massively multiplayer online role-playing games and serious games. This disclosed benefits of collaborative game play over noncollaborative play in a virtual world. Participants were in the digital natives age range.

Collaboration conditions varied over five sessions. We derived implications for accommodating collaboration in visual analytic (VA) tools. We have determined future research directions with respect to borrowing from video games to design VA tools that accommodate the unique characteristics of digital natives who become information analysts as evidenced during collaboration in a virtual world.

Keywords: virtual worlds; video game; visual analytic tools.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 2

From a Video Game in a Virtual World to Collaborative Visual Analytic Tools By Theresa A. O’Connell and Yee-Yin Choong, National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; John Grantham, Systems Plus , Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA; Michael Moriarty, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA; Wyatt Wong, Forterra Systems Inc., San Mateo, California, USA.

What does the gaming research community have to offer the world of information analysis? A principal goal of our research is to understand the behaviors and skills that young analysts will bring to the workplace for the purpose of applying this understanding to development of visual analytic (VA) tools. One goal of these tools is to support the work of information analysts 30 years of age or younger. To achieve this, VA tools must accommodate these users’ skills and behaviors. In particular, we are interested in learning how collaborative skills acquired playing video games in virtual worlds can be applied to interaction with VA tools.

We define collaboration as players’ interaction with each other towards a common goal.

The next generation of information analysts is highly computer literate (Jonas-Dwyer & Pospisil, 2004). Known as the digital natives (Prensky, 2001a), they have grown up with computing. A subset of digital natives is called digital game natives (Zyda, 2005) because they have grown up playing video games. Many of them participate in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), internet-based interactive games played in an ongoing virtual world where players take on roles. They can participate at levels ranging from passive observation to active interaction with other players in various forms including competition and collaboration. There is growing evidence that video game players develop visual attention processing capabilities that are superior to those of non-game players (Green, & Bavelier, 2003, 2007). They are prone to collaborate, developing collective knowledge (Oblinger, & Oblinger, 2005; Rainie, 2007). They require immediate feedback to their actions both within and outside of gaming environments (Prensky, 2001b). Looking at the attributes of digital game natives, we have focused our studies on collaboration, and, in particular, synchronous collaboration in a virtual world.

VA tools often have complex visualizations, representing huge amounts of data and relationships among data in various degrees of abstraction. Thousands of reports, maps, charts, photos, recordings, etc. may be represented as infographics, e.g., clustered colored dots or icons, positioned or visually emphasized according to relevance to an analyst’s information needs.

Dense displays represent complex relationships and networks, e.g. social or financial. These displays are often three-dimensional (3D), giving visual, spatial and audio feedback. Animation indicates state changes, evolving views of information, trend development or movement through a geographic plane. These tools are highly interactive. They are electronically networked to facilitate information access and dissemination.

In many aspects, VA tools resemble online games. The two share properties such as high interactivity; complex displays that are often 3D; animation; visual and audio feedback; movement of objects through geographic planes; and electronic networking. In both, collaboration can be synchronous or asynchronous, planned or spontaneous. Players’ ability to

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 3

collaborate is a primary characteristic of MMORPGs. Collaborating information analysts can work together in real time, or pass work products or information to each other asynchronously.

They can be co-located or distributed across physical locations, but connected electronically.

The information analysts’ workplace is often a high-pressure environment. Data is often abundant, but its reliability varies. Today’s analysis may become incomplete or incorrect tomorrow as new information is added or false information discredited. Sometimes, information analysis resembles riddle solving with finding clues, making sense of them and developing answers.

Our research to date has drawn from many fields e.g., cognitive psychology, social psychology, education, computer science and biology. However, our work primarily resides in the domains of human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability engineering. Thus, it is usercentered, focused on understanding human factors that impact the user experience when using technology. Much gaming research proceeds without considering usability per se. In those instances where video game usability is considered, its definition ranges from fun (Song, Lee, & Hwang, 2007) to supporting task performance and satisfaction (Cornett, 2004) to playability (Desurvire, Caplan, & Toth, 2004). In our work, we apply a standard definition of usability to gaming, i.e. user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction (ISO, 1997), using methods developed specifically for evaluation of VA tools (Choong & O’Connell, 2008).

We are particularly interested in applying the serious game paradigm to VA tools.

Although the purpose of serious games is not entertainment, they use entertainment techniques and processes to achieve real-world goals with impacts outside the game play environment (Libes & O’Connell, 2007). It is this potential to achieve real-world goals that has made serious games a topic of interest to HCI gaming researchers and developers of interactive VA tools for information analysts (Libes et al., 2007). Entertainment techniques that are essential in gaming include supporting interaction and cooperation among players (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005).

Serious games often share this support of collaboration.

We designed a user-centered methodology to study the effect(s) of collaboration in a virtual world. We designed a riddle-solving video game within an existing virtual environment.

The game borrowed elements from serious games and MMORPGs. User recruitment was limited to digital natives between eighteen and thirty years of age. This age range included people entering the field of information analysis as well as younger people who had grown up after video games became widely available.

Experimental Design We started by defining the aspects of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction to be measured and then set appropriate metrics for each measure. Efficiency was measured in terms of the length of time players spent solving a set of six riddles. Measures of effectiveness included the number of riddles solved and forfeited and the number of wrong answers given. We studied satisfaction across two dimensions, enjoyment and comfort. The first measure, enjoyment, derives from the gaming research literature which identifies enjoyment as integral to game play (e.g., Song et al., 2007). The second measure, comfort, is an integral component of user satisfaction when interacting with software (e.g., Dinda, Memik, Dick, Lin, Mallik, Gupta, &

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 4

Rossoff, 2007). To these usability measures, we added engagement, a topic addressed in the gaming research literature (e.g., Sweetser et al., 2005).

Although we were not evaluating the usability of the game itself, we followed standard usability engineering methods to investigate the effects of collaboration during a serious game.

The research objective was to see if there were any differences between the experiences of collaborating players and players who did not collaborate, and, if so, to understand the nature and effect of those differences. Thus, one of the ways we report our findings is in terms of collaborators (COL) and non-collaborators (N-COL). To understand the nature of collaboration among young players, we ran an experiment with five conditions: Condition 1 (Control with no Collaboration Conditions); Condition 2 (Collaboration Prohibited); Condition 3 (Collaboration Mandatory); Condition 4 (Collaboration Optional but Penalized); and Condition 5 (Collaboration Optional and Rewarded).

Players For each condition, we recruited four players, a total of 20 players. Among the 17 players who provided optional demographic data, ages ranged from 21 years old to 29 years old with the average as 24.76. There were three female players with one each in Condition 2, Collaboration Prohibited, Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory, and Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized.

There were 17 male players. Playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; self-rated computer expertise was above medium; nine rated themselves as expert, and eight rated themselves as medium. Eight players had no experience playing interactive computer games. Within the other nine players, three reported their frequency of playing video games as 1 to 5 hours weekly, five players reported 6 to 15 hours weekly, and one player reported 16 to 25 hours weekly.

Experiment Environment The experiment was run on four identical desktop computers, each with an Intel Xeon 3.0 GHz processor; 2 GB of memory; an nVidia Quadro FX 1400 128 MB 3D graphics card; a standard 101/102 keyboard; a 3-button click/scroll-wheel mouse, one 20-inch monitor set to 1680 x 1050 resolution; headphones and a noise-cancelling, free-standing desktop PC microphone. We developed a riddle solving game called ScavHunt in a virtual environment, using the On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) platform provided by Forterra Systems Inc. (2007).

The ScavHunt Game The ScavHunt game resided in a virtual city and its environs. Peninsula City resembled a location near the coast of California, U.S.A. Its 30 city blocks covered 1,000 square kilometers, with over 80 architectural models. Ten models had unique interiors: a Grand Hotel with a conference center, a high school, a hospital, an airport, a stadium, a high-rise, a surf shop, a bank, a warehouse and a train station with train cars.

Players, represented by avatars, could walk or run at a pace that scaled to real life walking or running. Ground vehicles, such as an automobile, accommodated a driver and one passenger and traveled up to 40 kilometers per hour scaled. Air transportation, such as a helicopter, accommodated a driver and four passengers and traveled up to 100 kilometers per hour scaled. Air vehicles had the added benefit of giving their passengers a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-eye view of the virtual world.

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The goal of ScavHunt was to earn points by solving six riddles selected from standard IQ test and riddle-listing Web sites. Reward points were based on the difficulty of the riddles as determined by the research team. The two most difficult riddles were worth 200 points each, two riddles with medium difficulty were worth 100 points each, and two easy riddles were worth 50 points each. We randomized the difficulty level when presenting riddles to the players. Both 200 point riddles had three clues. All others had two. Clues resembled posters with black text on white backgrounds. Each clue included the number of the riddle to which it pertained. Each clue was lettered to show players if it was the first, second, or third clue for a particular riddle.

Players had to move through the virtual world to find the clues for a riddle (See Fig. 1.). Clues were located in or around the hospital, high school, airport, high rise, surf shop, and stadium.

Players solved riddles either individually or collaboratively based on assigned experimental conditions.

Distracting objects made hunting for clues more challenging, e.g., clues to other riddles were distracters as were clues that did not pertain to any of the riddles. Using clues to solve a riddle reduced the reward points by 50%. A wrong answer caused a 25 point deduction. Players could choose to forfeit a riddle, losing 100 points. A 100 point riddle, solved on the first try without using clues, earned a bonus of a ground vehicle. A 200 point riddle, solved on the first try with no clues, earned a flying vehicle. The highest possible score was 875 for Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded and 700 for the other four conditions. The higher possible total for Condition 5 is due to potential bonus points for collaboration.

Figure 1. Two players view a clue posted outside of the High School in Peninsula City.

In addition to the player role, there was a Game Master (GM) role. The GM provided immediate feedback to players who submitted answers to riddles. Raising a hand in acknowledgement, the GM’s avatar responded in turn to players’ avatars who waved to him. The GM’s avatar used a combination of gestures to indicate a correct answer; he nodded his head, clapped and made thumbs-up hand gestures. To indicate an incorrect answer, the GM’s avatar shook his head from left to right. The GM awarded vehicles when appropriate; accepted forfeits; and presented the next riddle to players.

ScavHunt was a serious game. Drawing on MMORPG entertainment strategies such as moving avatars through a virtual world and providing rewards, it mimicked a real world situation

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 6

in which an information analyst must either answer a difficult question or gather information to inform an answer. The answer was passed to an authority figure, the GM, mimicking submission of a report to a supervisor. It imitated the workplace in that players often had to wait their turn for direction on the correctness of answers or assignment of a new task. As in the workplace, the authority figure had the power to reward high achievement. There were penalties for wrong answers. There were costs and benefits to collecting and using resources to answer questions.

ScavHunt and the task were designed primarily for riddle solving, an important aspect of analysts’ work. The virtual world aligned with information analysts’ real workplaces in two ways. The riddles did not gradually increase in difficulty. Rather, task difficulty level was random. Secondly, there was no iterative increase in gratification level; rewards were tied to the difficulty of the riddles, not a rising level of expertise in playing the game.

Procedure Players were randomly assigned to one of the five experiment conditions. For each condition, four players were present together in our research lab, but in separate cubicles. Players were briefed on the research project and each signed a consent form. Players were asked to wear headphones at all times during the game and to use the microphone for communicating. Each player received an avatar. One member of the research team assumed the role of the GM. Another provided technical assistance. As players trained, completed the competency test and played the game, the research team followed formal usability engineering user observation protocols, e.g., two usability engineers unobtrusively observed players’ interactions with the game or with each other, taking time-stamped notes and noting signs of engagement, frustration, fatigue and collaboration.

Training and Competency Test Before play, there was a 15-minute, self-paced training session. A written training guide familiarized players with the ScavHunt controls and operations. During training, players customized their avatars by choosing physical characteristics and clothing. After training, players took a competency test individually to ensure that each had acquired adequate skills to play the game. Observers gave each player the same competency tasks, in the same order and using the same prompts. All players demonstrated that they could perform all of the basic operations needed to manipulate their avatars and to navigate in the virtual world.

Players’ Instructions After the competency test, each player received a paper map of the virtual city and a paper game sheet. The experiment conditions were controlled by the instructions in this game sheet. Each session was set to a maximum of 90 minutes of playing time. Instructions constrained players from using any note-taking tools such as word-processing programs or paper and pencil. The only tool available to players was the MS Windows® calculator, made available because solving some of the riddles required mathematics. (It was not unusual to see multiple instances of the calculator open on one player’s screen.) In the game sheets, other instructions varied according to experimental conditions.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 7

Condition 1(Control) Players (called P1, P2, P3, and P4) received a game sheet describing ScavHunt and how the points were calculated, including consequences of using clues, giving a wrong answer, or forfeiting a riddle, as well as gaining bonuses by solving more difficult riddles on the first try.

No indication of encouraging or prohibiting collaboration was mentioned in the players’ instructions for this condition.

Condition 2 (Collaboration Prohibited) Players (called R1, R2, R3, and R4) received the same game sheet as the control group with an additional rule stating that all players had to work on the riddles by themselves. No communication was allowed among these players.

Condition 3 (Collaboration Mandatory) Players (called T1, T2, T3, and T4) received the same game sheet as the control group with an additional rule stating that all players had to work on the riddles together as a team, using a specific in-game voice-chat channel as their sole means for communication.

Condition 4 (Collaboration Optional but Penalized) Players (called C1, C2, C3, and C4) received the same game sheet as the control group with an additional rule stating that if a riddle was solved by players working together, each collaborating player would receive only 75% of the points that the riddle was worth.

Condition 5 (Collaboration Optional and Rewarded) Players (called J1, J2, J3, and J4) received the same game sheet as the control group with an additional rule stating that if a riddle was solved by players working together, each collaborating player would receive 125% of the points that the riddle was worth.

Game Play After reading the instructions, all players started the game in the hotel auditorium. Here, they received riddles one at a time; a new riddle appeared to them on a screen in the auditorium after the previous one was solved or forfeited. With each new riddle, the GM gave players a paper bearing the riddle number. A player who left the auditorium to seek clues for a riddle had to return there to report the answer to the GM. All players received the same six riddles in the same sequence. All clues remained available to all players throughout the game, regardless of which riddle players were addressing at any point in time.

Survey and Interview After the game, players filled out an optional online survey. Players also had the option of not answering individual questions. The survey collected players’ demographic data. It also collected players’ opinions on their game play experience with three questions on a 7-point Likert scale (1 as lowest, 4 as neutral, and 7 as highest). These questions addressed enjoyment, comfort level, and engagement.

Question 1:

Please rate how enjoyable the entire ScavHunt experience was. (Enjoyment)

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 8

Question 2:

How comfortable were you playing the game? (Comfort Level)

Question 3:

What kept you engaged? (Engagement Factors) 3a.

Trying to get the most points

3b.

Customizing your avatar

3c.

Interacting and collaborating with others

3d.

Solving the riddles

3e.

Hunting for clues

3f.

Trying to finish as fast as possible

After the survey, all players in each condition participated in focus group interviews.

Interviewers avoided leading questions, instead posing open-ended questions that encouraged players to freely discuss their ScavHunt experiences.

Preliminary Findings This was a preliminary study that set directions for future research. As we are still in the process of data analysis, we report the preliminary findings. We do not include an analysis or in depth reporting of interview data. Because we had a small sample size of 20 Participants, we did not perform statistical analyses. However, we did derive averages to facilitate discussions of the findings. Out of the 20 players, six engaged in collaborative play. In Condition 1, Control, and Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized, no players chose to collaborate. In Condition 2, Collaboration Prohibited, no players collaborated. In Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory, all four players collaborated. In Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded, two players strategically (J1 and J3) chose to collaborate.

Game Play Results and Discussion Game scores ranged from -200 to 475. The six COLs all earned a final score of 475 out of a possible 700 for the mandatory condition and 875 for the optional rewarded condition. The only points deducted for COLs were for using clues. The scores of the 14 N-COLs ranged from -200 to 225. Three players (J1, J2 and J3 in Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded) received ground vehicle bonuses. One player, P3 in Condition 1, Control, received a flying vehicle.

Regarding efficiency (time to complete), the four COLs in Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory solved all the riddles in 75 minutes. The two COLs in Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded, took the full 90 minutes. All N-COLs took the entire 90 minutes, except for player C3 in Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized who completed the game in 77 minutes (score = -75: 3 solved riddles; 3 forfeits; 1 wrong answer), and player C2 in Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized who stopped playing by the end of the first hour, solving no riddles.

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With respect to effectiveness (number of riddles solved, number of riddles forfeited and number of wrong answers), the COLs did not forfeit any riddles, nor give any wrong answers.

The number of riddles solved by N-COLs ranged from 0 to 4; no N-COL solved all six riddles.

Fifty percent (7 out of 14) of the N-COLs solved only three riddles. Three N-COLs did not forfeit any riddles; and the other 11 players forfeited between one and three riddles. Nine of the 14 N-COLs gave wrong answers at least once.

Game play results indicated a trend: COLs had higher efficiency and effectiveness than N-COLs. Survey Results and Discussion We looked at survey results both by condition and by comparing COLs to N-COLs. For the enjoyment question, players in Condition 1, Control (average = 2.75) and Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized (average = 2.5) gave lower ratings compared to players in other conditions where averages ranged from 4.5 to 5.5. For the comfort level question, players in Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized (average = 3.25) gave the lowest ratings, whereas players in other conditions gave average ratings ranging from 5.5 to 6.0. Survey question 3d asked if solving the riddles engaged players; solving riddles was the playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; most agreed upon engagement factor. The average ratings for question 3d were 6.25 (Condition 1, Control), 6.5 (Condition 2, Collaboration Prohibited), 6.5 (Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory), 5.25 (Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized), and 6.25 (Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded).

Fourteen players gave question 3d the highest rating and six players gave it the second highest rating, among questions 3a to 3f which all pertained to engagement. There was no consensus on other engagement factors across the experiment conditions.

Table 1 Survey Results for Enjoyment and Comfort Level, Collaborators COLs (n = 6) vs. Non-collaborators NCOLs (n = 14).

Enjoyment COLs Ratings

Average

Comfort Level N-COLs

COLs

N-COLs

T1

6

P1

5

T1

7

P1

6

T2

6

P2

4

T2

5

P2

6

T3

4

P3

n/a

T3

n/a

P3

5

T4

6

P4

2

T4

6

P4

6

J1

5

R1

2

J1

6

R1

7

J3

6

R2

5

J3

6

R2

6

R3

6

R3

4

R4

5

R4

5

C1

4

C1

4

C2

1

C2

2

C3

3

C3

3

C4

2

C4

4

J2

5

J2

5

J4

5

J4

7

5.5

3.8

6.0

5.0

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 10

COLs enjoyed the game more and felt more comfortable with their ScavHunt experience than N-COLs. Table 1 gives individual players’ ratings and averages for the enjoyment and comfort level questions. In Table 1, an “n/a” indicates that a player chose not to answer a question. COLs had a positive level of enjoyment (average = 5.5 out of a possible 7), whereas NCOLs gave negative ratings for enjoyment (average = 3.8). On average, players gave positive ratings for comfort (average = 6.0 for COLs, average = 5.0 for N-COLs). C1, C2, C3, and C4 in Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized, gave the lowest ratings among all players regarding their in-game comfort level.

Table 2 Survey Results for Engagement Factors, Collaborators (COLs) vs. Non-collaborators (N-COLs) Engagement Factors

COLs (n = 6)

3a

3b

3c

3d

3e

3f

T1

2

6

6

6

7

3

T2

5

4

5

7

6

7

T3

3

2

7

7

4

6

T4

4

4

6

6

6

3

J1

5

2

6

7

6

6

J3

7

2

6

7

5

5

Average N-COLs (n = 14)

4.3

3.3

6.0

6.7

5.7

5.0

P1

7

1

2

7

5

2

P2

1

1

n/a

7

1

4

P3

5

1

2

7

2

4

P4

4

1

1

4

3

6

R1

4

1

1

7

7

1

R2

5

6

1

5

2

n/a

R3

4

1

1

7

7

5

R4

5

1

n/a

7

6

4

C1

2

4

n/a

6

7

1

C2

1

4

1

1

1

1

C3

7

1

2

7

2

1

C4

7

1

3

7

4

7

J2

1

3

1

5

7

1

J4 Average

5

2

4

6

6

4

4.1

2.0

1.7*

5.9

4.3

3.2

* The ratings of N-COLs on 3c-Interacting and collaborating with others were not meaningful as the players did not interact nor collaborate during the game. Thus, they were excluded from the results discussion.

When answering survey questions 3a-3f, COLs tended to give higher ratings than NCOLs. Table 2 shows that both COLs (average = 6.7) and N-COLs (average = 5.9) rated 3dSolving the riddles as the highest of six investigated engagement factors. COLs and N-COLs prioritized the other five engagement factors differently. The second highest rating factor for COLs was Interacting and collaborating with others (average = 6.0). The third highest for COLs, 3e-Hunting for clues (average = 5.7), was the second highest for N-COLs (average = 4.3).

Both COLs (average = 3.3) and N-COLs (average = 2.0) gave their lowest ratings to 3bCustomizing your avatar.

Players were observed to be very focused on the game. It was noted that distracting objects such as clues to other riddles did not cause players to deviate from achieving their goals.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 11

All players except C2, who showed signs of frustration early in the game, remained engaged until either time ran out or they had completed the game. J4, the only other player who showed signs of frustration, continued to play and remained engaged. There were five players observed to show signs of fatigue, P1 and P4 in Condition 1, Control; C1, C3, and C4 in Condition 4, Collaboration Penalized. Those five players remained engaged in the game despite their fatigue.

None of the six COLs showed signs of frustration or fatigue.

None of the players in Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory knew each other before the experiment, yet they spontaneously formed a team with self-defined roles. One player (T2) quickly became the de-facto leader. The COLs volunteered for tasks based on their abilities.

Discourse among these four COLs was continuous and courteous, but concise and focused on riddle solving. The four COLs formed a body of collective knowledge. When they moved to a new riddle, they recalled and shared clues that they had seen earlier in the game. Sometimes these clues were very complicated. All four players were observed to enjoy their collaborative experience.

J1 and J3, the COLs in Condition 5, Collaboration Rewarded were workplace colleagues.

Their collaboration started with J1 putting out a dedicated voice channel call to the other three players for COLs. The J1-J3 collaboration differed from that of the players in Condition 3, Collaboration Mandatory in that J1 and J3 had a peer to peer collaboration. Neither asked permission of the other; they shared leadership responsibilities. They took on roles according to their own capabilities. They were observed to enjoy their ScavHunt collaboration experience very much. During the interview, J2 reported that he did not collaborate because he liked to work at his own pace.

Implications for VA Tool Design The study shed light on the nature and effects of collaboration in a riddle-solving video game. There were benefits to collaborative play over non-collaborative play in terms of user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. COLs did better across all three dimensions than NCOLs. The higher average ratings for satisfaction and engagement by COLs may be due to the fact that digital natives tend to collaborate (Oblinger et al., 2005; Rainie, 2007). Our preliminary findings indicate a need to design VA tools to facilitate collaboration among digital natives.

Below, we present strategies to facilitate digital native information analysts’ collaborative experiences with VA tools by borrowing attributes from video games.

Roles, e.g., the player’s job or class, constitute a major aspect of MMORPGs which directly affects player collaboration. Each role class has specific strengths and weaknesses which affect players’ in-game abilities. For example, in a combat-based MMORPG, one class is suited for hand-to-hand combat but is weak in magic attacks, whereas another class is resistant to magic attacks but takes damage from hand-to-hand combat. These two classes can team to better protect each other from their individual weaknesses while combining their combat strengths. In ScavHunt, teams benefited from players taking on roles based on their individual strengths. VA tools that give analysts this ability will empower the analysts to leverage their own strengths to the benefit of a team’s final analytical products. A VA tool that empowers analysts to volunteer for subtasks must first show those users the required roles so each can see where they can best contribute, i.e., where their strengths or skills best fit.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 12

During collaboration in interactive serious games and MMORPGs, an essential aspect is communication, e.g., synchronous communication through chat or dedicated voice channels or asynchronous communication by leaving messages. Providing ready access to communication mechanisms in the VA tools will empower information analysts to easily, at any point in the analytical process, discuss joint work in the same way game players do.

In MMORPGs, COLs benefit from seeing each others’ avatars and being aware of their activities. These abilities facilitate three aspects of collaboration: planning, designating responsibility, and achieving goals. Similarly, VA tools can facilitate collaboration among information analysts by giving them an awareness of each others’ activities, e.g. by identifying which analysts are working on the same or related problem or an aspect of that problem.

In many MMORPGs, players store objects for future use. Players also give and receive objects. An example is a player acquiring an object which is not presently useful, but has been recognized as having potential for future use for that player or another player. The player then stores the object until it is useful, or until the player chooses to share the object with another player. In ScavHunt, players were not allowed to take notes. Once they left the auditorium, they had to remember the riddle. (They did have a paper with the riddle number on it, but not the content of the riddle). If they happened upon a clue for a riddle other than the one they were currently solving, they had no way to record that clue’s content or location. Players had to memorize both clues and riddles. This gave us the opportunity to observe if players employed any strategies to address this difficulty. Collaborating players were observed discussing memorized clues found while solving other riddles. They made this part of their team strategy.

Survey respondents expressed a desire to copy and save clues for future reference. The need to remember the clues constituted a cognitive burden. VA tools have the responsibility of relieving information analysts of such cognitive burdens whenever possible. In much the same way that players in MMORPGs store and share objects, VA tools need to empower information analysts to gather and store data for future use and for sharing with COLs. Typically, VA tools help analysts develop analytical products, but they do not typically help them pass these products from one analyst to another. Such functionality will facilitate collaboration.

Future Work An emerging literature on the science of gaming (e.g., Zyda, 2005, 2007) is beginning to identify research directions, but little work has yet been done on setting formal usability engineering directions for studying players’ interactions with each other during game play in a virtual world. It is our belief that methods and metrics for measuring player collaboration in a virtual world should be an integral part of the science of gaming. Therefore, our future work will address this need, starting with developing more sensitive methods and metrics for measuring players’ efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction as they experience collaboration in virtual worlds while gaming. This will serve our ultimate goal of applying what we learn about players’ interaction with each other to the design of VA tools for young information analysts. We will start by applying metrics we have already developed for measuring collaboration in VA tools to collaboration in video games (O’Connell & Choong, 2008). We recognize the need for a longitudinal study that will generate data for statistical analysis. Our future studies will also collect a wider range of data types. To date, most gaming research has focused on survey, observation and anecdotal data (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006). We plan to use

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 13

logging data, voice recordings, screen captures and video captures to document users’ experience collaborating in a virtual world. To better understand all the contexts of collaboration in MMORPGs and serious games, we need to investigate both collaborative and non-collaborative interaction among people playing video games in general. Such a study can open windows into other areas of collaboration that need to be addressed. Some interactions may not be viewed as collaboration, but may indirectly benefit collaboration or other aspects of information analysts’ experience with VA tools. We expect that not all the aspects of collaboration in video games are applicable to collaboration using VA tools. Starting broadly will help us focus our research on identifying those areas that will yield the highest benefits to design of VA tools, e.g., does collaboration cause coordination overhead that diminishes benefits for the group? Or, conversely, does collaboration result in economies of learning or effort?

We recognize that to broaden our scope, our future work must add more experimental conditions. We plan to add more dimensions to the user experience to further investigate the human factors that pertain to collaboration during game play. For example, because skills and responsibilities associated with roles are fundamentally important to interaction in MMORPGs, we envision a study on VA tools involving assigning specific jobs or skills to analysts based on their real world skill sets and knowledge domains. We will apply the role-playing attribute of MMORPGs to a VA tool and study the effects on collaboration. One possibility is to compare effects over two conditions. One condition will provide visual indicators of information analysts’ roles to mimic the condition in an MMORPG where players know each other’s roles. The other will not identify roles.

We plan to expand our investigation of the function of rewards and their impact. We would also like to better understand the motivational factors behind the choice to collaborate or not. In the social domain, we would like to investigate the effects of peer pressure, the presence of other players and a player’s sense of one’s own presence. We need to investigate what aspect(s) of collaboration yield higher satisfaction and engagement. In addition, our early investigation has led us to realize that there is a fertile linguistic area to study, discourse during collaboration.

In this short-term study, time allotted for designing ScavHunt and implementing modifications to OLIVE was limited. Thus, ScavHunt had technical limitations that impacted the study’s scope. Communication among players in the conditions where collaboration was optional could only be initiated through the use of in-game avatar gestures, signaling each other to join the same voice channel. This required first getting the other player’s attention. There was no way to know that one avatar was signaling to another unless the player had the other avatar in view. It was necessary that the two players be aware of each other and each other’s location in the virtual world prior to initiating communication. We observed that players who did not initiate communication and collaboration in the beginning of the game did not do so later when players were working on different riddles, seeking clues in different parts of the virtual world or already engaged in collaboration. We see a need for a more comprehensive communication mechanism to empower players to more easily locate other players, as well as choose collaborators based on their progress in the game. To investigate replicating the capabilities of state-of-the art VA tools, we need a list of active players; notifications of which riddle a player is currently working on; speaker identification; a list of conversation participants; and related features. We recognize that the lack of written chat, a primary means of readily available communication in MMORPGs impacted players’ interactions with the game and with each other.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 14

Conclusions Digital natives who become information analysts will bring to their workplaces collaboration skills honed by collaborating in virtual worlds while playing video games. An investigation of collaboration during a game that borrowed elements from MMORPGs and serious games disclosed that there were benefits to collaborative play over non-collaborative play. We have looked at collaborative game play from a usability engineering perspective, following usability engineering methods to investigate the impact of collaboration on playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experiences while solving riddles in a virtual world.

Based on our understanding of information analysts and their tasks, we have seen that there are opportunities to borrow from MMORPGs and serious games when designing VA tools to leverage the collaboration skills of digital native information analysts. We have demonstrated some of these opportunities and translated them into design recommendations for VA tools.

This was a preliminary study. We have identified directions for future research. Our research to date has drawn from fields in addition to human factors and usability. We look forward to learning from the contributions of our colleagues in the many fields that will converge in the emerging science of gaming in virtual worlds. We believe that further multidisciplinary research into video games will uncover more opportunities for VA tools to borrow video game attributes to the benefit of digital native information analysts.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- From Video Game to VA Tools 15

Bibliography Choong, Y-Y & O’Connell, T. (2008). Planning user-centered evaluations for interactive information visualizations. Proceedings of Usability Professional Association International Conference 2008. Baltimore, MD. (in press).

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[On-line]. Available: http://www.educause.edu/IsItAgeorIT%3AFirstStepsTowardUnderstandingtheNetGeneratio n/6058

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O’Connell, T., & Choong, Y-Y. (2008). Metrics for measuring human interaction with interactive visualizations for information analysis. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1493-1496). April 5 - 10, 2008, Florence, Italy.

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Vol. 1. No. 1 ISSN: 1941-8477 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Futureâ&#x20AC;?

July 2008

Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments

By Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

This is a brief essay, we call "think-pieces", designed to stimulate a discussion on a particular topic. The topic for this series of essays is "defining virtual worlds".

Keywords:

virtual worlds, virtual environments, research.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments 2

Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments

By Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Virtual worlds are persistent virtual environments in which people experience others as being there with them - and where they can interact with them. I have argued for more than ten years for a clear definition of virtual environments and virtual reality technology as “a computergenerated display that allows or compels the user (or users) to have a sense of being present in an environment other than the one they are actually in, and to interact with that environment” (Schroeder 1996: 25); or, in short, ‘being there’. This entails that multi-user or collaborative or shared virtual environments are environments or systems which users experience other participants as being present in the same environment and interacting with them – or ‘being there together’(Schroeder 2006). Note that the definition focuses on sensory experience. If the sensory element of experiencing a place or space other than the one you are physically in, or of experiencing other people as being there with you, is taken away, then anything goes and definitions become meaningless: why shouldn’t books, text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), dreams or many other phenomena be called virtual environments or virtual worlds?

The difference between virtual reality or virtual environments as against virtual worlds is that the latter term has been applied to persistent online social spaces; that is, virtual environments that people experience as ongoing over time and that have large populations which they experience together with others as a world for social interaction. Virtual worlds can therefore be distinguished from online gaming and Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) in that they are third spaces, online places for socializing (Steinkuehler and Williams, 2006). Put the other way around, online games are a subset of virtual worlds; namely, those where the activity revolves around gaming activities. That is not to say that online games are not sociable; many studies have shown that online games are used to a large extent for socializing purposes (Axelsson and Regan, 2006). Nevertheless, games are primarily designed to foster accumulating points or reaching new levels and the like, whereas social spaces have no such focus.

Let’s be clear about why we need definitions: first, to set the social implications of virtual worlds or virtual environments technology apart from other ones, and second, to guide research.

In popular discourse, the word ‘virtual’ has come to mean anything online (as in ‘virtual money’), but in that case, the word becomes useless for research since it is too broad (why not in this case say ‘electronic transfer’?). Money within virtual worlds, in contrast, pertains to currency related to the objects within them. We can advance our understanding of society and research if we use definitions that clearly set phenomena apart from others and that provide an accurate and useful grasp of the world around us, including virtual ones.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research:- Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments 3

Bibliography Axelsson, A.-S. and Regan, T. 2006. Playing Online, in P. Vorderer and J. Bryant (eds). Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, Consequences. (pp. 291-306). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Schroeder, R. 1996. Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality Technologies.

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Schroeder, R. 2006. Being There and the Future of Connected Presence, Presence: Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(4): 438-454.

Steinkuehler, C. and Williams, D. 2006. Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Third Placesâ&#x20AC;?, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4) (available online).