Information Dynamics in Virtual Worlds: Gaming and Beyond

Information Dynamics in Virtual Worlds

Gaming and beyond

Woody Evans

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Part I: Virtual Ontologies

Chapter 1: Mapping virtual worlds

Abstract

Theory v. reality

Our theoretical moorings

Hyperreality

Globalization

Gender and queering

Actor-Network Theory

Intertextuality

Transhumanism

Spaces and how to move in them

Running in virtual spacetime

Money moves worlds

Some definitions

Chapter 2: Types of virtual worlds

Abstract

Games

Gametypes

Perspective, aesthetics, clickiness

Non-games

Chapter 3: N00bz inworld

Abstract

Gendered initiation

Stories and tasks

Floating World, Active World: Islands in the Net

Back to initiation

Help from the man

Symbols of passage

Chapter 4: Inworld info desks: information initiation

Abstract:

Official Stuff

The unofficial stuff

Wikis and forums

Fan pages, Blog posts, Newsgroups

Further discussion

Chapter 5: Info service inworld: how to practice info services in virtual worlds

Abstract:

Let’s talk about librarians first

Inworld library attributes

Real skills for real patrons?

Who is the community? Who are the patrons?

Where to lurk

Viral you

Linden, Turing, and Kempelen’s Turk

Part II: Time Inworld

Introduction

Chapter 6: Hungry Ghosts in Second Life

Abstract:

Deep and dark

Official signage

Academically speaking

No action

Public, as in Tammanial Hall

I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC

Real Life again

Chapter 7: After virtual worlds

Abstract:

Thumbing into new turf

Chapter 8: Conclusions

Appendix I: SL librarianship

Appendix II: TOS

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Chandos Publishing

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First published 2011

ISBN: 978 1 84334 641 8

© Woody Evans, 2011

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Dedication

This one is for Steven, who turned me on to Dungeons & Dragons just when I needed it the most.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the library staff at Tarrant County College. We do good work together.

Thanks to my friends and family, especially to my wife Aubree.

Thanks to Glyn Jones, Barbara Quint, Paula Hane, R.U. Sirius, and all the editors and readers who have helped me to sharpen up.

If I’m better, I’m better because of all of you.

About the Author

Woody Evans is a public services librarian at Tarrant County College in Arlington, Texas. As a librarian and private researcher, he has worked for military, corporate, and academic organizations. His work can be read in American Libraries, Library Journal, Searcher Magazine, ONLINE, Information Today, The Journal of Evolution and Technology, H+ Magazine, Mississippi Libraries, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and others. His previous book from Chandos, Building Library 3.0: Creating a Culture of Participation, continues to receive wide praise in America and France. Contact him through woodyevans.wordpress.com.

Introduction

Virtual worlds, virtual reality, augmented reality, cyberspace – every few years the idea of alternative computer-generated worlds becomes popular for a while, then fades away again in the light of collective disdain. There is wild oscillation from glee to sneer. This has been happening for a while now. Whether the buzz is hologram games or virtual commerce, interest builds precipitously before ‘the virtual’ is again relegated to last year’s fad.

Second Life was the flagship of the most recent run on virtual world cool, but five years after the big Business Week cover story (big buzz back in May, 2006: ‘My Virtual Life’), Second Life and many other attempts at modelling alternative realities are looking very dated. None yet seem to be gentrifying.

More information is now generated than ever before in human history, and this wild growth is happening in ways that can only be approached through models, through virtual worlds. These virtual worlds are, in turn, generating more and more information about themselves; or, if you’d rather, the actors in these worlds are generating the information about themselves and their worlds – but these actors are not always human. Useage statistics, trade values for ‘gold’ and ‘real estate’, chat logs, and many other types of automated data grow daily for virtual worlds. Algorithms tattle on almost all and any inworld happenings. But, of course, such data is growing in our Real Life too, and that data from Real Life activities is best visualized with (again) virtual models.

In this wash of information, the Real and the virtual blend. The first halting spawn of this seemingly inevitable arrangement appear variously as location-aware phone apps, computer interfaces that rely on physical gesture, and the slow encroachment by social networking sites upon our actual face-to-face social lives (ever have a conversation in a pub about a conversation going on in Facebook?).

Those attentive to media, technology, and information concerns would do well to use this moment – this temporary lull in excitement for ‘the virtual’ at the beginning of the 2010s – to look at virtual worlds as they are now, and to look at the use and movement of information in virtual worlds, before these worlds (as we now know them) are gone.

This is because the virtual will become finally and terribly married to the Real.

It may seem strange to quote Wallace Stegner (1969) in this context, but in his famous ‘Wilderness Letter’ he lamented losing the chance ‘to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it’. For the moment, virtual worlds remain somewhat isolated, singular in their identities, and (as much as it can be said about an environment cooked up with coal-fired electricity on silicon, lithium, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) still in their natural state.

These worlds and their inhabitants are ‘vertical’ in their own contexts, ‘individual’ in their own ontologies.

Soon the Real World will be slick with traces of the virtual. In 2011 it is woefully obvious to say so, but more aspects of our lives are becoming mediated all the time; there may soon come a day when the notion of ‘virtual worlds’ is meaningless, because there will be no firm border between the virtual and the Real.

So here we look at information dynamics in virtual worlds. We do this to gather thoughts about information dynamics in virtual worlds generally, and also to prepare for a future understanding of the relationships between what’s real, what’s mediated, and what’s human when all the boundaries start to slide.

Woody Evans

North Texas

Autumn 2010

Part I

Virtual Ontologies

1

Mapping virtual worlds

Abstract

Virtual worlds are many and varied. In investigating the scope of virtual communities, it is important to understand social and theoretical issues that impact online participants. Such issues as gender, ontology, socio-technological integration, and corporeal interface all impact exploration of virtual worlds.

Key words

theory

hyperreality

globalization

gender

actor-network theory

transhumanism

Theory v. reality

So: what is a virtual world? We can tackle the question from many different directions. There are the metaphysical concerns about whether an experience in a virtual world is any less real than an experience in the conventional/consensual world of Real Life. How real is the virtual or our experience of the virtual? There’s the epistemological route that considers whether a fully immersive virtual world is knowable in the same way as Real Life. How can we know that our experiences in it are any less real than ‘reality’? We can look at virtual worlds from aesthetic perspectives, and we can judge our experiences in them in terms of ethics. Since this book is concerned with information, we’ll only look at theory in a hard-nosed and practical way. Epistemological posturing doesn’t mean squat if it can’t help us to get the information to the people; what does it matter that we know X about world Y, and what does it mean for the dedicated users of any given world?

Here we take a look at virtual worlds on their own terms. Yes, we levy plenty of criticism, comparisons, and complaints – but the intention here is to give the virtual worlds we examine an earnest look as they are and as avatars experience them. This isn’t an armchair rant about virtual reality; this work comes from spending time in the odd corners of virtual worlds, thinking about those worlds in terms of their information dynamics, and reporting discoveries with an eye toward improving information service in virtual worlds, in the real world, and in the coming world of augmented realities.

Our theoretical moorings

Even as information and media professionals have to be more concerned with pragmatics and practice than with abstraction and metaphor, we can’t just gloss over the history and theory. Indeed, theoretical views from the social sciences in particular can help us to get our bearings and to make sense of things as we try to move forward within virtual realities. I am not concerned here about supporting any particular theoretical view as the one main or most important for understanding all the phenomenon associated with virtual worlds; but I will present a few of those that I believe to be the most relevant. Sometimes we will reference them in light of a particular event in, or attribute of, a virtual world. You can work forward from that on your own, if you wish.

Jonathan Culler (2009) presents us with a view of ‘theory’ as genre. Literary theory in particular isn’t just summary or psychology or economic digressions about the meaning of a text, but theory may use all of these things to say something new – indeed, ‘works that become theory offer accounts others can use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience’ (3–5, 5). The genre of theory means that works of theory must be read, at least in part, as works about theory as much as they may be read as works about any particular content used as fodder to feed the Big Perspective. The book in your hands isn’t a book of theory, but it does hope to use theory to bring some meaning to our experiences of synthesized reality. Seriously – this is much more reportage and policy critique than theory. But – let’s talk a little theory to help us mark out points on the compass, at least.

Hyperreality

What it is: Jean Baudrillard points out that, because our experiences are mediated (or over-mediated), we live in a kind of simulation. Because of the inclusion of mediation at almost every level of experience in ‘first world’ lived reality, we live in a ‘hyperreal’ state. We have increasing difficulty establishing a base-level reality, and our difficulty will increase as more aspects of life become mediated and simulated.

Why it matters here: That we are intentionally diving into fully simulated worlds is startling and meaningful for anyone interested in the mediation of everyday experience. Indeed, it might serve as strong evidence for a ratcheting-up of hyperreal experiences in even the banal moments of our lives. Hyperreality forces our focus onto mediation of ‘real’ experiences by simulators, simulations, or even the affected agents of simulating powers. When simulation of experiences alternative to the actual lived experience of the moment pulls us out of reality, we edge into hyperreality. It may happen on a bus ride, or when responding to an e-mail, when eating supper, or when making love. That it’s not just ‘happening to us’ but that we are in fact actively courting mediation and simulation says something about our attitude toward Real Life and awareness of any experience generally – whether real or virtual.

Baudrillard works in a field of semiotic reflection which became increasingly common in the latter half of the last century as the Boorstinian pseudo-event came to be a real force in economics, politics, and social psychology: people (overmediated, over advertised to) increasingly respond to signs, portends, and simulations rather than to real events in Real Life.

These concerns anticipate the popular expansion of gaming and virtual worlds, and now we live in hyperreal worlds that have made entire fictional environments out of pseudo-events, out of advertising campaigns, and out of for-profit gaming entertainments and distractions.

Consumer culture plays no small part in the development of virtual worlds, and consumer culture is a locus of the hyperreal. Celia Lury treats neighborhoods and homes as fortified spaces in which advertisements have become sort of real, though people’s lives in them are not fully real (see Consumer Culture, 1996). That people’s (well, consumers’) very homes could become the alpha nodes of simulated and consumption- driven pseudo-realities was a startling idea – but a decade later, Douglas Rushkoff would take the issue even further.

Rushkoff, a regular and vocal media critic and commentator, begins his 2009 book Life, Inc. with a story about how being mugged in front of his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, on Christmas Eve revealed a corporate mentality at work in his neighborhood – the living space had become a hyperreal place where reputation, gentrification, and safety mattered only in terms of their reflection in relative real estate values.

Rushkoff’s neighbors weren’t happy when he posted a warning about the incident in an online forum, because that online (public) forum could affect home values … er, home prices I should say anyway (xi-xxv). Rushkoff the man had become Rushkoff The Neighbor – and The Neighbor wasn’t particularly real in the same way that we might hope any random human would perceive another as real. The Neighbor was either a boon or a bane to the bottom line of a real estate investment – no longer a man, a human, but instead just an affective agent.

The Situationists have a place in the discussion of hyperreality, too. Guy Debord famously wrote about society as a series of spectacles (1967), and how our participation in the spectacle has only an oblique bearing on reality. The spectacle dulls some of our dearest attributes; reason is diminished as we watch the spectacle roll on. We try to keep up, try to understand it, maybe even form opinions about it – but it’s only ever an engagement with a construct or a show. Again, it’s engagement with a simulation – not with Real Life.

Does this increase in our truck with the hyperreal lead inevitably to a situation in which the popular masses engage in Borgmann’s hyperactivity too? We must wonder if the business inworld is more a constant, spinning, neurotic busy-ness than a processual and purposeful set of well- considered, reasonable, and present-moment centred decisive actions. What if it’s all mere bling, mere spin, glam, ping, and holler back that just sometimes (and maybe by happenstance) leads to money, influence, and new ways to crack math problems?

Hyperreality is a rather wide lens through which to examine these issues, because there clearly isn’t just one hyperreality – various competing conceptions of the relationships between simulations and Reality have led to a complex set of multiple hyperrealities. Each different understanding of the hyperreal gives us a slightly different, and always useful, glimpse of our densely mediated Real Lives, and of the moving simulation we participate in when we go inworld.

Globalization

What it is: Arjuna Appadaurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Peter Singer, and many other philosophers, sociologists, and economists have had a lot to say about globalization over the last 20 years. Less cultural isolation and more cultural, economic, governmental, and information interdependence is the new reality we came to face in the 20th Century; in the 21st Century we’ll need finer tools for making sense of these globalized flows.

Why it matters here: The idea that advanced telecommunications tools meant ‘the death of distance’ was an overly simple idea. Although we come face to face with globalized players (see discussion of Bauman’s ‘globals’ and ‘locals’ (1998)) in virtual worlds, many virtual interactions feed back into local economies and local relationships. A deal made in an online Guild affects and directs conversation and economic choices around the supper table. Understanding the gradations and qualities of the elements of globalization help us to make better sense of what happens in virtual worlds. Globalization is a driving force of online interaction, and all virtual worlds are globalized settings.

The role of mobile phones in the developing world is a shocking example of the living capillaries connecting Real Life to less-than-real worlds (or, at least, very differently-real worlds) of electronic bank transfers, social- media driven, micro-lending sites, and tenuous online connections between people of different social classes in countries a world apart. Micro-lending transactions between PayPal accounts on servers in San Jose, officer’s wives bank accounts in Colorado Springs, and Rwandan tinsmiths pull values, real value, know-how and skill, ethnicity, nationalism, and (postcolonial) paternal attitudes together in remixed ways.

Globalization – the interconnection of previously disparate lifeways – churns all the world’s systems together, and changes them all into something new and novel. A bit of clothing merchandise for a film based on a graphic novel that references a death scene in a Bolivisión telenovela is more than the sum of its parts.

Gender and queering

What it is: Queer Theory holds that gender roles and gender identity are built around and through the social context in which the persons ‘having’ gender live, work, and communicate. It holds that girls don’t necessarily or naturally like the color pink, boys don’t automatically play with toy trucks, but rather that gendered behavior is built from social cues; therefore gender can be ‘hacked’, altered, manipulated. Gender is but one aspect, one dimension, of identity – and identity can be actively and purposefully altered. Sexuality, it follows, is also mutable. Notables in the field include Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Donna Harraway (whose work also bears on transhumanism, science and technology studies, human and animal agency, and many other fields).

Why it matters here: Sex is big business in virtual worlds. Sexual encounters (such as they are) do not always map earnestly onto the sexual identities of the people behind the avatars. Gender (and, more broadly, identity itself) is mutable in the extreme in worlds where avatars are highly customizable. The personalities one encounters in virtual worlds are versions, masks, hacks of the real people behind them.

Maybe these alterations are low-risk ways to experiment with alterations to the basic facets of identity, but this is also full of paradox. It may become a public performance of private concerns … or it may be just another way to be fabulous or flaming or butch. Cornelia Brunner, in suggesting a butch-femme continuum as a way of understanding gender complexities in games and virtual worlds, makes the point that virtual worlds ‘give us a set of wonderful tools for taking apart and tinkering with the things we see around us, for imagining all the things we cannot see, and of sharing what we imagine with one another’ (Kafai et al., 2008: 35–45). Virtual worlds, in developing sophisticated senses of play and performance, encourage an imagining of gradations of otherness. Gender – and, more broadly identity itself – becomes performance and play.

McKenzie Wark provides a further bit of evidence in this direction when he posits that skin color in The Sims 2 (along