Guest Post: Viximo's Ravi Mehta on MIT's "It's a Small World: How Virtual Communities Are Changing the Ways We Relate"

This article is a guest post from Ravi Mehta, VP of Publishing for Viximo, a virtual goods start-up.

Last week I attended an event coordinated by the MIT Alumni Association titled "It's a Small World: How Virtual Communities Are Changing the Ways We Relate". The first lecture, "What Kind of World Would You Make: Second Life as Thought Experiment", was given by Professor Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The second lecture, "Hello Avatar! What Virtual Worlds Mean for Human Communication", was given by Professor Beth Coleman, Professor of Writing and New Media. The event broadcast is available here. So, instead of providing a transcript of the event, I'm going to highlight a few interesting threads that were discussed both during the lectures and the Q&A.

Virtual Worlds Are a Cultural Imperative

Professor Jenkins described Second Life as a modern form of Carnival, the festival season that has been celebrated in the weeks before Lent for hundreds of years. Carnival literally means "farewell of the flesh" and in many parts of the world it is an opportunity for people to cast off their everyday reality and throw themselves into a world of masquerades and playful festivities. In medieval times, Carnival participants would even trade gender roles - the husband acting as the wife and vice versa. According to a recent study called Gender Swapping and Socializing in Cyberspace, times haven't changed much at all. Hundreds of years ago, Carnival gave people the opportunity to take on an alternate identity and interact with each other unfettered by social norms. Today, virtual worlds provide the same opportunity. But, unlike Carnival, virtual worlds run all year long and provide for a much wider gamut of identity play, world creation, and social interaction - they allow people to see the world with a different lens and relate to each other on a different set of terms. While talking about avatars, Professor Coleman showed a picture of an Indian miniature painting immediately after showing a screenshot from Habbo Hotel. Although the rendering styles of the two were completely different, the scope and perspective were strikingly similar. She remarked, "its not new new that people create little worlds." Carnival, Indian miniatures, toy trains, puppets, and bonsai show us that people have, for generations, played characters and created little worlds. In that light, virtual worlds are just a new technology that allow us to fulfill an age-old cultural imperative.

Virtual Worlds Are a Social Laboratory

Professor Jenkins stressed that while virtual worlds are rendered digitally, the social relationships that form are very real. As people try on new social roles in virtual worlds, they learn about themselves and have an opportunity to integrate those findings into their everyday lives.

Exploring Subcultures

For example, a teenager from a small town may find herself drawn to the Goth subculture, but has nowhere to meet people with similar identities. With Second Life, that teenager can engage with an active Goth community, spread around the world, and experiment with her social identity. She may find that feeling of belonging that eludes many teenagers until they strike out on their own.

Political Activism and Experimentation

Social experimentation can take a more political form. Professor Jenkins cited experiments to create a Virtual Macedonia and a Virtual Palestine. With virtual worlds, ethnic communities in diaspora can build a virtual homeland where they are able to speculate about alternative configurations of land and political power. Its ironic that the same technological progress that marginalizes the importance of geographic colocation may help preserve and unify our cultural and ethnic identities.

Virtual World Governance

Perhaps the most salient social experiment in virtual worlds is the governance of those worlds themselves. Of course, the ultimate governing body in any virtual world is the company that operates that world - they act as benevolent dictators when the world itself is in jeopardy. But for most things, these worlds are self-organizing and governed by a form of peer-to-peer social contract. Although this social contract works in the majority of cases, the absence of a day-to-day ruling authority can lead to anarchistic tendencies. Social contract is unlikely to remain the standard for virtual world governance because of these tendencies. As real-world millionaires are born from virtual economies, there will be an increased expectation for virtual world law to be formally defined and enforced. Again we see a parallel between the virtual world and the real world - wealth and political stability go hand-in-hand. We can look to the dawn of civilization to see this phenomenon in action; the politically stable Kingdoms of Egypt were born out of the economic abundance of the Nile River Valley.

Avatars Are Interpretations, Not Simulations

Professor Coleman asked the audience an interesting question. Which is a better avatar: a) a jittery video conference feed or b) a beautifully rendered, pulsating sphere that changes shape and color as the user changes mood? Clearly, the second option is a better social instrument.

Avatar Expressiveness and the Uncanny Valley

Professor Coleman highlighted the point that the photorealistic quality of an avatar's rendering has nothing to do with its effectiveness as a social instrument. In fact, photorealism may be an obstacle to creating an effective avatar. In robotics and 3D computer animation, there is the notion of the Uncanny Valley effect which occurs when a human rendering has such a high degree of realism that the brain turns off its suspension of disbelief. As a result, our brains cease to gloss over the inaccurate details and pick up everything about the rendering that isn't human. The net effect of such a highly realistic rendering is revulsion instead of the human connection that was intended. On the other hand, stylized avatars, like those found in Habbo Hotel, act like cartoons. They allow us to connect on an emotional level and provide more latitude for expressiveness.

Projecting Ideals Through Avatars

Professor Jenkins had another interesting observation, "TV puts 10 pounds on you, but Second Life takes 20 pounds and 20 years off." We know that cameras do nothing to increase a person's weight, and many of the virtual worlds allow users to create avatars with more realistic body proportions. So why the difference? Its because we project our idealized selves into these worlds and, if that means shaving a few pounds off, then so be it. We even project an idealized version of ourselves into our mind's eye, so when we see ourselves on video, it seems that we're a bit heavier than we thought we were. Ultimately, avatars are interpretations of ourselves, our curiosities, and our fantasies. Avatars will always be anchored in our true personality, but they should never be limited by it. Technological progress will push us towards more realistic avatars, but cultural progress should push us to more expressive avatars.

Literacy for a New World

Both Professor Coleman and Professor Jenkins discussed the concept of "new media literacy". To be successful, children will need to be able to safely and effectively navigate a world defined by ubiquitous electronic presence, 24x7 access to information, geographically disbursed communities, significantly larger social networks, actions which are persisted indefinitely, and an unprecedented array of communication methods. In that world, children need to learn how to form meaningful social relationships, safely contribute to online communities, and avoid an unhealthy dependence on those communities.

Mastering New Social Skills

Professor Coleman related a story about a dinner she attended with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, Larry Lessig, and a number of other luminaries in the industry. During the dinner, Philip and Larry opened up their laptops and started conducting a panel discussion within Second Life; they were essentially in two places at once. That ability to time and place shift our conversations has a profound impact on our ability to form and preserve meaningful social relationships. Its a skill that new media literate children will need to master, but also one that will need to be tempered by good judgement. Just because social gestures, like breaking up with significant other, can be done online, it doesn't mean they should.

Dealing With Addiction

Another challenge facing youth is the problem of online addiction. There have been several documented cases of death related to MMORPG abuse, and the proliferation in the number of resources available to help people identify and cope with addiction to MMORPGs indicates that this is an ongoing problem. According to Professor Jenkins, leading research into online game and virtual world addiction indicates that the addiction is extremely rare on its own. Rather, it is a manifestation of various forms of depression. Typically, online games and virtual worlds are a vehicle for playing out classic symptoms of depression rather than its cause. Professor Jenkins went on to say that virtual worlds, when used in moderation, may even have therapeutic value in treating depression, autism, and other conditions which result in social isolation. The social interaction made possible by virtual worlds provides a valuable middle ground between complete social isolation, which may be damaging, and physical social contact, which may be overwhelming to the afflicted person.

Looking To the Future

It's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of interest surrounding virtual worlds. The industry focuses obsessively on next generation graphics technology, bettter business models, and new product features. No doubt, we'll see rapid progress on all of those fronts during the next few years. However, Professor Jenkins and Professor Coleman remind us to stay focused on the fundamentals of what make virtual worlds compelling: creativity, self-expression, and community. Tomorrow's Second Life may not be the best looking virtual world, but it will definitely be the one that gives its users the richest social experience.

Ravi Mehta is currently an executive at Viximo, an early stage start-up in the virtual goods space. Ravi has managed the development of online services and games for most of his career. He was the founding member of the Xbox Live team and managed several initiatives at Microsoft to develop MMOGs for Xbox and Xbox 360. Prior to Microsoft, Ravi founded Terminal Sunset Software, a Mac focused developer of casual games and multimedia applications. Ravi publishes Virtual Goods Insider, a blog that focuses on the emerging virtual goods space.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks for making that summary, Ravi, good job.

I frankly think that these particular speakers do not have a very deep grasp of Second Life and don't spend very much time in it.

Just some quick points:

o "carnival" is only a description of some of the user base -- obviously IBM or CARE aren't in a carnival, but using the platform for meetings, training, hiring publication, fund-raising, etc.

o political activism is hardly adequately described by these two very rarified and not well publicized or attended "virtualities". There is both RL activism, i.e. on the American elections or French elections or the war in Iraq, and SL inworld activism, i.e. campaigns against ad farms or texture theft

o this judgement about addiction and depression is made as a superficial media studies comment, not as a rigorous, scientific, psychiatric experiment. We can't know but that depression is exacerbated specifically by quest and reward games, or that they induce the depression described and set up a cycle of addiction. The use of these games or worlds for therapeutic purposes is also not rigorously studied or examined, but appears only as breathless anecdotes in the media

o the idea that experts on new media get to preclude a social contract for virtual worlds strikes me as rather high-handed. Too much emphasis here is put on a perception that such worlds are "carnival" and "anarchism" and "lawless" due to a default preference for "community and creativity" that seems to value some of these tendencies. A broader user base is more interested in stability and property rights and law ported right from real life to address very similar concerns like criminal mischief.