Unter den Linden

Virtualpolitik friend and digital journalist Bernhard Drax complains that a recent video has been pulled in Germany for alleged copyright violations. Although known for his use of machinima, Draxtor's low-tech video only uses a 2D representation of his 3D avatar.

As algorithms are developed to automatically pull YouTube videos with certain kinds of background music, the effect on videos that might incorporate copyrighted tunes unintentionally (rather than for critical or creative effect in editing, as in the Draxtor case) could lead people in public places to think differently about ubiquitous muzak if it interferes with vernacular video-making.

(My favorite appropriation of a likeness may be in this Mac vs. PC send-up.)

Beam Me Up Linden

Although some bloggers loved Star Trek in Second Life, now its creators are saddened to announce that "Star Trek Museum to Close." The letter of complaint that explains the closure and rails against the economic model that discourages fan participation has a number of interesting features.

For a long time our house sales and donations have been inadequate to pay the huge Linden Labs bills. On top of that, Linden Labs has made it more difficult to attract people to the museum. We cannot be in the Showcase because we use copyrighted material. Our events, which brought hundreds of new visitors a week, and donations, have been disallowed, while yard sales, nude beaches, penis stores and fake contests are allowed to flourish) and it is especially difficult to sell homes with all the limitations and expense of advertising. Without visitor donations and house sales, it is impossible to pay the bills. I have hung on as long as possible to try to save the museum, all the hard work by the staff and volunteers, and all the homes. Besides the monetary cost of running this place, taking care of the museum, fixing and finding things, helping visitors and residents, advertising, bookkeeping, all require a huge amount of time and energy, and I cannot afford the expense or the many hours per day any longer. To be honest, I am really looking forward to having more time for my real life ;-) To all of you who have been helpful around the museum, supported the museum with your tiers and rents, and generous with donations, you know who you are and how appreciative I am. I sincerely thank you again. To others, my only advice is to donate to the places you love in SL, or they may disappear too, as so many have. With our home-world gone, Tsora and I will most likely be retiring to our little corner of the universe, the Vulcan colony in Eridani, and do look forward to your visits.

In some way it constitutes a classic virtual world "goodbye" that acknowledges the demands of the real world, gives credit to community and collaboration, and -- frequently -- places blame for the surrender to a corporate entity.

In this case it is interesting also to note the role that copyright played in the project's lack of viability, an issue that Henry Jenkins has written about frequently to describe the frustrations of fans who want to appropriate content for new platforms, uses, and audiences.

Degrees of Separation

This video from Virtualpolitik friend Bernhard Drax uses the virtual world, which has its own virtual economy, Second Life, looks at the multiple ironies involved in another system of virtual economies: the cap and trade system. As Espen Aarseth has already pointed out, capitalism inevitably relies on virtual economies of many kinds, beginning with the contemporary currency system, so this form of abstraction isn't necessarily all that new. Check out how the video also uses information graphics, 3-D simulations, and a number of corporate tools to question corporate influence in the cap and trade system.

Correction: I overlooked sending kudos to VP pals Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil for their roles in the project.

I've Got a Lot of Plain Friends

Yesterday Jackie Marsh of the University of Sheffield gave a talk about "Digital literacy and play in MMOs/Virtual Worlds for children." She described children who generally had about two hours a day of media use in which family may "scaffold children's emergent digital literacy," but children also show "growing independence" and are even able to map their own literacy practices for researchers. She noted that other researchers, notably Sonia Livingstone, have demonstrated that children may move from one media platform to another as computational media become more popular in patterns of displacement rather than aggregation of hours spent. Marsh showed a broad continuum of digital media behaviors engaged in by young children, who may be pretending to text in pre-school, from "playing" to "controlling," although many forms of behavior are not ones of "productive and analytic media use." She also criticized the notion of the "digital native" and asserted that research had shown that "access and use was not just about class" because birth order and more complex forms of socioeconomic interaction could play a role.

Marsh's research focused on Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, although she noted that "children are always aspirational" and may quickly outgrow sites perceived as juvenile in favor of more adult virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel or migrate to ones that are seen as more trendy like Moshi Monsters. She defined basic characteristics of these virtual worlds, which included a "customizable avatar," a "home for the avatar," a "persistent space," an "in-world currency," and -- in the case of such kids' sites -- "chat," "moderators," and "link to an offline world of toys and texts." She cited the 2009 work of Maaike Lauwaert about the "geography of play" and the link between online and offline friendship. She explained how many of the sites rely on user policing of behavior, which she described as "cheap," because in playground play kids are eager to report on each other.

In discussing Club Penguin, she talked about various forms of capital, which have been enumerated by Pierre Bourdieu, which she demonstrated by contrasting the split-level igloo of a paid member of Club Penguin with the iglo of a participant limited to free services. She also discussed the "logographic capability" of children who recognize icons, although they also engage in more sophisticated literacy practices involving postcards, books, and newspapers.

These themes continued in her discussion of BarbieGirls, although she said this world -- which was in pink rather than primary colors -- had no even tokenistic mentions of boys as potential members. She showed the "butchest you can get your avatar to look" and noted the lack of choice in skin color and the fact that you might be frequently reminded that you are not a member during play. She also expressed her bemusement at the "heteronormative" character of "my crush" or fortune-telling forms of interaction that seemed strange to her as a "fifty-one year old lesbian." In this world she said, "children and parents are co-constructed as consumers," and companies like the Mattel empire make their pitch to parents by marketing their anti-predator credentials and their trustworthiness as a "safe" brand.

Marsh explained that she had conducted a small study in comparison with the giant Whyville study, which included 175 children from the ages of 5 to 11 who were surveyed, 26 interviewed, and 3 eleven-year-olds who were filmed. Shopping and consumerism were big themes for girls, while boys were concerned with games, but she said that some children did have critical thinking about the constraints of virtual worlds. In one example, a child complained about not being able to wear a wig and tiara separately, and another expressed distress that virtual pets could run away so easily. Many children found workarounds both playing solo and with siblings, relatives, and classmates. In thinking about playground rhymes and games and the potential for a more comprehensive study of play practice, Marsh observed that it still was not clear how virtual parties and other social rituals online functioned: if they only thickened existing social ties or invited children who would not be otherwise included into play.

One of her informants, Sally, age 11, explained that it wasn't all about "clothes, hair, and posh houses," since "I've got a lot of plain friends." Marsh described may genres of play, which included fantasy play, games with rules, rough and tumble play, and social drama play. She also described their delight in transgressive discussions of discos and getting drunk or throwing mudballs at security cameras. She cited the work of VP friend Tom Boellstorff (on disinhibition) and online friend Constance Steinkuehler (on rituals and performances) for related findings about the pleasures of doing bad online.

Bat Out of Hello

Stefano Gualeni gave a talk in this year's seminar series for the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds at UC Irvine, which may have contained more philosophical content than would-be game designers in the audience may have expected. In the European context, such a talk would probably seem like much less of an anomaly, given the presence of theorists like Miguel Sicart or conferences like the Philosophy of Computer Games.

Known for creating the Tony Tough games and a popular basketball simulator, and for lending a hand to the anarchic Fairytale Fights, Gualeni explained that he had trained as an architect and therefore wanted to start his talk with Rafael's famed fresco of the School of Athens to introduce his overview of metaphysics, which quickly made its way to Martin Heidegger's criticism of the "fundamental mistake" of assuming a separation between the real world of objects and the mental world of subjects, so central to Western thought and a major concern of René Descartes' substantial dualism that opposed the thinking think and the extended thing.

Then Gualeni jumped off from Plato's "myth of the cave" to an elaborate diagram that went from the base in the "Real" where subjectivity functions to make sense of the world through real experience and interaction to the real of metaphysics, which must mediate with abstract representations, such as charts, taxonomies, or phylogenetic trees. Atop of this structure he sketched out "Mediaphysics" as the realm of the imagination, which provided some answer to Hume's assertion that human beings are confined within the sensory apparatus. For Gualeni it is impossible to wax philosophical without mentioning Marshall MacLuhan who argued that first the man made the hammer then the hammer made the man. He also used Borges' famous story about "The Library of Babel" to argue that computational media are fundamentally different from books.

Which brings him to his central question: "What is it like to be a bat?" It is also the question asked in 1974 by the realist philosopher Thomas Nagel, and one difficult to answer because we are bound to human subjectivity and one recently re-asked by Katherine Hayles in her plenary talk at DAC 2009 as being critical to so-called "object-oriented ontology." The question serves as the subject for Guileni's game Haerfest. He reframes the question in the context of the game as "not what is it like for me to be a bat but rather what is it like for a bat to be a bat."

Appropriating Attire

In the first part of two panels on "How Race, Ethnicity and Class Shape Digital Media Practices and Activism" at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, session chair danah boyd encouraged a range of scholars to speak about research about Internet practices that constitute a form of racial profiling online.

The session began with Alexandrina Agloro's analysis of how the website Stardoll was used by working class girls of color in a youth center with a computer lab. Agloro argued that white defaults and racial coding of attractiveness shape behavior in ways that might be familiar to those who have seen Kiri Davis's A Girl Like Me in which the young filmmaker restages the famous pre-Brown v. Board of Education white doll/black doll study and gets similar results decades later.

Since I've had a lively exchange with Henry Jenkins about "Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies" and what I call the "Vanilla Ice Problem," I was particularly interested to hear Heather Horst's presentation about YouTube responses to Jamaican dance hall music by white participants. Horst focused her analysis on ways that the "Dutty Wine" dance had been redone by non-Jamaicans in videos like this and this and how Jamaicans viewing these videos might react very negatively to forms of appropriation that might be celebrated by others. Her reading of "culture, class, and race" in terms of "phenotype" and "inscriptions on the body" suggested a number of interesting avenues for YouTube research.

Next Katynka Martinez looked at how "home in where the humor is" when it comes to a young boy creating a game called "El Imigrante" that satirizes the realities of Latin American life in Southern California. (As a college student, he later went on to suggest a PacMan game in which the UC Regents serve as ghosts.)

Lisa Nakamura closed the session with a great presentation about racialized trash talking among professional videogame players, whether they be elite competitors with corporate sponsorships or Chinese gold farmers toiling in industrialized gaming.

A Throwaway Piece of Code

Mark Marino launched the first full day of the Digital Media and Learning Conference with a "Symposium on Virtual Worlds at the Intersection of Race, Class and Possibility." As chair, Marino explained some of the possible connections between more established fields like Cultural Studies and Critical Race Studies to newer work on Critical Code Studies. Marino's own dissertation on chatbots and other AI systems explored how race, class, and gender might be represented in the unit operations of online texts.

Fox Harrell opened his discussion about "representing ourselves computationally" with an overview of his interests in computer games, social networking, and other "educational and cultural systems" and encouraged the audience to think about "affordances that stigmatize." Harrel framed his argument with Erving Goffman’s Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity to draw attention to Goffman's ideas about "tribal stigma" of race, nation, and religion." Harrell's Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project in the ICE Lab at Georgia Tech, which is also part of the Identity Share Project, emphasizes the importance of "impromptu not formed communities" in an initiative shaped by an interest in "projected identity" and what George Lakoff has characterized as the imaginative extensions of "prototype effects" in which representatives, stereotypes, ideals, and salient examples play out in interactive media, including popular games. Harrell described how games like The Elder Scrolls assign numerical values to particular racially based characteristics, which in the game's algorithms translate into point categories for intelligence or running and jumping abilities. He marveled at how in Neverwinter Nights "bloodcolor" was "built into infrastructure of the game," much as the "one drop rule" shaped American racial public. He also argued that whether a computer user was "playing in the suburbs" or "rocking out" in urban spaces, racial categories appear in everything from commerce to aesthetic performance. As he closed he cited the work of W.E.B. Du Bois about "double consciousness" and the ideological consequences of "identity and its shadow," as computer users of color are aware both of their self-identities and how they are perceived in a world coded as white.

Sneha Harrell followed by presenting some of her extensive research about how young at-risk students in her program are engaging with Teen Second Life to learn mathematical and computational skills that might be valuable to them academically. Unfortunately, the default bodies of these programs discourage non-white students from participating, because they may feel characters are overly feminized or may not represent the qualities of being "solid" that they desire. She showed information from journal entires, video discussions, interviews, and many other sources to argue that the problem with how the code of these systems are configured is "not just about skin tone and hair."

Next up was Lisa Nakamura, one of my major influences in thinking about "cybertypes," which in my own research for the Virtualpolitik book involved digital representations of Iraqi citizens in government funded military videogames, virtual reality simulations, and official public diplomacy websites. Nakamura started her talk by praising "Henry Jenkins for being a mensch" by including viewpoints that were critical of his participatory culture thesis. As she put it "race, class, gender" are often in the position of "coming late" to discussions about technology so that forms of racial classification and "identity tourism" in many-to-many digital experiences might be likely to be overlooked. seizing the opportunity for struggle. In her thesis about "unfree labor" and "working at playing with race in digital games," she argued that race is often treated as a "throwaway piece of code" that is "like a texture for a wall" rather than a subject for inquiry about interfaces, affordances, and constraints. She noted that Asians are frequently overcounted as digital model minorities and enter into interactions online in the position of those who are "poor but not excluded." She showed a striking set of images of "gold farmer body spam" in an ad aimed at Horde World of Warcraft players for MMOP.com that is actually made of the bodies of spent avatars who represent Chinese worker/players who are excluded from the social space. For Nakamura it is important to analyze how virtual worlds function "as states that exclude certain bodies." (For more on race in World of Warcraft, check out my essay on just war theory in the game in Pacific Coast Philology from my PAMLA address last year.)

Finally, Beth Coleman appeared via Skype with a reminder that this kind of racial role-playing has a long history in popular culture that includes the book Black Like Me and the recent movie Avatar. In understanding how "we are using avatars of color," Coleman foregrounded two principles: 1) Virtual experiences are real and 2) Players bring different relationships of race to online interactions. She took issue with what she called the "Protean argument" that a computer user could walk in another person's shoes and understand the way that race is coded, although she did argue that it could work in certain situations for eliciting humor, as it did for Eddie Murphy in the classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which he rides a bus in the guise of a white person on bus and is told that it is free to get on before being handed a pot of gold.

During discussion, several of the panelists said that they didn't want to simply come off as prohibiting the "vision or desire for the Protean," but they did want to encourage attention to "transitions, comings, and categories" that might go uninterrogated in the process. Since many on the panel had also presented at the DAC conference, there were also references to the work troubling the notions of species and gender with relation to structures of exclusion by Micha Cárdenas.

Where Is Everybody?

On the listserv for the Institute for Distributed Creativity there has been a lot of chatter between digital artists, new media scholars, and online activists about a recent article titled "Whatever Happened to Second Life," which makes the Second-Life-is-empty argument yet again. What I find interesting about the article and the attention being paid to it is the question "Why now?" or "What is contributing to skepticism about virtual worlds?" Certainly virtual worlds seem to be appearing in fewer news stories in the past year. For example, even though the term "virtual worlds" would have been more familiar in 2009 than in 2008, it appeared in thirty-one fewer stories in The New York Times. I am also interested in how the article uses what could be called "a rhetoric of return" as a way to describe what the author considers to be a failed technology.

Avatarded

Last weekend I went to see the new James Cameron film Avatar and was disappointed to see how little of the humor and sociality of virtual worlds was actually represented on the big screen. Because of a central conceit in the plot that the the main character was coincidentally the identical twin brother of a scientist who had already mind-melded with the avatar in a naturalized bio-futuristic way, the writers could claim to have a staff of scientific consultants and yet ignore the fact that our brains are largely wired by experience and that biological twinship would be more helpful in organ donation than being able to drive a robotic arm.

And don't even let me get started on the science of networks that is presented in the film with its magical Internet of communicating and communing vegetation around one of two giant trees that somehow only has all the good features of networks (sustainability, redundancy, adaptability) and none of the bad features (cascading failures, lack of hierarchies, routing through vulnerable large hubs).

I also don't want to start in on these magical eco-friendly natives who somehow don't have technology or culture distinct from nature in a narrative that is more Lion King meets The Little Mermaid than a serious discussion of augmentation and prosthetic experiences.

Unlike this video about Second Life, Avatar gives us no sense that virtual worlds are cultural entities that require interpretation, workarounds, and trial and error efforts. To dramatize the organic ease of adapting to a virtual world, at one point the protagonist is running at high speed seconds after inhabiting his remote body.

The one thing that Avatar seems to appropriate accurately, quite regrettably, from onlne environments like World of Warcraft or Second Life is the voyeuristic rhetoric around a scantily clad and exaggerated hyperfeminine form.

Of course, the other potentially interesting aspect of the Avatar story is the idea that playing a role of one's combatant on the other side of a conflict can change attitudes about political opponents. As I finish an essay for Error: Information, Control, and the Culture of Noise for Continuum about the SonicJihad debacle in Congress, this issue about being able to play a simulation from more than one side seems a valuable thing to bring to the theatre. Unfortunately, the hero merely switches sides completely and abandons his human allegiances, so the potential loss of multiple perspectives is lost.

Update: For more on academia's reflections on Avatar, see Nancy Lutkehaus on being a Hollywood advisor and the thread about the film on Savage Minds.

Splitting the Indifference

Today Mic Bowman of Intel gave a talk at the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds at UC Irvine in which insights about how social experiences are constructed were applied to the technical problems created by the fact that at "the core of most virtual world applications is a quadratic computation of the set of interactions among avatars (users) and a shared scene," which creates a "fundamental barrier to scaling experiences in these applications." Much of the talk was devoted to specifics of previous techniques for limiting the interaction among avatars through spatial subdivision or sharding. However, Bowman argued that these algorithmic approaches consequently caused "the content and shape of the interaction" to be "driven by the limits of the simulation." Although I might argue that all kinds of real-world social interactions are constrained by certain architectures of control, Bowman claimed that Intel's use of "distributed systems technologies to balance the simulation load dynamically and to optimize network communication" in OpenSim could create more compelling and naturalistic virtual worlds.

One of the examples that Bowman kept coming back to is the challenge of creating an experience like "watching a baseball game with your buddy" rather than just "watching a baseball game." As he pointed out, a simple mouse swipe across the screen that changes the view of the player's avatar can create many technical problems, because the associated shift in head position has be be updated from the perspective of all the other avatars in a given scene. Fortunately, he noted, there can be a lot of redundancy for purposes of rendering scenes, as in the case of an event taking place on the other side of the stadium, which probably looks very similar to the avatar sitting next to you. In a talk that detailed the challenges of partitioning for scenes and operators, accounting for a user's cone of sight, and accommodating collision detection and physics, Bowman noted that there were lessons to be learned from real-time media streaming, as well as thinking about scene management from the perspective of the client. He also observed that granularity of attention matters, since those doing protein folding on ScienceSim might have very different expectations from those planning a workshop or a business meeting.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Ren Reynolds of the Virtual Policy Network reports that the British government has recently released the Code of Everand game, which uses the design aesthetic of popular quest-oriented massive online games that are popular with K-12 students like Runescape, although developers adapted the MMO format for the education of young citizens about traffic safety.

After playing the game for an hour, I soon discovered that much of the game actually plays more like Frogger, since players have to avoid being crushed by the "monsters" whooshing by in the "spirit channels" that they may attempt to cross, preferably at a designated crosswalk. In addition to traps and spells, the main protocol of the channel crossing involves looking right and then looking left to prepare to enter left-side-of-the-road traffic. (See below.)


The "about" page elaborates the game's design philosophy as follows:

Code of Everand is a multiplayer online game, which has been developed by the Department for Transport, to engage children making the transition from Primary to Secondary school, on the topic of road safety. The aim is that players will improve their road safety behaviour and apply what they have learned in the game, to the real world as a learned response. The Department for Transport’s aim is to reduce child pedestrian casualties and deaths among this age group by allowing young people to practice good road safety behaviours through a channel which is known to be very popular among those making the transition to Secondary school.

As a recent article explains, the game was actually developed by Area/Code, a firm perhaps best known for its theoretical work with ARGs and pervasive games.

Distance Counseling

According to "Second Life Duty Now Required for Penn State's Online Advisers," academic advisers for the Penn State World Campus Island will now be meeting with students in the online virtual world Second Life to help their distance education students pursue their curricular objectives. It might be somewhat disquieting to have mentors who look like undergraduates themselves with their younger, fitter avatars.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So students who want to meet with Rachel Zimmerman will find themselves chatting with a character called RachelM Snoodle. Looking for Karen Lesch? The adviser goes by KarenM Magic. All advisers are required to cover at least two hours a week.

Given how often support staff deal with tears from frustrated students, I'm not sure that the "exact same thing" is possible in an environment in which there is such limited paralinguistic contact.

Our Avatar in Cairo

These pictures come from Virtualpolitik pal Bernhard Drax, who attended a recent State Department event in Second Life for "bringing together architects in the West and Egypt who all use virtual worlds in their professional work." Not only did the line-up include my fellow panelist from the State of Play conference, William May, but also it featured one of my real life friends, architect David Denton, who explains his Cairo collaboration with Amr Attia here. Denton, who is known as DB Bailey in Second Life, has even given popular tours to my digital rhetoric class, as we talk about the rhetoric of built environments. More details about the event are available on this announcement.

"Ethics Has Become What You Can't Do"

This line from the AoIR "Ethics" panel moderator Elizabeth Buchanan expressed the frustration of many Internet researchers with the human subjects protocols that are mandated by university Institutional Review Boards, which tend to be designed for biomedical investigations rather than scholarship that engages with questions of self-representation and the liminal areas between public and private discursive realms. I've heard many talks in which speakers merely complain about their campus's IRB processes without much critical reflection, so I was pleased to see that the line-up at AoIR was engaging in a much more substantive and theoretically sophisticated discussion about what should be best practices.

Of course, there was some justifiable venting. Edward Lee Lamoureaux complained that his research in Second Life was frequently stymied, even though his study of religion in virtual worlds often concerns the rhetoric of display and involves participants who blog about their activities and express far less sensitivity than he does to the fact the SL isn't entirely a public space. In particular he bemoaned the fact that the "confidentiality" standard rather than one of "minimal risk" was expected by IRBs, who can't understand the self-publicizing nature of the Internet in which social actors may use multiple digital media platforms for communications with varying degrees of assumed openness. In his Prezi presentation he bemoaned the dominance of the "common rule" for research methods, which privileges the medical model and its biopolitics. The discussion of his presentation also raised interesting questions about the difference between studying digital objects and avatars.

Next Michael Zimmer presented a remarkable paper on the "Tastes, Ties, and Time" study of an entire college cohort's use of Facebook, which was sanctioned by the social network site itself, and attacked the fiction of unidentifiable information in the era of data aggregation. Using this study, which he could easily figure out was conducted at the supposedly anonymous Harvard campus, based on the size of the freshman class and their offerings for undergraduate majors, he argued that protocols are far too frequently designed "for protecting researchers not research subjects." Although he granted that the Harvard study presented important scholarship about the relationship between physical and network analysis and was also obliged to release data under the terms of their NSF funding, he claimed that this "new way of doing social science" also unfairly took advantage of "insider access" granted to Harvard graduate students who were also on the Facebook network of the university. Of course, since I'm a member of the Harvard Facebook network as well and a person who remembers a "facebook" as a print publication. In closing Zimmer also reminded the audience about the resources at InternetResearchEthics.org and credited Buchanan and Charles Ess for improving the practices of the field.

Dylan Wittkower, who is editing a new collection on Facebook and Philosophy that includes essays from Ian Bogost and myself, was the final presenter in the panel. (You can also check out his free philosophy podcasts, where he donates his time as a reader.) Like Lamoureaux, he was experimenting with software presentation alternatives to PowerPoint. In his case he used FreeMind's mind mapping software. Since we are teaching Aristotle's Ethics in the Humanities Core Course this year, and I co-authored the writing assignment about the nature of friendship in Aristotle's text, I was very interested in Wittkower's thesis that friendships of use or pleasure could become friendships of virtue as Facebook members are exposed to signifiers of civility and tolerance when unintentially exposed to albums with gay families or gay weddings.

Recursive Writing

Cynthia Davidson notes the invention in this interesting machinima video about recursive spaces that was created in Second Life. In addition to the avatars, computer interfaces play a key role. More information about the artist is here.

Call Waiting

Second Life talkshow personality Goddess Pooky Amsterdam stars in this video produced by Virtualpolitik friend and machinima journalist Bernhard Drax called "I'm Too Busy to Date Your Avatar." For more on the theme, you can check out "Do You Want to Date My Avatar" from Watch the Guild.

When Flowers and Candy Just Won't Do

The short digital film World Builder Bruce Banit also contains some creepy implications about how both doctors and male lovers shape the world for passive, unconscious patients, so it was interesting to see it linked to the main web page for Cyber Therapy 2009. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about rhetorics of empowerment and disempowerment when it comes to medical applications for virtual worlds technologies by looking at individual case studies in which Second Life is used for support groups, counseling referrals, and patient advocacy organizations. I would argue that the virtue of the virtual has more to do with collective knowledge networking than it does to individual cave experiences and that health is about conscious sociality.

The Artist's Guild

Aram Bartholl has created a number of video works in which regular people walk around European cities with World of Warcraft style avatar names floating above them. He has also done installations with Google Maps markers to remind passers-by of the ways that digital worlds can interpenetrate material ones. Bartholl will be staging another one of these performance pieces in connection with the WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, which I attended yesterday.

Visitors are given a conference-style neck badge and a glossy catalog in which half of the artwork comes from the game or from fans. Blizzard, the company that owns the World of Warcraft franchise, is one of the sponsors of the show.

Yet the installation also featured some who have used game spaces as sites for resistance, although Ian Bogost might question if such ventures really constitute art of the kind that he argues videogames are capable of producing.

Others in the show included Velvet-Strike creator Anne-Marie Schleiner, and thirdfaction.org continued the pacifist theme with an entire room devoted to their "/hugs" project, which purports to be a humanitarian NGO in Azeroth.



Jacqueline Goss intercut CGI video of American cities from the Department of Homeland Security with machinima gameplay and a soundtrack with reflections by Muslim Americans synched to the action in "Stranger Comes to Town."

Other offerings ranged from Chinese cosplay photographer Zeng Han, Tale of Tale's The Endless Forest, Cyril Kuhn's paintings of inventories and screenshots as visualizations of desire, Jorg Dubin's highly representational works, and Robert Nideffer's Bosch-like triptych.

Heavily represented was Eddo Stern whose work ran the gamut from the charmingly Arcimboldo-esque Best Flame War Ever that provides visuals to a verbal feud between players about the conventions of chat in Everquest to the misogynistic MELF that shows a sword penetrating a mechanized transparent female elf who served as a kind of shadow puppet.

Body Double

Why settle for a Halloween mask when you can purchase an entire Obama avatar for your favorite virtual world experience?

In "The Several Hundred Second Lives of Barack Obama," New World Notes explains why there is such a brisk market for the Chief Executive's likeness in Second Life. And for those tired of settling for mere First Lady paper dolls, you can also learn about playing dress up in 3-D with Michelle Obama.

Virtual House Calls

I first learned about how the Obama administration was using the online virtual world Second Life for focus groups about health care from documentary filmmaker and machinima artist Nonny de la Peña, who appears in this film in an orange jumpsuit. From social marketing expert Nedra Weinreich I already knew that the Centers for Disease control had a virtual office in Second Life, which was staffed by a male administrator with a female avatar during the Bush administration.