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.