Virtual Worlds as Subfields

At the start of this chapter, I said that I would not be going into great detail concerning the disciplines that regard virtual worlds as a subfield. Hopefully, this will be something of a relief, given how long I spent looking at disciplines that regard virtual worlds as (on the whole) independent phenomena.

Some of the points I’ll be making here do have wider application in the context of this book, and I’ll describe these in more detail. Others don’t, and for them I’ll limit myself to an overview and some pointers as to where interested readers can look if they don’t feel their academic energies have yet been exhausted.

Oh, I should mention that the brevity of my discussions here means that I am perforce required to make sweeping generalizations that could well cause anyone who actually works in the areas concerned to splutter with rage. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Literary Theory

Virtual worlds fall awkwardly between literary theory and dramatic theory, and are claimed by both.

• Literature. Authors tell stories. Some stories have multiple authors. Some stories are made by the telling. Some stories are modified as they are told. Some stories are improvised as the author proceeds. Some stories are interactive with the reader. Some stories allow the reader to become the author.

• Drama. Actors perform plays. Some plays have multiple dramatists. Some plays are scripted. Some plays are frameworks. Some plays are improvised by the actors. Some plays are interactive with the audience. Some plays allow the audience to become actors.

The view of literary theorists is that ultimately action in virtual worlds is textual ¹, therefore literature. The view of drama theorists is that ultimately action is performance, therefore drama. Researchers from both fields realize that the other has a point, however, and that with virtual worlds they share common ground. Occupying that ground already is the role-playing community, who have basically had to develop their own theories from scratch and now find that these are attracting more widespread attention.

So, literature first.

From the point of view of virtual world designers, the most interesting thing that students of Literature have to say about virtual worlds is that they do not have story in the conventional sense. Virtual worlds are open storytelling environments—that’s precisely what literary theorists find exciting about them. It’s almost taken as a given that conventional storytelling ideas do not apply to virtual worlds. There are plenty of reasons why virtual world designers might want them to apply ², but there doesn’t appear to be any interest in this from people whose job it is to study story. Indeed, some come right out and say as much: Jesper Juul, looking at ³ narrative as it occurs in computer games in general ⁴, concludes that the two are in conflict and that “it is the strength of the computer game that it doesn’t tell stories.”

The major work on literary theory as applied to virtual worlds is Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext ⁵. Although his book covers a wide range of what Aarseth calls ergodic literature ⁶, the author is himself a former player of TinyMUD (the original, rather than the codebase class) and he devotes a chapter to the subject of virtual worlds. Ergodic literature is not so much text as a machine that generates expressions of text, and therefore virtual worlds are extreme examples of the concept in action. Although cautioning against romanticizing the reading and writing processes of virtual worlds, Aarseth is upbeat about their prospects as a meaningful mode of literary communication.

Aarseth’s and others’ views are taken to task ⁷ by Julian Kücklich, who sees a number of problems with the application of literary terminology to virtual worlds (and, from the examples he gives, he has a point, too). His solution is to view virtual worlds as a deconstructive process, where people discover meaning only by taking it apart. It’s possible that both he and Aarseth are right, however, and that it depends on the players as to which applies ⁸.

Some other papers concerning literature and virtual worlds:

• Jeffery Young, 1994 ⁹. Young evangelizes on behalf of virtual worlds as places where human beings can express themselves. He wants virtual worlds to be studied for their speech and for their writing, and with controlled enthusiasm explains exactly why. That this paper seems a little dated now is perhaps because Young succeeded in his aims.

• Mikael Cardell, 1994 ¹⁰. In this early attempt to look at virtual worlds from the point of view of literary theory, Cardell compares the processes involved in the construction of virtual worlds with those of a literary world (that of Lord of the Rings) and concludes that they are fundamentally the same. Nevertheless, although virtual worlds are used as locations for storytelling—quests in particular—he sees little evidence of contextual role-playing in most of them except for social experimentation (for example, cross-gender play).

• Phil Goetz, 1994 ¹¹. This is a classic article that shows how virtual worlds can be used for highly literate role-play. Although the sample transcripts it presents suffer from dead-on-the-page syndrome, nevertheless Goetz makes his point. If you want to know what literary role-play is like in practice, this is where to find out.

• Catherine Wylie, 1999 ¹². In this paper, Wylie argues that virtual worlds are the natural successors of the ancient “memory theatre” approach to storytelling, where stories were told aloud rather than being written down. Such stories evolved in the telling, as the storyteller and listeners engaged in a dialogue. She sees virtual worlds as offering the same opportunity for their communities to direct the moral tide, which are unavailable in other common examples of post-modernism in action.

• Torill Mortensen, 2002 ¹³. Mortensen’s concern is that literary theorists have difficulty understanding virtual worlds because they are removed from them; they speak with experience of literature, but not of virtual worlds. She suggests that instead of looking at virtual worlds remotely, researchers should roll up their sleeves and actually play them ¹⁴. Only through such ethnography-like fieldwork can anyone hope to understand what it really means to be a “manipulating reader.” Interestingly, her own experience of this results in an explanation that reads very much like the hero’s journey.

Role-Playing Game Theory

Role-playing gamers have theories of role-play. Actors have theories of role-play too, of course, but players of role-playing games (RPGs) do not consider these to be appropriate to their particular circumstances. Instead, they’ve developed their own theories, the origins of which lie in the discussions of role-playing that occur on the Usenet group rec.games.frp.advocacy. Most of this work was done in the context of human-moderated games, whether face-to-face or live action; nevertheless, much of it can be applied to virtual worlds (and to single-player computer role-playing games, come to that).

There are two key aspects to the theories: mode and stance.

Mode is the style of play that players adopt, and concerns the reason that they participate in role-playing games. The usual answer they give—“to have fun”—is the same that players of virtual worlds reply. The RPG categorization of the answers, however, is different to the one I derived for virtual world player types. In fact, there are two main approaches: The GDS and GNS models, named after the initial letters of their categories (Gamist, Dramatist, Simulationist, and Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism). GDS came first, and is described in the rec.games.frp.advocacy FAQ ¹. GNS is a refinement by Ron Edwards ².

I’ll outline GNS here:

• Game mode. This concerns competition between players, rather than their characters. Players create victory/loss conditions for themselves that are reflected in their playing strategies.

• Narrative mode. Here, the idea is the creation of a story with a recognizable theme. Characters are protagonists, and the referee provides the narrative cloth from which the players cut the story. The GDS model has drama mode here instead.

• Simulation mode. This style of play focuses on exploration—of the character, setting, situation, atmosphere, and/or game mechanics. Internal logic and consistency of experience are regarded as paramount.

These playing styles are specific to individuals. The same game may have players in different modes, and conflicts will therefore occasionally arise (for example, game mode players might hire a half-orc tracker when their characters are all elves, whereas simulation mode players might object that their characters “wouldn’t do that”).

From a virtual world designer’s point of view, it’s interesting to compare these modes to the player types model (RPG theorists have done the reverse, too). There are some definite similarities: Game mode means achievers; simulation mode means explorers. Narrative mode could fit either socializers or killers, but serves neither very well. Why is this?

The root of the disparity is that in a virtual world, different characters do different things at the same time; in a human-moderated role-playing set-up, they don’t. Human beings can’t listen to instructions in parallel and react to each instantly; computers can, so they facilitate the person-to-person action and interaction that killers and socializers seek. Conversely, computers cannot adapt to unexpected actions to keep a series of planned events on track; humans can, therefore they can sustain a narrative.

In terms of mode, RPG theory has some relevance to virtual worlds; where it doesn’t apply, its limitations are clearly defined.

The second characteristic of role-playing theory, stance, concerns how individuals decide what to do in response to a role-playing event. There are four basic stances, although only the first three typically apply:

• Actor stance. Players decide what their characters do based solely on the knowledge that their characters have. I know there’s a dragon behind the door because I saw the referee’s notes, but my character doesn’t: My character goes through the door.

• Author stance. Players use their own priorities to determine what their character does, then retroactively ³ provide a rationale for their character to act that way. If we found the dragon this early, the gaming session would end too soon; the fact that my character is greedy enables me to send him back to look at some other doors he walked past, “before I get too far away.”

• Director stance. The player determines their character’s actions with no reference to that character’s knowledge or abilities. My character pulls out their secret, dragon-slaying sword and goes through the door.

• Audience stance. Events unfold, my character merely watches. This doesn’t apply in a role-playing situation: If I’m called on by the referee to act, my character must act—even if that means explicitly “doing nothing.” It can apply in virtual worlds in certain stylized situations (one of which is described in the section on drama theory that follows).

The director stance is rare among players of RPGs. It may be more common in virtual worlds where players have build privileges, but it’s impossible in those where they don’t. The important stances are the first two, which equate to in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OOC) action. Edwards suggests that stances may be linked to the concept of immersion, too, which seems reasonable.

I’ve mentioned GDS and GNS here, but they aren’t the only models in RPG Theory. Ever since the appearance of GDS, people have been creating their own player type models, almost invariably working to a threefold template. Brian Gleichman argues ⁴ that this archetype has become so ingrained that people don’t consider there may be better ways of doing things. It occurs to me that there may be a similar problem in virtual worlds following on from my own four-fold player types model.

Drama Theory

There are two standard works that look at virtual worlds from the perspective of drama theory: Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre ¹ and Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck ².

Laurel’s big idea is that computers are a medium, rather than a tool. She sees drama as a conceptualizing theory that should be applied for designing engaging human/ computer activities, its advantages over narrative being its emphasis on enactment—people perform. She argues that by arranging the action (in any software engineering project) about the interface, the rest of the design falls into place. When the interface is the human imagination, the possibilities are limitless.

This interest in interface leads Laurel naturally to virtual reality, which she regards with great enthusiasm. It is primarily for this reason that her work is often quoted with reference to virtual worlds, although it’s something of a distraction in today’s post-hype VR climate. More relevant is her general belief that the relationship between human and computer should be about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to the real one ³.

Laurel’s approach focuses on the players, as both performers and (when the computer acts) audience. Murray, on the other hand, focuses on the work; for her, this is the performance that results from interaction between the players. She does mean players (rather than characters), too: Characters are like the masks of classical Greek drama, a device that by delimiting actor and role liberates the actor to become their role. Although it’s tempting to think of the virtual world itself as the theatre in which the roles are played out, this is not Murray’s approach ⁴; rather, she sees it as a narrator, telling the story that unfolds as the players perform. Her vision is essentially constructivist: Players gain by building the context through their actions—they define the world.

Thus, she conceives of virtual worlds as being the collaborations of virtuosi, rather than the works of single geniuses: commedia dell’arte as opposed to Shakespeare. They follow a folk-story model, where the story form is passed down through succeeding generations and repurposed by each for their own needs; the high culture model, by comparison, fixes the work and passes it down verbatim. This means that although the resulting stories may look derivative to the outsider, they can be intensely meaningful to the performers. Hopefully, as narrative formulae are developed, understanding the stories and creating more advanced ones will become easier.

Murray’s approach is far more story-oriented than Laurel’s, but she still basically regards computers as a medium. She identifies three important properties of this medium, which by now should be familiar to virtual world designers:

• Immersion. How it helps people construct, rather than merely suspend, belief.

• Agency. How it allows users to do things that affect what is being represented.

• Transformation. How the medium can change to enhance immersion and agency.

Although much of what Murray says is relevant to the design of virtual worlds, its applicability is limited by the fact that (from our point of view) she’s looking in the wrong place. In virtual worlds, players don’t perform the work, they are the work. The closure that effectively ends a performance occurs when its structure is understood; for players, that’s the key part of their hero’s journey.

Also, purely from a designer’s perspective, much of what goes on in virtual worlds occurs because of the way the world is structured. The virtual world itself may be created by a presiding genius who provides a context that allows the players to excel beyond what they would have done otherwise. Virtual world designers can certainly count such geniuses among their number; Raph Koster is the most obvious example.

Virtual worlds are not narrative components, they’re places. As places, they can be venues for genuine performance without reference to the art of their creation—“art within art,” in other words. There are genuine virtual theatre companies who act out pieces of interactive drama within virtual worlds to audiences. The most famous of these, the Plaintext Players ⁵, have been performing regularly since 1994. They don’t work to a formal script: They are provided by the director with a basic scenario ⁶, and improvise to fulfill it.

Although the Plaintext Players often record (that is, log) their performances, it takes an experienced reader of transcripts to get any sense of the power and inventiveness of the piece. It is unlikely that someone who is not accustomed to reading log files would find them inspiring, even if they were replayed in real time. Basically, you have to be there, live, witnessing the performance taking place in the context of your own ability to influence it, in order to appreciate it ⁷. This is despite the fact that there is some heavyweight drama theory behind them ⁸.

Part of the reason for this is that the Plaintext Players work exclusively in textual worlds. Graphical worlds are more accessible in this regard, and unsurprisingly many players do record activities in these worlds for later consumption ⁹. Most of these recordings are of a “home video” nature, with subject matter concerning things like weddings, fights, and bloopers. Others, though, are parodies; some are actual scripted dramas.

At the moment, these graphical pieces are limited by the fact that the audience cannot enter the drama either actively (by moving the camera wherever they want) or passively (having a director choose the camera angles). They are recordings of events from a single perspective; they only show what is on the recording player’s screen at the time. In theory, since the data exists anyway, it should be possible for members of the audience to change the camera angle themselves, switching points of view between participants, and getting in among the action. It should also be possible for a director to edit a cohesive and compelling narrative from the unlimited camera recordings that could be made available to them. All it would take would be for the graphical client to be able to record the incoming data stream and play it back. As a bonus, the amount of data needed to store a performance would be low compared with what is needed to store it frame-by-frame; feature-length events would be possible, instead of the five-minute shorts we have today. In practice, though, this is much harder than it sounds due to synchronization and cross-patch compatibility issues.

Some other papers concerning drama theory and virtual worlds are:

• Howard Rheingold, 1991 ¹⁰. Chapter 13 of this well-known book describes drama in virtual worlds as envisaged in the VR-optimistic days of the early 1990s. Although many of the predictions related may in time come true, if they do it will be because of the worlds, not the interface.

• Jen Clodius, 1996 ¹¹. Here, Clodius describes the use of dramatic performance to give in-world context to a meta-world event (the return of a former player to an administrative position). She characterizes performance in virtual worlds as a form of spontaneous communication, people playing off each other to express and convey ideas. The actual event she describes used a framework script (which is presented), enhanced by improvisation during its execution to account for the reactions of the audience.

• Susan Warshauer, 1994 ¹². Warshauer has the refreshing idea of examining (through interviews) the aesthetic approaches of two different virtual designers, to ascertain what they believed was important to virtual world design (simulation of reality, quality of room descriptions, and so on). Focusing on their attitudes to role-playing, she constructs a “dialectic of interacting” ¹³ that describes the motion that players experience between IC and OOC states. This is strongly related to the stances of RPG theory and the concept of immersion.

• Shannon Appelcline, 2001 ¹⁴. In this experiment, Appelcline wrote his regular Skotos column in screenplay format to demonstrate the problems that arise when material created for one medium is presented using another. Things work in different ways in different media, and not all transfer; some aesthetics intersect, but some don’t. You always need to adapt a work of art for a different medium, and therefore you always have to adapt your understanding of works of art for different media. In particular, models of narrative and performance appropriate for the silver screen are not necessarily appropriate for virtual worlds.

This depiction of virtual worlds as a medium links suspiciously neatly to the next topic.

Computer-Mediated Communication

Communications studies is a broad field, concerning the ways by which human beings convey information and emotion to one another. Inter-disciplinary almost by definition, it attracts mainly sociologists, sociolinguists and psychologists. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a subfield that addresses human communication through the medium of the computer. It specializes in email, Instant Messenger, Usenet, IRC, and virtual worlds (particularly textual ones, and very particularly MOOs). To CMC specialists, virtual worlds are simply one of many forms of CMC: They are important because they are media, not because they are places.

The main concerns researchers have about CMC are ¹:

• The absence of social context cues (for example, body language, facial expressions)

• The recordability of conversation

• The rate of information exchange

• The level of formality

• The effects of anonymity

This means that CMC has lots to say about virtual worlds, but usually in the context of some wider theory, rarely addressing what virtual world researchers might like to think of as the unique circumstances that pertain in their subject matter ². For this reason, it’s actually quite hard to track down CMC writings specific to virtual worlds that aren’t using them to make some more general point ³. That said, CMC researchers are often interested in the same things as virtual world researchers (albeit for different reasons), and much CMC work touches on topics I have already mentioned in this chapter; indeed, some of the works I’ve cited were published under the CMC banner.

I have, however, refrained from using all CMC papers in this way, for two reasons: Firstly, to bring home to virtual world designers that CMC is an area they should be looking at; secondly, because some of the points of interest concern CMC itself.

So here are some CMC papers that might interest you:

• Elizabeth Reid, 1995 ⁴. Reid looks at the different forms of communication available in virtual worlds, and the social experiences that result from them. She asserts that virtual worlds are new realities that exist in the shared imaginations of the players. The CMC spin is that this is made possible by the way the server actualizes players’ commands into forms that can be communicated; it enables language to substitute for nonverbal cues, and the specialized meanings it employs to do so bind players into a common culture ⁵.

• Don Langham, 1994 ⁶. CMC has been criticized for causing people to speak before they have had time to reflect, encouraging them to think less deeply. Langham defends CMC from this by likening it to Plato’s description of Socrates objecting to writing because it disrupts oral society. In the same way that Socrates felt writing corrupted the individual’s relationship to society, CMC objectors feel that it destroys the individual’s relationship to their self. Langham, however, sees virtual worlds as coming round full circle, re-introducing orality to society through the written word. Michael Docherty, 1994 ⁷, criticizes Langham’s approach (if not his conclusions) on the grounds that the supposedly anti-CMC camp are actually merely speculating about what might happen, rather than predicting what will. Writing began as a tool, but literature made it a realm; CMC is currently a tool, but only future generations will know what realm it becomes.

• Nancy Deuel, 1996 ⁸. This paper discusses virtual sex, mainly in context of writings by other people on the subject; it is therefore a good starting point for further investigation into how CMC regards virtual sex. Deuel depicts it as a phenomenon of social interaction; while not tangibly productive, participants insist it contributes to their personal development and exploration. To this extent, it is a form of personal expression that is inevitable no matter what wider society may prefer.

• John Ryan, 1995 ⁹. Ryan looks at why people choose to communicate via virtual worlds, rather than through some other medium. He employs a uses and gratifications model; these are popular in CMC, and involve using statistics to find categories of common behaviors. He proceeded by interviewing 222 old-time LambdaMOO players using a fixed set of questions, then analyzing the results. He successfully identifies several reasons why people choose to continue playing LambdaMOO when they could easily have been doing something else. An interesting conclusion (from the point of view of this book) is that these long-term players seemed to have become more “themselves” as a result of their LambdaMOO experiences.

• Sonja Utz, 2000 ¹⁰. Utz examines how friendships develop in virtual worlds, which she sees as a highly developed form of CMC. She sets out to verify a number of commonly held hypotheses concerning: Virtual-world players; the way they develop friendships; the role that the communication forms available to them play in this. She produced a questionnaire that was answered by 103 players of German textual worlds. Although she does reach some interesting conclusions concerning her primary goals, of particular interest to readers of this book is how a cluster analysis of respondents’ answers found four different player types that bear some similarity to…well, read it yourself.

• Tari Fanderclai, 1995 ¹¹. This is only a short paper, but it is notable for alerting the possibilities of educational virtual worlds to a wider audience. Because CMC is interdisciplinary, people from other disciplines get to hear about things they might otherwise not.

Post-Modernism

Post-modernists view virtual worlds as examples of post-modernism in action. Then again, they view everything like that, so virtual worlds aren’t necessarily particularly special in this regard. What makes them interesting to post-modernists (in the sense that anything at all is interesting to them) is that they illustrate certain post-modernist concepts more clearly than usual, and thus make good examples when explaining postmodernism to people who don’t get it.

Post-modernism ¹ only really arrived in the mid-1980s. As an intellectual movement, it has things to say about a very wide range of topics. Fundamentally, though, it’s about the meaning of meaning (or, rather, the lack of meaning of meaning). Human beings are entirely subjective; all objectivity is therefore illusory. Meaning is constructed from individually meaningless signs and symbols; the truth is hidden behind the image, but the truth itself is an image. Ultimately, human beings are constructs created by themselves; deconstruct them, and at best all you find is another layer to deconstruct.

As I’ve just explained it (which is very much only a brief summary), post-modernism is basically a “so what?” subject. It’s full of theory, the theory seems to apply, but it also undermines itself in a recursive fashion. In the end, you may understand it but so what? This is what: It enables people to look at things in a non-traditional manner, giving greater insight into what things mean and why they mean it. It’s incredibly easy to overdo, though.

Insofar as virtual worlds are concerned, their importance to post-modernism is that they clearly demonstrate two of its tenets (both due to Jean Baudrillard ²). The first of these is the individual as a simulacrum of the self: In virtual worlds, with their lack of physicality, how could the individual be anything else? The second is the concept of the hyperreal, where representation becomes simulation (Reality as a simulation of itself); virtual worlds, being simulations of reality as people both understand and desire it to be, can seem to them to be more real than reality ³.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that there is a virtual world set up specifically to exemplify these theories in action: PMC2 ⁴, sponsored by the journal Postmodern Culture ⁵. Perhaps even less unsurprising is that many of the post-modern writings about virtual worlds concern this particular virtual world. Well, it makes a change from LambdaMOO.

Some papers (with great titles) that refer to virtual worlds as post-modernist icons are

• Mark Nunes, 1995 ⁶. This is a good statement of the post-modern line regarding virtual worlds, making useful reference to the “modern” that post-modern is “post.” Nunes sees virtual worlds as places that defy the unavoidability of modernist futures, allowing people to play with the assumptions that modernity bequeathed us concerning community, information, liberation, and self. They offer the chance to thwart inevitability by allowing us to redefine and rewrite whatever we choose.

• Jeffrey Fisher, 1997 ⁷. Fisher takes viewpoint that cyberspace is not the equivalent of medieval paradise that many people seemed to think it was (and he wrote this before The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace was published). Virtual worlds allow individuals to re-create themselves and to archive that re-creation ⁸; thus, they can transform people. Virtual worlds are not universally available to everyone, though, nor can they ever be: Although they can transform people, they can’t transform everyone because not everyone has (nor ever will have) access to them. There are thus real social costs to a virtual world existence.

• Troy Whitlock, 1994 ⁹. A concerted and deliberate example of post-modernism disappearing up its own backside. Whitlock set up a player class, “terrorist,” in the dying days of PMC-MOO. Every worst post-modernist nightmare ensued as the consequences of post-modernist theories came back to bite the theorists—as a legitimate example of their theories in action. Deconstructivists were deconstructed; self-reference was used as a weapon against self-reference. Amusing though this is, it makes many serious points in the detail. A splendid illustration of how Reality always wins, even against hyperreality.

• Chip Morningstar, 1993 ¹⁰. This is one of my favorite papers related to virtual worlds, written by a pioneer of the subject. It’s a wonderful cutting-through of academic weed to find the ideas that flower at the center of post-modernism. Chip takes a marvelous, pragmatic approach, pointing out what’s bogus about post-modernism as it is applied to virtual worlds (and everything else), and what’s valuable (which isn’t a lot, but neither is it nothing). It’s a magnificent dose of real reality to counter the hyperreal reality of post-modernist thought. After reading this, you need never feel daunted by anyone who renormalizes the phenomenology of narrative space through intersubjective cognitive strategy again.