Unit 4: Virtual Contexts

In today’s society there is so much digitalization of content that we are seeing a boom in virtual societies; such as gaming environments, social environments, and business environments. In this week’s readings there was a focus on these three different types of virtual societies. In the first article by Lauren Bans “Same Shit, Different World” she talks about second life’s virtual environment and how the social interactions are often very sex based as well as the issues that come up when players cross certain boundaries within a game. The next article by Robert Bloomfield “Worlds for Study: Invitation” focuses on how these virtual worlds can be used in and be productive in an educational and business setting. Finally the last article titled “Play Between Worlds” by T.L. Taylor discusses how these virtual environments specifically ever quest in this article can also cross over into the real world for meet ups and also how people interact online through the game. I think that all of these articles have one main idea in common and that is the idea that no matter where you are or what you are playing people seek social interaction. The difference in these virtual environments in comparison to the real world is that there is anonymity to it where people are more gutsy about what they say or do for that matter. I believe what we are seeing now is that these games are becoming very interactive to the point where people do want to meet up outside of the game. In the Taylor article the main focus was an EverQuest convention where people from the game met and shared this common interest of EverQuest. However, there is a dark side to this as well in the Bans article there was a story about a marine who was having a love affair with someone online and it go to the point where he killed another man over it. In these worlds it is all about the context of the environment and within every game there are limitations. There is only so much you can do in Second Life, EverQuest and Worlds for Study. I think this is the reason why people are reaching out even more and it is leaking over into the real world. Also the context or appearance of an avatar might affect how someone interacts with that person. An attractive female gets a better reception than a male character most of the time. I think virtual environments are very interesting because they blend this virtual fake idea of video games with the very real idea of social interaction. When you blend these two things together you are going to get a very interesting mix of a person’s personality and this online persona that could explore a lot of things considered to be taboo elsewhere. On the otherhand these environments can also be about business and that is what Bloomfield highlights. These virtual environments have become cash cows for the companies that make the games and also the in game currency economy has become profitable offline with the conversion of virtual money to real money. The idea of a business going to a virtual environment is not far fetched in today’s world we see people holding virtual meetings for virtual teams in environments like Second Life or in house projects that the companies have built. Overall the idea that virtual worlds becoming a place that blends and blurs a lot of ideas is a very accurate one.