162 Environments of intelligence
interaction, and residents quite naturally engage in conversation about the interactive possibilities and limitations of SL. Moreover, residents are intermittently
confronted with technical warning messages from the server and with service
disruptions, or users’ computers or SL applications may simply crash in the middle of a conversation, making the avatars disappear or ‘freeze’. These common
mishaps have an effect on interactions, and may be turned into a topic of further
interaction.
Above and beyond such disruptions in the perceived stability and continuity of
the SL environment, the genuine ontological status of that environment is open
to interpretation. Although referring to an ontology in this context may appear
as a philosophical exercise for its own sake, its implications are quite practical:
just as different places in SL have different rules, SL may be a different kind of
environment to different players, depending on their interactional aims and selfperception. Symptomatic of such disagreement are arguments among residents
about the extent to which they are supposed to reveal details of their real lives
in SL interaction. For example the appropriateness of posting a real-life photo to
one’s profile, or of asking other residents to exchange RL photos or to use voice
chat is very much contested, as is the question whether one’s SL character is
supposed to resemble one’s real-life self. For example is a “women only” club
restricted to female avatars or to female players? In fact, gender identity remains
one of the most hotly contested issues in SL. Although it is quite common for
players to explore alternate gender identities in SL (Ducheneaut et al. 2009; Hussain and Griffiths 2008), the discovery of such supposedly ‘faked’ identities is
likely to lead to conflict between residents.
6
The most notorious cases of ontological ambiguity are to be found in the possible effects and the meaning of emotional
involvement with other residents. Do residents fall in love with other avatars, or
with the person behind the keyboard, or are both involved in a falling-in-love roleplay? The players’ answers to these questions will have a bearing on how they
evaluate other players’ alternate identities.
To none of these problems are there rules or guidelines of global applicability, nor are there reliable and universal cues to be found within the environment.
Although the textual interaction possibilities in SL are mostly identical with that
of any online chat, other kinds of behavioural cues can be simulated on different
levels of perception. These may or may not be internally coherent for one character, and they may or may not be congruous between different players. SL is a
genuinely open environment, suitable to many varieties of interaction, in which
certain artificial channels are available for the transmission of information, while
most of the natural channels used and relied on in real life are missing. In a rich
artificial environment that supersedes Turing’s informationally one-dimensional
teletype communication, interaction consists in games of impersonation to which
conventions of real-world interpersonal communication are only partly applicable, as many of the cues used in the latter are either not present at all or can
be manipulated at will, while some resemblance to natural interaction will be
expected in some way by most residents, but to different extents and under different interpretations. What most residents expect most of the time is some degree of
interaction, and residents quite naturally engage in conversation about the interactive possibilities and limitations of SL. Moreover, residents are intermittently
confronted with technical warning messages from the server and with service
disruptions, or users’ computers or SL applications may simply crash in the middle of a conversation, making the avatars disappear or ‘freeze’. These common
mishaps have an effect on interactions, and may be turned into a topic of further
interaction.
Above and beyond such disruptions in the perceived stability and continuity of
the SL environment, the genuine ontological status of that environment is open
to interpretation. Although referring to an ontology in this context may appear
as a philosophical exercise for its own sake, its implications are quite practical:
just as different places in SL have different rules, SL may be a different kind of
environment to different players, depending on their interactional aims and selfperception. Symptomatic of such disagreement are arguments among residents
about the extent to which they are supposed to reveal details of their real lives
in SL interaction. For example the appropriateness of posting a real-life photo to
one’s profile, or of asking other residents to exchange RL photos or to use voice
chat is very much contested, as is the question whether one’s SL character is
supposed to resemble one’s real-life self. For example is a “women only” club
restricted to female avatars or to female players? In fact, gender identity remains
one of the most hotly contested issues in SL. Although it is quite common for
players to explore alternate gender identities in SL (Ducheneaut et al. 2009; Hussain and Griffiths 2008), the discovery of such supposedly ‘faked’ identities is
likely to lead to conflict between residents.
6
The most notorious cases of ontological ambiguity are to be found in the possible effects and the meaning of emotional
involvement with other residents. Do residents fall in love with other avatars, or
with the person behind the keyboard, or are both involved in a falling-in-love roleplay? The players’ answers to these questions will have a bearing on how they
evaluate other players’ alternate identities.
To none of these problems are there rules or guidelines of global applicability, nor are there reliable and universal cues to be found within the environment.
Although the textual interaction possibilities in SL are mostly identical with that
of any online chat, other kinds of behavioural cues can be simulated on different
levels of perception. These may or may not be internally coherent for one character, and they may or may not be congruous between different players. SL is a
genuinely open environment, suitable to many varieties of interaction, in which
certain artificial channels are available for the transmission of information, while
most of the natural channels used and relied on in real life are missing. In a rich
artificial environment that supersedes Turing’s informationally one-dimensional
teletype communication, interaction consists in games of impersonation to which
conventions of real-world interpersonal communication are only partly applicable, as many of the cues used in the latter are either not present at all or can
be manipulated at will, while some resemblance to natural interaction will be
expected in some way by most residents, but to different extents and under different interpretations. What most residents expect most of the time is some degree of