Virtual Worlds (again)

[robinturner]

Here I am snowed under with essays on Tolkien and I get a mail with our course development schedule, meaning it's time to get my act together on that virtual worlds course I've been thinking about. In fact, I've been thinking about it since the summer; the problem is that whenever I start thinking about it, I also start reading cyberpunk novels or wasting time in Second Life.

Looking through the bookmarks in my "VR" folder, I found one text that I would dearly love to put in my course, but could only do so if I had a secure job offer lined up (preferably in a different country):

We contend that virtual worlds enable the construction of a BDSM aesthetic that is connected to, yet distinct from, the real-life
BDSM aesthetic, and that moreover the differences can largely be explained by structural forces associated with computer interfaces themselves. As noted earlier, members of a community share a set of values; these values are embodied in rituals, social interactions, and artifacts. In virtual worlds, all three of these embodiments are computer-mediated. Speech is mediated through an IM window; leather and lace are equally made of pixels; furniture and sex toys are mediated through clickable objects; these objects are accessed from a Windows Explorer/directory tree “Inventory” interface; body parts, such as hair, genitalia, and nipples can only be touched through dialog boxes; enterprising partners who want to design their own sexual experiences often have to write scripts in the C-like Linden Scripting Language (LSL), though some vendors facilitate this process by selling generic, customizable scripts. Whatever artistry there may be to the construction of a scene, its theatre, its thematic coherence, its embodied imagination, all of it is mediated by computer interfaces. Interface and aesthetics are mutually interconnected.

If anyone knows of some less risque papers on social interaction in virtual worlds, please let me know.

Comments

[b0rg.livejournal.com]

yeah Joyce gave us the "stream of conciousness" seeing something like this I think it was a quesionable present...

[alienghic.livejournal.com]

Real papers are hard to come by, though some of these blog entries are about academics who should have some papers.

some futurists chatting about the "metaverse"

blog entry

hints that some VR is "sexist"

I think these people had a paper on learning diplomacy through playing MMOs

[bram.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for studies of virtual worlds sans whips and chains, I think Pavel Curtis may have done some. He was a computer science teacher of mine way back when, and in the early days of the internet created a virtual community called "LambdaMoo". Pavel's contacts naturally led to a lot of academic study of his work: example of which there may be more upon further googling "Pavel Curtis", "LambdaMoo", etc.

wish I could be of more help...

[dualistic.livejournal.com]

the last thing I read on the subject was a book called "Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace" by Janet H. Murray, and that's bound to be a bit dated now, maybe? And it focusses a bit more on the storytelling part than the community part.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks - that's a good set of links (particularly the links inside them). Zimmerman's paper is particularly good.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I could use that text prior to the one I'm using about the infamous "rape in cyberspace" incident.