I’m a convert to virtual spaces. I’m a convert because there’s a migration happening and I like the idea of being part of a diaspora charting new territories, arriving in some new land with hopes and dreams (and a look of total mystification and bafflement).
The migration is like from the Old World to the New World – from Europe to America. It’s a migration because people move from where life is less good to places where life is better. People who arrive in these new worlds might end up baffled, confused, and then head back to the old country – the rewards aren’t easy to find, the experience is jarring, the learning curve is too high. And just as some immigrants arrived in North America and then spent the rest of their lives dreaming of returning “home” to the Old Country, people are arriving in virtual worlds and deciding they don’t really want to live there – they might visit once in a while, but for now they’ll dismiss the benefits of these new lands.
Edward Castronova, the ‘father’ of synthetic worlds economics, puts this well in his book that “Synthetic Worlds, being much like our world in their essence, will grow in popularity if they seem to be better places to spend time.”
Castronova also argues that if this migration continues, if the number of people who migrate to virtual spaces increase, it may have profound implications for society, economies, and culture.
And thus the argument can begin – how do we value our time? Who uses these worlds? Are their “real lives” so empty that they need to turn to virtual spaces to ‘escape’?
I would argue that the combination of technology, the economics of virtual spaces, and the dissolving of the walls between the “virtual” and the “real” have established that virtual worlds, for a larger number of people, offer alternatives for the use of time that are increasingly appealing. I don’t know what life is like in Korea or China or India. I imagine that for some people virtual worlds give opportunities that aren’t accessible in their ‘real worlds’ and that this might explain the pervasiveness of the technology, virtual world use, and time spent on the Internet.
So, not being an expert on places where virtual worlds are far more pervasive, I can only use my own cultural context an look for the different ways in which time spent in a virtual world is more “valuable” than time spent in the real world:
- Virtual worlds can be more “fun”. Depends what your idea of fun is, but if virtual worlds do nothing more than give us a substitute for passive television viewing this might be enough for some users to participate.
- They can provide economic benefit – maybe not for the vast majority of people, but certainly for the gold farmers in China, a land developer in Second Life, or even some kid who builds a mini Empire in Entropia.
- They provide deeper social satisfactions allowing individuals to connect with a group of people who may be from all corners of the world. The ability to find people with similar interests is facilitated by the use of avatars as expressions of our desires, hopes, fears and skills. World of Warcraft guilds can have deeper social meaning to their members than the old gang from high school. Virtual spaces seem to elicit deeper connections because of the 3D nature of the environments – social relationships become more intuitive because our minds are used to processing social contact in 3 dimensions.
- Virtual worlds provide tools for collaboration and creative expression that have not been widely shared or available previously.
- It will soon become easier, or necessary, to use virtual spaces in combination with ‘real world spaces’ in order to interact, work and play. When a tipping point is reached in which Facebook or MySpace profiles include virtual rooms, it will become a social norm to have avatars. When companies start realizing the cost and collaborative benefits of holding meetings in virtual worlds, employees will need to attend training sessions in virtual conference centers. As the technology and our understanding of it improves, we will create new ways of visualizing information, work flow, collaboration and development.
This leads to the wider business implications of virtual worlds. I believe that companies will need to fit synthetic worlds into their marketing mix just as they need Web sites, or use e-mail or viral marketing, or worry about buying keywords onGoogle. I also think that virtual worlds create unique marketing problems – companies will need to adapt to the concept that their ‘customers’ will include avatars that represent different personalities than the users behind them, and that they will need to accept layers of anonymity and identity that will confuse traditional models of ROI. As well, the concept of “product” will become blurry, and companies will either end up with digital versions of real world product, or real world versions of in-world product will start to appear. (I’m still waiting for a line of Neko clothing at the local mall but it might be a while).
But aside from my business interest, I’m also intrigued by exploring how virtual worlds increasingly provide experiences that aren’t as easily paralleled in the “real world”. While there aren’t many knights or space pirates or blacksmiths running around these days, the social and economic structures in places like World of Warcraftt are, as Castronova pointed out, “skins” on top of common and accepted social and economic models. But how will these new tools create new ways entirely of communicating or understanding our relationship with objects, each other, ourselves?
And for that I love to look at builds, unique scripts, communities, and visions.
I recently wrote about Jon Brouchard’s use of virtual architecture.
A visit to DanCoyote’s sim opened my eyes to how art can also push the boundaries of how we perceive objects, space, and context.
Check out the Second Life Insider’s review of the exhibit.
All right – so lots of random thoughts. When I see the kind of work that people put into virtual worlds, and in particular Second Life which is one of the few current platforms (though there are lots more coming, in particular Metaplace which is generating a lot of buzz) where the users can generate whatever content they desire, it makes me feel that people find these spaces “better” places to spend time – not as a replacement for real life, but as a replacement for some activity they used to do but now don’t.
Individuals are joining these worlds with little true economic incentive (for most anyways) and are finding sufficient social or intrinsic rewards to stick around and make great art, or great animations, or great roleplaying sims, or even to perfect their avatars so they can become great lovers. The worlds become increasingly immersive – new physics engines, client viewers, rendering technologies, scripting abilities, ease-of-use, decreased learning curves – as these things happen, more and more people may make the migration to virtual worlds.
I’ve jumped on the wagon train in any case. It doesn’t replace my life – I enjoy my life, my work, my friends, my hobbies, my books, travel…but it replaces spaces in my life that might have been used playing PC games, chatting in MSN, watching television, loafing, or working on different sorts of projects and hobbies. As virtual worlds start to take up more and more space in my “business” life, I’m also putting my time against what I think is an investment in the belief that virtual worlds will increasingly become immersive spaces that larger and larger numbers of people migrate to because of the sheer power of creativity, immersion, community, transportability, and efficiency that these spaces represent.
