Virtual Worlds, Machinima and Cooperation over Borders

Cooperation over borders between individuals and groups is possible using online three-dimensional virtual worlds. This cooperation occurs in the production of art, research, teaching and learning, and performance as well as in building social, professional and personal contexts. The borders that are crossed can be geopolitical, generational, spatial and embodied. In order to maintain coherence for people to meet, talk, build, write, perform and exchange in virtual worlds, a sense and understanding of place is required. Such human activities as meeting are reliant on a shared space and place. This chapter integrates the idea of sharing places in examples of how virtual worlds can provide common spaces and places from a series of projects involving art, documentation, teaching and communication. By using examples of one artist’s project and several machinima – videos made using screen-capture software on computers, to film places and avatar actors in virtual worlds – I argue these virtual worlds can enable cooperation over a variety of borders through sharing. Virtual worlds are multimedia, digital, three-dimension environments that are accessed simultaneously by multiple users represented as avatars - three-dimensional bodies in the world - that render in real-time and are synchronous, persistent and facilitated by networked computers. In virtual worlds Synchronous communication operates in real-time as a shared activity. Reliant on this activity is ‘the notion of a ’common time’ [that] allows for mass group activities and other coordinated social activities.’ Associated with synchronous communication, virtual worlds are also persistent, as when one logs out or leaves a location within the world, the world continues on regardless. A virtual world cannot be paused. Any action taken by an avatar in a virtual world becomes part of that world. Along with this holistic understanding, we can add that virtual worlds are places that perform a number of functions in common with those places our bodies interact with every day. The most obvious is they provide a location and a temporality. In doing so these technologies make it possible to transverse the geopolitical boundaries that nation states are based on. If we are to define virtual worlds as distinct places in terms of populations, the virtual world of World of Warcraft (WoW) has 10.2 million subscribers (Holisky), in Second Life (SL) approximately 800 000 logins are performed every month (Linden), and the teen-fashion world ‘Stardoll is the most popular, with 69 million registered users.’ In terms of economy, virtual worlds such as Second Life and Planet Calypso include the possibility to earn and spend money, own property, charge rent and operate a business. Economy, investment and some form of membership are all indicators of place-based presence in virtual worlds. What people who inhabit virtual worlds are part of is the metaverse, first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, which is defined as ‘a shared virtual social space with 3D capacity, but which in many instances does not represent to the user as 3D.’ Coincidentally the perception of three-dimensionality is not essential for the perception of place either. A place can be solely linguistically mediated, such as the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which later results in the numerous tours and monuments that have emerged from it in ‘real’ space. However, virtual worlds are mostly three-dimensional representations and within this spatial structure there is the linguistic mediation of place. Place is a complex and multidimensional concept, but central to any place is the ability to name it. A location without name is not a place; it is a site with coordinates and attributes. In going back to the earliest conceptions of …