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

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.