Drawing on conversation analysis, Bob explains that a key feature of real-life conversation is that you can hear a turn unfolding in real time. This enables you to do things like determine who should speak next, anticipate precisely when the turn will end so you can start your next turn with minimal gap and overlap, and even preempt the completion of the current speaker’s turn if you don’t like the direction in which it’s going. In other words, the ability to monitor other people’s turns-in-progress is a requirement for tight coordination in conversation. Most virtual worlds (with the exception of There.com) use IRC- or IM-style chat systems and therefore do not allow players to achieve this tight coordination among their turns at chat and avatar actions. The result is an interactional experience that feels very unnatural (at first) and that motivates players to invent workarounds to the system.

A vibrant sociable atmosphere requires adequate social density. One of the amazing things about virtual worlds is how quickly you get a sense of being copresent in a place with other people, even though it may be an image on a screen, a world into which you are kind of peering.

And more amazing to me is that, just like in the real world, ambience is created by building and room size and scale in relation to crowd size. In ethnographic studies of bars and dance clubs in virtual worlds, Bob identified room size to be a key feature of the success of a virtual place. While construction in these worlds is cheap com-

Socializing in Second Life: An empty megaclub and . . .

May + June 2008

interactions

pared with real life, it is more difficult to fill these spaces with people than it is to fill the real-life urban centers that researchers like William H. Whyte have examined. As a result, the dance club in City of Heroes and the majority of player-built clubs in Second Life are simply too large. They feel like an airport terminal or concert hall rather than a cozy corner pub. “In order to achieve the kind of social density necessary for a vibrant social space, or ‘third place,’ as academic Ray Oldenburg would call it, designers should make virtual bars and clubs much smaller than they currently do, or rather, they should maintain an adequate social density,” says Bob. The most successful virtual third place that Bob discovered was a Second Life bar that was intentionally tiny. In order to get into the place, you had to “rub elbows” with other patrons. The place felt “busy” with only five players and “hoppin’” with 20. And everyone was within everyone else’s chat radius, which

facilitated public conversation.

In other words, lessons from real-life urban design appear to apply in several ways to the design of virtual public places.

Users learn what to do, how to behave, and game mechanics through social interaction and active exploration. There are challenges in designing a world in which newbies can learn the ropes. If you want to learn about interacting in one, you simply have to get off (or on) the sofa and get in there. It is much easier to learn in-game than to learn out of game. But for many of us this is daunting.

Bob recommends getting into a pick-up group and simply trying things out. There are usually plenty of folks in-world who are willing to help; helping newbies enables them to show off their knowledge and make new friends. Of course, not everybody likes to help, and your chances of getting help are influenced by other factors. You guessed it—attractive female avatars get more than their fair share of