After reading Yee's (2008) The Unbearable Likeness of Being, a couple of thoughts occurred to me.
One is that I wonder whether this whole fuss about bodies might have to do with our conception of what virtual reality is (or could be). Yee's article starts with a quote from Barlow ('Suddenly I don't have a body anymore ...') If this was a virtual reality thing with like video helmet and data gloves (the movie Tron comes to mind, or, even more extreme, The Matrix trilogy), than, yes, I could follow that people feel disembodied in a virtual world. To describe Second Life as a virtual world in this sense is ridiculous, because you are very aware of yourself sitting behind a screen looking at the back of the head of your avatar, looking at other avatars. Hell, not even the experience is 3D, it's an utterly flat world and you really need to stretch your phantasy to imagine it as being 3D. Somehow this echoes with Yee's observation that in a textual multiuser online game his embodiment was 'salient in a way I'd never experienced in either physical reality or graphical worlds.'
Yee has two other observations that ring a bell with me.
The first one is that 'Games are all about slowing you down ...' This was the experience I had in the two Second Life sessions we had last week. The second session where we discussed, or rather should discuss, the literature made this awfully clear. The tutor was hardly around, spending her time picking up lost avatars probably. The discussion was a chat, much like the Skype chat we had two weeks earlier, with second Life functionng effectively as a wall paper to that chat. It, the chat, took well over an hour, if you reread it, it takes you about 5 minutes. What an inefficient way of achieving things.
What really hit me is Yee's following remark: 'If you were using a virtual world for work, why on earth would you want people to walk places, open virtual file drawers, be blocked by virtual walls, or have to figure out what to put on in the morning?' Exactly. Our thinking about how we have always done things offline influences pretty heavily the way we do things online, and as a consequence, we are many times disappointed in what technology has to offer.
Keywords: IDEL10
Comments
Hm, you might find the idea of embodiment or SL being a world ridiculous, but I think you can pick up from the Boellstorff reading, for example, that others do not. So maybe the question is why are you experiencing it one way and those SL residents experiencing it another? I’d argue that it’s to do with how comfortable you are in the environment. You’ve taken a few steps into the world, but that’s not that same as having become practiced at it. Where would you say you are on Dreyfus’s scale for instance in terms of SL skills? :) I wonder if you have yet had the feeling of flow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29 ) that you may perhaps have had in other online environments?
So that you have not yet felt that way has interesting implications for learning in immersive environments. E.g. around different learners not having that immersive experience (maybe even regardless of practice because it might be an attitudinal stance that you, as their teacher, can’t shift), about the experience therefore not being either authentic or useful enough for the learning, around the way tech can support or disrupt immersiveness etc
I get what you are saying about inefficiency – it is always that way for the first time in a new environment with lots of beginners finding their feet. Another thing worth remembering for when designing online learning. I have found both SL and Skype chat very effective and useful in later courses, once students are more au fait with things.
Go along to one of the tutorials this week and see whether there is a difference.
Cheerio
C.