Category Archives: Second Life

Creating Second Life: Blurring the Boundaries – Metalepsis

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I must admit, I don’t remember ever hearing the word metalepsis before. And when I google its meaning, I then have to google the meaning of the words used to define it. ‘Trope’ and ‘extradiagetic’ aren’t part of my day-to-day vocabulary – though they might have been if I’d stuck with language and literature instead of veering off towards educational technology.

This definition ‘any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […]’ is fairly typical. The diegetic universe is the fictional universe – Narnia and Discworld are clear examples, but most works of art and fiction present their own world. The extradiegetic universe is one that is different from the fictional one. So metalepsis takes place when a story’s author intrudes their comments within the story, or when the artist’s hand suddenly appears in a comic strip in The Beano transgressing the boundary between the narrative world and the physical world.

Master of the Revels: Magritte

This Magritte painting is an example of taking it further – the movement between fictional worlds and different realities.

At the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference, Astrid Ensslin began to explore the connections of metalepsis with the conference theme of ‘Blurring the Boundaries’.

Lots of ideas – too many for me to note down during the presentation. They include ‘participatory metalepsis’such as cosplay and fan fiction, and the ‘avatar as a metaleptic vehicle’ that takes us into a different world.

Two themes emerging for me – one about paratexts (the texts that arise around digital media, such as walkthroughs, cheat guides and fan fiction) and about ‘parapractices’ (a term I’ve just invented to cover cosplay — I’m sure there are more examples). Also the theme of the wish to move between the worlds – to bring our avatar into real life, or to move with our avatar into the virtual world (see Liberate Your Avatar for an example of this).

Second Life chatbots

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While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots.

The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s beginning to get some sense of memory and emotion – and that she has situational awareness and motivation. This may be the case, although I failed to spot it.

I guess she does indicate a way forward, though. When you meet a new avatar in Second Life you may well have a bizarre conversation – either because you both have different first languages, or because one or both of you is doing something different in the real world. So, without the visual cues provided by Abi looking like a bot, she doesn’t need to talk very well in order to fool passers-by.

As the website says, chatbots like these have a future as greeters, information sources, tour guides and non-player characters.

Virtual worlds links

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Some web references I picked up at the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

Exit Reality is an application that allows you to present every web page as part of a 3D virtual world, and to move the same avatar around them. I’ve been a bit limited in my ability to try it out, as it doesn’t run on a Mac and I don’t have time to fiddle around with it at work. My first impression, though, is it takes a lot of energy because you need to configure each web page as you get there. I guess it would be fun to see my Flickr site as a 3D gallery – but I waste enough time already messing around with my pictures online and don’t need an excuse to spend more time there.

Mmogchart.com tracks 45 virtual worlds – each of which has over 10,000 subscribers. Looks like an excellent resource for research – although there doesn’t seem to be much activity on the website at present.

I was impressed by the idea of gamesusd, which apparently translates the currencies of different games into dollars. The site is there, but all its downloads are dated 2005, suggesting that the exchange information is no longer current.

A video I thought wase worth watching. ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’ – the South Park episode set in World of Warcraft. I usually find South Park unwatchable, but enjoyed this one. I haven’t provided a link, as it tends to appear on the web and then be removed for copyright reasons – but then someone else posts it, so it’s worth Googling. Although the makers worked along with Blizzard, they apparently had to enhance the footage, because machinima made in WoW wasn’t high enough quality.

Touching Virtual Worlds

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More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

Jonathan Roberts and Nigel John are doing some very impressive work on being able to touch the virtual. Their research relates to training medical students to perform operations, and developing haptic technologies to do this.

They pointed out that touch is not a single sense, we have different tactile experiences, including pain, texture and muscular change. Touch provides us with feedback on our environment, telling us if a car is passing, if a tin is heavy or if coffee is hot. It also allows us to give a value to that experience – we can tell how hot the coffee is, how fast the passing car is moving, and how full the tin is.

To reproduce these affordances with technology, we require information about vibration, temperature and force. Tactile feedback provides us with information about the surface features of objects, while force feedback provides information about weight and inertia.

Haptic devices are increasingly being incorporated into technology – examples are the wii and the Logitech iFeel mouse.

Creating Second Lives

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At the start of half term I travelled to Bangor for the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference. It was a relatively small conference, but had participants from NZ, the US and Scandinavia among others. I was impressed by how quickly research into Second Life has moved on. A year ago I was watching very basic presentations along the lines of look-we’ve-got-an-island-now-what? This year people are working on medicine, libraries, art, economics, education, sociology – and coming up with some impressive results.

Denise Doyle aka wanderingfictions talked about the narratives and stories of virtual worlds that challenge our relationship with out own world. See her article  ‘Embodied narrative: the virtual nomad and the meta dreamer’ in International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media 3:2 (2007). She quoted Tom Boelstorff, author of  ‘Coming of Age in Second Life: an Anthropologist explores the virtually human’ as saying that avatars make virtual worlds real, if not actual. Unsurprisingly, the question of reality came up several times in the conference and there seems to be a growing consensus that it is possible to distinguish between the real (which virtual worlds are) and the actual (which they are not).