So I wonder if our disagreements stem primarily from mistaking our subjective viewpoints for universal truth. It’s like the old folk tale of the blind men who were asked to describe an elephant through their experience of being next to one part of its body. The person who felt the trunk thought it was a snake. The man at the leg thought it was like a trunk and the unlucky soul who was standing under it’s backside thought it felt like shit.

Personally, I’m rooting for those with all points of view to go after their visions (assuming they aren’t in the take over the world category), because as you said, the tent is wide. Predictions of the future are interesting but almost always off-base. The coolest new things that emerge are unanticipated.

Will do. And it’s interesting, Tom speaks a lot about the magic circle and blurring of actual and virtual and makes the point that for all the discussion of the “membrane” most people look at it the wrong way. However, I’ll reserve comments for now and thank you for the link!

Once you’ve had the chance to read it (and maybe you have but I doubt it because you would have likely referenced it) I’d love to continue this discussion in the context of “The Magic Circle”.

And Rheta – I don’t think you’re a poster girl for immersion, but I do have you on my wall as a towering thinker. However, you are arguing in your post, whether for provocation or devil’s advocacy that SL provides escape, and I think the point of my post is that I agree with you, albeit from a slightly different angle. Virtual worlds are virtual worlds because of the disconnect they cause from the actual, Tom would say (I think, I’m sure projecting a lot here!), and because they allow us a new way to express sociality.

I partly disagree on this last point – is it a virtual world if we have 4 users at opposite ends of the grid spinning prims but never talking to each other? Sure – just a dull one.

But I start to come at this definition of virtual worlds in a different way and one that may be as relevant to brands as it is to users or platform owners or experience developers. And that is that virtual worlds allow sociality, but virtual worlds with “legs” will also create cultures within them. The cultures within them are only possible if the users of those worlds have some ability to craft their own artefacts, their own tools, otherwise it’s a social site sponsored by Coke or whatever. And sure, Coke can learn what kinds of tools most befit it as a cultural icon, but most brands want to be PART of a culture not help to build one.

But the gap between the virtual and the actual doesn’t need to arise solely because we escape our actual lives into a culture, world, place, avatar, etc. It arises because we participate in techne. As Tom says, we are ALREADY virtual and always have been – so if we’re escaping our virtual selves from the actual world into an avatar in virtual world, all you’ve really done is introduced recursion.

What this position allows is an augmentationist to also benefit from the gap. So long as the participant creates a gap between actual and virtual by their participant through an avatar, they have opened the thin wedge of possibility, and by participating in techne are participating not in epistime but extending human potential. Culture would thus seemingly arise in a grid full of augmentationists as much as a grid full of immersionists – the gap might be much tighter when you remove, say, anonymity, but it doesn’t mean that the gap disappears. Participation in techne gives rise to culture, virtuality gives rise to the gap, and it’s the strength of the culture (reinforced rather than ‘blurred’ by the loop between the actual and virtual) and the power of the tools that unleashes our potential.

It seems to me that this makes the tent wide enough for us all. Escape becomes another word for creating a more pronounced gap, and thus more pronounced potential, but it’s not a precondition to that gap occurring – the gap which Tom calls the source of our new possibilities for human being.

I’d also say that while this tent is wide enough to include both a tight coupling of the actual and the virtual, culture, immersion, escape – all that good stuff, it’s not quite wide enough to embrace simulation or 3D commerce. Those are applications of techne, but they’re not recursive.

A game is not recursive. It is not techne as a product of techne – it’s a game, it’s virtual, it can even be cultural. But it’s generally not recursive – it is not techne within it. (It’s interesting, as a side note, to to think about Spore in this context, because it will be recursive, it certainly will contain techne with it, and I wonder whether that doesn’t open up a discussion of whether you need avatars to be present simultaneously to consider it a virtual world, or in this case a virtual universe).

3D commerce is not recursive either – and while a gap can still be created through clever use of avatars, sociality, and perhaps even, to a degree, culture, it doesn’t generally open us up to greater potentials, that wonderful space where we have the tools within the technology itself.

The definition of “virtual world” is broad and wide. I’ll stick (for now, because it deserves far deeper thought, and maybe our discussion Digado!) with a virtual world being a place spawned by technology that is always on and where you have a sense of presence. Where stuff can change and evolve even when you log off.

And sure, that casts a wide net – games, casual game portals with little 2D avatars, or a 3D room on a Facebook profile. But what defines SOME virtual worlds, like Second Life, is that the tools for cultural expression reside with the users rather than the platform owners. Techne within techne is the source of greater possibility. Which would include the former Sims online, openSim, etc. and the subtle differences and power of one platform over another can then be parsed through the power of the tools, our ability to create a larger gap through avatar expression, the abilities for sociality, and the cultural contexts on which the platforms are predicated – cultural capitalism in the case of Second Life. What defines the OpenSim culture, I wonder – Second Life arose from concepts of property and ownership attached to the recursive techne. Is OpenSim’s defined by the lack of these concepts?

None of these things then guarantee a culture, but the way you tweak the buttons and the ‘engine’ will give rise to different cultural outcomes. Thus, my argument in one form or another to introduce greater tools to a platform like Second Life is predicated on the idea that I’d like to see the culture continue to thrive because of the ability for users to deepen their ability to express new cultural artefacts, whether those dividuals doing the expression are companies, scientists, casual users, or escapists.

Having said that, the ability for the culture to thrive and change and grow – for social norms to evolve, for potentials to be expanded, for the gap to be expanded because of the strange loop between the virtual and the actual, is hindered if the society is too closed. Expanding the tool set in a way that raises the barriers to entry doesn’t do anything to help the culture thrive, it just makes the culture insular, and so you end up with the paradoxical argument that we need both more advanced tools and a far simpler way to become a participant.

I loved Coming of Age in Second Life, but because of the authors background in anthropology, it’s only natural his study focuses on the social relations and implications which doesn’t do entirely justice to the full potential of these platforms (which is obviously why the book is called Coming of Age in Second Life, and not coming of Age in Virtual Worlds), and is the point Christian argues in which I find him being spot on.

Other than that I feel you raise more than a few excellent points (I think there is a lot, a LOT, to the point you bring up about culture – which is exactly why I’ve been wanting to talk to you ‘face to face’) and give them great context here. Absolutely one of the most interesting articles I’ve red so far.