Mo Hax

Recently Agile Bill started a thread on the definition of virtual worlds. (He’s writing a college paper.) I know. I hear many sighing, “Not that tired topic.” But you would be surprised. People are still talking about the complexity of all this. Again, I know, “What complexity?”  That’s exactly the point. For whatever reason some have stretched and twisted the definition of virtual world beyond recognition to most of us. To help you make sense of it, here are ten simple ways to tell if you are in a virtual world:

1. You twitch and stare

… while staring at a screen, typing, mouse-moving, or using some other tech gadget to make something happen on that screen. This is the virtual part. You might do a lot of twitching and staring in real life but without a screen involved, it is a good bet it ain’t virtual.

2. You miss places that never existed

A fancy term for this is spatial memory and you don’t get it if there isn’t some mappable geography involved. This is the world part of the term. Worlds are things you navigate, things that have a least two dimensional space, but usually three. This is why most any average person—even most geeks who understand the virtual worlds industry—will tell you Twitter, Facebook and things like them are not virtual worlds. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is very likely and literally trying to sell you something.

By the way, this separates platforms from worlds. OpenSim is a good example of how this gets confusing. People often say “So is that in OpenSim?” when they really mean “So is that using the OpenSim platform?” Few beginners know the difference and probably don’t need to. It’s the decision-makers and people buying stuff that need to understand. This confusion is probably a carry over from, “So is that in Second life?” which means the Second Life grid, the virtual world of Second Life, not the platform that supports it, which only recently became available for people to deploy their own virtual worlds behind their own firewalls (Nebraska). Even then, on the main secondlife.com home page is says ‘virtual worlds’ implying that there are many virtual worlds within the Second Life grid, which is really even more accurate, Luskwood is different than Health Info island for example. The folks at Linden Labs often remind us that Second Life is a platform on and in which you can to build your virtual world. Nevertheless, ‘in Second Life’ has come to mean ‘on the Second Life grid.’

3. You fix up your hips, hair, sword or horde

… and you like it. You take some sense of ownership and pride in that representation of yourself in that virtual world, after all, you likely created, customized, or grew it. Usually this is a singular avatar, but might be an army or civilization that you command. You might even really empathize with this small version of yourself, real or pretend, in that place. Barbie, Ken, zombie, cat, elf, ship, mole, army, horde, whatever you are you see yourself there and care about that virtual you.

4. You throw up, duck, swoon, sweat, or swear

Ahhh, immersion. My wife used to duck when rockets flew at her playing Doom in college with friends after sneaking into the language computer lab where I worked. Doom, by the way, not just gave me nightmares, but had me dreaming of the future possibility of visiting a virtual France and practicing the language without being there. Guess that’s what you get when you have demonic monsters and foreign language on the brain as much as I did then.

As your avatar interacts with this world so do you. That’s what virtual is all about. You can be shot, kissed, pushed, bumped, forced to walk the Sahara and you sorta feel it, so much so that respectable health institutions use this for emergency response simulation and phobia treatment such as vertigo and social anxiety. If you feel it even though it isn’t real there’s a good chance you are in a virtual world.

You should know people sometimes call this immersive (even though no spell-checker I have ever used recognized it as a word). Business types and others don’t like looking too playful despite what Mr. Pink and his research has to say about that. This might be why they flock to this immersive term. For example, Linden Labs is coming out with an Immersive Workspaces product, code named Nebraska. Erica and Sam Driver at ThinkBalm have practically built their business around the term immersive internet and immersive environments. Dealing with businesses and ’serious’ decision makers requires a fancier term I suppose. Truth is, immersive is usually just a way of saying three dimensional, but the subtle differences are justified. You could become immersed in a two dimensional environment. My boys have proven that to me over and over playing in 2d Flash virtual worlds.

5. You talk, yell, shout, whisper, or poke others

… for fun or profit. You certainly could be the only one in the world. I have often done that running a personal version of OpenSim on my desktop. But unless you are Will Smith, and even then, your world likely includes others with whom you interact, communicate, and collaborate. This multi-user aspect is behind another term you might hear that seems popular with people that use the word pedagogy a lot as well. A Multi-User Virtual Environment or MUVE is the term they’ve come up with, but it seems to include all the non-spatial, non-immersive stuff as well so I don’t use it. Still good to be aware of it.

Twitter is Not a Virtual World, But is Google Earth? How About Zork?

Ok, I admit I wrote this post because a some otherwise very respectable people keep insisting that Twitter, Facebook, and the like are virtual worlds. They just aren’t. Please stop confusing the rest of us simple people by making confusing arguments that they are. Here’s a bunch of obvious virtual worlds:

• Second Life
• Teen Second Life
• Second Life Behind the Firewall, (Nebraska, Immersive Workspaces)
• Open Simulator (Reaction Grid, etc.)
• EduSim
• MetaPlace
• Blue Mars
• World of Warcraft
• RuneScape
• IMVU
• Webkins
• Club Penguin

I will leave you with a riddle to solve. Is Google Earth, the best widely-available, virtual representation of our actual world even a virtual world? And what about  Zork, that classic single person interactive textual world that became the basis for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS)? What say you?