Virtual Worlds: New frontiers for expression

February 19, 2009 by Jorge Labrador 

Second Life blurs the distinction between real, virtual worlds

The Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies hosted a conference titled “Virtual Worlds and Interpretive Communities: Opportunities for Global Dialogue” Monday and Tuesday, in tandem with the Sammy Ofer School of Communications in Herzliya, Israel.

Virtual worlds were explored as media for religious expression and the formation of communities, portraying new and existing environments and legal and marketing issues and serving as a forum for public discussion.

UNLV delved into the realm of virtual world research, with the entertainment engineering program working on a three-dimensional virtual recreation of the Las Vegas Sands Hotel and Casino in its heyday, the journalism department offering a class revolving around Second Life, and UNLV Distance Education owning and operating a virtual simulation in the Internet’s most popular virtual environment, Second Life.

This work comes at a time when the line separating the real and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly blurred.

“What the Internet does is emulate how people are in their day-to-day lives,” said Heidi Campbell, assistant professor at Texas A&M University, in her keynote address called “Offline Implications of Online Religious Community.”

Campbell described modern online communities as a “third space” not quite like home or public areas, noting that scholarly perceptions of online communities have changed over the years.

Pall Ariantho (David Wortley’s avatar in Second Life) of the Serious Games Institute spoke on the increasing parallels between the virtual and real worlds in a virtual keynote address moderated by UNLV professor Larry Mullen, in which he described what he thought of as the long-lived legacy of shared virtual environments.

Wortley’s goal is for Serious Games Institute to be a “thought leader and focal point for games-based learning, simulation and immersive 3-D virtual environments.”  

“Cave paintings… and social networks are both shared spaces,” he said. “We have used shared spaces as a way of sharing knowledge, emotions and experience. If you go back to even the cave drawings… the person who created those cave drawings was sharing an experience [with others].”

Wortley described these spaces, including services like Facebook and Second Life as well as video games like “Guitar Hero,” as “unique to us,” each providing a shared experience for the group and individual experiences for end-users. 

Wortley argued that this level of personalized experiences will be demanded from physical spaces, further blurring the line between the physical and virtual worlds. On the other hand, some research has been found to support description of real and virtual worlds as very different spheres.

Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya professors Doron Friedman and Yuval Karniel presented study findings that separate the two realms, at least in terms of community discussions. Their experiment compared roundtable discussions on global warming in a real conference room and in a Second Life conference room.

“It’s almost the equivalent of the physical setting,” Karniel explained as he showed a slide comparing the notably similar conference rooms. He switched to a picture of a computer lab and said, “But this is where it took place. In the physical world they’re here, but in the virtual world they’re there.” 

Contrary to typical conditions in online communities, participants in Friedman and Karniel’s study were not anonymous. Their virtual avatars were tagged with their real names, removing what some consider an incentive for antisocial behavior on the Internet.

The study found that real discussions stayed on topic better and were filled with more diverse topics than their online counterparts.

A clip of one virtual discussion showed one avatar removing its clothing and jumping on the table, while other avatars grew bored with the discussion and started to explore the surrounding virtual environments. Karniel assured the audience that this did not happen in any of the real discussions, and explained that attention span was shown to be an obstacle virtual worlds would have to overcome to become a legitimate form of discourse.  

Karniel and Friedman are still tabulating the results of a second study comparing text-only chat discussions with those in virtual environments. According to Friedman, the results thus far look similar to the first study.

This work at UNLV and around the world is part of long-running research on Internet communities. 

According to Campbell, the first wave of scholars had high expectations for online communities, looking at them as “new and extraordinary” constructs, only to have expectations reset  to reflect less spectacular forms of communication norms in the second phase of online communities. 

The current chapter of research sees online communities as a “[mixture] of scholarship and application” and fosters a growing environment of participation and discussion.

UNLV students interested in the virtual worlds field can take part in JOUR 447, which begins in early March and looks at topics surrounding virtual environments.

FOR MORE INFO:

Prof. Mullen, JOUR 447: 

lawrence.mullen@unlv.edu