Reading list

I've been doing quite a bit of reading about virtual worlds over the last few months. The focus has mainly been on SL and WoW, but some general/theoretical stuff crept into the mix. For now, it's just a list of names; I will come back and annotate them later.

Here's the list, in the order that I read them (or will read them, for those yet unread).

Tom Boellstorff, Coming of age in Second Life

Edward Castronova, Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games

-- , Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace

Zach Waggoner, My avatar, my self: Identity in video roleplaying games

Bonnie Nardi, My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of Warcraft

Ken Hillis, Online a lot of the time: Ritual, fetish, sign

T.L. Taylor, Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture

Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of play: Emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds

William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft civilization: Social science in a virtual world

More about SL and WoW

I've noticed another great and I think significant difference between Second Life and World of Warcraft: Connectivity and the context of my identity.

SL is a single, continuous, large world which is distributed in small pieces across many hundreds of servers. Each server holds a unique portion of the world, and all avatars can move freely between all servers. IM communication works across servers, you can speak to your friends regardless of where you or they are.

WoW is more like a set of parallel universes: it is a relatively small world which is duplicated identically on many hundreds of servers. Each shard contains exactly the same physical world and the same storylines, with the same monsters lurking in the same places and the same NPCs giving out the same quests. An avatar is restricted forever to one single shard, and can only interact with avatars who reside there. ("Forever" is a relative term: you can apply to have your avatar moved permanently to another server, but it's a one-way process that takes a week and costs a month's subscription fees.)

Because the WoW servers are discrete (unconnected), it suffers from the same disadvantage as OpenSim: your character and your identity exist only on a single server, and nothing prevents a malicious person from creating an identically-named character on any other server. This has obvious consequences for your reputation: how would you explain that the person creating havoc under your name in a sim you've never visited is not you? Why should you need to explain this?

RL deals with the problem of non-unique names by creating artificial identifiers (passports, drivers' licenses and the like). Websites like Avatars Online represent an attempt to achieve this by letting people declare all their identities in one location. Perhaps OpenSim needs a similar kind of central registry?

This isolation of avatars from each other has always struck me as the great weakness of OpenSim. Why would I leave SL, where my friends are, where (as a builder or musician or maker of clothing) my possible audience and visitors and customers are — to move to a place which has none of those? I don't believe that people enter online virtual worlds in order to be alone; certainly the majority doesn't, and the evidence of SL is that those who remain alone usually drop out fairly quickly.

That is different in WoW because the game environment keeps you busy: at lower levels, most races and classes don't need other players to interact with. You can't get far into the game without joining a guild and taking part in group battles, but there is no other need or reason for sociability there. And indeed there is no sociability to be had.

In other news I picked up a WoW special-issue gaming magazine in the airport on the way to Canada, and read some more background about the various races and classes, and have made yet another character: a human paladin. From the description, they can play the healing role that appealed to me, but also have combat abilities that the priests are lacking. I'm currently trying them both, and will decide soon which character will be my "prime."

SL meets WoW, both survive

It is probably hideously presumptious to make statements about World of Warcraft on the basis of fourteen days' experience (and three characters none of which has yet passed level 11) but that's exactly what I am about to do. As always: IMHO YMMV. If your mileage does vary significantly, please tell us about it in the comments (or on your own blog and comment the URL).

I've been playing WoW for a fortnight now, having discovered a free-trial offer CD in the local computer store, and have noticed a few instructive similarities and differences between it and Second Life. First, "playing" is the right word to use. Anyone who is uncertain of whether to call SL a "game" should try WoW, the difference will be instantly clear. WoW is a game, people enter it in order to play a predefined set of actions according to a predetermined set of rules in a packaged environment with readymade avatars. SL is a world, people can do anything and everything in it, there's even a near-equivalent of WoW available inworld.

The graphics of WoW are (shall we say) disappointing to eyes accustomed to the glory of SL. Imagine viewing SL scaled down to 32k colours on a screen 100 by 150 pixels, that is roughly how WoW feels to me. It's low-rez and low on physical detail, the avatar mesh in particular is extremely crude compared to SL's.

The avatars are only slightly modifyable: you can select between a dozen skin colours, hair styles and colours, and facial tattoos/makeup — but that's it. The body shape is fixed, and laughably unrealistic. I've made three characters, all female because I simply could not stand to look at myself in one of the male bodies. You spend just as much time looking at your own back in WoW as you do in SL, and I just couldn't take those shapes seriously as "me."

I've spoken before about the standards of politeness, helpfulness and generosity that exist in SL. These are unknown in WoW. Newbies are treated as scum, requests for help or information are either ignored or trigger floods of invective. I think this is because of the competitive and combative nature of the game, my belief is that people feel that helping others would disadvantage them (though in point of fact there is no race to be won, and no shortage of monsters to slay or treasure to win). Updated: age is another factor in this, there is no "teen grid" in WoW. The battlefields are full of children, who act with all the subtlety and fineness of discrimination that one would expect.

There is no conversation in WoW. Starting a sentence with "hello" is socially unacceptable, people react as though you were wasting their time with worthless crap. It's an amusing paradox that I felt that there was more conversation in Dragon Age: Origins (which is a single-player CD-based offline game) than in WoW (which is online with other live humans). People don't talk in WoW. They offer to sell or buy, they ask for volunteers to join them in slaughtering this or that group of monsters, but that's it. Many people don't even bother to say "ty" when you heal or bless them.

Executive summary: It's different from, and in many ways it is inferior to, the visually and socially glorious world that is Second Life; but WoW has an attraction and an appeal of its own. I'm hooked and I will be going back — to both.

RP

Roleplaying.

Different kinds of RP in SL: sci-fi, Pandora, Western, post-apocalypse, sexual.

Some would say that all of life is roleplaying: that we are different people at work than we are at home with our children.

Important distinction: an alt is not roleplaying, not in and of itself, though one may use an alt to keep one's RP separate from one's daily life.

Play

When we are in SL, are we "playing"?

What does "play" mean anyway? When a hobbyist carpenter turns a table-leg on a lathe, is that playing? When a Grand Master takes part in a chess tournament, is he playing?

Lalo commented on an earlier post that augmentationists play with Second Life, as though it were a toy, whereas immersionists play in SL, as though it were a playground.

To be expanded.

Augmentationism

Dusan Writer wrote a really interesting piece about the direction that the Lindens seem to be taking SL: integrating it into our offworld-but-still-digital real lives. I find this direction really worrying, because I do not wish to have my lives commingled in this way. There are some people offworld whom I tell about my time in SL, just as there are some people inworld who have also met my meat avatar, but that's as far as it goes. Right now, I control who knows what about me, and I wish it to stay that way. The Lindens' new plan feels like it will take that out of my hands.

Augmentationism is one of a set of words describing people's opinions (or opinion-driven actions) about what SL is for. Augmentationists believe that so-called real life is the only valid reality, that anything that happens outside of RL cannot possibly be other than a more-or-less meretricious form of entertainment. Hence they believe that SL exists to enrich and enhance our offworld lives. They believe that SL has no separate existence, no culture of its own, and no community.

I suppose there's no reason why an augmentationist could not have a differently-gendered avatar or be another species, but those whom I have met tend to believe that these things are false, morally wrong. Some even reproduce their RL appearance in their avatar (though these too are often suspiciously tall and fit and beautiful).

(The opposite of augmentationism is immersionism, but that's a subject for another day.)

Game

1. Second Life is a game, according to Linden Labs, because that places it in the category of "online entertainment" for taxation and general legal purposes.

2. Second Life is not a game, according to almost everyone who visits it regularly. I have never heard a SL resident refer to it as a game or an entertainment.

Discuss.