Signs and Symbols

So, let’s start with symbols.

When movies were first made, directors had to develop a language and their audience had to learn it: Real life doesn’t have jump cuts. When something happens in the way information is presented on a movie screen, which runs counter

to the way that human senses accept information in the real world, this signals an interrupt that the mind needs to interpret consciously. By codifying the interrupts so they are always used under the same circumstances, the brain can learn what they “mean.” This done, subsequent occurrences of the interrupt don’t register unless they subvert the code in some way.

I recall as a child seeing a film on TV where the action started going on in several small mini-screens at once. I figured this meant the story had branched and I had a choice about which mini-screen to watch. Not knowing which story was going to turn out best, I asked my father for his advice. He explained that it was all part of the same story, and the activities shown were meant to be going on simultaneously; therefore I should try to pay attention to all of them at once. Nowadays when I see a split-screen effect, it doesn’t even record in my consciousness, I just “know” it means that several things are happening at once. It’s a symbol for which I have a reliable meaning. However, if early directors had gone a different way, a split-screen could have signified something entirely different.

The field of semiotics is concerned with the associating of meaning to signs. When the signs are structured according to a grammar, the result is a language; when they are merely systematized, the result is a vocabulary. For movies—and, as we shall see, virtual worlds—they aren’t organized even to that degree. Nevertheless, the codes do exist, and they do have meanings that have been implicitly agreed on by those who create and experience them.

Determining the meaning of the signs (that arise because of the difference between virtual world technology and the way reality works) is therefore important. You didn’t think virtual worlds had signs? When you watch a TV drama, you don’t think you’re actually a character participating in it, yet when you play a virtual world you do. Why? Is it merely because you control a

character? No: It’s because you accept that the character you control is a token that represents you. Accept it enough, and it becomes you (and you become it). Immersion is accepting the signifier as the signified. Those pixels on the screen are just pixels; you associate meaning with them.

For a critical aesthetic to be useful, it has to aim for universality. Everyone should understand the signs and their denotations in the same way. If I visit a textual world for the first time, I expect new conversational messages to appear below those I have already read ¹; I could play some other world that puts them above, but it would feel (to me) seriously weird. For textual worlds, there are reasons (ultimately to do with the way people read books) which explain why “above” connotes “before” and “below” connotes “after.” For graphical worlds, though, conversational messages don’t have to appear in a single window at all—they can (and do) appear in multiple embedded windows—for example, as speech bubbles ². These are still signs, though: Even though I can see words above some character’s head, I don’t assume I can pick them up like I could fruit hanging from a tree.

The coming of graphics to virtual worlds is like the coming of sound to movies. The same old rules apply, but the emphasis is different; there are also some new rules. These are rules, however, that are learned very early in a player’s career, if indeed they didn’t already know them from other art forms. It is possible (albeit tedious) to list them all, but doing so would only be of academic interest—a chart showing every color and its emotional impact doesn’t make everyone a landscape artist. Where signs are important to designers is in their use, and I shall therefore refer to them in this context rather than

enumerating the major ones here and continually referring back to the resulting table.

Symbols in virtual worlds have two roles. One is to make statements valid in the real world, and the other is to make statements valid in the virtual world. A virtual world that imposes a character class regime is “about” order and conformity; one that doesn’t is “about” choice and independence. Both of these are political statements, irrespective of designers’ bleatings to the contrary; they’re statements that the virtual world makes in the real world through its design. A room complex that has increasingly lower light levels, on the other hand, is a statement within the context of the virtual world itself: It says that these rooms are successively more dangerous, because darkness is a metaphor for danger.

I’ll address the external symbolism first, then move on to the internal symbolism.