says. “We should be concerned both with the in-world simulation of face-to-face interaction and the usability of the interface for puppeteering the avatars and interacting with the system. By looking at the challenges in interaction that people routinely encounter and work around, it is possible to ask how important— or disruptive to interaction in-world—those challenges are, and propose ways to address them through interaction, interface, and system (re)design.”

Sounds like sound advice to me. And on that note, it’s time for me to get my hair on, build a shack, and get me some bebop.

attention (just like in real life). Fortunately, anyone can have an attractive female avatar.

There are other things to learn aside from activities and how to interact effectively. As noted above, many virtual worlds allow people to buy, build, and exchange things. Second Life is perhaps the primo example: It is a sandbox with a unique constructive geometry system, which enables the site to stream your data and create your objects on the fly. From IBM engineers to Steampunks, people are building amazing physical-world analogues and/or imaginary places and artifacts.

There are also people who visit, cobble together something outlandish, and then leave it behind. Their endeavors have an “I just learned to build today (and then I gave up)” look to them. This digital debris is, for some, an unsightly scar on the landscape. This is not so unusual of course. As is oft lamented about content and personal sites in social networking spaces

like MySpace, there is a tension between giving people freedom to be creative on their own terms and making sure your world doesn’t end up looking like the aftermath of an afternoon in a Montessori School for gremlins. Of course, I would argue if we want Gaudi, not virtual bru-talism, we need to provide better tools to scaffold the building endeavors of the folks in-world.

At a more general level, to get an understanding of issues and do good design/redesign, Bob advocates a close and detailed analysis of what is actually going on as it unfolds in real time, looking at patterns of action and interaction, how those patterns develop and are understood, learned, and evolved, and identifying patterns that are persistent and prevalent. Too many developers and designers have theories about what is going on based on hunches and ideas that are completely external to the actual interaction situation. “You need to get close to the phenomenon, the players’ experience,” Bob

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time Elizabeth researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. Elizabeth rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia. Bob is an expert on the social dynamics of 3-D virtual worlds and a game designer at Multiverse, a startup in Mountain View, Calif., that provides a free platform to third-party developers for building virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games. Prior to Multiverse, Bob was a sociologist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he founded the PlayOn project, which examined social life in multiple virtual worlds using micro-inter-action analysis, virtual ethnography, and social-network analysis. Bob has published in academic journals and has spoken at numerous conferences on virtual worlds. For more on Bob visit him online at www. myspace.com/bobmoorephd, or email him at bobmoore@multiverse.net.

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May + June 2008

DOI 10.1145/1353782.1353791