Virtual World Professionals and the Interloper Effect in 3D Virtual Worlds

In this chapter we discuss virtual world professionals: real world employees deployed in virtual worlds for the purpose of representing a company or organization there. We investigate the notions of belonging and community in 3D virtual worlds, and identify the ways in which “belonging” and “not belonging” are constructed and perceived, especially in relation to so-called employee avatars. We explore the dimension of social stigma in virtual worlds and discuss the utility of the separate categories of outsiders and interlopers for inhabitant characterization. Our motivation for doing so is to determine the degree to which corporate presence can be mediated through the specific mechanism of employee avatar appearance. In considering the possibility that some employee avatars may be perceived as interlopers, we propose three methods for investigating the effect of their presence in virtual worlds, called the “interloper effect.”

Technological Minimalism versus Second Life

This chapter addresses a certain resistance against the use of Second Life in education, which is based on the theory of technological minimalism. The main arguments behind this resistance and the theory’s basic concepts are discussed. Then a critique of an example of the application of technological minimalism to the use of Second Life in education follows. Technological minimalism advocates the minimum use of technology needed to transmit content. The text argues that in the current stage of education technology potential educational tools should not be chosen based on that criterion. Technology and education cannot be easily separated anymore. As a conclusion, this chapter suggests a new form of minimalism: a minimalism of content.

User-Driven Content Creation in Second Life A Source of Innovation?

In this chapter, Second Life is conceived as an open space and symbolic world of user-driven co-creation of content. The questions asked concern the ways in which the actors of three case studies design, mediate, and remediate their Second Life projects and how the choices they make contribute to user-driven content creation and possibly to innovative practices. To answer these questions, concepts of innovation, in particular closed and open innovation are introduced and motivations for engaging in co-creation are identified. It is suggested that we understand user-driven innovation in a world like Second Life in terms of symbolic reorganization of conceptual frameworks and meaning-making. Subsequently, the concept of remediation is suggested as a way to conceive of mediation in the cases studied. It is shown how difficult it is for actors to co-create, mediate, and remediate thus to generate user-driven innovative practices in two Danish business projects (Wonder DK and Times) and in one public service project (Literary). To conclude the analysis of the case studies, it is suggested that methods of creative co-creation and innovative practices can build on the concept of remediation borrowed from research on new media and redefined in virtual worlds.

Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Second Life

This chapter will explain how this study was conducted, as well as the results and the conclusions drawn from it. After the data analysis we concluded that avatars rarely use kinesic communication - although there is, in Second Life, an inventory full of gestures - using instead verbal communication. In fact, it was very clear that individuals use written code to express their emotions, thus increasing the number of participations. Non-verbal communication had a small role in interaction, proxemics was influenced by space, and finally, appearance didn’t reveal the true personality of the user.

Virtual Worlds and Health

With decades of experience in simulation, the health professions are comparatively well versed in virtual environments for training. More broadly, there is a growing body of experience and supporting evidence on the benefits of virtual worlds for professional information sharing, clinical simulation, healthcare delivery, and as a research tool. Virtual worlds have empirically demonstrated outcomes as a simulation tool that increases knowledge and of health professionals, and initial explorations in regard to healthcare delivery show promise. Key challenges for wider adoption of virtual worlds within the health professions include a lack of established standards around privacy, a fragmented approach to collaboration and marked skepticism toward virtual worlds as a platform for health care delivery. Recommendations for formalised collaboration mechanisms, agreement on standards, and future research avenues are put forward, with a focus on virtual worlds as a tool that increasingly will be central to professional learning and practice.

The Players’ Dimension

This chapter outlines three positions in the development of game spaces from the ideal of the perfect mindspace to the commercial reality of virtual worlds to the expansion of the game world into the physical environment into a hybrid space. The third position will be investigated further as the argument looks into peculiarities of the evolving hybrid space that result from the combination of changes to the physical through the fictional space. This continues the ongoing dissolution of the magic circle’s boundaries and illustrates how fictional worlds expand into even non-game locations. Building on Popper’s system of the 3 worlds, it is suggested that today’s fictional game worlds have already changed our physical environments. In that, it partially closes the argument back to the earliest dreams of cyberspace but arrives not at a new mindspace to “log in” but instead at a new physical space in need of re-evaluation.

The 3-D Innovation Sphere

This chapter will explore the 3-D environment Second Life as a communication platform used by industry and science to create, design, develop, and distribute innovation. In order to achieve sustainable economic success in the context of global competition, companies need to optimize their communication activities within their innovation processes. In addition to identifying relevant trends at an early stage and generating marketable ideas, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to sufficiently communicate the usage and the meaning of innovations and to position themselves as consistent innovators. Virtual worlds like the high profile, realistically designed online environment Second Life offer far-reaching possibilities within the innovation management process – from ideating to market introduction. The objective of this chapter is to provide a systematic analysis of the communication paradigms in virtual environments. In particular, the main issues, challenges, opportunities, limits and trends of digital innovation communication will be discussed in the context of the 3-D world Second Life.

The Art and Flux of Telepathy 2.0 in Second Life

This chapter looks at contemporary art practice in Virtual Worlds, and the effervescence of new technologically mediated telepathies. Avatar Performance Art by Jeremy Owen Turner and Second Front have explored a variety of Second Life telepathies, and have quickly earnt the title of Virtual Fluxus. Second Front’s links to Western Front, Fluxus, Robert Filliou and the Eternal Network assist the continued internationalised new media and performance collaboration work with telepathy. As the body becomes obsolete, it develops new techlepathy1.

Finding Liquid Salvation

The Cardean Ethnographic Method was developed between 2007 and 2010 to study religious communities in the virtual world of Second Life. In our research, we faced a two-sided methodological problem. We had to theorize the virtual and its relation to the actual, while simultaneously creating practices for an effective ethnographic method. Our solution, named after the Roman goddess of the hinge, Cardea, theorizes the “virtual” as desubstantialized and nondualistic; “residents” as fluid, multiple, and distributed cyborg-bodies; and “cloud communities” as temporary, outsourced groups of emotionally bonded residents. These three qualities enable a classic form of ethnography based on participant observation, which is possible on Second Life because the platform enables immersion, a prolonged time in the field, as well as the bodily practices necessary for thick description. The Cardean method unveils online religion operating as “Liquid Salvation”—which is defined by consumerism, radical individualism, and pragmatic religious practice.

Virtual Worlds and Reception Studies

Across the various fields, discourse communities, and paradigms studying virtual worlds, there are disagreements about the object of their studies. The nature of what virtual worlds are, and how to study them, are in flux. For some, this flux has benefits. However, the flux is potentially a problem for the study of virtual worlds from the audience and reception studies paradigm. Without knowing what can be labelled as a “virtual world,” it is hard to study how people engage with a virtual world and to discuss what is found as ecologically valid. This chapter argues for research studies focusing on how people make sense of virtual worlds when they engage with them, and to compare these situated sense-making processes amongst “virtual worlds technologies” as well as other types of media products. By mapping out and comparing such engagings, we may have a better understanding about what constitutes a virtual world.