Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
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- Fear of Uru
- Entering Uru
- D’ni Land, Shorah Island, Second Life
- Uru Again
Journal Entry: Uru RevisitedI learned last week that on August 9, a group of Uru hackers who had reverse-engineered the Uru servers made an arrangement with Cyan to set up a system of player-run Uru servers. Experienced players seemed unenthused about this because they also want new content, and this will just be the old version of Uru running on fan-owned servers. This has precipitated a debate among TGUers as to how this will impact the Uru community in There.com. There are also some shifts going on with the group; it appears that Uru refugees are spending more time hanging out with Thereians and less time in Uru areas. Correspondence this week on the forums indicated that Leesa was thinking of shutting down Yeesha Island. This was averted by Wingman who stepped in to contribute to the rent. A concerted effort is now underway to come up with new ideas for encouraging Uru refugees to spend more time there. Fear of UruJournal Entry I received my copy of Uru so I can play Until Uru on the player-run servers. I haven’t touched it though. I am finding myself resistant to trying it. On the one hand, it scares me because I worry that it will draw all the Uru immigrants out of There.com and back into Uru. I guess this is what they really want, but at the same time, I think their new “hybrid” community in There.com is so much more interesting. It also concerns me because of the ramifications it may have for my research. But there is another, more subtle anxiety at play: Underneath it all, I’ve really enjoyed the fact that my only experience of Uru is vicarious, through players’ stories, documentation and fan culture. I’ve seen simulations of Uru and its artifacts, but I’ve never actually seen the original. To me Uru is sort of like the Land of Canaan, a fictionalized memory, what Norman Klein calls a “social imaginary.” (Klein 1997) I guess I am clinging to the picture of Uru that exists in my mind from the retelling. There is a part of me that feels it would be so much more poetic if I never actually experienced the real Uru. It’s very irrational, but I know I have to get past it. It’s absolutely critical to the research that I observe the study participants in their “native” context. And anyway, in the end, it is not up to me where this research goes. I have to follow their lead. Entering UruJournal Entry: I am finally sitting down to play Until Uru. I’ve turned off all the lights in the room and surrounded my desk with lit candles. This is kind of a big deal. I’m actually a little embarrassed about all the ritual I’m going through. If my housemate walked in, she would think I was insane. I’m meeting a group in-world who is going to walk me through the first Age, which I gather is somewhat complicated. Naturally, the first thing I have to do is create my avatar. Choices are somewhat limited, but I go for a look that approximates my look in There.com, I guess the inverse of what the Uruvians did when they immigrated to There.com. I look for a similar hair style, and go for a similar color palette, mostly teal tones. The game actually starts in a desert, which I had seen in some of the web images from the Uru Library in There.com. I explore this area for a little while to get “journey clothes,” which apparently Yeesha has left for us. I descend via a ladder into the infamous “cleft,” a crevice in the desert that is vaguely vaginal in form. I explore the cleft by crossing bridges, descending more ladders; the bridges sometimes break, dumping me unharmed into puddles at the bottom of the shallow cleft. All of this is, of course, planned, and I can use the broken bridges as ladders to climb up to different ledges. I have to solve some puzzles in order to get bits of narrative of the game, mostly conveyed (albeit obtusely) by a kind of hologram of Yeesha, who I recognize immediately by her costume, after which the “Yeesha” costume in There.com is modeled! After taking a series of steps in the puzzle, such as turning a windmill, activating power, opening and closing doors to get access to other rooms and find hidden journey clothes, jumping and climbing up ledges, I find my way into a tree trunk, within which I see a book on a pedestal. When I go to take it, I am teleported to a tiny island floating in a cloud bank. I recognize it from its elements as the Relto! The book I picked up must have been the Relto Linking Book, which I am now wearing on my belt. Making my way to the TGU hood in Uru involves a complex procedure of transport using linking books and the Nexus, a giant machine that dispenses linking books. I'm in the Hood! The first thing I see is the fountain similar to those in There.com and the Atmosphere Hood. Going upstairs. I can see the infamous Egg Room, with the floating “egg room egg.” There is something surreal about seeing the originals after having spent months immersing myself in their facsimiles. It’s as if I am remembering things I never actually experienced. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. The whole Uru story is a narrative of simulations within simulations within simulations. Seeing the “real” simulation of Uru itself was amazing and disorienting, especially after seeing the “homage” versions in There.com and Atmosphere. I now recognize all the icons. I now understand the origins of much of the visual culture of the Uruvians. There is a shared meaning to these things; in the beginning I did not know what they meant—the eggs, the fountain, the books on pedestals. Now I am beginning to understand. D’ni Land, Shorah Island, Second LifeJournal Entry Another trip down the rabbit hole as I enter into the Second Life instantiation of Uru. As I slowly come to understand what this culture is about, I am realizing how rich the Uru world and its progeny are with layers of meaning. Now, inside Second Life, my God! They have totally re-created the game! I think it would have been less amazing had I not seen the “real” Uru hood already, although it’s pretty stunning even if you don’t know what it is. But to see how close a replica this is, how true they stayed to the original. You can see that they went to great effort. They must have had to do drawings, maps, and floor plans. I mean it is EXACTLY the same, right down to the details. They have added the crates and traffic cones and other Uru ephemera. It's remarkable. They even made the Heek table. I am taking a lot of pictures, but oddly, have not run into anyone. This is strange because I always find some Uruvians in There.com, whereas here, it is eerily empty. I feel like I am in the deserted ruin of D’ni Ae’gura… Wow. Uru Builders in Second Life One terrific feature of Second Life is the ability to find out the creator of objects, an affordance that oddly does not exist in There.com. By checking who owned the land on D’ni Island, I was able to track down its creators and arranged an interview. While there seem to be about 200 Uru Refugees in Second Life, the builders themselves are a much smaller subset who have worked diligently to re-create Uru here. Apparently they built the entire thing once, then tore it all down, and started over. It’s incredibly impressive. I’ve visited and interviewed them a couple of times. I was also able to tag along on a tour they gave to some SLers who stumbled into it inadvertently. They seem to really enjoy taking people around, explaining what everything is, and talking about Uru. As with the TGUers, they’ve been extremely responsive to me and my research and eager to share their stories. I wish I could spend more time with them, but it’s not feasible to follow both groups concurrently. Uru AgainAlthough I will be meeting Lynn and company tomorrow, I decided to go into Until Uru tonight on my own to feel my way around and also take some pictures. Having seen Uru in Second Life and the Uru artifacts in There.com, I want to get my head around the various artifacts players have been recreating and making in other worlds. Part of the mystery for me is finding the connections between what is here and what is in other instantiations of Uru. For instance, I see a firefly and some mushrooms, elements I have also seen in the Uru areas in There.com. Now I begin to understand at least where they come from and what they mean. Everything in Uru seems to have a meaning. Some of those meanings are encoded in the game, others are a result of cultural practices, created by the players themselves. I'm not sure if the fountain had a particular meaning until people began to play in it. I don't understand why semioticians aren't studying this. I decide to jump into the fountain, just to see what it's like. After a couple of tries, I manage to get onto the very top. This is very interesting from a spatial storytelling perspective, because these spaces tease, they suggest certain things, but it is difficult to interpret. One feels like an archaeologist, which is of course is intentional. Without understanding the D’ni culture, it is hard to say what all these spaces are actually for; I know what some of them are because the Uruvians have told me. But still, it is often detective work. I think it is for them too. Everything has a meaning, but nothing is obvious. Me and My Shadow: First Presentation (October 2005) I gave my first public presentation in situ at a conference in New York. The decision to start giving presentations in-world was initially an accident: I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make one of the London seminars, so I suggested it as a way to be able to participate. Both my supervisor and I agreed that this was a really great idea and should be integrated into the project somehow. Since Artemesia’s primary mode of communication is text, I decided to give the entire presentation in character via text. I toured Yeesha Island in There.com and discussed the migration from Uru. I showed a few examples of player-made Uru artifacts. Because it was hard for some people at the back of the room to read my text bubbles, I had Mary Flanagan, a member of the SMARTlab Ph.D. cohort who happened to be there, stand out in the audience and read the text, basically serving as my “voice.” I, Celia, said nothing. In fact I kept entirely silent throughout the presentation. At the end, I took some questions as myself, but during the Q&A, people started spontaneously directing their questions to Artemesia. When this happened, I felt I had, to some extent, succeeded. In reality, I think the presentation had mixed success. One thing I realized immediately was how slow the pace of text communication is relative to speech. This is not as noticeable in-world, because of course you lose track of time and everyone else is communicating at the same pace; but when presenting in a real-world context, I was all too painfully aware that the whole enterprise seemed to be dragging on. It represented an abrupt change in pacing when juxtaposed against the conference itself, which may have been refreshing for some, but really annoying for others, although a number of people came up to me afterward and seemed to enjoy the experiment. I think one of the challenges of trying to do something this avant-garde in a conference context is that people are accustomed to certain conventions. I can probably get away with this in a situation where there are more “artists,” and where I am better known, such as my Ph.D. program or the Banff Centre, but here, most of the participants were lawyers and academics and a few game designers. One thing I noticed right away was how nervous I was. Even though the avatar served as a kind of buffer, at the same time I was very self-conscious. I’m sure part of this was that I was doing a risky experiment in a context where I knew less people. But afterward, I also realized “performing” an avatar is a strangely private experience. We seldom do this with anyone else proximal to our physical body, and even then, the other person is usually in-world as well. Doing it as a performance on a stage made me feel very exposed. I also think that introducing my avatar persona into a professional context may have also made me feel vulnerable, even though she is a “professional” avatar so to speak. This is also one of these situations that you really can’t rehearse; practicing the presentation on my own (which I did) prepared me in no way for getting up in front of several hundred people and laying my avatar bare for all to see. Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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