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Culture in virtual worlds? Critiquing the complexities and our assumptions

Jeremy Hunsinger

Granted this model of culture makes things more complex and clouded than many current ideological strands of the cultural sciences and humanities might prefer, but in virtual worlds, where the environment is constructed either through fixed programmed interfaces or the through the results of genetic algorithms, the construction of subjects and objects as different in any knowable sense is speculative at best. The assumption that many cultural scientists, and humanities scholars make that if it seems to talk and act like a subject or like them’ then it is a subject very much depends on the environment. People have been simulating conversation in virtual worlds for years, and simulating actions just as long, beyond that people have been designing these virtual world for cultural effects that frequently do not come to fruition.

Consider the possibility of a virtual world developed to support natural and cultural sciences. In this world, the humans interface with the world is intended to simulate nature, such as pseudorandom distribution of wind or water flows over abradable media such as sandstone, or the bifurcations of tree roots as they interact with the soil. The purpose of such a world would be to see to what extent artifacts found in nature are likely man-made or man-influenced or not. In this game, individual actions add up to a part of the simulation, thus an ‘avatar’ would be the combination of forces over time as mixed with the forces and the fun would be had by influencing and changing the additive and multiplicative efforts of many people over time. The actions ‘avatar’, as a natural forces, is a combination of many possible people’s influences over time where time is one of the variables that consensus can effect and the interface can model, so that some people may slow down to a bacteriological time, or speed up to human time onward to the geological times of redwoods, and onto that of mountains. One possible sub-game may be to produce objects that might be confused with archeological artifacts, such as the Sphinx. Another sub-game that would surely arise is the design and or defacement of areas of the world for artistic or other purposes. We can see from such a game, that the ‘avatar’, or that which acts on cultural objects in the world may in fact be plural, and may produce things that are not considered artifacts as much as terrain. This possibility, the dissociation of the avatar from the individual and the dissociation of the products of the avatar from the culture is an extreme example of the reality of what people already do in virtual worlds today.

This dissociation of cultural subject and cultural production problematizes much of the scholarship being done in virtual worlds which depends on the assumptions that subject/s create or exist in relation to objects, but in the messiness of programmable systems, the mixing of subjects/objects into quasi-subjects, quasi-objects, and the pluralization of the relationship between a persons interface and their ‘avatar’, causes one to be immediately skeptical of the reported experiences of people acting through their interfaces in the virtual world. Even their reports should be colored by the researcher’s inability to discern the authenticity of the persons reporting given that the world they experienced through their screens, speakers, and haptic devices could be entirely different from that world experienced by a person using different devices, having different proficiencies, or living in different cultures. This is not to say that we cannot make assumptions about world, subjects, and objects, but it is to say that the assumptions that we rely on in the f2f world that ground our research may not be, and frequently are not valid assumptions. In short, when exploring culture in virtual worlds, we need to take care in our methodological choices and their assumptions for even the most basic assumptions such as, “my student in my virtual classroom had the same experience as my other students” is likely to be false in ways that are profoundly different than the ways it may be false in a f2f classroom. Similarly, our assumptions about the causes of behavior, social, economic, and cultural, must account for the new forms of re/mediation in their models, else they will likely end up describing less a model of subjects in a virtual world, then describing the base assumptions of their observations or experiments yet again.

Citations

Delanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory And social complexity. Continuum.

Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies (G. Genosko, Trans.). London: Athlone Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social : An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press, USA.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard Univ Pr.

Latour, B., & Porter, C. (2004). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Harvard Univ Pr.

Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge.

Maltzahn, K. E. V. (1994). Nature as landscape: Dwelling and uderstanding. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Suarez, D. (2009). Daemon. Dutton Adult.

Veblen, T. (1990). The evolution of the scientific point of view. In The Place of science in modern civilization. Transaction Publishers.

On October 6, 2008, IBM will be sponsoring a free one-day workshop in Washington, DC on high performance computing for humanities and social science research.

This workshop is aimed at digital humanities scholars, computer scientists working on humanities applications, library information professionals, and others who are involved in humanities and social science research using large digital datasets. The session will be hosted by IBM computer scientists who will conduct a hands-on session describing how high performance computing systems like IBM’s World Community Grid can be used for humanities research.

The workshop is intended to be much more than just a high-level introduction. There will be numerous technical demonstrations and opportunities for participants to discuss potential HPC projects. Topics will include: how to parallelize your code; useful tools and utilities; data storage and access; and a technical overview of World Community Grid architecture.

Brett Bobley and Peter Losin from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities have been invited to discuss some of the NEH’s grant opportunities for humanities projects involving high performance computing.

If attendees are already involved in projects that involve heavy computation, they are encouraged to bring sample code, data, and outputs so that they can speak with IBM scientists about potential next steps for taking advantage of high performance computing. While the demonstrations will be using World Community Grid, our hope is that attendees will learn valuable information that could also be applied to other HPC platforms.

The workshop will be held from 10 AM – 3 PM on October 6, 2008 at the IBM Institute for Electronic Government at 1301 K Street, NW, Washington, DC. To register, please contact Sherry Swick, sherry@us.ibm.com. Available spaces will be filled on a first-come, first served basis.

More about the World Community Grid

World Community Grid, a philanthropic initiative developed by the IBM Corporation, offers researchers a unique opportunity to accelerate the pace of their work while also mobilizing people worldwide around critical social issues.

Launched by IBM in November 2004, World Community Grid uses grid technology to harness the plentiful, underutilized resource of PCs and laptops to support humanitarian research. Today, volunteers around the globe have donated the computational power of close to 1 million PCs; World Community Grid is harnessing their power when the computers are on but not in use to help advance promising research. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.

World Community Grid is available free-of-charge only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of IBM’s commitment to advancing human welfare, all results must be published in the public domain and made public to the global research community. Current research partners include The Scripps Research Institute, The University of Texas Medical Branch, New York University, University of Washingon, French Muscular Dystrophy Association, the University of Cape Town and The Ontario Cancer Institute.

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Looks like Ill be at this:)

some insights into why moodle might work in elementary…. and other schools, better than blackboard.

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weee, cool little install video

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of course it isn’t translated to english, but…. it is an e-text.

kongregate for casual games…

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Pentabarf is a conference management system. it looks pretty nifty… it is a rails program.

They keep gameplay simple, but the play is brilliant.

Dubbed Project Darkstar, the Java-based software lets developers create a variety of games that can be accessed through a single-server framework. Sun has been a supporter of online and mobile gaming, chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos said. And Project Darkstar will be an “important technology foundation in the exploding multiplayer online game marketplace.”

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this will be a great boon for educational games.

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this is a good presentation about intellectual freedom, the the freedom to create and innovate.