Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life

Reflective Architecture: The Prokovy Neva Thumb-Sucking Test

Reflective Architecture contributes less to an avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not enough time worrying about buildings that people can really live in:

People readily adapt to immersive virtuality and live in it as if it is real, in a very simple way, and the lower the level of education, they easier they do this, without thumb-sucking about reflexivity.

The architecture needs to have a comfort level that avatars can really live in, and not just gaze at, as art. The camera angles have to be good!

I also think there isn’t anything terribly fascinating or insightful about tracking avatars around on a sim, they’re like people, only a little clunkier until the technology gets better.

Virtuality and artificial intelligence are human artifacts, and bear all the markings of any human tool. (Neva)

I feel I’ve somehow misled or been misled on the power of virtual worlds. As Neva pointed out, “people readily adopt to immersive virtuality…and the lower the level of education, (the) easier they do this.”As someone without any post-secondary education, I’m not sure whether I fall in the ‘easily immersed’ group or whether he’s referring to high school drop outs - I suppose like everything, there’s an implied continuum.

Guides like Neva and Keystone Bouchard help me to realize that there’s probably a lot of stuff that an uneducated sap like myself can’t grasp, so I can only give amateur observations. Because I don’t have the nuanced framework that Neva does for really ‘getting it’ so I’m just throwing random bits into the conversational soup.

Immersive Virtuality and Why We Need Buildings that Function

I agree with Neva. Have a look at my own builds - camera angle is everything to the point where I’ve gone so far overboard that the scale is distorted, the ceilings are 5 floors high, and you could cam around the living room from 100 meters and never hit a wall. May not make the coziest living space, but you sure can see everything!

Form and function, I think architects call it (if they still do, no idea what shores modernism have washed up on lately).What about stores where you actually have to open a door to get in? Are they trying to keep the cold air out?

There’s a club in SL I went to twice and then boycotted (actually, I don’t actually get out much at all, I spend a lot of time gazing and thumb sucking) because it had a door to get in which, for whatever reason, had the highest resolution texture on the sim and was always the last thing to load. Everything would rez EXCEPT the ability to enter the club (without resorting to cam’d poseball hopping, hardly something a newbie like me would have known about).Same thing with roofs and second floors.

Taking an escalator up to the second floor of a mall? Insane. Why not just rip most of the flooring out so you can fly up in 1.25 seconds? Or rip the roof out as well so you can drop in from 200 meters where you and your flight feather were taking a tour of the nearby skyboxes (all of them, of course, with blackened windows and, um, locked doors).

And you can do all of these things without sacrificing style or the experience of venue.So from the perspective of immersive virtuality, reflective architecture doesn’t seem to add much to a community that might have more interest in ensuring maximum store traffic or cuddle space on a sim, so it’s merely an interesting diversion.

While I agree with Neva (or think I agree, I can be both indecisive and uncomprehending) that SL should be thought of as nothing much more than a domain for human activity, with all the implied utilitarian needs such as good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market, I can’t help wondering whether my attention span is too limited for immersive virtuality and that maybe I should switch back to lower-realm pursuits like Warcraft where I can spend countless hours being bemused by farming for herbs and gazing at the awesome sky.Because to me there’s something about reflective architecture that’s not about gazing or tracking avatars on a sim.

And Neva cunningly both derided me and the thumb-sucking crowd and pointed us in the right direction with his comment that virtuality is a human artifact. So it got me thinking about whether reflective architecture might hint at something different about how human artifacts are created in virtual worlds.

Reflective Architecture as Visual Rhetoric

With a nod to Ian Bogost, perhaps Reflective Architecture is an exploration of how virtuality can be used as a medium for rhetoric and persuasion, and not just an exploration of how to track avatars through a sim, or how to get prims to move when you get close to them.The scripts are tools in a larger exploration of how a procedural medium can be used to persuade.

Bogost talks about procedural rhetoric as an extension of the reasonably well understood approach to verbal rhetoric, and the growing understanding of the use of visual rhetoric to persuade with images. Procedural rhetoric extends this further, because although virtual worlds and games can include verbal (voice, text) and visual elements, and further create platforms for social and personal interactions that can be themselves persuasive, he also argues that the foundation for persuasion in virtual worlds is procedural - it’s in the ‘code’, the product of which are things with which we feel we can interact and with which we are limited by the process of the platform.

For myself, this causes no end of confusion and dissonance. On the one hand, a world like Second Life is scripted, in many ways, to look like and act like real life - albeit with lax building codes, the ability to fly, and the nuisance of remembering to set your perms right before you hand in your homework. I suppose this is the immersive virtuality that Neva refers to.

And in a libertarian “your world/imagination” place like SL, the idea seems to be to make the code as invisible as possible. There is an advocacy to keep the coding authorities out of our everyday Second Lives as much as possible, remove the friction caused by rogue code and grid instability, and let us all pursue freedom, happiness, and appreciating real estate values while we build a more just society.

However, just as it’s incumbent on us (or someone, anyways) to deconstruct visual media so that we understand how advertising, for example, uses images to persuade us to buy things we don’t need, or go places we don’t need to see, so too does it become incumbent on us to explore how virtual worlds and the objects within them can create a new rhetorical language the purpose of which is not to just make it easier to get into a shop or to maximize camera angles, but to persuade for other purposes as well.

Reflective architecture (and virtual world architecture in general when it abandons notions that the more “real” it is the better) is one front in deepening our understanding of how virtual worlds might both entertain (the gazers like myself anyways, I won’t speak for those who are more educated) but also persuade. It helps to bring clarity to the the procedurality of synthetic environments and through this to therefore persuade, create cognitive dissonance, teach, change behaviors, and influence.By doing this, it can remind us that objects, including objects for which we typically impart specific meanings through our “real world” symbols, can be manipulated to create interactions in which the environment, in adapting to us, can also adapt towards persuading us.

These strike me as valuable and thought-provoking questions for which we’re surely picking up only the first threads from those dreaming, ivory-towered, overly-educated gazers.

But then again, so long as they keep making shiny objects that move and rotate, I’ll likely be entranced anyways.

(sticks thumb in mouth and happily wanders off.)

9 Comments

speak up

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site.

Subscribe to these comments.

*Required Fields

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.