A Virtual World Aesthetic
I’ve often thought that there’s a set of things that become interesting if you work in virtual worlds that collectively might comprise an aesthetic. Things like avatars, anime, dolls, theater, economies and reward systems, cosplay, gachapon and Burning Man. This is evidenced often for me in the Flickr feeds of my friends and colleagues
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My Son Theo looking very "virtual world"
I’m not sure what any of these have in common, but clearly there’s a shared set of principles, both aesthetic and rules-based that are predominant in virtual worlds but are beginning to assert themselves in the real world. As a father, what I find fascinating is how much these principles have to do with very childlike impulses for role-play. Also, as a father, I must confess that we are using virtual world principles to raise our children. Most of this is done by all parents (”If you pee in the potty you can have a candy”). The question is really how much you raise the bar. Right now, Theo has a whole economy that he’s defined, which measures his good deeds (sharing, being a good listener, etc.) and gives him stars. He can spend these stars as he wishes. Last week he traded in 20 for a $14 skateboard. Anyway, does anyone see these linkages? Is there a virtual world aesthetic?
November 12th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I think you really get to the soul of the question when you talk about how it carries over with your kids. One of the most incredible things about kids is their willingness to take risks and to be creative. To give it a go, to ask the question, to try something new, and to pursue the unrealistic.
Fundamentally, I think virtual worlds are - for adults- a portal back to those behaviors. The causes? There are A number. One though is most likely exposure. After all, what better way to pick up some of those traits than to work, operate, socialize and interact with young children and people of all ages cooperatively and as equals?
Also, it creates a safe “imagined” world where even adults can let lose, take a risk, don an avatar and embrace the creative and curious impulses they might otherwise ignore and suppress.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I see two separate threads running through the things you identify. One of those is the answer to the question, how do people behave when you (almost completely) abolish scarcity and coercion? The other’s an aesthetic proper, a shared cultural visual language of bright/colorful/fun/affordable/new.
For the first, if you take people raised in (relative) affluence and autonomy, and take away the onerousness of earning a living, they make stuff, show off and (mostly) help each other.
Add in the second and you get *what* they want to make and do.
The native speakers of that aesthetic language are already there. What’s interesting is watching others try to learn that language.
Enterprise is doing pretty well; the benefits are hard to ignore.
Education is flailing; much of their mission, after all, has been to stamp out that sort of behavior in their charges, and while they want to be more like an enterprise, old habits die hard.
The military is profoundly drawn to it, but what on earth will come of a mashup of *those* two aesthetics? Some of the most interesting questions are there.
What’s also interesting is whether those two threads necessarily combine, whether you could get post-scarcity behavior with some other aesthetic, whether the combination is an accident of history or if something links them at a deeper level.
Understanding that could be important in designing future worlds, or in reaching out to include speakers of other aesthetics, past what seem to be natural limits to growth in VWs right now…
November 13th, 2008 at 3:37 am
As lead and co-founder of Koinup, I can say that one of the main thought every time I look at the streams of photos-videos produced by the Koinup communities is exactly upon the “virtual aesthetics”. Does exist something as a virtual world or metaverse aesthetics? and what we have beyond Second Life? What are experimenting people in the rest of metaverse? Are they creating something original and valuable or not?
Probably this is one of the reason because we decided some weeks ago to launch a cross-world picture contest, devoted to Avatar Art: http://www.koinup.com/contest/avatarart/
The idea behind the contest was that the most probably if there is something like virtual world-metaverse aesthetics it is something around the avatar and the use of the avatar as a canvas for artistic and creative expression…..
Btw, there is an hypotesis behind the All Koinup Challenge (not only the contest). The hypothesis is that probably Virtual World Art or Aesthetics is something that is growing up in the tons of user generated contents, more than in the corporate and big firm graphics and aesthetics choices……
November 14th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Pierluigi –
That’s super interesting that you’ve wondered the same thing and also interesting that you attribute it more to UCC rather than corporate, polished work. Is the virtual world aesthetic, by your definition, sort of the digital equivalent of folk art?
I’m going to look at the conference entries now — thanks for reading and commenting and good luck with Koinup.