In order to understand what to do with virtual worlds, we have to understand how people use them. In order to understand how people use virtual worlds, we have to understand how they make sense of them. And what I want to talk about today is the idea that in order to better understand how to create virtual worlds people will be more likely to want to use, we have to understand a specific type of sense-making they do when they engage with them. This specific type of sense-making revolves around metaphors. [30 seconds]
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Virtual worlds are media products intended to replicate, reproduce and represent aspects of the physical world, physical people, and the activities people do in the world. There are a great expanse of virtual worlds currently operating over the Internet. Some are designed primarily to be places of play. Others are designed primarily to be user-generated spaces of socializing. For this study, I looked at one of each of these two types: City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game; and Second Life, a user-generated social world. [30 seconds]
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This study was part of the multi-study, three year project housed at Roskilde University in Denmark. Using an experimental framework, 14 people with relatively little experience with virtual worlds engaged with the two worlds mentioned, as well as a video game and a movie. During the experimental sessions, they were asked to talk aloud about their experiences. After engaging in all sessions, a comprehensive interview, designed with Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology, asked them to go in-depth into their experiences, and how they relate to each other, and to their lives outside of the experiment. [30 seconds]
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It was during these comprehensive interviews that I noticed how often they would use metaphors to describe their experiences with the virtual worlds. The analysis for this paper lead me to trace the use of metaphors for understanding sense-making as a cognitive process to Lakoff & Johnson’s 1980 work “Metaphors We Live By”. From their trajectory of research, we get the theorization of how metaphors are used in situations of learning and problem-solving; that is, how metaphors are useful for sense-making the unfamiliar. This “metaphorizing” can then be theorized as part of the sense-making process people go through when involved in situations that are novel to them – such as for my participants engaging with a media product with which they had little to no experience. [60 seconds]
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The themes that emerged from the grounded coding all dealt with how the participants were making interpretive links between the virtual world and the physical world. Thus, metaphors highlighted participants' attempts to draw connections to the physical world to help them make sense of what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why they were doing it the two virtual worlds. From this thematic analysis, the metaphors could be categorized into five types of comparisons between the virtual and the physical. [30 seconds]
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Danika compared the feeling and appearance of emptiness of Second Life to physical spaces and places that either are the opposite of such a feeling (a bazaar) or possibly represents that sense of loneliness (a space ship). "I think [Second Life] was very empty. I mean, because compared to the bazaar metaphor, it's kind of crowded and people are all haggling, and, I mean, this is very bare and kind of barren. So it had the feeling of kind of being on a space ship or something like that, I think." [30 seconds]
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Morten compared the feeling of being unable to control his avatar in City of Heroes to being a toddler in the physical world. "So I'm like, I'm like walking like I'm a toddler around in this world where people are trying to kill me. And I'm just like I go, you know, very simply moving around." [15 seconds]
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Torben compared the feeling of uncertainty we can all appreciate: meeting new people at an academic convention to meeting people in Second Life. "Although I'm thinking of a possible parallel could be being at a scholarly conference where you don't know anyone and you have to chat people up and you walk up to people at the opening reception or whatever." [30 seconds]
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Morten compared the feeling of how you connect with people in Second Life to other technologies he felt are better for making those connections. "[Second Life] was like a social network basically. Like where you were just walking around in a social network, instead of just, you know, moving around your mouse around Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or whatever they call it." [30 seconds]
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Grette compared the feeling of how she had to perform quests in City of Heroes by finding clues to the detective genre she has become familiar with throughout her life. "[City of Heroes] was kind of like a detective story, or something like that, where I had to solve a certain problem and there were clues along the way." [15 seconds]
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Across these five categories, a total of 42 instances of unique metaphors from 28 situations were coded and recorded for subsequent analyses. With just a basic frequency distribution , we can see that there were more metaphors used in discussing Second Life than City of Heroes. This comparison helps us to see that, for these participants, engaging with Second Life was perhaps a less familiar situation to them, thereby generating more metaphorizing, drawing in more from their physical world experiences to make sense of their virtual world experiences. [45 seconds]
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From these 14 people, we see that they were using metaphors to describe, to themselves and to me, how they experienced the new media product of these two virtual worlds. In a sense, the metaphors were acting as a bridge; the participants were bringing into the new experience what they knew from their lifetime of experience in the physical world via the metaphors. [30 seconds]
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This bridging may have been spurred along by the idea that these media products are deliberately attempting to replicate aspects of the physical world in how they are designed. Thus, to better design these worlds, we could use the metaphors people have to better understand what metaphors are related to better experiences of engaging. Further in this paper, I conduct such an analysis, linking metaphors to how they particularly helped or hindered the person’s experience with the virtual world. The implication is that if we are designing worlds for specific purposes, such as education, training, socializing, and gaming, then we need to measure for how people are metaphorizing their experiences during any beta-testing or user-centered design. [45 seconds]
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