Douglas Thomas: Keeping It Real
Filed at 3:34 pm on November 10, 2008 • Leave a comment
The USC Network Culture Project’s Doug Thomas explains how persistence in virtual worlds narrows the gap between the “real” and the “virtual,” yielding an environment where imagination can be more readily translated into action
USC’s Network Culture Project has been exploring ways that virtual worlds can promote the public good and create difference in real-world settings. Along with Global Kids and the MacArthur Foundation, I invite you to join us on November 17th as we share our successes at “Real World Impact from the Virtual World,” an event that provides a sneak preview of the MacArthur Foundation’s Island in Second Life and shares important insights from Network Culture’s Second Life Challenge and RezEd, a project of Global Kids. Please visit our website for more details about this exciting event.
At the Network Culture Project, we have been examining one of the key elements that separate virtual worlds from digital games—the concept of persistence. Virtual worlds, unlike most console games, have no pause button. They continue to function whether you are logged onto them or not. And, perhaps most important, the actions you take in them have consequences that persist as well. This sense of persistence is what gives virtual worlds their worldliness.
There is a second consequence of persistence, which is discussed less often, and that is the problem it poses for developers. A typical digital game may provide a player with anywhere between 50 and 200 hours of play. For denizens of virtual worlds, who may spend 20 to 30 hours a week in-world, that amounts to only a few weeks of online time. But those who dwell in virtual worlds stay much longer than that, often times spending years in places like There.com, Second Life, World of Warcraft or EVE Online.
In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga outlined one of the central characteristics of play as something that is separated from “ordinary life.” What makes virtual worlds interesting as an area of study are the ways in which this characteristic of play is continuously challenged by the nature virtual world itself. To be sure, virtual worlds are spaces of play. But they are also spaces that are shaped and influenced deeply by the intrusion of ordinary life.
I do not simply mean the moments when ordinary life ruptures the space of play, e.g. a phone call that interrupts the game at an inopportune moment, or the need to attend to the biological necessities of everyday life (the beautifully named “bio break”). What I mean is that ordinary life has colonized virtual worlds because of a primary quality they share: persistence. Partly that is born of necessity. Developers simply cannot create enough content to maintain a world. But equally important are the kinds of things one needs to do simply to persist. Within virtual worlds, people form relationships, they earn and spend virtual currency, and they create institutions. The persistence of those relationships, economies, and institutions require ordinary life to maintain them.
All of this is a way of saying that the gap between the virtual and the real may be much less wide that we have previously assumed. It also means that virtual worlds may be spaces that can be especially good at bridging imagination and ordinary life.
When we set out to create a Community Challenge this year in Second Life, we asked for proposals that demonstrated how Second Life could have “real world” impact. We received more than two dozen proposals, from which the Second Life community eventually select three. What has become apparent in each of our finalist’s projects is that they have all found ways to bridge the gap between the imagination and the ordinary.
Our final three projects, which deal with obesity, access for the disabled and Native American identity, are all projects that focus on the practices of everyday life. They have each, in their own way, used the persistence of a virtual world, to speak to, influence, and change those things that also persist in everyday, ordinary life.
While it is tempting for us to look to virtual worlds for high profile and high impact events, I think we miss one of the most critical affordances that these spaces provide: the ability to imagine our everyday lives differently and that these worlds may provide the tools to put those differences into practice.
While persistence is the quality that makes virtual worlds what they are and allows imagination to flourish, we also need to recognize that the persistence of virtual worlds may have another, equally important effect, the ability to translate that imagination into action and to keep it real.
Editor’s Note: See additional posts about the “Real World Impact from the Virtual World” event here and here.
Next: "Real World Impacts from the Virtual World” and Sneak Preview of Foundations Sim > >
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