Lori Kendall — Hanging out in the Virtual Pub
I recently finished this book (see my wiki summary). Kendall provides an interesting and personal account of life in a virtual world and provides insights in the types of people that gather there, their interactions and the relations that they develop.
The MUD surroundings described struck me as being very similar to a lot of in-crowd IRC channels. These are made up of a group of people, social codes, symbols, boundaries and automated actions encounters and the likes. Such a channel can have the same community characteristics.
More recently online worlds such as the MUDs described have been migrated to realistic and compelling virtual reality worlds. This movement has always been present if you look at the early attempts of creating VRML worlds and avatar based interaction.
But I think those early attempts showed clearly that technology was not yet sufficiently mature for this kind of sophisticated interaction.
Second Life Most similar to MUD style interaction Second Life is becoming increasingly popular with a growing number of internet users (I have to try this out).
Second Life also sporst user generated content as one of its main features. Users are free to create their own avatars, various objects and also buildings on land they own all to their own design. Because it is not in everybody’s ability to make these objects, people who can do this will offer their services up for trade.
There also is a lively trade of services which is paid for in an online currency called Linden Dollars (L$). This currency is tradeable for real money on an exchange. The amount of money exchanged monthly is valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Wikipedia, CNN, Second Life).
World of Warcraft The in game play is in a lot of cases in character and very much story oriented (I think) but a lot of people that are closely bound in the game already have prior relations and have agreed to meet up in the game or they strike up more casual contact using any of other internet communication means (if only to agree upon on which times to run together).
Some of my colleagues play WoW and they sometimes run together or they compare their level rankings with each other.
