Liquid Learning

Waiting for myself

An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?

I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels opening for blogging; twitter, web-browsing, SL to Flickr, audio, facebook links, and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both AndyPowell and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life.

So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps a fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

How tall is tall in Second Life?

Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough. In virtuality it was a more challenging competition than I envisaged.

Building in SL requires a number of skills: knowledge of the client interface, the ability to interpret the ‘build’ dialog boxes, good camera controls and a design based visual grammar that can adjust to a 3D working space. Complicate this mix by making it a cooperative task and the constraints of SL as a tool for collaboration start to become uncovered. The permissions structure in SL means that object sharing is problematic and needs to be solved if team building is going to be effective. To progress, clear communication channels between avatars needs to be established, not a straightforward matter when the main chat window is clogged with the noise from competing parties busy issuing each other instructions and encouragement.

From my perspective as judge and referee it felt like 15 minutes of mayhem. Thankfully, towers did appear out of the chaos and the most productive builders were those who in the end chose to go it alone. It was also a great insight into how to design a creative activity for a virtual environment such as SL. The issues that needed to be addressed (and were forgotten by me) were around scaffolding the activity – ensuring there were a set of baseline competencies in place from which creativity could emerge. Next time I will make sure:

•    the instructions (and supporting resources) are given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here;
•    time is allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem;
•    that I do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area;
•    that if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams.

Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.

Thankfully here the entire session did not go completely awry and towers were wrought from SL’s basic prim set.  Congratulations to Art Fossett who was awarded the winners prize – a ‘Ruth’. Of course we will be expecting him back next year, or perhaps at the next social, to defend his title.

See the full photostream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenwbohm/tags/towers/

and other snaps here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubistscarborough/tags/em0608/

MUVEs and Second Lives

This was a presentation given at the annual King's [College London] Institute of  Learning and Teaching conference, a mainly internal affair aimed at highlighting current educational research within the institution and disseminating good practice. The talk itself formed a general, if critical, introduction to Second Life as a social virtual world and articulated the abundant issues that make SL a challenging yet compelling arena for teaching activities. What was noticeable when putting together these slides was just how *much* is going on in SL, to the extent it was difficult to capture the richness in a short session like this. One of the key threads that ran through the talk considered how the first phase of simply diving in-world and trying things out is being extended by a second phase of serious research activity - evidenced by the number of grants that have been  secured by new projects such as MUVEnation, (Open)Habitat and LLL3D. Some of the early empirical data gathering that I have carried out with fellow researcher Margarita Perez-Garcia has been a study of the non-formal learning opportunities made available to SL citizens in the form of hands-on workshops. The emphasis in this work has been to explore how teachers in short duration SL competency building classes have appropriated virtual spaces and have made use of tools and techniques that may be valuable in understanding what good practice is in MUVE-based teaching. The slides show the culmination of the preliminary data analysis in the form of a taxonomy of practices and a matrix that elaborates four areas of teaching that are formed by axes addressing control of the environment and pedagogical approach. The conclusions are that good practice in these workshops is exemplified by maintaining a close control over the teaching space combined with a reflective and  process orientated  teaching approach.

| View | Upload your own

Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy

At the Berlin Educa Online conference back in November 2007 I started to tackle the problematic issue of identity and identity play in Second Life. I have been consistently fascinated by what I consider one of the key attractions and confusions of SL, namely the ability to slip into another shell and build a unique presence - within what is arguably the richest and most diverse virtual setting at the present time. A large topic for a short talk - so I took a particular focus on one aspect of avatar identity: how we develop a ‘relationship’ with our avatar. Relationship may sound like an odd word to use but I choose this deliberately as for me it captures something of the  discourse that we often read when we talk about our second lives or indeed the characters we build within other online worlds (see ‘Alter Ego: avatars and their creators’ http://www.alteregobook.com).

From  analyses of blog posts and mailing lists, interviews in-world and face-to-face workshops, and from my personal experiences I discovered common threads that run through many narratives in the evolution of avatars. A number of critical points in the development of this relationship over time could be clearly identified in this mapping activity:

The graph 'Development of avatar identity and empathy in MUVEs' is the visual result of this mapping activity and gathers together these key moments along a continuous time-line that stretches from the beginnings of entering the world of SL to the point of rupture where a second avatar may be spawned to cope the complexities of changing identity in-world. The x axis time-line is plotted against a y axis that I have called 'investment' and represents not simply the amount of time we invest in 'working' on our avatars but also the sense of empathy we begin to develop with our virtual other. Running along the time-line there are two drop-out thresholds marked towards the beginning of this path, where technical, competency and 'care' barriers if not surmounted often result in no further or very limited in-world activity. Beyond these points we trace multiple and changing trajectories that reflect the often complex relations we build with our avatar. On the right-hand side three phrases of being in-world are marked out: exploration, professional activity and playfulness which as can be seen in the detailed description below as often antagonistic to one another:

1. Technical and competency threshold: The early technical and competency barriers can undoubtedly be severe for many, to the extent that even when a powerful enough graphics card and a connection with adequate bandwidth have been located, newly formed denizens enter the world only to find themselves trapped on orientation island. The competency requirements for SL are often understated and form a bewildering mix of manual dexterity, games-based visual grammar and client interface navigation that demand serious and determined attention to master. In a recently published student survey, Steve Hornik posted a reflective response to what were in effect a series of negative comments on the use of SL in his accounting course that illustrate just how frustrating to students these early steps can be:
   
   

   "I did not use it that often because it was hard to understand and was too slow on my computer. I could not grasp how to use it well."

   "Honestly, I got so confused trying to simply walk and talk to people that I just ended up getting frustrated."

   Such comments serve as a reminder to all of us who are rushing forwards to introduce such cutting edge technologies into our learning and teaching settings. This situation is not atypical as Judy Robertson reports in a recent post where she came head to head with the technical difficulties that can plague efforts even at the institutional level:

   "We have two multimedia labs full of computers which are meant to be our souped up fast computers for this module. Alas, these computers meet only the minimum spec for SL but not the recommended spec. This is the difference between a happy well adjusted lecturer and a raving maniac. The computers keep crashing. Sometimes they run terribly slowly. And to add to the circus, there were intermittent network problems. The upshot of all this was that the students got frustrated."

2. Threshold of care:  One of the most difficult moments to pin down in the process of building a virtual identity. It marks a fuzzy boundary beyond which we begin to feel an emotional pull towards our virtual self and yes, we start to care about our avatar. Our creation has become an entity, even a personality, in its own right. How does this happen and how is this possible? The clearest way of understanding this process is one that touches mainly, though not exclusively, on the concepts of social and cultural capital: the building of friendships and connections; becoming part of a community; purchasing artifacts that increase our avatar's aesthetic appeal; a variety of other cultural exchanges and physical engagements that can be as simple as building ones own in-world residence and holding a house warming party.
   
   
3. Schism: As our in-world interactions become more elaborate and diverse a moment is reached where we feel a tension between our single avatar and the multiple roles that our virtual self is able to adopt. We may exist as both a playful representation of our selves alongside a virtual presence that is comprehended as an extension of our professional lives. SL offers a vast range of highly developed sub-cultures and communities that are fun, enlightening and self-revealing to explore yet these require a level of engagement that does not always sit easily with a professional demeanor. Spending time as a neko, vampire, furry, Gorean slave or participating in other roleplaying spaces that  have corresponding dress-codes, social norms and modes of behaviour may begin to sit uncomfortably within the embodiment provided within a single avatar.
   
   
4. Managed instablity: This describes the ongoing flux between playful and professional modes of in-world existence that is, for example, revealed in lengthy discussions amongst educators (cf. SLED list) of what represents a professional appearance in SL with questions posed that tackle seemingly mundane issues of where to purchase 'correct' outfits for teaching and the 'correct' anatomical and visual configuration we expect of students, visitors and tutors alike. As 'AJ' comments (reproduced with kind permission from an original SLED list posting) this in-world tension may result in real-world action:
   

   "Beyond the psycho-babble, the reason for more than one avatar was quite simple.  At the point where my employer, a state institution, began paying the bills for my work as AJ Brooks, I felt it necessary to have a second avatar.  First off, I felt it was the ethical thing to do. Second, I wanted a CLEAR distinction between what I was doing for work and what I was doing for myself, on my own time."

   
   
5. Multiple avatars: Diverse personal definitions of self and approaches to this play/work border are clearly visible in SL profiles. Statements are found that on one hand appear to mark sameness - 'I am my avatar' - and yet on the other hand celebrate difference and possibility - 'Keep SL in SL and RL in RL'. The struggle to stabilise the tensions between multiple modes of existence within a single frame can lead to the spawning of a second avatar - a blank persona that can act as a safety valve allowing these multiple states to co-exist. Multiple avatars in effect offer multiple channels for reflecting the range of roles and identities that we take for granted in our everyday existence. This can be a liberating experience for many as it suddenly frees the creator from the behavioural pressures that dominate formal settings even when they are translated into our virtual and imaginary worlds. Multiple avatars also form part of a strategy for addressing digital reputation management issues that are currently underexposed but of increasing importance to those of us who live and work in virtual spaces.

Many of the moments described above are particularly well summed up in the SLED list post below, reproduced with kind permission from 'AJ', who describes the reasons behind the creation of his small team of avatars:

"I have three avatars. AJ Brooks is my first avatar, 1st rez date coming up in January.  This is the avatar I first came into SL with and to this day use AJ for all things work related.  AJ has never really been one to "socialize" as some of my non-education friends do, such as going to clubs, puttering around, etc...  I did, of course, visit a number of places when I first came in and didn't have a "home", but now when I go out to visit someplace, at least as AJ, it is purely business.  AJ's base of operations is the CHSS Island and is normally on from 9-5 M-F, except when needed for teaching purposes (I use AJ as the avatar for my classes also) and for conferences, etc...  AJ looks a bit like me in so much as I tried to keep facial features similar, height, and hair color also, although I will admit that he is slimmer and a bit more chiseled than I. Very recently, having run out of groups, not being able to drop any more from AJ, but needing to work with faculty, etc..., I needed to start a third avatar, an alt that would be purely a "CHSS Island maintenance guy".  I've shared land ownership, buildings, etc..., plus use that avatar for creating groups related to CHSS business.  This avatar is currently a cyborg but could certainly take another shape, but would probably not be a human form.  This is purely a utility.
Wealthy Mizser is my second avatar and owns an art gallery on Avendale called The Gallery Beleza at Avendale and also own a home on Nevi, which is also one of the five sims that make up the Avendale community.  Wealthy is usually on after 5pm and on the weekends.  Wealthy is blonde with blue eyes has a body worth every linden (as opposed to having to slave for hours at the gym, which is very non-virtual), and is definitely the one to attend a party or other social event, or even to poke around places around SL that really have nothing to do with The Gallery."

Where next? This study marks the starting point for a series of other ongoing investigations that include a review of the social nature of profile building in SL as well as a more detailed engagement with competency frameworks. So ... more to come.

Making the right MUVE

After a squeezing a few free minutes this morning I have found found time to publish the first set of slides from the Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm held in October 2007. The workshop itself focussed on using the tools that I have described in my previous two posts and included work on identifying critical factors impacting on the introduction of ICTs into educational settings that has been initially presented here by Margarita Perez-Garcia on her personal site, 'espheres identitaires'.

Workshop presentation: Making the right MUVE:

| View | Upload your own

 

Virtual environments and game-based learning

These presentations form part of a double workshop given alongside Margarita Perez-Garcia at the recent 6th Open Classroom Conference held in Stockholm from October 24th to 26th 2007. The title for this particularly lively session was “Second Life beyond the hype: taking real world education into virtual spaces, a recipe for failure?”. Audience participation was high and the discussions that precipitated from each of these position pieces provided valuable insight into how and where educators see the current state of play with regards to using MUVEs (such as Second Life) in educational contexts. As with all emerging technologies, the understandings elaborated during the one and half hours stemmed as much from reflections on technology i.e. metaverses in use, as from the design principles that lie behind many 'narrative free' virtual world offerings. In light of this, much of the session concentrated on pragmatics, taking apart the current rhetoric on MUVEs that seems to promise a 'do anything', 'be anything' alternative reality.

 

Presentation 1: Virtual vanity: sex, shopping and reputation in Second Life

| View | Upload your own

 

Presentation 2: MUVEs: technical state-of-play and their future potentialities

| View | Upload your own

 

Further details of the workshop and other resources can be found on the newly launched Prism(lab) site.

 

MUVEnation, motivating pupils, linking teachers through active learning with Multi-User Virtual Environments

After a successful bid into the last round of the EU Life-Long Learning call a new project on Multi-User Virtual Environments and active learning will be starting in December this year involving a group of  seven European partners. The funding of this project is further evidence of the increasing interest amongst not only educational researchers but also the major funding organizations in exploring the potentialities of 3D virtual worlds for learning and teaching. This type of large scale endeavour will be particularly valuable in building  a strong evidence base to support the  perceived affordances that virtual worlds offer as a new new modes of social interaction in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

Partnership:

• University of Macerata, IT, Promotor
• MENON Network, BE, Coordinator
• FIM New Learning, DE
• Florida Centre de Formació, ES
• Agence Départementale du Numérique des Pyrénées Atlantiques, FR
• King's College London, UK
• University of Reading, UK

Project overview:

Based on the potential and opportunities afforded by active learning approaches combined with Massive Multi-Users Virtual Environments (MUVEs) as effective solutions to inspire and engage learners and foster motivation, the MUVEnation project's general aim is to contribute to explore, analyse, develop and evaluate within context the effectiveness of this innovative way of teaching and learning with regard to some of the problems of the educational system such as pupils motivation and participation. MUVEnation is founded on the so called 'teachers' effect” on educational innovation and its approach is to explore the promising potential of active learning approaches integrated to MUVEs by starting from the analysis of some major educational problems such as the lack of motivation and find how their integration in education can effectively foster pupils' motivation and participation.

Therefore the MUVEnation project seeks to develop a European peer learning program for teacher training for the use of “Active learning with Multi-Users Virtual Environments to increase pupils' motivation and participation in education”. By doing so, MUVEnation seeks to encourage the development of teachers' metacognition strategies, problem solving, critical thinking and professional judgement so they will get used to make decisions about which technology to use for which students, how to do it, and how to judge the effectiveness of its use. The main objective of the program is to develop in-service and future teachers' competencies and skills so they can contribute by their innovative practice to bring solutions into their environments to increase learners motivation and participation in key fields of common interest in Europe such as the participation of girls in mathematics, science and technology; boys and literacy; the participation in education of children and young adults with disabilities; the combat against dropouts; the cross-fertilisation between informal and formal learning environments; and the smooth and successful transition between school and work. .

The project's specific objectives are:

•    To develop inductive-deductive learning experiences, methodologies, materials and tools that will support the ‘intellectual scaffolding’ needed to integrate MUVEs into the classroom by exploring the nexus between ICT, learning and motivation, and application of active learning methodologies (e.g. Buzz groups, affinity groups, solution or critic groups, ‘teach-write-discuss’, critique sessions, role-play, debates, case studies and integrated projects);
•    To implement technological solutions allowing enhanced online social interaction for the peer learning community of teachers;
•    To set up the peer learning community of teachers in order to carry out the following activities:
•    to identify and analyse training needs of in-service European educators who are running, or wish to run, educational projects in MUVEs in K-12 and middle and upper secondary education;
•    to collect and document good practices illustrating the use of active learning methodologies with MUVEs to increase pupils motivation and participation in education;
•    to design pedagogical patterns that give a solution for identified pedagogical problems in regard to pupils motivation and education in these new environments;
•    To guarantee the wide dissemination of the project's deliverables amongst European HE institutions, teachers’ training centres, teachers’ training and teachers’ networks and/or professional communities.

Amongst the concrete results of the project, we highlight, the peer learning community where 60-80 teachers will participate during 6 months, the inductive-deductive learning activities for prerequisites acquisition, the methodological frameworks for the needs analysis, the best practices collection and the pedagogical patterns design and development, the national collection of information in each country participating in the program, the European reports integrating the data collected during the activities, the teachers own reflection and assessment of the activities they have participated on and the online conference.

Panic: voice kills textual play in SL

Most people (well SLers) will have by now heard, read, blogged the recent announcement by Linden Labs on the introduction of 'Voice in SL'. This has provoked a somewhat wild and wide-ranging debate on the effects, both positive and negative, that this might have on the SL world and the relations between SL inhabitants ... and interestingly the relation between the self, avatar and anonymity when playing in-world. These debates were surfaced in an article in the Second Life Herald:

"... the way many residents feel about SL is that it's an *extension* of RL, and representing the 'self' in avatar form is logically a process of reflecting RL. Other residents see with clarity the almost endless possibilities available in creating an entirely different 'self' (or many selves) from their reality, sometimes extending that 'self' outside of the grid. The rest of us fall somewhere in between these two virtual extremes, or possibly have a foot in both camps (I do). When 'Voice' was announced, a huge outpouring of anxiety was expressed by those who, given their point of reference, felt it was no more than a mortal threat to their keeping the fantasy/anonymity element of SL safe. Others, although quieter, felt it was a positive, necessary step in the evolution of the platform. And of course the rest of us fell somewhere in between.

I made a very quick comment on the full article on the SL Herald blog but felt it worthy of revisiting here. The panic that seems to surround the introduction of voice as expressed by some parts of the SL community seem to me to be generally missing the point in that fundamental shifts in the discursive space of SL must stem from widespread adoption of audio. I question whether this is actually going to be the case? My analogy would be to take a closer look at another audio technology such as Skype. How many people choose to use Skype for text based interaction (IM) rather than voice? For me, voice or text preferences must be understood within the differing contexts within they operate or are indeed situated. In Skype, text/IM is very heavily used by nearly everyone despite the audio option ... why?. Here the subtle divide between partial-asynchronous/synchronous presence is one dimension that provides each communicative modality (voice or text) with a distinctly different texture. I predict (I hate predicting ... but anyway) that it will be the similar for SL and that the balance will be firmly maintained by the appropriatenesses of IM chat except to certain types of human interaction. For some reason there seems to be an assumption that 'voice' is just better than 'text' and somehow users will be forced or coerced by an unseen natural order into voice-based interaction. Why on earth would this happen? Technology is always situated ... there is no natural hierarchy!

[one might also choose a second example here and examine SMS versus voice in mobile phone use]

Paradise engineering

Recently, I have spent so much time 'in-world', exploring and living my Second Life that I have not actually been back long enough in Real Life to reflect and blog these experiences ... relying on room service and my trusty alarm clock to remember to eat and sleep. Ok, so I exaggerate, but this is not as flippant a comment as it might seem.

Talking with others both inside and out of SL then a pattern of use is emerging which on the surface is quite astonishing. Hours and hours a day being spent within this seductive virtual environment, hanging out, socialising, building, going to concerts, flirting, working and so on and so on (building social capital). And as increasing numbers of corporate and public institutions continue to stake out their territories within SL  then the reasons to venture out into our bleaker and less colourful, more physically determined world (so it seems?) become less and less attractive ... other than to seek nourishment and ensure our continued bodily presence? Waking this morning and feeling an undeniable urge to slip back inside my digital persona I began to wonder if Huxley's "soma", the utopian wonderdrug of Brave New World, had arrived almost unnoticed, not as a pill but in the guise of a compelling massively multi-user 3D immersive world.

And what of this analogy? I leave it open to question. In Huxley's multi-layered tome (and I take a quote from one reading of the novel):

"A regimen of soma does not deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyse any mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way promote personal growth. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic "imbecile happiness" - a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom. The drug heightens suggestibility, leaving its users vulnerable to government propaganda. Soma is a narcotic that raises "a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds."

Perhaps I am being inflammatory and negative - but then, perhaps not? I am as yet unsure.

Addiction, reality and SL

The addiction element in relation to games and the focus on virtual worlds (particularly gaming)is not new but this article with quotes from a SL representative (Director of Community Affairs - whatever that means) does spark a few thoughts.

"All the people in Second Life are quite real and their emotions and motivations are quite real so in that way it's much more like socialising in the real world than it's is going into a game of World of Warcraft where it's an entire fantasy world that's quite well constructed and has a definite story line to it. In Second Life you're dealing with real people and real emotions."

Hmm ... really? I think that some definition of 'real' (mentioned 5 times) might be needed here to unpack this quote. If, as it seems to me, the authenticity of the SL experience constantly needs to be defended by 'fans' (not just here but in many quarters) then the crude collapsing of SL and RL (Real Life) to justify this authenticity is a bizarre way to accomplish this. The most glaring disjuncture for me is simply is the naming of avatars, the lack of [RL] profiles and the almost obsessive desire of most SL citizens to avoid any link to their real world selves. Perhaps I am reading too much into this. Alternatively I suppose, if this is a statement purely about the relations within SL, then yes I might have more sympathy. I can see how it is possible to identify very strongly with an avatar and respond to SL interactions in ways that are both mediated by and understood within RL frames of reference or I guess - societal norms. What I find fascinating once again though is the inability of most to capture any kind of complexity around the meaning and affect of social presence within immersive environments coupled with a certain desperation to declare that this is not a 'game' it is 'real'.