Towards a Theory of Place in Digital Worlds

Following last month's State of Play Conference, Gamespot has a good discussion of some issues brought up at the conference, as well as some analysis by Cory Ondrejka of Linden Labs. From the Article: "There is no spoon ... is a tempting shorthand, made all the more powerful by its association with the Matrix. It is also clearly wrong. There is a spoon, just not one that you can eat with. Digital worlds are very real places." Relatedly, Cory Doctorow has up today a short story on Salon.com (registration required) that takes place inside a MMOG.

Comments

attractive nonsense

[timothy]

To say that "digital worlds are very real places" is silly, at least if you mean that they exist outside of the universe of made-up places.

*Every* imagined place is real, in a sense -- someone thought of and defined them, crystalized their ideas in a way that both the creator and an observer can apprehend. Further, the observer might be so taken with an artificial world that he wants to extend its boundaries with the same sort of concretization: that's one reason D&D is popular. Waterworld is real, to this extent. (And I don't mean the world's largest artificial island, created for the filming; I mean the fictional Waterworld of the movie.) However, they are not therefore real in some *other* sense.

Parallel: Huckleberry Finn is real -- a real character invented by S.L. Clemens writing as Mark Twain. Now, American students have come up with a huge body of text celebrating and analyzing -- and rarely casting a bad light on -- the character of H. Finn(thanks a lot, English teachers of the world, lazy nogoodniks!), but that does not make the (real) character into something else. Are there drawings of Huck, "further adventures" penned by writers since Twain, made for TV movies? Sure -- because the human imagination doesn't like to respect all the boundaries of reality, and there's nothing that says the *imagination* has to respect them; that's the great thing about it.

(Aside: What does it mean for something to be "very real," anyhow? I don't demand a terribly rigorous reality in general -- I really enjoy dreaming, for instance -- but words "very" and "real" just don't seem to go together.)

The linked text has quite a few words, arranged in readable sentences, but I can't find much meaning in them. The semantic difference between there not being a spoon and there being an spoon that exists only in a shared fiction (and which can't hold, say, actual cottage cheese) is not one that excites me. It sounds like the interesting-but-pointless distinction you can distract certain people into deep pondering with, about whether our brain-jars are stored in a backroom at Wal-Mart, or are in individual little brain-jar huts on a pleasant island in the tropics.

I would write more, but just at the moment I hear a knocking, knocking, knocking on my chamber door, and it's either the pizza guy or my arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty.

timothy

Re:attractive nonsense

[Zareste]

Precisely. That's just what I keep telling people who use the 'everything could be a hologram' excuse. If by some chance a spoon is made from 1's and 0's, then so what? It just means spoons are made from 1's and 0's; it's still a spoon. Everything's made of something.

So yeah, if something's abstract then it's still real, because, like all real things, it exists. The fact that it's not made of atoms really doesn't change this.

sigh

[ultramk]

It is also clearly wrong.

Why is it that when someone uses the word clearly in this context, it often means just the opposite?

As much as some want to deny it, that which is virtual is not real, by very definition. It is a symbol.

The symbol is NOT the actuality. The map is NOT the city.

I am not claiming that symbols must lack value. However, value in regards to symbolic objects is almost completely arbitrary.

Confusion arises when money is involved, as money itself is symbolic by its very nature.

m-

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Custard]

>It is also clearly wrong.

Why is it that when someone uses the word clearly in this context, it often means just the opposite?

Because the person knows they're making a highly questionable, opinionated statement. Specifying how "clear" it is to him will hopefully make you distrust and disregard your own opinion in favor of theirs. He tries to convey to the listener that his confidence is greater than the listener's on this subject, and thus he must be right. It's a classic, however juvenile, debate trick.