The Brief History, Tumultuous Present, and Uncertain Future of Virtual Worlds (Terrae Fabricatae)

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

One fact dominates the brief history of virtual worlds (VWs) and the explosion in numbers of worlds, their users and possible activities. VWs owe their existence to the uneasy admixture of video games and emerging social media (Damer, 2008). The overlap of these two phenomena in VWs forms a watershed for cyberspaces, which are computer-mediated spaces of human socio-economic activity. On one side are the cyberspaces of the web: two-dimensional spaces organized by text or image and user with a hyperlink geography. On the other side are VWs, described by Lessig (2006) as spaces that pull you in, in part because of their three-dimensional spatial nature. Bell (2008: 2) fleshes out the feeling of being there, suggesting that virtual worlds are ‘a synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers’. We agree with the focus on the network as the seed of a feeling of presence for multiple users. Without a more complete definition of these networks as worlds, Bell’s definition of a network of avatars describes many other kinds of cyberspaces and is too broad to capture the particular qualities of VWs. We therefore extend his definition: a virtual world is the network of avatars, creating co-presence, along with the virtually spatial and concrete qualities of a world. VWs are about people, but also about objects, places, and organizations.

Keywords

Virtual Reality, Virtual World, Institutional Logic, Uncertain Future, Game World

Discipline

Strategic Management Policy

Research Areas

Strategy and Organisation

Publication

Changing the Rules of the Game: Economic and Management Issues in the Computer Games Industry

Editor

S. Hotho & N. McGregor

First Page

186

Last Page

210

ISBN

9781137318411

Identifier

10.1057/9781137318411_11

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

City or Country

Basingstoke

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318411_11

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