MetaverseU Follow Up #2

Massively.com put up a great (sometimes paraphrased) transcript of the discussion between Raph Koster, Howard Rheingold, and Cory Ondrejka. (Previous info on who these guys here).

In their discussion, they kick off talking about online communities and the way they try to imitate real life based on the tools you offer them. According to Koster:

From the beginning, virtual communities has never been about the “virtual.” All the oddities come from the mediation, not from human nature. We build trellises, and communities are plants growing on them… you get to shape them a little bit, and sometimes in very bad ways if you’re not careful. We tend to think we have more power than we do when architecting these things. I wince at the title “community manager” (“relations” would be better) because it perpetuates the myth that we have power to control what users do.

After diverging into discussion of dealing with a generation of digital natives, they circle back around to this mimicry of real life and start discussing rituals that show up in online environments. Rheingold and Koster offer these thoughts:

Howard: Will people be able to use those technologies to do ritual together? If so, then yes it’s worth the trade-off. Have been reading a book by Rich Ling — he’s bringing Durheim into the age of the cellphone. He’s asking the question: do mediated communications dissolve the glue that holds societies together, or are they a new glue? He has a theory that people are using phones for ritual among small groups of people. Ritual meaning there is distinction between who is in and who is out, there’s a change of consciousness, and everyone can see everyone else who’s in it. If you can achieve that feeling of ritual the technology sort of falls by the wayside.

Raph: In UO we had really fascinating ritual stuff come up. You have online weddings common nowadays but I haven’t seen a lot of stuff recently that was as crazy as what we saw in UO with guild induction ceremonies and so forth. Lots of weird stuff happened.

This has started me thinking about news delivery in virtual worlds as it matches real world rituals or patterns.

- Are there online pubs where patrons watch SportsCenter?

- What’s the virtual version of breakfast with the morning paper?

- Top of the hour radio news tends to be a commuter thing. I’m playing a game right now where news about the made up world the game takes place in plays in the background of a train station. Wouldn’t it follow to scroll news the same way in the commuter sections of virtual worlds.

Of course, surface-level matching of real world to virtual world could be quite artificial. However, there are definite natural patterns to what parts of the news humans seek out and share, where they do it, and when.

This is probably obvious enough to be discussed in better depth before, and I’m sure Second Life and other worlds have some already tested examples. I definitely want to start exploring this more.