Coming of Age in Second Life Boellstorff, Tom
2015, 2008., 20150825, 2005, 2008-12-31, 2015-08-25, 20080101
eBook
Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create ...communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love—the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group.
An examination of our many modes of online identity and how we live on the continuum between the virtual and the real.Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, "Hello, Avatar!"); is a tiny piece of user-friendly ...code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency-our new power to customize our networked life.By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities-in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject-all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.
Proteus, the mythical sea god who could alter his appearance at will, embodies one of the promises of online games: the ability to reinvent oneself. Yet inhabitants of virtual worlds rarely achieve ...this liberty, game researcher Nick Yee contends. Though online games evoke freedom and escapism, Yee shows that virtual spaces perpetuate social norms and stereotypes from the offline world, transform play into labor, and inspire racial scapegoating and superstitious thinking. And the change that does occur is often out of our control and effected by unparalleled-but rarely recognized-tools for controlling what players think and how they behave.
Using player surveys, psychological experiments, and in-game data, Yee breaks down misconceptions about who plays fantasy games and the extent to which the online and offline worlds operate separately. With a wealth of entertaining and provocative examples, he explains what virtual worlds are about and why they matter, not only for entertainment but also for business and education. He uses gaming as a lens through which to examine the pressing question of what it means to be human in a digital world. His thought-provoking book is an invitation to think more deeply about virtual worlds and what they reveal to us about ourselves.
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play ...games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
This study investigates the user experience to clarify what it is like to experience stories in VR (virtual reality) and how immersion influences story experiences in immersive storytelling. This ...study explores the immersive storytelling context, developing and testing a VR experience model that integrates presence, flow, empathy, and embodiment. The results imply that users’ personal traits correlates immersion in VR: user experience in VR depend on individual traits, which in turns influence how strongly users immerse in a VR. The way users view and accept VR stories derives from the way they envisage and intend to experience them. Rather than simply being influenced by technological features, users have intentional and purposeful control over VR stories. The findings of this study suggest that the cognitive processes by which users experience quality, presence, and flow determine how they will empathize with and embody VR stories.
•User experience of virtual reality storytelling.•How immersion influences story experiences in immersive storytelling.•Users' personal traits correlates immersion in VR.•The way users view and accept VR stories derives from the way they envisage and intend to experience them.
Understanding Virtual Reality Sherman, William R; Craig, Alan B; Craig, Department of Mathematics Alan
2002, 2002-09-10
eBook
Understanding Virtual Reality arrives at a time when the technologies behind virtual reality have advanced to the point that it is possible to develop and deploy meaningful, productive virtual ...reality applications. The aim of this thorough, accessible exploration is to help you take advantage of this moment, equipping you with the understanding needed to identify and prepare for ways VR can be used in your field, whatever your field may be. By approaching VR as a communications medium, the authors have created a resource that will remain relevant even as the underlying technologies evolve. You get a history of VR, along with a good look at systems currently in use. However, the focus remains squarely on the application of VR and the many issues that arise in the application design and implementation, including hardware requirements, system integration, interaction techniques, and usability. This book also counters both exaggerated claims for VR and the view that would reduce it to entertainment, citing dozens of real-world examples from many different fields and presenting (in a series of appendices) four in- depth application case studies.* Substantive, illuminating coverage designed for technical and business readers and well-suited to the classroom. * Examines VR's constituent technologies, drawn from visualization, representation, graphics, human-computer interaction, and other fields, and explains how they are being united in cohesive VR systems. * Via a companion Web site, provides additional case studies, tutorials, instructional materials, and a link to an open-source VR programming system.
Although research on three-dimensional virtual environments abounds, little is known about the social and business aspects of virtual worlds. Given the emergence of large-scale social virtual worlds, ...such as Second Life, and the dramatic growth in sales of virtual goods, it is important to understand the dynamics that govern the purchase of virtual goods in virtual worlds. Employing the stimulus—organism—response (S-O-R) framework, we investigate how technological (interactivity and sociability) and spatial (density and stability) environments in virtual worlds influence the participants' virtual experiences (telepresence, social presence, and flow), and how experiences subsequently affect their response (intention to purchase virtual goods). The results of our survey of 354 Second Life residents indicate that interactivity, which enhances the interaction with objects, has a significant positive impact on telepresence and flow. Also, sociability, which fosters interactions with participants, is significantly associated with social presence, although no such significant impact was observed on flow. Furthermore, both density and stability are found to significantly influence participants' virtual experiences; stability helps users to develop strong social bonds, thereby increasing both social presence and flow. However, contrary to our prediction of curvilinear patterns, density is linearly associated with flow and social presence. Interestingly, the results exhibit two opposing effects of density: while it reduces the extent of flow, density increases the amount of social presence. Since social presence is found to increase flow, the net impact of density on flow depends heavily on the relative strength of the associations involving these three constructs. Finally, we find that flow mediates the impacts of technological and spatial environments on intention to purchase virtual products. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and practical contributions of our findings.
Ethnography and Virtual Worldsis the only book of its kind--a concise, comprehensive, and practical guide for students, teachers, designers, and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods to ...study online virtual worlds, including both game and nongame environments. Written by leading ethnographers of virtual worlds, and focusing on the key method of participant observation, the book provides invaluable advice, tips, guidelines, and principles to aid researchers through every stage of a project, from choosing an online fieldsite to writing and publishing the results.
Provides practical and detailed techniques for ethnographic research customized to reflect the specific issues of online virtual worlds, both game and nongame Draws on research in a range of virtual worlds, including Everquest, Second Life, There.com, and World of Warcraft Provides suggestions for dealing with institutional review boards, human subjects protocols, and ethical issues Guides the reader through the full trajectory of ethnographic research, from research design to data collection, data analysis, and writing up and publishing research results Addresses myths and misunderstandings about ethnographic research, and argues for the scientific value of ethnography
Successful drug development relies on accurate and efficient clinical trials to deliver the best and most effective pharmaceuticals and clinical care to patients. However, the current model for ...clinical trials is outdated, inefficient and costly. Clinical trials are limited by small sample sizes that do not reflect variations among patients in the real world, financial burdens on participants, and slow processes, and these factors contribute to the disconnect between clinical research and clinical practice.
On November 28-29, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to investigate the current clinical trials system and explore the potential benefits and challenges of implementing virtual clinical trials as an enhanced alternative for the future. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
