Augmenting Actual Life Through MUVEs

1 Augmenting Actual Life Through MUVEs Laura Anna Ripamonti, Ines Di Loreto, Dario Maggiorini DICO – Dept. of Inform atics and Communication Università degli Studi di Milano Via Comelico, 39 I-20135 Milano Italy [ripamonti, ines.diloreto, dario]@dico.unimi.it 2 AUGMENTIG ACTUAL LIFE THROUGH MUVEs ABSTRACT The necessity of supporting more and more social interaction (and not only the mere information sharing) in onlin e environments is the disrup tive force upon which phenomena ascribed to the Web2.0 paradigm continuously bud. People interact ing in online socio- technical environments mould technology on their needs, seam lessly integrating it into their everyday life. MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) are no exception and, in several cases, represent the new frontier in this field. In this work we analyze if and how MUVEs can be considered a mean for augmenting communities’ – and more in general people’s – life. We trace a framework of analysis based on four main observations, and through these lenses we look at Second Life and at several projects we are currently developing in that synthetic world. 3 THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN VIRT UAL AND ACTUAL: IDENTITY, RELATIONSHIP AND PLACE The relationship between online and offline lif e (but we rather use synthetic and actual – see Castranova, 2005 and De Cindio et al., 2008) has been widely studied in recent years, adopting several different approaches and thro ugh the lenses of different disciplines (e.g. psychology, computer science, soci ology, economy, architecture, etc.). An exhaustive analysis of each of the aforemen tioned research branches is alm ost impossible; nevertheless, within eac h of them , some key features naturally emerge denoting particular or remarkable facets of the complex relation which binds together the synthetic and th e actual worlds. Three key concepts, in particular, seem to be fundamental for investigating how synthetic and actual worlds overlap, intersect a nd interact to “augm ent” each other, instead of being counterpoised (Mitchell, 2003; Wellman & Ha ythornthwaite, 2002). These concepts are identity , relationship and place . It is through these dimensions that we analyze how the MUVEs (Multi Users Virtual Environments) – among which synthetic worlds are one of the more “extreme” products of the cyberculture movem ent – are becoming more and more an extension of people everyday life. MUVEs does not provide their user s with an alternate reality, but augment and add “value” (which shou ld be implicit in the notion of augmentation) to their actual life. Our framework of analysis is based on four major observations: Observation 1: online identity is an extension of personal actual identity, which is socio- culturally constructed and evolve s over time in both worlds. Observation 2: online social netwo rks emerge, in th e space of possibilit ies created by th e Internet, as extensions o f actual ones; in this process “onlin e identities” can be involved as well. Observation 3: synthetic places are the extension of actual, public and private spaces. They augment people’s possibility to in teract in online soci al networks and, at the sam e time, are affected and shaped by social interactions. Observation 4: online identity, relations and places can interact to augm ent effectively people actual social life. A careful and exhaustive design of the online social environment is required for this to happen: this means that critical factors affecting social interactions among users must be taken very seriously, and need a cons istent amount of study, to guarantee the succes s of a synthetic world. Observation 1: Online Identi ty Is an Extension of Personal Actual Identity The Cyberculture movement (Markham, 1998; McKenna & Bargh, 1998) assumed that technology allows people to det ach from the actual world, inventing a completely different “virtual” identity. This new identity is comp le tely unconnected to the actual one, since the physical/actual world is cast aside when entering the cyberspace. However, it ha s emerged (see, for instance, Graham, 2002) that personal identity is based on th e interaction between physical and virtual elements even when identity is considered in term s of the online world, thus leading to a completely different conclusi o n compared to the Cybe rculture pe rspective. Indeed, in the actual world, our body is a mediator in creating our personal identity, but when the body is abandoned – precisely as in online so cial interactions – “technology” replaces it. Paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan ( 1964), we can consider “technology as an extension of 4 man” (Lister et al., 2003). Just as our corporea l bodies are integral to our personal and social lives, digital self-representati ons (e.g. avatars) are central to our experience in synthetic environments (Polsky, 2001). In this vein, Manuel Castells says that peopl e with online identities are nevertheless “bound by the desires, pain and mortality of their physical life” (Castells, 2002, 118), while several case studies support the assertio n that online identity extends offline identity: see, for instance, the analysis of RumCom.local news groups (Rutter & Smith 1999). Hence we can say that identity is socio-cultu rally cons tructed for both the virtual and the actual environments. Identity in the actual world is continuously evolving due to interac tion with the multiple socio-cultural contexts we co me across during our lives (Ma ffesoli, 1996). Online, this phenomenon is enforced by the fact that the Inte rnet is intrinsically “global,” thus supporting and multiplying worldwide cross -cultural social interac tions. However, people’s virtual personality tends to stay increasingly the same, or at least to chang e over time at the sam e pace as actual personality (Schiano & W hite, 1998; Becker & Mark, 2002; Cheng et al., 2002). Online and offline impression managem ent works in very similar ways too. The “cyberselves” are built through presentation , negotiation , and signification (Waskul & Douglass, 1997) and evolve over time due to th e ongoing interactions with others, exactly like our “actual selves”. Studies in this area seem to indicate th at, although people like to indulge in some experimentation with th eir self-projection, iden tity play decreases with time. In other words, the longer people use online environments , such as e.g. MOOs or chats, the more likely they are to produce self-p resentations that are more “au thentic” and, even when some “false” element is present in peop le first online self-presentations, over tim e “their true self will seep through” (Leary, 1993; Turkle, 1995; Curtis, 1997; Roberts et al., 1996). Observation 2: Online Social Network Em erge As Extensions of Actual Ones The online world also has relevant effects on relationships , on the natural tendency of people to gather in associations, and – m o re in general – on community life. These effects can be seen through dystopian or utopian lenses. On th e one hand, the Internet is seen as a means to increase social aliena tion and the erosion of community life (see e.g., Dreyfus, 2001; Putnam, 1995), even though it ac knowledgedly helps buildi ng social relations, because such relationships cannot be compared to those of actual life, from which they subtract time. On the other ha nd, the Internet is s een as a social glue binding collective intelligence, the matrix on which the global vi llage germinates and develops (de Kerckhove, 1997). Both positions appear too determ inistic. As is often the case, the truth may lay in the middle: the Internet could be looked upon as a “space of possibilities” supported by technologies that are unable – on their own – to built or disr upt social networks (Wellman, 2005). This happens, as an example, in synthetics worlds, th at – by an active exploitation of all our senses – can create a psychological sense of presence , or, in other worlds, the illusion that “I’m in the virtual world and not in my house” and, as a consequence, that “I’m there with other people ” (Biocca, 1997). Observation 3: Online Places Are the Extens ions of Actual Public and Private Places The Internet has tickled the interest of a large number of different disciplines (geography, architecture, urban planning, comput er science, etc.), from whic h alluring suggestions can be drawn about the role of actual vs. synthetic space and place . The "sense of place" is defined by cultural geographers, anthropologists, so ciologists and urban planners as those characteristics that make a place special or uni que, as well as those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging (s ee e.g. Relph, 1976; Norberg-Schulz, 1980): a 5 well-known phenomenon in human society, in which people strongly identify with a particular geographical area or location. The term space, on the contrary, can be viewed as a set of dimensions in which objects are sepa rated and located, have size and shape, and through which they can move. In the virtual world, people generate a “sense of place” – exactly as it happens in th e actual world (Mitchell, 1995) – and tend to interact with virtual space using the same metaphors adopted for the actual world. Cyberspace, like its actual counterpart, can be zoned, trespassed upon, interfered with, and split up into small la ndholdings s imilar to actual property holdings. These effects are sometimes emphasized when they involve online communities: just as actual communities need an appropriate m ix of privat e and public places to prosper, th eir online versions need analogous places, carefully d esigned to effectively support the social interactions that underlie commun ity life. It is through the bala nce of these two types of place that we encourage spontaneous conversation and social-network building among ‘neighbors.’ Such interaction is the terrain upon which st rong relationships, sense of community and identification germinate (Wenger et al., 2002). Observation 4: Online Identit y, Relations and Places Can In teract to Augment Actual People Social Life. We observe that the three concepts – identity, relationsh ip and place – are strongly linked and enforce each other in both environments (the act ual and the virtual – see Fig. 1). The use of effectively designed spaces enforces (and is enfo rced by) the building of social networks – that is to say a net of relationships – but social networks constitu te an ideal environment for expressing and evolving personal identities. Last but not least, spaces are shaped by identities and social networks. This implie s th at an appropriate ‘use’ a nd mix of these three elem ents may serve as a fulcrum to achieve noteworthy r esults when dealing with online communities. In the following paragraphs we will see to which extent this can be empirically proved, investigating through th ese lenses the case of a MUVE: Second Life. IDENTITY ACTUAL & VIRTUAL RELATIONSHIP PLACE Figure 1 - Actual and virtual place, identity and relationship 6 MUVES, MMORPGS, MUDS AND OTHER SYNTHETIC WORLDS MUVEs are online, multi-us er virtual environments, a lso known as “virtual worlds”. This term has been used till recently to refer to the evolution of more traditional 3D chats, Multi- User Dungeons/Domains/Dimensions (MUDs), MUDs Object Oriented (MO Os) and Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Ga me s (MMORPGs), but now it is widely used to indicate Massively Multiplayer Online Game s (MMOGs) tha t not necessarily present the whole set of characteristics of a game (e.g. th ey have no specific goals to reach). Among the more known MUVEs we can list Second Life, Th ere and Active Worlds, beside them there are also some intriguing research projects goi ng on, such as Harvard’s Rivercity Project (a MUVE aimed at “learning sc ientific inquiry and 21 st century skills”) and Croquet . MUVEs derived from the combination of two tec hnologies: virtual reality and text-based chat environments. Traditionally, MUDs were design ed for adventure gam es played by distributed users. Social use of MUDs subsequently develo ped and, at times, they becom e environments for chatting. They were commonly referred as virtua l worlds , whereas, because of the unfortunate history of th e “virtual reality” sc ientific res earch paradigm , the “virtual” tag was opposed to the “real” one. This is the m ain reason for which we prefer to call them “synthetic worlds”: it conveys an idea not of a different a nd detached “other” reality (often also connoted with negative meanings), but of something perhaps unnatural, but nonetheless bou nded to our everyday life. Technically speaking, MUVEs are online persistent virtual wo rlds represented using 3D isometric/third-person graphics, that allow for a large number of simultaneous rem ote users to interact. This means that they generally offer (more or less) realistic 3D graphics and physics to bring the users in a space populated by object s that may or may not recall those of the actual world. They are not necessarily games, but they are always social environm ents, inhabited by avatars (usually two or three- dimensional graphical representations of humanoids), that may have “dem i-god” abilities, such as being able to fly and change their appearance at will. If we dig a little deeper in MUVEs character istics, we discover that they are not simply the last ring of the online social environment evolutionary chain. Som e MUVEs (e.g., Second Life) have some evident – and some more im plic it – characteristics that subtly trace a fracture between them and the previous generation of MUDs, MMORPGs, etc., and pave the way to an unforeseen possible convergence with th e Internet (and the web) comm unicative potentialities, since they e ffectively couple content diffu sion and social interaction. The Synthetic World of Second Life Second Life (SL for short) is one among several virtual worlds th at have been inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement and in particul ar by Neal Stephenson' s novel “Snow Crash” (Stephenson, 1992). SL adopted Stephenson's idea of Metaverse , a user-defined world in which people can interact, pla y, do business, and otherwise communicate. Actually, SL was intentionally designed to be an environment complete ly constr ucted by its users (Ondrejka, 2004). Created in 2001 by Linden Lab and launched in the public in 2003, it registered a skyrocketing diffusion, and in a very short pe riod its users outnumbered those of any other similar environment (at the m oment SL counts a bout 7 millions registered users from all over the world, among them more than ha lf a m illion are very active). SL users are represented by motional avatars, which are the medium used to interact, explore, socialize, participate in indivi dual and group activitie s, etc. SL users define themselves as "residents": it is noteworthy that this term sugg ests an idea of “citizenship”. As a matter of fact, early residents strongly felt their belonging to the synthetic world, and they organized in- 7 world 1 public demonstrations to counteract specif ic policies or rules adopted by Linden Lab they did not agree upon (this happened, e.g., when residents were being charged for objects they created in-world: a protest has been set in-world, sending out a Thoreau-style proclamation against Linden Labs, see Rymaszewski et al., 2007 p. 282). Since SL was conceived as an empty world, its internal building syste m is powerful and easy to use (compared to other similar 3D development tools). It allows manipulation of geometric primitives: residents – alone or collaborativel y – can mould these “prims” into new shapes, change their texture and physical qualities, link them together for creating objects as complex as they like, add contents (e.g. text, multim ed ia, etc.) or m ake them interactive through a scripting language. Content creation in SL involves skills like gr aphic design, three- dimensional modelling and programming. The abil ity of users to lear n the relatively easily programming language and to crea te objects on their own made Second Life particularly popular. Creation and crafting is an intriguing co mponent of SL: it attr acts so m any users and has played a relevant role in SL success. Actually, it was by engaging its users in the act of creation that SL produced an environment different from others virtual words: residents become a sort of producer-consumer (sim ilar to the thousands of people who are mixing their own music, making their own m ovies or publishi ng their own art or te xts on the Internet). Many MUDs and MMORPGs have contents that we re – and continu e to be – built primarily by their users (Lastowka & Hunter, 2004; Turkle , 1995), but they imply at least two major constraints to creativity: objects a nd contents should often be t uned with the environment (e.g. medieval or science fiction) and the creator doe s not have any intellect ual property right on them. On the contrary, following a farsee ing suggestion by Lessig (Rymaszewski, 2007; Lessig, 2004; Lessig, 2001), SL residents preser ve their intellectual property rights on each object or content they create in-world, and these objects can be sold or bought using a synthetic currency (Linden Dollar), that can be traded for US Dollars according to a fluctuating rate of exchange. Some Technical Insights About Second Life SL is implemented as a clien t-server system; the clients will connect to a server holding the metaverse content. Content inside the m etavers e is made up of basic shapes (nam ed also primitives or prim s) which can be linked together to create complex objects. Due to the limited number of prim s and the relative ease to describe them, SL can use a relativ ely low- bandwidth streaming-like system to push environm ent data first and multim edia (like textures and sounds) later to the client. This system has been proved to improve user experience while being less demanding in term of network resources. The SL metaverse is not located on a single server, but resides on the implementation of a huge distributed system. This distributed system, or grid , is made up from a federation of nodes, each one taking care to simulate the envi ronm ent inside a given virtual space of 256 by 256 meters. Due to this function, these nodes ta ke the name of “Simulators” (or SIMs for short). Each SIM acts as a virtual machine: it ta kes in input actions from avatars and objects within, applies them to the current virtual envi ro nment together with ph ysical rules and local policies, and provides back a new environment. The global SL grid is the result of a 2D distribution of SIMs, glued together by a globa l messaging system, where avatars can walk or fly between virtually adjacent SIMs. As fo r January 2008 the current “geog raphical” extension of the SL grid is about 26 millions acres. Despite the fact SL is a completely distributed system, in order to ensure data consistency between SIMs and some other features unique to SL, there are a number of operations 1 The word “i n-world” is c ommonly use d among SL residents for indicating e vents takin g place into t he synthetic world, counte rposing to even ts taking place in RL (real life). 8 performed in a centralized way. Authentic ation, profile m anagement and economic transactions are managed by a back-end servic e, whereas in-world objects m anagement is achieved by means of a dedicated server ( asset server ). The asset server is in charge to ass ign a unique ID to all objects present in-world, to provide consistency for objects uniqueness between SIMs, and to apply acce ss policies to preserve resid e nt’s intellectual properties. As already mentioned before, in-world object s can be “augmented” by user-created programs using a special purpose programming language (the Linden Scripting Language or LSL). Using LSL, a resident can describe objects reacti ons to stimuli o r interactions, from an avata r or the surroundi ng environment. Interaction between avatars and objects is governed by a messaging system, which can be local to a SIM or global to the grid. Local in teraction is initiated by the interface (like mouse clicks or keyboard press) and by text messages (like chat). When one of these events is triggered, the sim ulator will distribute a number of m essages to involved avatars and objects; reception of these messages m ight imply the visu alization of a text message and/or a state change for a program inside an ob ject. Global interaction is e ssentially text-based and is mainly intended as an inter-SIM instant m e ssaging system; both avatar and objects can benefit from global communications. Communication is a key point of SL: the messagi ng system can be intertwined with all other in-world operations. Relationship between avatars will extend in-w orld with no distance boundaries and will also span off to real life, because messages will be relayed via e-m ail when the user is not online. E xpressing personal identity can be performed not just by avatar reshaping, but also by wearing (attaching) scri pted prims, which in turn will be able to interact and send messages to nea rby objects and avatars. In this way attachments will be playing a role in how th e surrounding environment will percei ve th e user presence, even at a distance. Places can be filled w ith interacting and active scrip t ed objects, which will send messages to users no matter where they are, th us, helping creating a social network without the constraint of being “there”. To some extents, SL communicatio n is not limited to the grid itself: scrip ted objects have means to reach the Internet and use data from it to augment the virtual environment; it is possible to access web content as well as send (and receive) e-mail m essages. Multimedia content f rom the Internet is supp or ted in an indirect way; a real-time media stream can be set as part of the envi ronment a nd the SL client will ta ke care to independently retrieve the content and perform the pla yout without interfer ing with the grid. The It.net and Others Ongoing Projects Our experiences with SL has be gun during late winter 2006 and firstly conc retized in a cycle of seminars in the framework of a course on online communities building for undergraduate students in Computer Science. From this f irst positive experience (students were enthusias t of having classes and meeting teachers in the s ynthetic world) bud several projects, among which the more relevant are: - a project with a local body, aimed at building an in-wor ld presence supporting the activities of its sector devot ed to touristic promotion. This project unfortunately aborted few weeks before its official inauguration, due to political discussion about online presence that, in the meantime, grew among public officers; - a study about how SL can be exploite d to sustain and improve com panies communication activities. This project is under development in partnership with a company working in the advertisement and m arketing industry; - a project aimed at investig ating if and how SL could be a m ean for supporting emerging young musicians (thus also com paring it with other very popular tools for 9 music sharing). This project involves a not for profit company, whose main goal is helping young musicians in the actual world. - the It.net project: an am bitious initiat ive, whose main goal is determ ining commonalities and differences between approaches necessary at building web-base d and MUVE-based communities; - a collaboration with a course of virtual re ality for undergraduate st udents in Computer Science. As part of their homework, stude nts of this course should create – using advanced 3D graphical editors such as Maya – buildings for the It.net project. The It.net project was born during late summ er 2007 as a comprehensive environment in SL aimed at collecting several in -world experiments under deve lopm ent by a group of students graduating in Computer Science. It consists of an area where different asp ects of the synthetic world are explored through different lenses, no netheless they are knit firm ly together by a common idea: the creation of a shared social network. In the following we will use our experien ces in the It.net project (althou gh it is currently still under development) to test our approach to th e adoption of SL and – more in general – of specific MUVEs as means for effectivel y augmenting people’s everyday life. SECOND LIFE DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS According to our observations, three major as pects are the basis upon which communities can eventually germinate: how people presents th eir identities, how those id entities are used to interact in social networks and, to which degr ee people and their networks are able to mould spaces into places and are – vice-versa – influe nced by them. SL feat ures strongly supports each of these aspects. Identity Creation and Management in SL MUVEs (and Second Life between them) generally eff ectively support creation and management of online identities. P articipants are usually registered members, identif ied in the synthetic environment by their pseudonym (n icknam e, username) and by an avatar. Other information about them (such as age, intere sts, etc.) m ay be provi ded and made publicly available in a user profile. The username they choose, the details they do or don’t indicate about themselves, the presented information, and the avatar they assume in the online community — all are important clues about how people manage identity in synthetic environments. Since SL offers a visual environment where pract ically eac h detail is customizable, at leas t two aspects are fundamental for identity building and management: your nam e and your avatar. In our actual lives these characteristics are persistent (except for very particular cases) and we should adapt to whichever choice others have done for us. This is not true for SL: its residents can invent the name that better suits their personalities and adopt or even create no matter which self-representation they like. Th ey can be a dog, an elf, a human, a dragon, a can of Coke, etc.; no constraint limits thei r creativity. Their appearance can be further customized by adding e.g. special textures, clot hing, and “animation overri ders” (scripts that add much more natural movements to the avatars) . These features of SL are very relevant and “make the difference” with oth er MUVEs and MMOGs – where users can only choose their identity among a set of pre-defined avatars and change their clothing – since, like in the actual world, the avatar/body is the “suit” used for self-presentation in so cial environment. Avatars choices in SL, however, generally confor m to cultural standards of what is considered attractive or normative (Lastowka & Hunter, 200 4): th at is to say, the par ticular cultural view of the more influential or numerous groups of us ers impacts the virtual space. This is largely visible in SL , where is quite difficult to find an avatar that really diverges from the standard s. 10 As a matter of fact, it is not straightforward to undertake a co nversation with a puzzling avatar such as a flying metal ball, while a plump ino ffensive teddy is by far more reassuring. While SL residents can change their appearance as many times as they like, they are not allowed to change their avatar’s nam e: a name chosen at registration time is the nam e, and the only way to reappear in SL with a new identity is creating a new account. SL identities should be composed by a name and a surname: while residents can pick up whichever name they fancy about, they have to select their surn ame from a (very long) list provided by Linden Labs. This procedure have some implications: th e similarity to what happens in actual life (at least in western cultures) makes the choice of names such as e.g. “amy48” or “starry_night_47” – a normal praxis for emai l addresses – sound quite “strange” in SL; moreover, aroused the necessity to bring, und er some circum stances, actual names into Second Life . It’s the case of the novelists Ellen U llm an and Cory Doctorow, of the game designer Harvey Smith, creator of the games De us Ex; again, of the singers Suzanne Vega and Duran Duran (who appeared as themselves in an island on which they performed live concerts), and the politicians Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton . A publicly accessible profile is associated to eac h SL resident. Profiles are a powerful m ean of self-presentation and impression management: they are essential to d eclare to the world who you are, which are your interests, what your avatar looks like, and what you think is worth of seeing in SL. They may even contain details of your actual life (your name, contact details, portrait, etc.). Profile s, last but not least, inform about the groups you belong to and about your favourite places in SL, and may contain advertising about your business and “profession” in SL. Although explicit tools for suppor ting reputation building and tracking are not provided by the SL client, it is undeniable that the com bin ation between identity representa tion (name, avatar customization, user profile information) and the retenti on of the creator/owner by user created contents create a powerfu l mix, able to strongly charac terize through virtuous circles residents both in the synthe tic and in the actual world. The main features of SL that act as enabler fo r effective identity creation and m anagement are summarized in Tab.1. Table 1. Several SL synthetic world di stinguishing characte ristics – Identity SL Characteristic Notes/implications Avatar detailed personalization SL residents can deeply customize th eir identity, wh ile users of other MUVEs can only choose their identity among a set of pre-defined avatars. Unconstrained avatar personalization SL residents can create and adopt wh ichever representa tion they like for their avatars, no constraint exist. Resident detailed profile A publicly accessible prof ile is associat ed to each SL avatar. It contains information about the resident that can be automatically generated (e.g. groups subscribed) or provided by th e users herself (e.g. information about real life, about favourite sites in SL, etc.). Persistent user- chosen name and identity When a new account is created in SL, the user chooses a name (whichever) and picks up a surname in a pre-defined list of several hundreds. This name cannot be changed for any reason and will be indissolubly linked to the avatar a nd to every object she eventually creates. Gestures and animations Users-created gestures and animati ons can be applied to the avatar, further personalizing it. 11 Relationships Creation and Management in SL SL is a synthetic society where resid ents engage in a m ultiplicity of different ac tivities and are involved in a variety of social relations. Similarly to what happens in the actual society, SL social relations can be of differe nt types: some more formal th an others, som e transitory and some other connected to fr iendship networks. For many SL residents the synthetic world is simply a place to hang around and meet new friends , for others is a place for gam ing or doing business. Residents organize all sorts of events in SL: movie festivals and shows, scientif ic conferences, parties, literary meetings, etc. A ll these activities are s upported by an appropriate set of socio-technical feat ures, that impact both at in dividuals and groups level. From the individual point of view , the creation and m anagement of social relations is enabled primarily by the elements discussed in the prev ious paragraph, that are further enforced by other specific features of avatars. As an exam ple, SL avatars can use gestures: a gesture is a 3D implementation of chat emoticons, that is to say a way to support phatic comm unication (Stewart & Williams, 2005; Caron & Caronia, 2001), thus reinforcing linkages among people and building common grounds upon which interacti on can take place easier (Rin tel & Pittam, 1997; Bickmore & Picard, 2005). Technically, gest ures are a com bination of animation, pose, text and sound. Once assembled, re sidents can use a gesture by triggering it via text or shortcut keys. Users-created gestures and anim ation can be applied to the avatar, further personalizing it, and making it a bit more resembling an actual being. Other relevant affordances for social interaction are more “co mmon” tools such as chats (SL client supports both textual and voice chat), instant messagi ng, buddy list, online presence indicators, etc. Social interaction among indivi duals inevitability leads to th e creation of groups and the consequent agreement onto a set of shared be havioural norm s. Harrison and Dourish (1996) pointed out that the appropriatene ss of social behaviour in a particular multi-user virtual environment depends on the inte rpretation of it by indi vidual par ticipants and on the social construction of knowledge. Similarly to what happens in other online communities, SL has rules and policies that limit resi dents activities. A f undamental set of formal rules (the so- called “six big no-no”) must be signed by every new resident when subscribing to the service. These rules are valid all over the synthetic wo rld, but, beside them, other formal rules – usually defined by users or groups – can regulate behaviour e.g., in specific regions or among specific social networks. This is precisely what we have done for regulating students behaviour during the classes in our earlier experiment: we defined a specific netiquette residents whishing to visit our area (during or ou tside class hours) are ex pected to respect. In general we could say that differe nt places in SL are devo ted to different activities, supported by different groups and, thus, are regulated by more or less fo rmal rules, that can vary between very simple netiquette (the “six big no -no”) to very com plex structures (sometimes documented in appropriate libraries and supporte d by classes in “proper behaviour” – as it is the case of the Mentor group). Groups are generally created by residents, and collect people sharing similar interests. As actual groups, they are a collection of members playing di fferent roles, and endowed with certain special priv ileges, including sharing land and money. They can build in the land owned by the group, and communicate in a more pr ivate way, using group internal messaging system. Similarly to what happens for individua l identity, groups too have profiles, that can be partially or totally public. Group profile s contain information about the group (logo, mission, etc.), members list, shared notices and activities, polling tools, etc. The subscription to the group can be open or restricted and fo r free or subdued to a fee. Belonging to a group can be explicitly shown: a member title can be made publicly visible near the avatar nam e. This group visibility impacts also on identity creation and m anagement, as well as land sharing in a group impacts on places management. 12 It is noteworthy that social in teraction taking place in SL is supported also by tools that are not in-world. Many discussions about SL take place in web-based forums, and can includ e knowledge that exist inside or outside the boundar ies of the synthetic world. Residents have also created several tools that – in perfect Web2.0 style (O’Reilly, 2005) – allow to import and export contents from/into SL. A website called SLProf iles acts as a kind of MySpace for SL residents, Snapzilla is the SL version of Flickr, BlogHUD allows SL people to post directly to their blogs, and so on, in a perpetual attempt to create a seamless conjunction between in-world and the rest of the Internet. The interplay between actual and virtual rela tionships in SL emerges also from several residents projects, such as the “Better World Island” which touching exhibits about life in a Darfur refugee camp. A number of renown not-for-profit organi zations, including Techsoup.org, Creative Commons, and Omidyar Ne twork have their in-world “versions”. The main features of SL that act as enab ler for effective relationships creation and management are summarized in Tab. 2. Table 2. Several SL synthetic world dis tinguishing characteri stics – relations SL Characteristic Notes/implications Support to social networks Residents’ social network is supporte d by an effective variety of tools (e.g. friends lists, sharing of object s, groups creation by users, access lists, etc.). User-defined groups Groups can be created and manage d by users. No constraints are imposed by the Linden Labs, except that at least two residen ts subscribe to the group. Netiquette (customizable) Every new resident is required to accept a general netiquette when subscribing to SL. Moreover, specif ic netiquettes created by residents can apply to specific areas or groups. Gestures Avatars can partially support phatic communication by using gestures. Places Creation and Management in SL Form Tab. 3 it is quite immediatel y perceivable that – from a sp atial perspective – actual life and the synthetic world can overlap and interact . Actually, the notions of places and spaces – as conceived by architects and urban planners – can be applied (quite) straight away to the SL environment: anyway, in SL the notion of space progressively looses it s m eaning in favour to the one of place . This fact is due to several in tertwine d features of SL and how they interact and intersect with residents’ behaviour. New land in SL is bor n naked: residents create the whole content of every SL island, and are endowed with the capability to customize even the tiniest details of their land. Residents can de sign not only buildings, but also oro-geographical and weather conditions of their land, and the flora and fauna it contains. Moreover, avatars do not need a lot of the infrastruc tures that are indispensable to hum an beings (such as streets, kitchens, bathrooms, elevators, heating systems, etc.): on the contrary, th ey can represent an incongruent burden to avatars activities. In other words, practically no constraint limits residents possibility to mould – and re-mould in any moment – synthetic spaces into synthetic places, thus creating environments that intrins i cally satisfy not only a quantity of their needs and desires, but also those t ypical of a community (e.g. the presence of both private and public places – Wenger et al. 2002). Moulding of spaces into places can take place on different levels: public (any place publicly accessible, such as a square, a library, a town, a garden, etc.), private (a private house – as far as the usual concept of “house” can be appl ied to SL private spaces) and group. A special 13 attention should be devoted to th is latter category, since SL customization tools offers new powerful opportunities to groups. The whole SL is a wonderful and extreme example of Participatory Design (see i.e. Nygaard, 1983; Schuler & Namioka, 1993; Blomberg & Kensing, 1998) and participator y development, that coalesces into projects such as Neualtenburg: an attempt to simulate the loo k and feel of a functioning Bavarian city. Collaboration and co-design are so stressed in SL, that strong groups tends to create spaces (also public) that deeply mirror the set of valu es they share. An evident example of such collective sense-m aking activity and mutual intel ligibility is the vast group of islands owned by the Elf Circle, one among the more active and numerous community of SL. Residents belonging to the Elf Circle only occasionally are lovers of role playing games, instead they tend to share similar ethical and cultural values (e.g., respect for nature and other living things, love for literature, poetry, and arts in gene ral, etc.) and this is undeniably reflected by the aspect of their lands, that are dominated by beautiful landscapes and buildings, where no explicit representation of technol ogy is allowed. Thus, only by visiting those areas, “foreign” residents are immediately immersed in a well-defined atm osphere. Other phenomena well-known to architects are re produced into SL synthetic spaces. As an example, people tend to redesign or reallocate pre-de fined spaces to better fit with their needs. This is precisely what happens, e.g., in the “Help” and “Orienta tion” islands, the spaces where new-born residents arrive when entering SL for the very first time. A special category of long- date volunteer residents (the Mentors) hang around in those island for lending a hand (and their tacit knowledge – Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1 995) to newbies; nonetheless these areas have also become a place where m entors meet and enforce their mutual network relation s. In the same vein, the recombination of places (see e.g. Aurigi & Graham , 2002) is a very frequent event in SL: shopping area are s eamlessly coupled with graceful ha m lets, plants of a botanical garden are also for sale, etc. Last but not least, people us ing SL often experience a sort of “double belonging” that mixes together the actual and the synthetic places: for example, residents can interact through avatars present in a synthetic places while sittin g in an actual place and discussing with other residents about actual life or work life issues, as it is ofte n the case in our work-group at It.net, and as it happened recently, when IBM employees went on strike both in the actual and in the synthetic worlds (IBM owns several is land s in SL). This behaviour matches with recent evolution (see Soukup, 2006) in the concept of online third place (see Oldenburg, 1989a; Oldenburg, 1989b; Oldenburg & Brisse t; 1982), according to which online third places (i.e. online communities) are sustained by Internet t echnology in m ultiple act ual places. In this situations people can bring a s ynthetic third place with them during their everyd ay life and access it form a multiplicity of actual plac es (e.g. home, office, third places, etc.). The main features of SL that act as enabler for e ffective places creation and management are summarized in Tab. 3. Table 3. Several SL synthetic world distingu ishing characteristics – spaces and places SL Characteristic Notes/implications Possibility to change spaces into places The transition from spaces to places is easy, than ks to the high customizability of the environmen t (e.g. creation of m ountains and rivers, definition of weather c onditions and flora, design of buildings, etc.). Private and public places The access of SL virtual land par cels can be open to public or restricted to specific lists of residents. World Map Both spaces and places (e.g. events , etc.) can be retrieved through a map of SL virtual geography, coupled with search capabilities. 14 Georeferencing Search results can be highlighted on the map. Unconstrained building SL residents can build whatever they like in SL. No constraints (e.g., about the architect ural style) exist. Multimedia contents linked to lands Multimedia contents (e.g. m usic or movies) can also be defined by the users as a characteristics of a specific area (e.g. when entering a region a certain music is diffused). Import of off-world contents As it happens in the Web 2.0 paradigm, specific tools can be created to import/export and distribu te contents from/to external applications (e.g. RSS readers, etc.). Collaborative building Possibility to grant or deny m odify permissions on own objects and buildings to other residents. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DE VELOPMENTS: IDENTITIES, RELATIONSHIPS AND PLACES IN SECOND LIFE The It.net project is aimed at building a comm unity; hence it has to approach the interplay among the three fundamental dim ensions – identity, relations and places – in a comprehensive and holistic way. In the project, personal identity is perhaps th e less analysed dimension, since it is under the direct control of each single resident and, therefore, it is quite impossible (and useless) try ing to affect it. More intriguing hints tickle our interest in the remaining two dimensions, their mutual interactions and their in terplay with thei r actu al counterparts. He nce, our efforts have a double focus: building a lively social network and effectively binding it to a place. These goals require to sustain social relations and to d esign spaces that can be easily m oulded into places. The first issue has been addressed in severa l ways: in order to favour communication and linkages among people (no community can be crea ted if not based on an existing socia l network – see Wenger et al., 2002) a group has b een created to collect all the residents interested in the project. Several ev ents take place on the group land : live music concerts, literary meetings, charity markets, etc. Even ts are prom oted through different media: the group in-world private messages channel, a group blog, message board s on the group land, etc. in order to reach not only m embers, but al so any resident potentially interested, and to give a certain visibility to the group activities. The iden tity of the group has been enforced b y creating a logo, a netiquette and a motto that match with its mission. Moreover, communities are built also on shared knowledge (both tacit a nd explicit); hence, they require shared repositories of memories. SL tec hnical infrastructure is quite l acking form this point of view, since it provides no effective tools for keeping tracks of communities history and p oor tools for the retrieval of contents. The only availa ble alternative has been the creation of a web- based group blog equipped with RSS feeds. The development of the social network has be en intertwined with the design of the places supporting It.net community activities. The dest ination of the space has undergone a detailed analysis from different perspectives, since we had to couple technical constraints (many buildings mean too many prims, which in tu rn create lag 2 , resulting in a poor user-experience) with the creation of the “sense of place”. It.net land contains areas: 2 The “lag” is one of the more fear ed pr oblems by SL residents. The te rm indicates the del ay in the environmental rendering when entering too crowded or ove r-built areas. It depends from a variety of factors, among w hich networ k latency and bandwid th usage. 15 - at a different level of privacy : public places (connoted by the group identity), p rivate places (teachers’ houses) and semi-private places (m eeting rooms accessible only to specific residents); - with different purposes : some places are devoted to community activities (e.g., the amphitheatre), while other are more “ins titutional” (e.g., the area containing multimedia information about studen ts’ projects). The intermediate results of the It.net project, jointly with the lessons learned from the other SL experiences we are developing, seem to support the intuition that the concept of augmentation encompasses the idea of enhancin g actual world by seamlessly adding layers of digitally supported value. This form of augmen tation is clearly perceivable in the synthetic world of Second Life , where, as outlined before, id entity, relationship, and place becom e natural extensions of the actual world. Thanks to augmentation, the value perceived by SL residents is increa sed not only along each dimension, but also by their mutual interpla y. In Fig. 2 we sketched the superim posed interactions that take place, on the one hand, among identity, relations and place, and on the other hand between their actual and synthetic expression. Online ident ity, relation and place extend their offline counterparts; similarly, rules that regulate their interactions behave in the same way for both the synthetic and the virtua l worlds. This double circ ular interaction can support people actions in both worlds in an effective way, by creatin g a technology-enabled environment, appropriate for augmenting social interaction. 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