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

I dunno...

[nekoniku]

I like P.K. Dick's comment (in the novel "Valis") that "Reality is that which, when you ignore it, does not go away." On-line games pretty definitely go away when you ignore them. Plus you can't level up.
nn

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