Information Dynamics in Virtual Worlds

Gaming and Beyond

Woody Evans

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843346418
• eBook ISBN: 9781780632742
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Virtual Reality
• Index: Computer Science

Presents a broad examination of the nature of virtual worlds and the potential they provide in managing and expressing information practices through that medium, grounding information professionals and students of new media in the fundamental elements of virtual worlds and online gaming. The book details the practical issues in finding and using information in virtual environments and presents a general theory of librarianship as it relates to virtual gaming worlds. It is encompassed by a set of best practice methods that libraries can effectively execute in their own environments, meeting the needs of this new generation of library user, and explores ways in which information literacy can be approached in virtual worlds. Final chapters examine how conventional information evaluation skills work falls short in virtual worlds online.- Maps out areas of good practice and technique for information professionals and librarians serving in virtual communities- Provides a clear foundation with appropriate theory for understanding information in virtual worlds- Treats virtual worlds as 'real environments' and observes the behaviour of actors within them

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 re...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I: Virtual Ontologies
• Part II: Time Inworld
• Appendix I: SL librarianship
• Appendix II: TOS
• Bibliography
• Index