Keep Your Hair On: Designed
and Emergent Interactions for
Graphical Virtual Worlds

Elizabeth F. Churchill Yahoo! Research | churchill@acm.org

in conversation with Bob Moore

David Gartner

[ 1] http://en.oreilly.com/ et2008/public/content/ home

May + June 2008

interactions

Chatting with virtual world researchers Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell, I found out that a seriously desired artifact in Second Life, not unlike in First Life, is hair. Swishy, shiny, thick, luscious hair.

But there is one problem with this fabulous hair: It is computationally costly to render in comparison with the average avatar body. And so, sadly, your avatar body arrives before your hair. For a matter of moments, no matter how fashionable your garb, you’re as bald as a coot.

And it’s worse than that. Often from other players’ perspectives, your hair has failed to “rez,”— that is, appear—but not from your perspective. So you think you look hot—really hot—until, that is, some newbie says, “Why are you bald?”

Things have come a long way since I did my first studies on interaction in text-based and graphical virtual worlds in 1996. The technologies have improved considerably, and the worlds are well populated with folks from all over the planet and from all walks of life. Actual numbers of regularly active participants are hazy, but MMO Crunch reported 36 million regularly active MMORPG (Massively multiplayer

online role-playing game) players in August 2007.

What is certain is that there is so much more to experience and do in-world these days. A recent talk at O’Reilly’s ETech 2008 conference[ 1] in San Diego by W. James Au, the author of The Making of Second Life, enumerated a number of different kinds of interactive experience, all within Second Life. The list included a fantasy role-playing game called Midian City, which is like a mini-MMO where people collaborate to write a story on the fly; a 3-D architectural design and prototyping or “wikitecture” where 3-D objects are “wikified”; a visually stunning in-world videogame called Kowloon; and Steampunks, an active community building fantastic steam technologies as (possibly) imagined by authors like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells and those of their ilk. Au calls Second Life a “bebop reality…the virtual world as a kind of 3-D jazz combo.”

All this is fascinating. Personally, I am really curious about what challenges are confronting the designers and developers who create the worlds and the in-world games and experiences. So, I spent an afternoon chatting with Bob Moore, an

expert on the social dynamics of 3-D virtual worlds. As a game designer at Multiverse, a startup that provides a free platform to third-party developers for building virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games, he has been thinking long and hard about key issues in virtual world interaction design.

First and foremost, Bob’s perspective is that interaction in virtual worlds is not so different from interaction in the physical world. “Virtual worlds are fundamentally a medium for social interaction. One that takes face-to-face conversation as its metaphor. As such it leverages users’ common-sense knowledge,” he says. “I see a humanoid avatar and I know that if I want to talk to that player, I should approach his or her avatar with my own.”

However, I had to point out (of course) that, as with all metaphors, there are fractures in people’s feelings of immersion— their “being there” experience— when the metaphor simply doesn’t hold up. I asked Bob what some of the fractures that really break the experience are. And what approach does a designer like him take to address the issues that arise? Here are some thoughts: