rad’s “RL” self has got herself into a bunch of discussions these past few days and so I havent had time to come here and unpack Chade’s post about real and virtual – I will I promise – soon.

meanwhile

Radhika’s blog has some posts of interest

Rad raised a question yesterday in the EmbodiedResearch group on the subject of how to differentiate the real world from the virtual world. That sparked a lively debate which has been echoing in my head overnight and which underscores the different perspectives we have in the group.

For me, the idea of “differentiate” isn’t necessarily clear. I *reference* the two spaces as “meat space” and “cyber space” to denote an artificial distinction between, say, a building on my campus and a house in Second Life. This differentiation is necessary because we use the word “building” in both contexts and it sometimes needs context setting in order to be made clear.

But the argument of “real vs virtual” is a meaningless construct for me. The confusion results from a semantic confusion of the computer term “virtual” and the English word “virtual” which have different and distinct meanings.

When used as a modifier in communications and computer contexts, like “virtual machine” and “virtual world,” the word virtual means “mediated by computer” and has no bearing on the philosophical notion of “reality.” In communications contexts, the term applied as in “virtual world” connotes akin to the name of a communications channel.

When used as an English term, like “virtual prison” or “virtual angel,” the term is rooted in the word “virtue” and can be restated to something like “a prison by virtue of having many of the characteristics of a prison” or “an angel by virtue of having many of the characteristics of an angel.” The idea is that the reference isn’t to a “real” thing, but something — by definition — other than the real — it’s not a “real prison” or a “real angel.” While the temptation is to extrapolate that meaning into the computer context, the reality is that this usage requires a comparative entity. We need a construct like “the school was a virtual prison” or “Jenny was a virtual angel” in order for the phrase to have any contextual meaning.

The temptation is to transfer that usage into “Second Life is a virtual world” and I believe that this is the confounding semantic trap that most people fall into. While it’s certainly a valid sentence to restate it as “Second Life is a world by virtue of having the characteristics of a world,” the notion of “real or not” is automatically void. That construct requires “not real” as a predicate. Clearly this is not the context in which we need to deal with “virtual world.”

I maintain that the idea of “virtual world” is more akin to “telephone” and names a communications channel. In this context a channel is not necessarily “a medium” but more like some aggregated notion of media, technology, and pathway. The telephone is a good comparison to Second Life in this regard. Familiarity with phone leads us to overlook some realities of the channel, however. We use a variety of technologies – spoken language, audio encoding/decoding, analog or digital transmission, etc – to connect two or more people. The concept of “real or not” never comes into play. We don’t have a “virtual conversation” on the phone. Your relationship with your mother on the phone is as real as it is when you are in the same room with her in spite of the reality that you are not hearing your mother’s real voice on the phone, but rather a decoded simulation of her voice created when the sound waves from her vocal cords hit the diaphragm in her phone and are converted to some other form for transmission to your location, and are then recreated mechanically for you to interpret. Of course it’s not REALLY her voice. The construct has no meaning because the notion of reality isn’t relevant to the larger notion of the conversation you’re having with your mum by using the channel called “telephone.”

Likewise the question of reality in dealing with Second Life is a meaningless construct. In the same sense that your mother’s voice is not real when you hear it on the phone, the messages — graphic, audio, whatever — you get from Second Life are not real. It’s not a physical house, nor a physical body, but rather a digital construct that’s used for transmitting a message in the same way that laughter, sighs, and inflections are audio constructs used for transmitting a message on the phone.

With that as a given, I believe the interesting questions about SL are still surrounding the messages we send, the negotiations we make — explicitly and implicitly — over the nature of the conversation, and how we choose to use the capabilities of the channel to send messages. Even questions of “what constitutes a message” have a certain interest. But the idea of “real or not” when applied to SL — for me — has no more meaning than when applied to the telephone.

Some nice people from SL have formed an educator/research cooperative to help educators and researchers make the transition in-world. Their web site is at http://educatorscoop.org/ and the process to be approved is rather elaborate. The cost is not terribly high, given the amount I pay in land tier every month. I’ve applied to become a member.

One of the questions they ask is “what you are interested in and imagine doing in SL as an educator/researcher?”

In part I’m doing it by participating in this little activity with rad and in part the answer has to be, I don’t know yet.

One of the difficulties in dealing with educators and researchers in general is that they seem to want to know what you’re going to study before you even have an idea of what might be interesting. THE big question about SL for me is “What’s a valid question?” The embodiment topic is sort of interesting. Research on “Do people treat me differently in this body or that body?” is probably interesting, but I’m not sure what to do with it. “Yes,” as an answer leaves a lot to be desired.

So, I told the interviewer (yes, you have to have a phone interview! — I hate phones), I’m not really interested in *teaching* in SL per se. I’m not sure that the idea of *teaching* in SL has a lot of merit frankly. For that matter, I’m beginning to question the merit of *teaching* in RL. I *am* interested in the power of creativity as motivator and in the issues surrounding perception of distance. I still run into people — like this group who insist on having a phone interview — who feel like the communication isn’t valid unless they can hear your voice. Or see your “body language”

Which brings me back to embodiment in SL where the POV is not thru the avatar’s eyes, but something else — most often over the shoulder but frequently at some tangent zoom angle. Just because the avatar moves its head, doesn’t mean the person at the keyboard is looking in a different place. Placement of avatars in relationship to each other is — at least for me — a haphazard exercise at best. I find I DO like to sit. I dont know what that means. It has something to do with anchoring the av so I’m free to use the cam. I will move so that the group is in the 20m chat circle from me, even if it means that people on opposite sides only hear me and not each other. Most people don’t seem to even be aware that there IS a chat range, let alone how big it is. I wear a small device, in fact, that tells me who’s in chat range. It updates every 20 seconds and I find it invaluable, but I don’t think that most people find that information is particularly useful. Why IS that?

And one last idea before I pack to go to a physical conference that could be just as easily handled by text chat, my largest reservations about the Coop have to do with the tendency for people to get into SL and not move around. Educators in particular treat the rest of SL like some kind of dangerous third world country where the water is suspect and the food is bacterially contaminated. If all they/we as members of the coop do is sit on the Mesa and chat, then the whole experience is lost.

We’ll see.

Value in virtual worlds comes through virtual practices that assign meaning and value to particular objects in-world through virtual artefact exchange both in-world and outside the virtual world (whether in MMORPGs or SL) – so when companies wish to establish “virtual markets” with products from our everyday life outside of the virtual worlds – what are they expecting?

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/07/la-times-joins-.html

Similarly, when we teach in SL and try to reproduce the four walls and powerpoint in-world and then state that that does not work – what are we expecting?

Chade wrote of real estate and value on SL in his most recent post.

How is value attributed to particular activities and objects in SL? What social categories and hidden and not so hidden literacies prevail in the shaping of demand and supply?

One of the things I noticed is the scarcity of complex skins and shapes – is there not a demand for them? If the more complex skins (as in “old” skins ) are produced will the effort of producing them “pay off”?

I notice that scripted objects carry more Linden value than, for instance, simply made clothes.

Complexity is valued – but what sorts of activities shape the demand for specific kinds of complex products – why are some complex products available and not others?

When I talk of value I speak of both social value – what is valued in the everyday secondlife living – as well as value in terms of Linden dollar costs of objects and land etc. Both are linked of course.

And then there is the value that links Lindens to “real” U.S. dollars and the logic and process through which these exchange values generated daily …

Rad talks about what people value. How they assign value. Interesting question relative to real estate too.

Lot size is important. I sell more 512sqm lots than any other. They are good for new people because there are no land tier usage fees.  Of course they come with only 117 prims, too, so putting down complex objects, like houses, can be problematic.

Most of my profit comes from selling to the neighbor of a lot. The occupant decides, apparently, to go ahead and pay some minimum tier fee and buys up the lot next door to expand onto, or sometimes just for the additional prims.

Location is important, too. Sea side seems to be most valued, followed by “flat and green.” Mountain sides are least favored, perhaps because the lots look smaller, or more difficult to build on.

Neighborhood is important. It’s difficult to sell a lot where the “cutters” have chopped up lots in to the 16m squares for rotating ads. It’s difficult to sell lots near casinos and malls. Neighbors who put up big fences or erect the ‘red lines’ can make it challenging to get a good price. And if the surrounding construction is ratty, awkward, or otherwise just ugly, forget it.

In the last couple days I have been discussing with some others (off and on SL – but with people who are both newbies and longtime residents of SL), what consitutes “value” in SL?

And how are SL buying and selling practices shaped by – similar and different from – other types of computer game, MMORPG type virtual artefact value exchanges…

more on this later but just thought I’d throw it out for conversation while it was still fresh in my memory.

I sell real estate. Most days I don’t sell much. My tier is 8k which means I can own up to about 8100 sqm before I have to pay more usage fees. My current fee level is US$40/mo. So far, my earnings in land trading haven’t covered my tier expenses so this isn’t a very good model. One of the problems is that I’m too small. I only have — at most — 16 plots for sale at a time and I make only about 10% margin on each trade. For a 512sqm “basic plot” I make about 500L profit between buying and selling. For 1024s — the “double wide” of real estate — I make about 900L.

The interesting thing is what people want to buy. The reality of SL is that you need a small piece of land — or at least access to a plot — in order to actually drop anything. Some people use sandboxes, but those tend to be public. I struggled myself with whether or not I really needed a house of my own. It is, after all, inventory in my trade and might be more valued as such. Early on, I bought a hillside. Very attractive, and an intriguing slope. That was before I learned that most people want flat, green, rectangular plots.

So I claimed the lot as Villota World Headquarters and built my house there.

I went into SL this afternoon to meet D as we had planned. We wanted to talk. About various things. We each tp ed to my store at Nirma Designs (http://gridmarker.com/search/rad/Nirma).

d and I sat down to camp on the bench outside and d was telling me how much she liked the green sari (of course I love to hear that..). a. came out to meet us all dressed in a nice gown. We got to talking about shapes and skins (I was still wearing my Jamuna mask

We had conversation about SL and our frustrations at trying to find the right kind of dark skin. d began to note how even rl dolls dont have good dark skin…

lots to think about – and then I went dancing at bollywood (youtube clip of that forthcoming).

Why rad Zabibha?

What is she? (yes this character is firmly rooted in a “she” for a variety of reasons)

WHO is she?

As we read various texts on Embodiment and Gender in a Feminist Research Methods class that I (Radhika Gajjala) am teaching this summer – rad explores her emerging subject position(s) as rad Zabibha.

One to note for readers of this blog – I will be in character as rad Zabibha when blogging.

Thankyou Chade for setting up this conversational space. I will start journalling starting today.