Uru inspired landscape in Second Life
Can virtual worlds and games make us reflect on fundamental issues of humanity? Yes of course, and it was proven during the latest Metanomics show where Dr. Celia Pearce (pdf) told us about the Uru Diaspora.
Celia is the director of the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech.
The Uru are a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds such as There.com and Second Life, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees,” and referring to Uru as their “homeland.”
I quote here from the abstract which can be found on Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab:
The study referenced concerns the largest group of Uru refugees, who immigrated into the virtual world There.com. These players developed unique hybrid cultures other games, including the creation of Uru-inspired digital artifacts, and through an eventual process of “transculturation” (Ortiz 1947) eventually transformed from “Uruvians” into “Uru-Thereians,” integrating both virtual places into their collective identity.
Through this example, Pearce will argue that in the current historical moment, in which connections between identity, community and place are being supplanted by the generic placenessness and identilessness of “global markets,” the tendency of players in the Uru Diaspora to construct a shared, place-based identity may reflect a larger need by individuals to associate themselves with affinity groups and reclaim a sense of connection between a specific locality (place), community and identity.
There is also a podcast available about this research and a powerpoint presentation which you can find here.
During the Metanomics show Celia told us how the Uru Refugees try to keep their culture and identity in the diaspora but had to confront resistance by their new neighbors in There.com because the groups of refugees were so large they slowed down the system.
On the other hand, the virtual objects the refugees made in their typical Uru style were appreciated by non-Uru avatars, who acquired similar objects using them outside the cultural Urua context.
All of which reminded us the diaspora of the Jewish people and their problems trying to establish themselves. It raises important questions about how identity and place are related, how real fictive identities can be and how fictive real identities, how scarcity of resources leads to conflict and how cultural artifacts can get new meanings.
Professor Robert Bloomfield suggested to use virtual environments in order to develop “experimental anthropology”, a suggestion which lead to much discussion.
Read also:
The transcript (and watch the video) on Metanomics (soon to be posted)
Discovering the Age of Crafty Knowledge in Second Life (my previous post, about the other guest in the show, the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff)
Roland Legrand
