Less "Virtual" - More "Real"

Think of Immersion as leaving behind your normal life and going fully into a different life.
A (maybe bad) example would be to go on a Total Immersion language course, in which you become a native language speaker or die.

Augmentists might be alternatively described as Extensionists. For them, SL would just be an extension of their RL. Corporate users conducting meetings in SL would be good examples of that. People using SL as a sort of FaceBook would be another example.

There can be grey areas.
Building a space jet is kind of in between. One could theoretically build the space jet in RL, which makes the building a little Augmentist, but maybe largely Immersionist.
Feeling a little unnerved when the speedy vehicle is overtaken by a pink rabbit on a blob of green jelly would be an indication of lingering Augmentist tendencies.
The pink rabbit is a definite Immersionist.

Yummi, I sympathise with your confusion, I too am always getting these 2 categories back to front.

I suppose one way of answering your question, would be to consider what type of code Phaedra writes.

Is she the inventor of the gadget that takes your facial impression from your webcam and places it on to your Avatar's face? ( Augmentationist)

Or perhaps she makes the definitive application that Morphs a man's voice into a woman's, a filing clerk's into a dragon, an attorney's into an escort, a tinkling soprano into a rumbling baritone. ( Immersionist)

As I stated earlier, debate can sometime railroad us into taking entrenched positions on this issue, but in practise, I think most glide smoothly enough between opposite poles, as circumstance dictates.

I think those categories are very difficult though.. they would be very difficult to discuss because there's no real way to identify which one a person from any external behaviour. Someone could technically "leave behind their old life", but actually play a person who was nearly identical to their RL self, as with Phaedra above. What I was more talking about were groups of people who want to use SL to have experiences that they cannot have in RL, as opposed to those who want to use SL to have experiences that they _could_ have in RL.



Well see, I'm not so sure about that, because it could be that the pink rabbit's friends all know their real name and all their interactions in SL are centered around networking with new people, it just so happens that they've chosen an unusual avatar. I mean, there are people on facebook who have pictures of cartoon character or similar as their profile pictures, but that does not mean they are acting as a character on facebook!

Fascinating discussion! I have a lot to catch up with!

What attracted me to SL in the first place is the wonderful things that people have built. I spend a lot of time wandering around looking at the amazing builds: realistic or fantasy. I'm constantly amazed by the talent and am so glad SL is here to give people a chance to have fun building things ... and to give people a chance to meet others. I've spent lots of time on various other websites and have met many people who have become RL friends (and my RL husband!), but SL has something more. Maybe it's the artist in me, but I'm just thrilled by the creativity, from the elaborate builds to the customizing of avatars.

That being said, the other sites I mentioned above have other "purposes" than social, but it's the social undercurrents that make the sites better. It's cool to build something, but it's cooler to see other people enjoying it!


Hey! I resemble that remark! I like having an avatar that's a version of the younger, slimmer me. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not lying to anybody. Then again, SL doesn't have a slider that gives you cracked, chapped heels and makes your hips hurt, so maybe I *am* lying. At least I can dance there ... I know I can't in RL!


I *love* this idea!


Why do I get the feeling you'd be able to find clubs in France that let you be a cyberpunk or a fairy princess?

Augmentation or immersion is not defined by how close the apparent view reflects RL.

An SL family, with realistic avie parents and children, living in a villa at the beach, is pure immersion.
A dragon avie and a huge robot discussing how to solve a script issue is pure augmentation.

The problem is, that the SL family will often discuss issues of RL together as friends. And the dragon and robot are actually working on a cool fire breathing effect to use in a RPG sim.

Augmentalism and Immersion is often completely intermixed within SL. People switch from 'meta' to 'playing' all the time. Putting people in 'boxes' as being one or the other is kind of black and white.

I agree that there's a strong mixture, but I don't agree that there's absolutely no use drawing a dividing line between the two, because there there does seem to be a fairly strong dividing line on SL. Some activities are possible and some are not.

Basically.. I think Xanthia actually made an excellent point! If you can be a fairy princess on SL, it's only in the same way that a RL nightclub might allow you to "pretend" to be one on Halloween night. And I don't mean that in the simple sense, where doing anything in a virtual world is "pretending" because none of it is real. What I mean is the sense that it can't completely become your character, can't be your complete role in the virtual world in the same way that you can be a warrior in a fantasy MMORPG. Because you will still have to earn and spend L$ and buy content - now yes, you can do that purely by buying your L$ with US$, but you will have an advantage if you also become involved in the "meta-culture" of Second Life, finding the best value stores with the highest quality items, etc. And most importantly, you will still have to fit in with a community that - while it isn't going to stop you being a fairy princess - isn't going to go very far to make sure you _can_ be one, either. Not because the community is bad or mean, but because you are just one of ten million people, all of whom have their own desires, and it can't possibly provide such special treatment for everyone.

And that's actually made me finally understand what I was going to say in SL. Which is that, looking at it that way, there _is_ no immersion in Second Life. It's all augmentation, it's just that one of the augmentations SL offers is that people are more tolerant of "pretending" as part of regular life. In the real world if you dressed up as a fairy princess regularly to walk around and go clubbing and shopping people would think you were weird, in SL they don't, but that's the only difference. There's no more immersion than that. The same with meeting up with some people you don't really know and pretending that they are your family, the only thing that really stops you doing that in real life is that your looks wouldn't fit and people would think it was strange.

Yumi, I enjoyed reading that comment. Seriously, I am questioning our status on SL and I realize that many others are also doing so. After all, I have an SL partner so ... what part fmy reality does he exist in? Is our "virtual commitment" as logically intentional as our REAL commitment?

Except, of course, people do it all the time in RL psychotherapy role play.

And the flip side of that is the SL "family": what if they're actually a RL family too, role-playing themselves in some imagined situation? This would seem a case of simultaneously intense Immersion and Augmentation.

I take Damani's point that "realistic" vs "fantastic" is orthogonal to "Augmentationist" vs "Immersionist." (Although the "fantastic Augmentationist" quadrant--in some corner of which dragons and robots spend all their time designing accounting software--seems to possess only a thin veneer of fantasy. And the "realistic Immersionist" quadrant, in some pathological corner, seems to be identity deception.)

The "realism" of RL is overrated. While the organism is pretty good at perceiving physical phenomena (excepting sensory illusions and hallucinations), it is notoriously bad at stuff like conditional probabilities, or interpretation of other's emotions and motives. Even though there's manifestly a "ground truth" to such things, we tend to let ourselves off by labeling them "subjective." Indeed, our perception of them *is* subjective, filtered as it is through eons of evolutionary risk-aversion bias and millenia of religion, enlightenment, romanticism, etc.

So it's hardly surprising that humans can accept immersion in a conjured virtual reality: our perception of RL, too, is largely constructed. It's up to the individual how much meaning and significance to attribute to either of these realms. Esse est percipi, after all.

Yes - this is absolutely true. You can have more a belief of more control of the construct in SL, although, paradoxically, this control reduces as the limitations in SL decrease (introduction of voice, for example can completely destroy some constructs). The absolute construct is the text based chat room, as it is the closest you can get to brain to brain interaction (through language) without any other external distractions.

/me loves my Barbie and Kens. I think I might like to keep my original Avatar too.

I don't think that's quite true. Although we talk a lot about "subjective" judgments of reality, as you say there _is_ a ground truth, and our subjective viewpoints can be judged "wrong", or even judged "insane".

After I wrote the post above I actually spent a lot of time thinking about what the difference between playing let's-pretend and actually doing something really was. What I've tried to do is to take the instictive understanding we have of whether something is "real" - or "realistic", or technically "having verisimilitude" because of course we all know in our hearts that virtual worlds are not "real".

Basically.. if there is an action you're taking which doesn't affect other people at all, or which hurts other people, or which is linked to the environment, then it's easy to establish if it's real or "let's pretend" because it can be judged by whether or not the action takes effect upon the environment without needing endorsement those other people. If I buy a house in RL, then I have my house, whatever others think (doesn't need endorsement), and I can go inside to get out of the rain (affects environment). If I buy a house in "let's pretend" then I only have my house as long as the other players don't mind me having one, and I'll still be rained on. If a soldier shoots someone dead and it is real, then the other person is dead. If it's let's pretend, they can say "no fair, I'm a tank".

When it's an action that's special because it's of _benefit_ to other people, then things become a lot more complicated, because you have to start looking at the motivation of those other people. For example, think about a pop singer giving a concert to which 100 people turn up, and a little girl pretending to be a pop singer and giving a "concert" for her friends as part of a pretend game, to which 20 people turn up. The key difference isn't the number of people - it's in the motivation of the benefit. The fans turn up to the concert because they want to hear the singing - it's directly linked to the star's action - whereas the girls' friends come to the pretend concert because they want to play pretend too, or because they want to keep the friendship - not so directly linked. Of course it is entirely possible that the girl _is_ actually a good singer and that one of more of them _did_ actually come because they wanted to hear her sing, in which case she is effectively becoming a real pop singer on a smaller scale.. even though she might not know that!

Now.. how about a game like WoW? Technically on WoW you only have anything as long as the administrators don't take it from you but I think that's a case we have to exclude. If you don't exclude that then you arrive at the conclusion than any action in WoW is "let's pretend" because WoW is not real, and although that is true, it isn't useful in this case. The question is how 'real' those actions are _within_ the virtual world, and the game administrators aren't within that world.

Now let's think about it.. in WoW, if you're a wizard who can cast fireballs, then that can happen without endorsement - nobody needs to agree with you, that you can cast a fireball. You can't hurt other PCs with fireballs without their permission, but your fireballs can affect the enviroment (ie, NPC monsters) without anyone else's endorsement. So that fits into the "verisimilar" category. How about an activity that's to someone else's benefit? In WoW this varies. Healing another character is verisimilar, because the other person's benefit does come from being healed (not from some other benefit they recieve as a result of "playing along" with being healed). On the other hand, leading a guild which people join because they enjoy being led by you, might actually be breaking the barrier entirely and going from verisimilar to _real_ because it's all about real relationships with real social skills between real people.

Now, here's the issue with Second Life: I can think of many behaviours in SL that are real: designing items, as it's based on real talent; using purchased content, as it's based on real money; social activity as it's based on real people. I can think of many that are "let's pretend" even _within_ the Second Life world. For example, "being" a fairy princess or in fact "being" anything generally requires you to be able to engage in activities which define that role, and in SL there's no way to do that because everyone can engage in every non-real activity anyway and thus no non-real activity defines any role. The only way to become one is to find a group of people who will endorse you as being one for other unrelated benefits (eg, because they are playing a role too, which you will respect in turn) which is not verisimilar.

But the only verisimilar activities I can think of are - unfortunately - combat, and griefing.

Phew. Lots of long fancy words in this thread.

I've thought a lot about this, and the following is really only my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

SL=RL. I can't draw a distinction between the two. SL is an incredible tool for communication and an incredible outlet for creativity. But, what's the difference between creating on SL and creating in RL other than the medium? What's the difference between communicating on the phone and communicating on SL other than the medium? It's like a sculptor saying painting isn't really art because it's 2-dimensional instead of 3.

While I'm communicating with others, I may be taking on a different form, or doing it in a different way, but it's still communication. The people on the other end are real people communicating back to me. We might be roleplaying something, but that's no different than getting together in RL and playing a game. I still feel strong friendships with my SL friends and I greatly enjoy their company - I wish we could hang out physically, but the fact that we can't doesn't mean I value them differently than my friends that i actually can hang out with.

I guess I just can't distinguish between SL and RL because I see one as just another facet of the other.

The difference is huge for me. Because of so much anonymity in SL, people are often imaginary. You're imagining who the person is behind the avatar and they may be nothing like how you imagine them to be. So you learn to stop worrying about who is behind the avatar and just respond to the messages and not take them too seriously. But when doing this it all just becomes meaningless. One literate avatar is no different from the next. It's all just text messages.

Some days I feel like hacking the client and replacing everybodies names with "Avatar x".

Avatar x: I went to watch a movie today!
Me: umm... err.. so was it good?
Avatar x: Not really blah blah blah..

What I'm getting at is what makes one anonymous avatar's movie watching more important than the next anon's movie watching?. Is it really worth trying distinguish one anonymous person from the next? Who cares?.


I am borg.

Bleh...

I understand - that's why I said it was my opinion. But it's sort of sad that you can't distinguish one person from another. I recognize that they may be portraying something other than they really are, but it doesn't take too long before someone's personality and true nature starts to show through. The people I count as my friends in SL are real people behind their avatars. I don't think they are actually Nekos or furries or super-model-beautiful in RL, and I don't particularly care what they actually look like. I'm friends with them because I like them for who they are. (newsflash - Trout is much thinner and better looking than I am in RL. He has cooler hair, better clothes and a pilot's license.) I guess my point is that once I get comfortable with the person behind the avatar, I feel like there is no real line between SL and RL - it's obviosly different in that we aren't in each other's physical presence, but at the same time, the feelings of friendship and cameraderie are just as real.

If that makes me a dork, then fine, I'm a dork. I'm a happy dork, though.

Yeah you're a dork. That's okay though. We still like you.

Seriously though, I agree with Trout. It's pretty obvious that Lindal, Chris, Brenda, FD Spark, Trout, and everyone else whose style I've come to recognize are different people and easy to tell apart.

If I asked all five people "So what did you do today?" I'd get five very different answers. Even if every single one of them went to the same movie, they'd all give me responses according to who THEY are in RL, not what their avatar looks like. If every single one of them was Ruth and didn't have a nametag floating over their head, I could still probably tell who was whom. We are NOT all Borg, LOL.

Every single one of us did go to the same movie. It was great! We ate popcorn. I made out with Lindal in the back of the theater. We got in trouble when Chris' cell phone rang, then we went for ice cream. Didn't you get the message we were going? We saved you a seat.

I appreciate the thought people are putting into this. It's all pretty interesting stuff. It even touches on some discomfort I've had lately regarding my SL and FL profiles and where I end and the person on the keyboard begins. I've not always enjoyed the RL times I've been recongized and approached because of my RL brand. Frankly, it ooks me out. So SL is totally separate from that for now. Still, I've toyed with the idea of creating an alt for the RL me and inviting groups of people in to interact but that just seems like a replacement for RL and the 2D internet and would cut into my "escape time"....uh oh. I'm starting to confuse myself. I think I'll just proceed with my M.O. of respecting whatever others want to do with this place and trust them to realize anything I or anyone else says or does may or may not be FL or RL.

If any of that made any sense at all it's a miracle.

I care enormously. Everyone is extremely different from each other, as Oryx and Trout have just pointed out. Each and every person I've met here is entirely different from each other. Each person brings their innate personality to their Av, it's impossible to leave it behind, even if you're pretending to be something from out of this world.

And, one more thing. The few people that I have gotten to know out-of-world, those that I have shared personal information with, and have seen their RL selves? Yes, initially imagination did project images into what I expected of them, but my rational self allowed me to recognize that in reality, most likely I was going to see common looking people, much as I am myself.

Seeing them, for who they are, only made me love them, and their Avatar that much more. And certainly, it helped me take all other Av's more seriously, regardless of who or what they present themselves to be.

No, we certainly are NOT Borg.

Christmas is the Time of Miracles. Nice thought, Bod, and I pretty much concur with it.