Bizarre forms of intimacy in a parallel universe

Convergence Culture:The virtual world suggests we can share our opinions as if we were standing in a bus queue, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

When I watch soccer on television, the impression that strikes me hardest is how similar the look of the pitch and the flow of play are to games. By games, I mean computer games. I suppose the short answer is the players run around as if they'd been programmed. Cynicism aside, there has been so much progress in the rendering ability of games, whether on X-Box or PlayStation, and even Nintendo, that there are people out there, like me, who are inclined to see real life through the prism of the virtual.

Last week I had a chance to put myself into a virtual world when the computer giant IBM hosted a day-long seminar for people like me to talk about content on the world wide web. Thirty of us convened on IBM's IQ Island on www.secondlife.com, the leading virtual community on the web. I got there by way of another conference, a real one in Cork where Irish IT experts discussed similar issues.

If you could have a 3-D figure representing you in an unreal world what would you do with it? Right now there are people using their 3-D personae to test-drive Nissan cars in Second Life, to dress up in fashionable clothes, and to meet new people from around the world.

The virtual world is attracting attention because it suggests we can come together in a meaningful way and share thoughts, opinions, and experiences as if we were standing together in a bus queue or a meeting room. What it told me was just how important order, structure and hierarchy are to human communications, and how closely our experience on the web is controlled by metaphors.

Given a free reign to "chat" on IQ Island the virtual meeting descended into anarchy for those of us trying to build a conversation. A moderator set up questions such as: why is Second Life so popular? And just about everybody in the room piled in by typing a different answer or proposing a better question. We got nowhere because there were no boundaries to respect. It led me to begin unpicking what I had really experienced.

A virtual world is a series of metaphors. An island on Second Life is really a computer server on a shelf in a cold-room somewhere in the US. It's a clever metaphor. In place of the cold metal box we see a warm, contoured landscape.

When the web first started, the metaphor everybody began using was tantamount to a fraud: to surf. To surf is not to sit impossibly still for hours on end staring at a screen. It conjures up quirky images of adolescent freedom and energy. Microsoft's spin on it at the time was "Where Do You Want To Go Today?". In reality everybody sat at their desks.

An avatar is a metaphor not for a person but for web navigation. Instead of browsing our way to a chat room we "teleported" into it. "Teleporting" is simply a familiar hyperlink. We are being invited to buy into this new generation of metaphors. Here is my worry. As we move into ever more sophisticated online worlds so we spin a more complex set of illusions.

One of the insights I left IT@Cork with is that the real mover and shaker in the culture of the web is the average user. It is the average user that adopted Chat, Instant Messaging, Groups, blogging and took these into the corporate world. If IBM are looking for the key to virtual worlds then it is readily visible.

But recently I found myself saying to a female avatar in passing: nice dress. Crazy. Even worse, it's a compliment I hesitate to use in real life. Avatars are near-perfect bodies wearing attractive clothes in environments where war, poverty, and injustice are absent.

Virtual worlds work by bringing us rapidly into a bizarre form of intimacy, propagated by safety and beauty, and by the absence of taboo, which is why Second Life is very likely going to succeed, ironically, when it focuses not on the external vista or on business but instead capitalises on our innermost feelings.

Words in Your Ear

Virtual worlds: Computers are capable of rendering cartoon-like landscapes, gardens, shops, and people, and these are used to sell virtual goods such as clothes for avatars, but potentially also real goods, like hotel rooms and holidays.

Avatar: A 3-D character in a game or computer screen.

Second Life: A website which contains many virtual islands or environments where you are represented by an avatar, which you can dress, move and "chat" through.

Chat: Chat on the web means typing your comments onto a screen. This is no different in the more advanced virtual world - as yet.

The next column appears in the New Year: In the multimedia web-world is there room still for literature?