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 DOI: 10.1177/1206331208319742

2008 11: 200Space and CultureEric Gordon

The Geography of Virtual Worlds: An Introduction  

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The Geography of Virtual Worlds

An Introduction

This evening I am home in front of the fireplace, chatting with friends and lookingout the window onto a wide expanse of ocean. Not far from my beach house, there aredance clubs, art spaces, snowy mountain peaks, and classrooms. I am only seconds fromLondon, Berlin, New York, Dublin, and Tokyo. And without much effort I can summonmy friends from around the world to join me in my spa.1 You’re probably wonderinghow, on a professor’s salary, I can afford all this. The answer: log onto Second Life.

Second Life is a multiuser virtual environment (MUVE). And while it might includegame spaces, it is not a game. Unlike other virtual environments such as World ofWarcraft or even The Sims Online, there is no built-in objective to the Second Lifeworld. And yet, millions of users have “moved in” and participated in creating it—frombuilding homes like the one described above to building natural landscapes and evenentire cities. At the time of this writing, the world is composed of nearly 900 squarekilometers of virtual landscape (Linden, 2008) used for everything from simple chat tocollaborative work, performance, education, commerce, and, of course, sex.Corporations such as Nike, Toyota, and IBM have created presences there. The Centerfor Disease Control and the Red Cross have set up services. Universities are teachingclasses. Entrepreneurs are selling everything from virtual real estate to physical paint-ings. And pornography abounds.

So although Second Life is not inherently a game, it does seem to have a dominantobjective—commerce. Real money is traded in the form of “Linden Dollars”—an onlinetoken that exchanges at about 200 per U.S. dollar. And unlike other virtual environmentswith less formal economies, Second Life users don’t need to rely on third-party tradingsites such as eBay. All currency transfers take place on the company’s Web site (http://sec-ondlife.com). Second Life has enjoyed rapid growth since its launch in 2003 largelybecause the motivation of market exchange is built into the business model. It is for thisreason that some commentators have characterized it as a three-dimensional extensionof the Web (Kirkpatrick, 2006). But these views seem to ignore the rather importantpeculiarities of the three-dimensional platform. Although MUVEs such as Second Life,There.com, and Metaverse are direct descendants of text-based multiuser domains(MUDs) and their graphical counterparts (MOOs), the 3D immersive qualities of thesecontemporary spaces suggest a significant divergence from traditional chat rooms andmessage boards. MUVEs provide a level of engagement that is quite different from the2D Web. It is for this reason that a number of commercial spaces in Second Life remainempty. Many of the companies and services that initially rushed to build virtual stores

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and offices have failed to bring people to their sites. For these companies, the strategy wassimply to reproduce their web presence in three dimensions— building flat product panelsdispersed in space and not considering the specificity of user experience in the virtualenvironment. What was ill considered in these ventures was the centrality of the spatiallylocated avatar in all interactions. In other words, instead of searching for a product, click-ing on it, reading reviews, and then purchasing, my avatar has to first walk through aspace and find the product. Or instead of a chat room, where communication is repre-sented as words in a browser window, avatars in a MUVE have to organize themselves ina pattern conducive to conversation. They have to stand next to each other, sit on a parkbench, or fly to a far-flung corner of the sky. In short, MUVEs reintroduce space into dig-itally mediated communication.

The way bodies are organized in space is determined by multiple factors, includinggender, design (street, church, club, etc.), event (art installation, class, wedding, etc.),ownership, and many other vertices of spatial organization. Paul Dourish and GenevieveBell (2007) refer to this as infrastructure. Although they write specifically about perva-sive computing, or computing in physical environments, their thesis applies quite well toMUVEs. They argue that spatial organization, including distance and presence, informsthe meaning of individual spaces and, in turn, informs the nature of communicationwithin those spaces. This general concept is well supported by research that has investi-gated the nature of communication in virtual environments. In a particularly interestingstudy about spatial infrastructure in MUVEs, Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, andMerget (2007) concluded that offline personal space norms applied to avatar interactionsin Second Life. By measuring avatar movement, they learned that female avatars tend tostand closer together than their male counterparts. In addition, they concluded thatmales tend to stand farther away from each other outside than they do inside. These con-ventions are parallel to real-world, physical behaviors. Beyond Second Life, extensiveresearch has been conducted in various other MUVEs. Martey and Stromer-Galley(2007), in their study of The Sims Online, conclude that the metaphor of the “house” isprimary in shaping a player’s sense of “appropriate behavior.” And Taylor (2006), in herstudy of Everquest, points to the centrality of the body metaphor: “Bodies,” she writes,“act not only as a conduit through which we participate in society but as a mechanismthrough which communities themselves are performed. They facilitate not only the pro-duction of identities, but social relationships and communication” (p. 117). Bodies, andtheir relationship to objects and structures (including other virtual bodies), are generallyproscriptive of user behavior and social interactions in MUVEs. Dourish and Bell’s con-cept of infrastructure adds the organizing context of space into all of these studies.

But understanding the context of virtual space is no simple task. Considering that vir-tual space is infinitely malleable, how is it that it comes to affect communication? Onewould think that, because of the open-ended nature of the technology, virtual spacewould emerge in a manner unconnected to physical space. Unbounded by physics, spacecould assemble within any organizational principle—color, time, number, or emotionalregister. And yet, within most MUVEs, there is an abundance of metaphors to physicalspace. Why do avatars need houses, beds, or even chairs? They don’t get cold, they don’tneed to sleep, and their legs don’t ache from standing all day. Second Life, for instance, isfilled with familiar habitations, from bedrooms to lounges, clubs, and swimming pools.Virtual houses have kitchens and showers, parks have benches, and beaches have towelsto protect against virtual sand creeping into virtual bathing suits. Although it is possiblethat in the early stages of adoption, MUVE users, like users of any new technology, grav-itate toward the familiar (consider the early Web’s heavy reliance on magazine and room

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metaphors), it is more likely that physical space, as a socially vetted context, will remainthe most useful metaphor for the navigation of MUVEs. Wheras the Web and mostgraphical operating systems suggest space (i.e., the desktop) only as an organizing prin-ciple, MUVEs are fundamentally built around that principle.

But the utility of these metaphors extends beyond spatial orientation. The abun-dance of city sims (simulations) in Second Life suggests that users are also drawn tofamiliar places. One could walk the streets of London, Tokyo, New York, Boston,Berlin, Dublin, and Zurich, just to name a few. “Debs Regent,” the owner of a Londonsim and a U.K. expat living in Portugal, explained that the project of building theKnightsbridge neighborhood in London was a labor of love.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have [London] in SL so I don’t get homesick. There are lotsof ex-pats out there. Not just ex-pats in other countries, but in the UK too—people whomiss their roots just like I did. So we recreated Knightsbridge in SL. (personal communi-cation, August 10, 2007)

Debs assembled an all-volunteer team to build the city, which currently includes every-thing from true-to-life detail on all the buildings, several double-decker buses, and aworking Underground that moves from Knightsbridge to the under-constructionChelsea neighborhood. The long-term goal of the project is to recreate the entire cityof London. There is no completion date set—because completion is not really thepoint. The people who gather in the London sim are there because they enjoy theprocess. It’s a collaborative building project that has reconnected a number of peopleto the city. And my conversations with the people involved in Berlin and Dublinrevealed very similar stories. These people are using Second Life not to escape the con-fines of physical space but to collaboratively work to create a familiar environment.The familiarity of the represented space is central to the user experience. And theimmersive qualities of the technology, facilitated by the spatial parameters of avatar-led navigation, offer a sense of presence not possible in traditional Web media. In thissense, place becomes yet another potential infrastructural component of virtual space.

Spatial practices within Second Life, and other similar MUVEs, are much too variedto characterize in a singularly cohesive manner. From the touristic impulses of citysims, to collaborative workspaces employed by corporations, to elaborate fan commu-nities, art spaces, and classrooms, to real-world design scenarios, the technologicalaffordances of MUVEs provide new frameworks for social interaction that are funda-mentally organized around space.

This special issue of Space and Culture brings together scholarship across disciplinesto better formulate questions that need to be asked as virtual worlds integrate with thephysical world and the 2D web. Gene Koo and I contribute an article about a programwe started in Boston, Massachusetts. Working with the city government and its plan-ning arm, we have employed Second Life as a means of better engaging neighborhoodsin the urban design process. Ultimately, we argue that enabling groups to simultane-ously participate in virtual and physical spaces opens up possibilities for group identi-fication and communitarian action. Rebecca and Charlie Nesson describe a classtaught at Harvard University in spring 2007 where Second Life was combined with thephysical classroom to organize local and global populations around a single curricu-lum. They argue that virtual space fundamentally changes the nature of distance edu-cation and provides some additional possibilities for the real-world classroom.Shaowen Bardzell and Will Odom explore the function of virtual space by looking at aparticular fan community in Second Life. The article addresses how 3D space facilitates

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the creation of “emotional places” and makes the argument that the design of MUVEsshould be influenced by these kinds of practices. The last two articles depart from thespecific platform of Second Life to explore other kinds of virtual spaces. The piece byEric Kabisch is a theoretical intervention into the accepted distinctions between thevirtual and physical. Taking issue with this dichotomy, he describes his own projectcalled Datascape, which intentionally merges the two into what he calls a “hybrid envi-ronment.” And finally, Sybille Lammes looks to more traditional games such as Age ofEmpires III and Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, making the argument that they “translatespatial hegemonies into play” and provide an important framework from which torethink the role of space in contemporary culture.

The articles included in this issue take a wide range of approaches to the topic of vir-tual space. Although some seek to integrate these spaces into institutions (Gordon &Koo; Nesson & Nesson), others explore what happens in these spaces when they are welloutside of institutions (Bardzell & Odom). Still others put into question the very natureof virtuality, asking if it’s appropriate to be considering the virtual and real (Kabisch) orthe ordered and chaotic (Lammes) as anything other than spaces of continual hybridity.Indeed, although MUVEs can be seen as worlds unto themselves, they are, more appro-priately, both windows and mirrors of the embodied world of physical spaces. What fol-lows is a collection of articles whose main connection is their focus on virtual world andtheir corresponding suspicion of the dichotomy that gave that term life. The Geographyof Virtual Worlds provides a truly interdisciplinary analysis of how a more porous defi-nition of physicality has significant implications for society and culture.

Note

1. Disclosure: I don’t actually own this home in Second Life.

References

Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2007). The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastruc-ture: Meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space. Environment and PlanningB: Planning and Design, 34, 414-430.

Kirkpatrick, D. (2006, November 10). No, Second Life is not overhyped. Retrieved fromhttp://money.cnn.com/2006/11/09/technology/fastforward_secondlife.fortune/sindex.htm

Linden, P. (2008). Year-end updates, and thanks for the Emmy. Retrieved January 8, 2008, fromhttp://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/09/year-end-updates-and-thanks-for-the-emmy/

Martey, R. M., & Stromer-Galley, J. (2007). The digital dollhouse: Context and social norms inthe Sims online. Games and Culture, 2(4), 314-334.

Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., & Merget, D. (2007). The unbearable likenessof being digital: The persistence of nonverbal norms in online virtual environments.CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10, 115-121.

—Eric Gordon

Editor

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