Abstract
There is a growing recognition of the importance of virtual worlds as environments and media that carry the potential for social and cultural innovation by making possible new forms of social relationships based on communication among avatars. The articles in this special issue exemplify some aspects of this potential but also point out some of the many questions and unsolved problems that follow with innovation and the continuous development of virtual worlds. The two key concepts of virtual worlds and innovation are both widely used concepts that refer to emergent and rapidly changing phenomena without sharp contours or clearly defined boundaries. In the context of this special issue, we treat both virtual worlds and innovation as emergent phenomena in flux.
Some of the features of virtual worlds, however, may also be seen as stable. According to Bell (2008) and Schroeder (2008, 2011), virtual worlds depend on stable, persistent digital infrastructures. Moreover, the online presence of gamers and residents is referred to by digital symbols and signs – be they avatars, space ships or green dots – and the technological platforms are accessible 24/7 over longer periods of time. They appear to be stable technologies and platforms, almost permanent. How is it, then, that we see them as emergent phenomena in flux?
Our focus in this special issue of Convergence is on social and cultural innovation in and with virtual worlds which means that the technological innovation of the digital platforms and of the technology in itself are not our primary interest of reflection and analysis. Social and cultural innovation are phenomena of a fluid nature, subject to continuous change: the way we see and understand ourselves and each other, the way we experience exciting and extraordinary events or seek inspiration by thought-provoking art installations, the way we build virtual communities of high ideals or take the opportunity to live out behaviours otherwise not acceptable in our everyday life, these are all examples of human relationships with distinctive features that hold the potential for creative and innovative responses to new environments.
On the basis of these reflections, the articles in this issue have been chosen in order to exemplify emergent phenomena of virtual worlds and innovation rather than to discuss definitions of the concepts or to identify different genres or typologies of worlds or users.
Many different definitions and characterizations of virtual worlds circulate. For example, Bell (2008: 2) defines a virtual world as ‘a synchronous, persistent network of people represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers’. And for Schroeder (2011: 5), ‘virtual worlds provide large-scale persistent places that many users can inhabit together’. In our framing of this special issue, we do not aim to define virtual worlds and innovation but understand them in the following ways.
We view virtual worlds as environments built of symbolic bricks of signs and shapes. When seen in this way virtual worlds are symbolic worlds of meaning-making flows and semiosis that create sign-relations to be interpreted and symbolic spaces that make possible new senses of place and presence. In our view, these new symbolic worlds of meaning-making flows influence how we perceive ourselves and relate to each other, when we are mediated by avatars, digital objects and text. Questions and new ideas are likely to emerge when we experience flows of meaning-making that make possible new interpretations of our basic orientation in the world such as senses of place and presence. Thus symbolic virtual worlds made out of digital objects are interwoven with new experiential qualities and social relationships mediated by the digital objects of avatars; these are emergent phenomena that even question the very idea of what a world is.
Just like virtual worlds, innovation is a phenomenon with blurred boundaries and contours that encompass a multiplicity of phenomena. Innovation is variously treated as a research field (Krohn and van den Daele, 1998); a constructivist inspired sociology (Latour and Woolgar, 1979/1986; Latour, 2005); in the light of historical and/or economic understandings (Sundbo, 1999, 2002); as collaborative network achievements (Gloor, 2006); from a management and/or strategic perspective (Davis et al., 2005). The dynamics and processes of innovation are conceived as individual and subjective qualities of creativity or as processes of cognitive problem solving (Simon, 1977); as collective achievements when seen from a systemic viewpoint (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) and as social and knowledge-intensive processes of learning when seen from a constructivist perspective (Austin and Darsø, 2009). Yet the dominant understanding widely adopted in policy and strategic programmes emphasizes the commercial aspects of innovation (World Bank and OECD policies in (Baldwin and Hanel, 2003; Wessner, 2009)). From this point of view, innovation is seen as closely related to new products and processes of commercial production. This conception of processes of innovation is on a par with what is characterized as closed innovation (Herzog, 2010). Examples of advantages gained from introducing ideas and knowledge from outside companies, and of doing so in the early phases of idea generation and innovation practices, have influenced ideas of innovation and led to the open innovation concept (Herzog, 2010; von Hippel, 2005). Open innovation denotes an assemblage of different ways to understand and produce innovation united by the feature that end-users are involved in early stages of the processes and in practices of co-creation. Inspiration for the open innovation approach derives, among other sources, from the open source movement of software development.
The digital technologies of virtual worlds are some of the mediators of practices of innovations and change in ideas. The open innovation approach has led to a broadening of the field and scope of innovation, and hence to the inclusion of new groups of participants in innovation practices; participants, who ask questions about what is taken for granted and do so in processes of co-creation. When commercial motivations for the innovation of digital technologies are linked up with the emergent phenomena of co-creation and collective idea generation through the concerted efforts of potential and actual users, then the practices of innovation have been extended so as to encompass the areas of social and cultural innovation.
Questioning the taken for granted often mobilizes creative energy, rethinking, and the reinterpretation of agency and engagement. In this special issue, social and cultural innovation in virtual worlds is understood in these terms. In the examples given in the different articles, social innovation is related to new forms of communication and social relationships as mediated by avatars and also to new ways of organizing communities and work. With regard to cultural innovation, it seems as if new understandings of our bodily being and mind are emerging; online spaces appear to be generating new senses of place and presence; events, fun and entertainment are remediated and redefined; and ethics may be changing – or a state of lack of ethics may be emerging.
The articles gathered together in this special issue present a broad range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies: phenomenology (in particular, early phenomenology), Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology, Actor-Network Theory, virtual ethnography, perspectives on ethics, dialogue theory, social semiotics and textual analysis. These perspectives and methodologies straddle the fields of media and communication studies, sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design studies and IT studies. In the different articles, their application is illustrated in studies of a range of different practices: the embodied experience of a mixed reality environment; users’ reception of virtual worlds in comparison with other media; the promotion of virtual worlds as platforms for architecture; the ethics of social interaction in virtual worlds; the enactment of social rules in role-play communities and the authorial practices of independent film-makers.
Conceptualizing virtual worlds and innovation in this way, it may seem as if we are about to revitalize to the classic, philosophical discussion about the constantly changing character of phenomena in the world as illustrated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who uses the metaphor of a river to illustrate his point – each time we step into a river, he says, it is never the same river – or, conversely, as the stable and perpetual world of ideas which Plato contrasts with the changeable and deceitful world of senses. In this context, we do not attempt to elaborate on this discussion; we mention it here in this introduction in order to emphasize that ‘newness’ often seems to revitalize old questions and problems, albeit in new ways. As we see it, bringing the past into the future is part of any sustainable innovation, be it social, cultural or technological. These reflections have influenced our choice of articles in that we have avoided hype in relation to claims about the new and innovative.
Article overview
The special issue opens with an article by Sita Popat, ‘Keeping it real: Encountering mixed reality in igloo’s SwanQuake: House’, that focuses on the relation between the physical and the virtual and how the concept of mixed reality environments disturbs this very distinction and the dualism it implies. The article describes the author’s personal and bodily encounter with a virtual world art installation located in the damp basement of an old building. A thick description of the author’s experiences is analysed in relation to language, in particular the language of post-Cartesian philosophy and its inherent separation between the physical and the virtual realm. A detailed analysis of selected engagement situations vividly illustrates the shifting boundary between body and world, flesh and binary code. In conclusion, the article calls for new conceptualizations that can further our understanding of the changing, embodied character of mixed-reality experiences.
The next article by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Brenda Dervin, ‘Comparing situated sense-making processes in virtual worlds: application of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology to media reception situations’, similarly focuses on the nature of the experiences and engagement of virtual world users and adopts an embodied, situated approach as a basis for analysis. But rather than a thick description, a comparative media reception approach is followed. The article presents a study of how novices make sense of four media technologies: film, console videogames, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and social virtual worlds. It presents a specific methodology, Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) (e.g. Dervin and Foreman-Wernet, 2003), and demonstrates how the methodology can be applied to analyse media reception situations without making a priori assumptions about the characteristics of the technology and new media in question. The focus is on how SMM represents a methodology that improves our understanding of users’ situated sense-making in engaging with virtual worlds, in comparison with their engagement in other media.
In their article, ‘Selling the selling point: How innovation communication creates users of virtual worlds architecture’, Ursula Plesner and Maja Horst examine the discursive construction of users in relation to virtual worlds. The analysis unpacks the language of the innovators involved in establishing virtual world technologies as a new, desirable platform for architectural design practices. The authors argue that ‘innovation communication’ can fruitfully be conceptualized as an integral part of the very process through which virtual worlds become sites for social and cultural innovation. According to the analysis presented in the article, the performativity of innovation communication in bringing virtual worlds into being as innovation platforms lies in its articulation of visions and expectations about the technology in which users are constructed in particular ways.
The final research article by Bastiaan Vanacker and Don Heider, ‘Ethical harm in virtual communities’, engages with ethics in virtual worlds. The article explores empirically the conditions under which ethically relevant ‘avatar harm’ occurs in virtual worlds. Through selected examples of norm violation, value debates and ‘griefing’ in virtual worlds, the authors discuss differences in player relations between real life identity and one’s virtual character. They find that questions of avatar harm are closely linked to differing degrees of avatar attachment and that avatar harm is most likely to occur when players see their avatar as constitutive of their own identity. It is argued in the article that these attachment characteristics are unique to virtual worlds and the authors thereby call attention to how specific ethical questions and considerations urgently need to be addressed as virtual worlds evolve, grow and become widespread spaces for social and cultural experimentation and innovation.
Following the four research articles, this special issue includes two feature articles, ‘Make-believe and make-belief in Second Life role-playing communities’ by Maria Bäcke and ‘Animated war: Perspectives on resemiosis and authorship applied to two DIY film projects’ by Lisbeth Frølunde. The feature by Maria Bäcke examines fantasy role-playing practices through performance theorist Schechner’s concepts ‘make-believe’ and ‘make-belief’ (Schechner, 2006). The two relatively large-scale role-playing communities, Midian City and Gor, are analysed as performative utopias. The analysis illustrates the very different ways in which these two communities articulate and negotiate social and cultural rules, community dissidents and disturbances, as well as the very distinction between the real and the virtual. Like the previous piece on avatar harm, this feature points to the importance of ethical and normative dimensions of virtual worlds as an unsettled area of social and cultural innovation.
The feature by Lisbeth Frølunde shifts our attention to the wider media ecology and the political contexts in which virtual worlds come to work and gain meaning. Machinima – ‘do-it-yourself’ filmmaking and storytelling – is explored as a reappropriation and remixing of virtual-world technologies and content. Two different war story machinima productions exemplify a contemporary form of authorship based on redesign of existing digital content and a remixing of this creative content across media platforms. Inherent to this process is a continual complex transformation of meaning conceptualized and analysed in the article as ‘resemiosis’. The article touches upon ownership rights and economic aspects of these practices and points towards a notion of ‘participatory creativity’ as a possible path for social and economic growth related to virtual worlds.
The final section of this special issue comprises four book reviews. The reviews provide glimpses into some of the ongoing discussions and important currents related to the interdisciplinary field of virtual worlds during the year 2011; media researcher David Gauntlett’s Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, From DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, sociologist Ralph Schroeder’s Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments, anthropologist Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, and finally, psychologist Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
What picture of virtual worlds as sites for social and cultural innovation is formed across the articles? It is certainly not a simple one with primary colours, broad brushstrokes and sharp contours. Across their diversity, the articles share one feature – an understanding of virtual worlds as complex and continually shifting objects in the process of coming into being – and this feature creates a picture of virtual worlds with subtle nuances of colour, nebulous shapes and fuzzy borders. Virtual worlds appear in this picture not as clearly defined and stable entities but as phenomena that defy easy definition and clear delineation. And, according to all the articles, it is in the process of coming into being that the potential for innovation – unsurprisingly – lies.
While all the articles theorize and analyse facets of emergent virtual worlds that entail innovation, they do so in distinctive ways, producing different kinds of insight. Here, we will briefly sketch out the distinctive ways of understanding the emergent character of virtual worlds underpinning innovation, and, following this, we will identify one further point on which some of the articles converge. It is up to the reader to find additional patterns across the articles with respect to the theorization and analysis of virtual worlds as sites for social and cultural innovation.
Understanding the emergent character of virtual worlds
Vanacker and Heider and Bäcke both examine the emergent nature of virtual worlds with respect to how social rules are in the process of being established. Vanacker and Heider take as their starting point the assertion that issues of ethics need to be addressed in order for ethics to keep pace with the innovations taking place in virtual worlds, while Bäcke draws attention to the innovative nature of social interaction in virtual worlds.
The approaches followed by Reinhard and Dervin, Plesner and Horst and also Frølunde all share a broadly constructivist, interpretative orientation, highlighting the constitutive role of meaning-making in constructing virtual worlds and their users, but, at the same time, the approaches differ with respect to their theorization of meaning making and the methodologies they develop and use.
Applying Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology which conceptualizes meaning-making as sense-making, Reinhard and Dervin focus on the situated, dynamic sense-makings of users who interact with media products with particular properties that impinge on that sense-making.
Inspired by Bakhtin’s dialogue theory (Bakhtin, 1981), social semiotics and cultural studies approaches to literature, games and film, Frølunde analyses the production of meaning not of users but of the producers of machinima productions. Here, Frølunde understands social and cultural innovation as a product of a process of resemiosis in which meanings are transformed. This process results from the authorial practices of machinima producers in which they combine existing digital texts in innovative ways.
Plesner and Horst view communication that promotes the vision of virtual worlds as innovation platforms as performative in bringing both virtual worlds and their users into being. Furthermore, interpretative flexibility in relation to the meanings of the user and in the technological vision prevents the stabilization of the innovation as part of socio-material reality. While Reinhard and Dervin and Frølunde treat users and producers as agents who act in relation to the affordances of media products, Plesner and Horst theorize and analyse both virtual worlds and users as categories that emerge in processes of co-construction. Moreover, the methodology which Reinhard and Dervin present – Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology – is designed to produce an analysis with a broad sweep, identifying the similarities and the differences across the different, situated ways in which users engage with different kinds of media products including virtual worlds. In contrast, Plesner and Horst home in on the local network of elements that bring virtual worlds into being and stress the contingency of those elements, and Frølunde sees the particular forms of resemiosis in play in the production of machinima as the historically contingent product of the complex, contemporary media ecology. Popat deals with the emergent nature of virtual worlds from a phenomenological perspective in her analysis of how mixed reality represents a form of cultural innovation that creates new, intertwining relations between the virtual and the physical.
Transgressing boundaries
A second pattern that can be identified in the special issue is an interest in many of the articles for the innovation that arises in practices that work across different media or across the physical and the virtual. Frølunde explores how innovation occurs through the transformations of meaning that take place in the production of texts across digital media platforms. A central force driving this innovation, Frølunde argues, is the commercialization and marketization of virtual worlds. The semiotic and economic dimensions of film-making in virtual worlds are enmeshed as redesign across media platforms, dynamically altering economic systems of production and distribution. Plesner and Horst discuss visions of mixed technology solutions in the conclusion to their article. In addition, they view architects’ promotion of virtual worlds as part of a process involving the transgression of the boundary between social media and media for professional purposes: social media designed for social or cultural innovation are turned into products to be used innovatively in professional practices. Popat looks at a mixed reality environment in which physical and virtual elements are intertwined and explores how her experience of that environment is constrained by language that maintains a boundary between the physical and virtual. In conclusion, she calls for the development of theories and practices that allow us to transgress that boundary. Vanacker and Heider and also Bäcke both deal with innovation based on another type of transgression – namely, transgression in relation to the establishment and maintenance of rules of social conduct in virtual worlds. Vanacker and Heider discuss issues of ethics in relation to violations of emergent social rules in Second Life, while Bäcke analyses how social roles and performative utopias are not only created but also questioned by actors two role-play communities in Second Life.
Although these shared themes can be identified across the pages of this special issue – and readers may be able to find further commonalities – the special issue is characterized by a theoretical, methodological and empirical heterogeneity that provides a broad take on virtual worlds as sites for social and cultural innovation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
The guest editors are attached to the Virtual Worlds Research Project at Roskilde University, funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council, KINO committee (grant no. 09–063261).