Virtual Worlds as Subfields on Designing Virtual Worlds

Literary Theory

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Role-Playing Game Theory

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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).

Drama Theory

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Computer-Mediated Communication

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Post-Modernism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.