Space and Culture current issue

The Geography of Virtual Worlds: An Introduction

Gordon, E. — 2008-07-30

Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement

Gordon, E., Koo, G. — 2008-07-30

This article describes a pilot program in Boston, Massachusetts, that incorporates virtual worlds into the urban planning process. The authors argue that the immersive, playful, and social qualities of the virtual world Second Life are uniquely appropriate to engage people in dialogue about their communities. By sharing experiences of a planned space and having the opportunity to deliberate over, comment on, and alter that space, previously disempowered individuals are able to form politically powerful groups. This takes place through the formation of what the authors call placeworlds, a subgroup of the Habermasian lifeworld that is organized around the shared understanding of place. Second Life and similar virtual world platforms offer profound possibilities for how local communities can imagine themselves as political actors in the face of global and homogenizing political systems.

Datascape: A Synthesis of Digital and Embodied Worlds

Kabisch, E. — 2008-07-30

Digital and synthetic worlds are often conceived as self-contained entities that exist in abstracted and remote spaces. The author elaborates an approach to hybrid space that instead focuses on local contexts of digital information correlated with the embodied spaces people inhabit—an informational substrate that both describes and regulates human activity. The author presents a mobile interactive art installation as a way to bring geographically referenced information out of databases and into everyday experience of traveling through the world. Datascape enables a hybrid ecology whereby participants author dynamic geographic narratives that compose a digital world coextensive with the planet Earth. A vehicle-mounted digital periscope engenders action between passengers and a visual and sonic landscape that unfolds and emerges based on conversations between people, data, and dynamic representational entities that compose the landscape. By allowing people to view and interact with information descriptive of the location in which it is encountered, Datascape enables awareness of and engagement with the hybrid digital/physical spaces people traverse and inhabit in their everyday lives.

The Experience of Embodied Space in Virtual Worlds: An Ethnography of a Second Life Community

Bardzell, S., Odom, W. — 2008-07-30

The article examines the mutually constituted relations among avatars, space, and artifacts represented in a Gorean community in Second Life. Combining virtual ethnography (i.e., participant observations and in-depth interviews) with the growingly important concept of experience design in human—computer interaction, the authors explore and unpack the spatial experiences of participants in the community and, with them, the grammar and symbolism of power and submission, of private and public, and consider body as a place for social inscription. The spatial experiences of these participants shed light on the nature of this community (both social and computer-mediated interactions) and help explain why virtual simulation of Gorean fantasy is such a compelling form of play and source of intimacy and emotion for thousands of Second Life residents.

Spatial Regimes of the Digital Playground: Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices in Computer Games

Lammes, S. — 2008-07-30

In this article, the author investigates how computer games can be understood as sociospatial practices. Although spatiality has always been considered a central quality of any digital game, cultural and social functions of space have not been much theorized in relation to games. This article furthers a discussion on how they can be understood as spatial practices by proposing a first approach that makes an analysis of games as sociospatial practices possible. It introduces the concept of magic node as a manner to facilitate such a study of games. A case study of cartographical practices in real time strategy games exemplifies how games can be approached as such magic nodes.

The Case for Education in Virtual Worlds

Nesson, R., Nesson, C. — 2008-07-30

This article is a practical, often ethnographically based, argument for the current value and future potential of virtual worlds in education that attempts to specifically address the concerns and reservations of the many thoughtful educators and observers who are not yet convinced. It relates our experience teaching the course `CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion` at Harvard and in Second Life and the principles for successful teaching in a virtual environment that we derived from it: (a) use the technology for what it is good for and not for what it does not do well, (b) seek advantages in what appear to be limitations, and (c) where new capabilities are offered, find ways to use them.

Obliterating Informal Space: The London Olympics and the Lea Valley: A Photo Essay

Edensor, T., Christie, C., Lloyd, B. — 2008-07-30

Caroline Christie and Bobby Lloyd have regularly photographed the Lea Valley London Olympic site since 2003. In 2006, they were joined by Tim Edensor for a day of walking and exploring. This article has emerged from this event as well as reflections on the photographs featured here. The area is one of the few remaining informal spaces in London, and the variegated activities and experiences it offers are being replaced by the giant Olympic development. The authors particularly focus on forthcoming loss: of the sensual experience of space, of the numerous possibilities for often improvisatory spatial practices, of an immanent and playful engagement with materiality, of a nondesigned and alternative spatial aesthetics.