In his lecture on Saturday, 08/07/10, Dr. Jeffrey Wimmer, researcher at the institute of media science and communication studies at Technische Universität Ilmenau with a focus on virtual worlds and digital games, provided an intensive insight in his collection of data and statistics done in 2006/07. A large amount of gamers and players of different agegroups and ranks had been surveyed concerning gaming practices and usage of virtual entertainment.

Jeffrey Wimmer’s presentation and research concentrated on online gaming as the MMORPG World of Warcraft – a fact, that already indicates one of the problems of researching computer games: although a mass phenomenon, scientific research proves as being extremely difficult, even limited. First of all the field of computer games is a huge one. For also casual and “simple” games as Virtual Chess or Solitaire are computer games – and these are also consumed by individuals which would not think of themselves as gamers or players, not even in the moment of playing Virtual Chess. A narrowing down of the object of investigation, as it is done by Jeffrey Wimmer’s project, which contains the gaming categories roleplaying, action, strategy and sports/racing, seems utterly expedient and necessary. To focus on social impact of computer games, Jeffrey Wimmer’s project also largely disregards privatly consumed single player and console games and centres on online games. To find out the disposition and constitution of their social relevance – and to provide scientific evidence of their “social impact” – the survey dealt with diverse categorising questions, which had been presented in statistics to the summerschool in Bremen during Jeffrey Wimmer’s lecture. Statistics concerning the disposition of gender and computer games as well as of agegroups and active playing time were, already with regards to content, considerably revealing relating to social relevance of computer games – for they actually were able to come up with surprising findings and conclusions.

By presenting his methodological approach and survey problems at the summerschool we got an interesting overview of different possibilities of approach to a research on computer games as well as empirical findings of the project, which pointed out that also academics are not immune against clichés and often not scrutinizing them. Above all, regarding the paradigms of questioning like distribution between sexes in the total proportion of computer game users or concerning gender-related distribution in genres as roleplaying or action games, it becomes evident how intensely a research for social and religious studies in virtual worlds has to consider „classical“ sociological approaches to meet its scientific claim.

My consideration in view of Jeffrey Wimmer’s quantitative statistics has been that a research of the social relevance of computer games has to be careful not to get caught in the trap of another popular cliché:  Social relevance and impact of computer games, cyberspace and virtual reality does, in general public, not arise until the level of excessive gaming has been reached – and its suppositional result of gamer’s social loss for the offline ambience and fellow men and women. Even though such cases, on the basis of their quantitative importance alone, have to be scientifically considered, the survey presented by Jeffrey Wimmer points out that in view of a distribution of gaming to almost each agegroup and with a extensive averaged expenditure of time for gaming, which remains comparatively constant, the average of an user and gamer has to be in the focus of researching interests.

As mentioned by Jeffrey Wimmer, the description and construction of the press regarding computer games – often discredited as initiators of addiction and a-social behaviour like violance or isolation – has significant impact not only on the public impression of computer games and their social relevance but – by acceptance and adoption of this impression – on the social impact of computer games itself, which is necessary to be included and kept in mind during the research.

So it seems more important to me in view of the popular clichés of an isolated, socially destituted, immobilised and addiction marked gamer of World of Warcraft to examine the transferred or at least virtually connected but, as Jeffrey Wimmer emphasized, in the survey proved social potential of, for example, online roleplaying games. Interview statements as presendet by Jeffrey Wimmer which refer to emotions of belonging and membership between online and virtually interacting gamers or even a game inspired, offline realized “clan” or statements of a sense of duty between online war cronies impressively point out how social structures are transferred into virtual space – and come back. Phenomena like clans demonstrate how borders between virtual and actual, physical worlds may be “destroyed“: what achieves social relevance in one space, may also develop relevance in the other. Of course this has not to be: Statements by gamers like they would not think about online stuff when offline are neither falsifiable nor verifiable – actually, in my opinion, only a psychological study would be able to give results concerning frequency of recurrence of online references during offline life.

As mentioned above, Jeffrey Wimmer presented the research categories of roleplaying, action, strategy and sport/racing games. In these categories, the RPG section had been the quantitative most important one. Related to the above expressed question for the specific relevance of computer games in the gamer’s every day life, if it is – as in case of extremely excessive gamers – that a game takes one or even the one explicit centre of somebody’s life, a certain question recurs: Annihilates the game the gamer’s social life, or does that relocate itself into the virtual space which has been accepted as new anexed world of living and accordingly has to be shaped? This part of the question is, regarding researches and findings of some social phenomena existing in World of Warcraft mentioned during summerschool, to be answered positively. But which role take the frank – or quested – shaping and configuration of the virtual world? And, regarding a research of religious structures and their tendency of strong and solid orientation and regularization in actual, offline life, what role play just the rules of the game, its in-game-hierarchies, its constructed world orders et cetera which a gamer probably decides to inherit when and after entering the game’s world and questing for positive experiences and progress?

Hence what kind of role do “classical” social aspects play in computer games? Jeffrey Wimmer’s study showed roleplaying games as more attractive than other genres: and they tend to have a lot of social space – as Guild Wars does – so they are supposed to present a concisely socially tagged construction. Qualitatively it should be of interest which adaptions of offline life systems prevail in virtual space – or in what way these systems get modified, maybe according to users’ and gamers’ preferences.

This notion is connected to another aspect of Jeffrey Wimmer’s lecture: targeting. Without doubt, computer game creation and development is based on industrial marketing and selling strategy and a branch of trade that orientates itself on its consuments. For example with regard  to the increasing number of “girls’ games”, based on pony riding or dress changing, it becomes apparent how the computer game industry handles stereotypes. But thinking of the social impact of video games: Do they also create stereotypes themselves?

Every leisure activity, especially those with a huge time consumption like online games, have an effect on their user. Particularly if they provide experience and joy, as it is the case with turn-based games, they may become systems of identification and orientation. Wimmer and Quandt’s article The Social Impact of Online Games: The Case  of Germany (Wimmer & Quandt 2009) even contains an interview statement, that games can be a compensation for a life that doesn’t seem to be liveable for a person. Looking at the far-reaching, but still traceable branching of gamer presence in the population, which is to large extend user and gamer itself, it can be noticed, that an interdependency between online and offline, virtual and actual world layers et cetera, like with the design and relocation of social structures in the virtual space, manipulation of identity and interdependent reception of stereotypes can be immense. But Wimmer’s classification by game genres and their quantity also shows that the research has to be done in a differentiating way. After this efficient lecture’s experience I personally doubt that overall statements about the influence of new media on society can be made. A specification to the respective medium, the online event, the virtual space, the virtual reality, the game genre et cetera is necessary.

Bibliography

Quandt, Thorsten & Wimmer, Jeffrey (2009). The social impact of online games – The case of Germany. In: Pantelli, Niki (Hrsg.): Virtual social networks. Mediated, massive and multiplayer sites. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 75-97.

At the Summer School ‘How Virtual is Reality?‘ in Bremen 2010, Vit Sisler lectured on Islam respectively Muslims in video games in general; Islamic educational video games and video clips from the Arab world, Iran and the United States. His aim -as articulated in his abstract- was to show how private companies try to claim those new markets of Muslim youth while promoting (their idea of) Islamic moral and ethical values in video games and edutainment software. Another aspect of his lecture was the significance of video games and such as an important but still under-examined aspect of cultural life, not only in the Middle East. For this purpose he calls on Walter J. Ong‘s concept of >secondary orality<, Ian Bogost‘s >persuasive games> and also >neglected media< coined by Philipp Reichmuth and Stephan Werning.

Ong’s idea of >secondary orality< is about the parallels between primary oral cultures and secondary oral cultures like our own. Secondary oral cultures are actually primary literate cultures which became more and more oral and aural again by means of new electronic communication media. The fundamental empathetic and participatory nature of orality itself shapes “new” forms of communities which show great resemblance to communities of primary oral cultures in their social interactions.

Bogost’s >persuasive games< on the other hand, is not only a concept which he articulated in his book Persuasive Games. The Expressive Power of Videogames but also a successful company by now which puts the concept to work. The idea of >persuasive games< is that games can and do shape people’s opinions.

Reichmuth and Werning’s >neglected media< pertains to media that has a strong impact on public and economic interest but is not (yet) of cultural or scientific importance. In addition to video games, other examples are comics, video clips or applications for smartphones (apps) etc.

Vit’s lecture was structured into a short introduction of himself and his interest in this particular field, the seven levels of his presentation in which he explained the different aspects of his research and one bonus level where he introduced http://www.digitalislam.eu, a very informative website and research project on Islam, digital media and the Middle East which he co-founded and nurtures as the editor-in-chief.

In his introduction, he showed us some screenshots of a game named ‘NATO Commander’ from 1984  which he played as an adolescent in Communist Czechoslovakia. The game was produced in the West and given the political circumstances at that time, the first mission was -of course- to bomb and destroy Prague, his hometown back then. The Muslim youth in the Middle East is in a similar situation nowadays. Most of the games they play there were produced in the West for a western public. They play those games because the games are fun and available but many of them show anti-Islamic biases, stereotypes and schematisations. Considering the fact that video games are a very widespread leisure activity all over the planet -becoming more and more regardless of age, cultural origin, gender and social class- and have a strong influence on identity construction and opinion shaping, this field of research is overdue.

Level 1

Level 1 of his presentation was about the methodology he uses. Here, the above mentioned concepts of >neglected media< and >persuasive games< were introduced next to the three game studies methodological zones which are audiovisual signifiers, narrative structures and Gameplay (game rules). In addition to that he showed and explained a ‘Petri Net Model’ for Computer Games Analysis which illustrates the different stages of the game and the player’s options of action at each stage. He started a group exercise to map such a ‘Petri Net Model’ for an ATM and the options given if you use it. At first, the task description was a little bit confusing so it took some time until every group figured out what to do exactly, but eventually it was a success. For me, trying that ‘Petri Net Model’ myself was very interesting but not that important and I think the time spent on that could have been used better to extend other parts of the presentation. I think Vit’s idea was to have an active part for the audience which is, of course, a good one and everybody was already a bit weary at the end of the wakeful summer school so the circumstances were suboptimal.

Level 2

Level 2 was titled ‘Representation’ and about how Muslims or Arabs are represented in video games made in the West. Vit showed some screenshots of games e.g. ‘Prince Of Persia‘ (1989), ‘Harem Adventure‘ (2003), ‘Battle In Sadr City‘ (2005)  and ‘Assault On Iran‘ (2005). By means of these screenshots and some game-magazine descriptions about the different units in ‘Command & Conquer: Generals‘ (2005), he pointed out how strong the stereotypical generalizations in most of the video games produced in the West, really are. He used the term >digital orientalism< to describe the tendency in those games of constructing schematized oriental (all-cultures-in-one) characters in marked contrast to the ethnic and cultural diversity, the Islamic World in fact has to offer. The narrative and mission-structure of these games is often repetitive, racist and sexist (like save kidnapped women, kill evil viziers, etc.) There are, of course, exceptional cases like ‘Civilization IV‘ (2005) which show an attempt of the producers to represent different cultures in a more balanced way, but these exceptions are few and the mainstream looks different.

Level 3

In Level 3 titled ‘Self-representation’ Vit quoted the Central Internet Bureau of Hezbollah about the problematic representation of the Islamic World in western video games [url unreachable - http://www.specialforce.net/english/indexeng.htm]. He also gave some screenshot-examples of two games produced in the Middle East as alternative drafts to western games: Special Force (2003) [no url available] and Special Operation (2007) [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Special_Operation_85:_Hostage_Rescue]. Unfortunately, these games mostly just reverse the western stereotyped schematizations.

Level 4

The fast growing sector ‘Edutainment’ was introduced in level 4 of Vit’s lecture. He presented 3 different programs in which the creators tried to combine studying the qur’an and learning about being a godly muslim on the one hand and playing games on the other. ‘Al-Muslim as-saghir’ and ‘Al-Mughamirun’ are for kids while ‘Abu Isa’s A New Dawn‘ is a 3D space shooter which rewards the player with a random name of god.

Level 5

A full-fledged game, subject of level 5, is a game, in this Islamic context, that does not just copy games produced in the West, replacing the stereotyped anti-Islamic content with an also stereotyped pro-Islamic one. Full-fledged means that these games are commercially produced by a game developer just like their western counterparts. The example here was ‘Quraish‘ (2005) which is a real-time strategy game “about the origin of Islam”. The developers goal was to counter the negative image of Islam in the media and show its peaceful truth to the world. I am not sure if a game of war in which you have to build armies and attack and defeat the opposing forces of Islam at that time is the right way to do that, but its not my decision.

Level 6

Level 6 was about immersive worlds like Second Life and the Islam-themed places there. Vit showed some screenshots and a Petri Net Model of the virtual ritual possibilities for an avatar in Second Life.

Level 7

Our concluding discussion was level 7 of the presentation and, sadly, I can only remember my own question about how the reception of the game ‘Assassins Creed‘ (2008) was, in the Middle East. Vit told me that it was a success in the Middle East compared with other western games and that even the parents wanted to see the game to have a look at the famous mosques and other buildings.

All in all, it was a very interesting lecture and I will definitely track Vit’s upcoming work on http://www.digitalislam.eu, you should too by the way.    =0)

If you think about „Digital Games and Religion“ you don’t really expect the creation of board games, hence the teaching unit of Markus Wiemker was quite surprising.

An imaginary NGO concludes a contract to design a board or card game which transmits the message of peace and supports the tolerance for different religions. Before starting with the group work, we watched a short videoclip about the contract to gain an insight of the project. In small groups of four or five people, we had to agree on one of the many ideas we had in mind in order to figure out the rules for our game in the next step and create a prototyp of it.

We had access to a wide variety of materials, including colourful paper and even Playmobil-figures, but only one pair of scissors for all groups together, making the bricolage a bit difficult. All of these single stages of game creation were exactly discussed with Markus Wiemker, who walked around between the groups all the time. In the end we’ve created five completely different games, although four of them teach players to achieve peace by defeating the teammates.

I still don’t know why this teaching unit was called “digital games”, but to me, this doesn’t really matter since I had a lot of fun attending it. Of course, all the things we have learned from developing an idea in small teams, to reflecting our own creations (would anybody want to play my game more than three times, or is it just boring crap?), can be used for digital games, too. Sadly, there wasn’t enough time to play all the games, since some sounded very promising. But take a look on your own:

Freepoly

A version of Monopoly which doesn’t satisfy your capitalistic wishes. This isn’t about money, it’s all about influence. The streets of Jerusalem and important places like the Western Wall are the zones on the board, and the players don’t have to build hotels but to organize flashmobs and demonstrations to gain influence. The player with the most influence wins, because now he can accomplish his ambition to make the world a better place.

Second Life Paper Chase

Okay, this is a digital game, therefore I partially have to take back my critique about the teaching unit’s title. So of course we were allowed to make a digital game, if we had the tools and the knowledge to use them. For this game, a big board with challenge-zones was created in Second Life, the avatars themselves became the “pawns”. The cast of a digital dice decides the zone you have to go and which challenge you have to accomplish. There is a time frame of fifteen minutes for every challenge, for example to find a Christian in Second Life and ask him about his opinion on buddhism. The accomplishment of the challenge has to be proven by taking a screenshot before returning to the board to continue the game. The winner is the one who masters all the challenges and reaches the goal as first player. But be careful! As in many board games they last zone on front of the goal brings you back to the starting zone, and the dice might betray your luck.

Religion-Munchkin

This is card game works like an addon for the popular Munchkin-card game but with a little twist to it: Instead of looting the treasure with your dwarven mage after fighting the mighty plutoniumdragon, your hinduistic monk tries to defeat the bad stereotype „Every muslim is a terrorist!“
(This is a level 20 encounter like the plutioniumdragon!). Instead of races you get religions, instead of professions you get… well, you get professions, too, but they are different. So there are no fighters or a thiefs, but you can be a missionary or a priest. Every player starts as a level 1 agnostic and has to reach the 10^th level in order to win the game. The monsters you have to fight are religious stereotypes, for every fight you win, you gain a level and if you fail, you lose all of them and have to start again. But don’t be afraid of your hinduistic monk dying, he reincarnates at his old level.

No stoning, please!

This game is a 2D mix of Jenga and Tetris. A foursquare board serves four players as an arena to fight together against intolerance. Either all of them win or no one does. Every player has different types of tokens, which look like the typical bricks in Tetris, and every token stands for a different religion. For example, buddhism is the square one. Every player starts in his corner with a “religious mix” of all tokens and has to make his way to the center, queuing token after token. If a token of every player is in the center, the game is over and the players have won. At any time, they are allowed to add tokens to the other players queue instead of their own to help them out, but they get punished for connecting the same tokens (same religions), to add some extra difficulty. Every time this happens, a huge bulky stone of intolerance will be put at the board and blocks the way to the center, so that you have to build a way around it. If there are too many stones of intolerance in the game, the path to the center is blocked, resulting in a loss. So this game works as a metaphor of the principle: religious diversity leads to the goal.

Push the red button!

This board game is very similar to the popular strategy game Risk and advances tolerance by totally exaggerating the opposite. Each player embodies a religion and starts on his own continent. You randomly draw your victory prerequisite at the beginning of the game, for example, “Destroy all Christians!” and have to stick with it. It’s no problem to have the Islam between you and the Christianity, you are allowed to destroy everyone in yourpath to your (un-)glory victory. Once you have finished your crusade, you are all alone in the world. In order to achieve the total silence, you just have to push the red button, because being alone is not as great as it sounds at first glance. So to finish the game, the remaining player has to push the red button which “resets” the world by destroying all life. Let’s hope mankind will be smarter next time.

A lecture that deals with Computer games – The eyes of many people would light up immediately and they would start to listen with eager anticipation. I also was curious what Michael Waltemathe would tell us about „Religiousness and
God“ in Computer games.

The first part of the lecture dealt with the topic of religion in computer games. For that he chose three games as main examples to show how the topic might be placed and handled within a computer game.

The first one was the final sequence of Jedi Knight – Mysteries of the Sith. In the  sequence the character Mara Jade has to solve an encounter with her friend Kyle Katarn, who has been corrupted by the dark force. Before that final encounter she had to find her way to the center of the temple. During that she passed many pictures which described what two Jedis have to do in order to solve a conflict. One of this things is that the player learns that conflicts are solved by the abdication of violence. So in the final scene the only solution is at first not to cross the bridge to attack Kyle but to commit „suicide“. In the following scene a picture at one end of the thrown hall shows a kneeling Jedi with his switched off lightsaber in front of him. This is the final hint for the player – only if one condemns violence, one is a true Jedi. When Mara switches off her lightsaber Kyle is so moved by her confidence in their former friendship that he sees his failures and realizes the corruption by the dark force. In Waltemathes opinion this scene shows the central substance of the Star Wars universe where a Jedi acts in accordance to friendship, faith/reliance and devotion.
Only if one’s matters are seen as arbitrary one can become a good Jedi. The inspiration by some religions can be recognized in it’s absolute clarity in this scene. He used the term sledgehammer method for the approach of Mysteries of the Sith.

A different approach was chosen in Peter Molyneuxs game „Black and White“. Here the player actually plays a god whose aim is to get the people to worship him and to get them to do what he wants. This can be done by force if one puts fear into the hearts of the worshipers or if one commits acts of kindness towards them.

Another example given by him is „Resistance – Fall of Men“.  Here an additional moment concerning „religiousness and god in computer games“ takes place – The transformation of a sacred space into a profane one. This case happens in an alternative history where the cathedral of Manchester is a field hospital for the humans who had been attacked by aliens. The interesting thing regarding this case is what Waltemathe told us happened after the game was released.
At first the Church of England was appalled by the blasphemy of that act and sued Sony, the publisher of the game. But a by-product of the game was that many tourists streamed to the cathedral because they had seen it in the game and now wanted to see it in reality. In the end the Anglican church stated that as good Christians she should forgive the deed of Sony. And Sony on the other hand apologized for it.

Another game which should be mentioned here is „Left Behind – Eternal Forces„, a computer game which is based on the Left Behind series which has an evangelical background. Here Jesus, in analogy to the apocalypse in the revelation of John, takes the righteous one’s with him in an instant. And so planes fall from the sky and trains and cars crash, and so on. The sinners remain and have to fight the devil / Satan and his army who is represented by the Romanian leader of the UNO. Worth noting is the evangelical view concerning women as portrayed in this game. Men do everything from persuading to fighting but women can only heal men and sing to encourage them.

After these examples the lecturer switched to the topic of computer use by young people. So after the sweets always comes the water and the bread. But to his credit I have to say that we did not had to dig deep into the statistics
conducted by the “Medienpädagogischer Dienst Südwest” . But anyhow one should mention a few of the results here although they might give ammunition for prejudices.
The first result is that boys are playing more computer than girls about 1,5 h – 2 h a week vs. 47 minutes. Concerning the computer use as a whole girls use their computers more to write text, create presentations or do some video editing. And before I might forget it…according to the study it is true that half of the boys prefer to play shooters. I’m not sure at the moment because one can not see my friends as a representative group but I would like to formulate the guess here that the preference towards shooters might shift a bit to the so called “open world games” over time. And also the “casual games” which aren’t mentioned separately in the study might gain more importance in the near future. To conclude that I would like to say that due to lesser restrictions and more possibilities of technology use for it the landscape of computer games might change and evolve even more in our near future. But as I said that’s just some thought based on my perception of the changing of computer games since the 90s.

The next part of Waltemathes lecture was about his application of Alfred Schütz theory of life-world to computer worlds. He has done that in order to get a phenomenological look at the idea of using computers as media or tools for learning in religious education. Because this text here is a blog entry I would like to try to just give a sketch of Schütz
theory and its application to computer worlds. Schütz phenomenological approach of the life-world sees the World of working in daily life as the paramount reality or to say it in Schütz own words

the intersubjective world which existed long before our birth, experienced and interpreted by Others, our predecessors, as an organized world.

There are other worlds which constitute the life-world and which are mere modifications of the world of working in daily life in which one can leap for a period of time. These are, here already supplemented by later scholars:

• World of dreams
• Worlds of phantasies, especially the world of art
• World of religious experiences – added by Peter Berger
• World of scientific theorizing
• World of play, games and humor

The leaping process happens by experiencing something which Schütz called “a special shock experience”. For example the shock of faling a sleep when one leap into the world of dreams.

According to Schütz there are six characteristics of finite provinces of meaning for the world of working in daily life:

• specific tension of consciousness : wide-awakeness, originating in full attention to life
• specific epoché : suspension of doubt
• prevalent form of spontaneity: working
• specific form of experiencing ones self: the working self as the total self
• specific form of sociality: the common intersubjective world of communication
  and social action
• specific time-perspective: standard time between duree and cosmic time as the
  universal temporal structure of the intersubjective world.

In Waltemathes opinion this characteristics might be be applied to virtuality in life worlds. So far that means virtuality in life-worlds:

• specific tension of consciousness : wide-awakeness, leap to actions in virtual
  life and working in real life
• specific epoché : everything is possible except for the illogical in itself
• prevalent form of spontaneity : working is determined by my actions and
  performances in virtual life
• specific form of experiencing ones self : the working self is no longer the total
• specific form of sociality : the common intersubjective world of communication
  and social acon through less channels
• specific time-perspective : inner time

Between the different life-worlds are the so-called enclaves. The virtual worlds can be viewed as situated in the enclave amongst the World of Play and the World of Phantasms / Phantasies. Here the term ‘flow’ is of some importance because this term coined by the American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes

the optimal experience while someone is engaged in an activity with high involvement, concentration and enjoyment, and experiences an intrinsic motivation and the sense of time distortion.

This term can be attached to playing a game. Here one detaches temporarily from the world of daily life in this case the body and leaps to the World of Phantasies for example. With regard to religious experience in the life-world according to Peter Berger it can develop in at least four variants:

• Experiencing transcendence
• Trust in ones own experiences
• Epistemological Reversal
• Humor as an Epistemological Reversal

Especially the point of epistemological reversal is of some importance because it means that the World of religious experience can conduct a paramount change and for a person who experiences that the World of religious experience will become the one which in the standard scheme is the World of working in daily life.

After this remarks about Alfred Schütz theory and Waltemathes adaption of it he changed the topic to how one can actually apply that to computer games and education.Here he gave some examples of works he had done, for example the Calvin game. The idea of the so called Calvin game was that the player, who should revise an exhibition on the occasion of the 500 th  anniversary of the death of Calvin in 2064, learns about the legacy of Calvin by travelling with a time machine to different places to meet people who had known him rather direct or indirect. One of the ideas of that
game was to show the timelessness of Calvin’s idea.

The last part of the lecture was about virtual religious spaces and how pupils created them with the editor of a popular game – unreal. Here one example which I want to show at the end was really interesting. The situation is as follows: At the beginning the character is baptized and now has two options. The first is to go to Heaven the direct way or to rely on the free will. Now the char can either go to Heaven or Hell. But even though if one really chooses the Hell one can receive a cleaning and therefore start again at the moment of the baptism. So the so called free will is kind of tricked and a backdoor is used, so that salvation might come for everyone as shown by the picture below. Dear reader I hope that salvation is also still in store for the humble writer of this text.

Links for further reading and information:

• About the use of computer games for religious education with the example of Jedi
  Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (article in german) :
  http://www.theomag.de/24/miwa1.htm
• About Waltemathe and the way used by him to impart religion (article in german):
  http://www.pro-
  medienmagazin.de/?id=internet&news%5Baction%5D=detail&news%5Bid%5D=3136
• The same topic but from a non religious news perspective (article in german):
  http://www.heute.de/ZDFheute/inhalt/14/0,3672,8096750,00.html
• jim study by Medienpädagogischer Dienst about usage of computer etc. :
  http://mpfs.de/index.php?id=172
• Article by Waltemathe and Terno about Destination 2064 – the Calvin game (article in
  german): http//www.rpz-
  ekhn.de/cms/fileadmin/rpz/download/schoenberger_hefte/2009/Heft_1/37_Terno_Wa
  ltemathe.pdf
• The concept of the Calvin game by the same authors (article in german):
  http://www.calvinspiel.de/modul/calvin/files/Konzept.pdf
• The Calvin game: http://www.calvinspiel.de/

“Mediatized Worlds of Religion: Researching the Everyday Mediatization of Religion Empirically” was the title of the lecture on August 05. The professor Andreas Hepp of the University of Bremen talked to us about the importance of taking mediatization processes into account in our research projects. His lecture was aimed to provide us with the conceptual tools for that purpose. Hepp says there are two extreme positions with regard to the meaning of “mediatization”. The first one discusses mediatization as a “logic of the media”. According to this approach, there is one specific logic of the media, and what we can study is how actors and organizations accommodate to that logic. The second position on the contrary, contends that the society is shaped through a lot of acts of appropriation, interpretation, and resistance; not necessarily media related. Furthermore, the media-related pressures are too heterogeneous to be reduced to one media logic.

Andreas Hepp is in an in-between position: he shares the critiques against linear approaches to mediatization, but he does not share the rejection of mediatization theory as a whole: mediatization of certain cultural fields has to be investigated, but we should do it carefully in detail and without assuming a single “linear media logic”. The concept of mediatization becomes useful if we do not relate it to the assumption of one “media logic”, but understand it more generally as a frame for researching the relation between media and cultural change.

Hepp considers mediatization as a meta-process that cannot be researched empirically as a single transformation phenomenon. This is not difficult to understand, since it happens with other well known meta-processes. For example, the process of individualization, and the social change it entails, cannot be proven by any single survey. Rather, we have to understand it

as a meta approach that makes it possible to integrate very different results of surveys and qualitative investigations into an overall coherent understanding.

The same applies to mediatization as well.

Hence, it is necessary to theorize mediatization in a more complex manner than medium theory does. It is true, as medium theory says, that “media change” and “cultural change” are interrelated, but mediatization not only theorizes this in the perspective of the relation from media to cultural change. It is not enough to talk about the specificity of certain media related to the specificity of certain cultural changes. In a quantitative perspective, mediatization means that we are confronted with a long-standing process of spreading media communication. In a qualialitative perspective, there is a “moulding force” of the media; that is, media themselves exert a certain pressure on the way we communicate.

Regarding the ongoing cultural transformation, we find certain patterns along which cultural change takes place. And these patterns should be related to questions of media change. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, there was a sort of territorial national communicative space, constructed by the media, something we might call national-territorial media culture. Nowadays on the contrary, we are confronted with a much higher multiplicity of different communicative spaces. The argument is that this process of change is related to an increasing mediatization along the social, spatial, and temporal dimensions, interrelated with processes of further cultural change towards individualization (the individual is urged to be far more responsible for his or her life), deterritorialization (loss of the relation of culture to geographical and social territories) and the coming of intermediacy (the temporal ubiquitousness of electronic media). The process as a whole, results on a pluralization and fragmentation of institutionalized cultural fields and in a plurality of different (de) territorialized communicative spaces.

However if we want to consider the “moulding forces” of the media we need a more detailed approach. Hepp wants to take a detailed look at the mediatization of cultural fields by researching their articulation through various related institutions and power-relations empirically, in order to get an understanding of how the “moulding forces” of the media manifest themselves in processes of interrelation with other “forces”. For this purpose, he exposed in his lecture the case of the Catholic World Youth Day, celebrated in Germany in 2005. You can see several videos to realize how passionately young people from all over the world gather to life this experience:

Hepp pointed out several features of the event and its media coverage, to see the relevance of taking into consideration the mediatization approach. His empirical work is deep and cannot be explained in detail here. It entails both quantitative analysis of the media coverage of the World Youth Day and theoretical elaboration of some features of the celebration.

All in all, Andreas Hepp underlined, that if we want to research mediatization, some points are fundamental: transmediality of research (not “one media” but media “enviroments”); dialectic of research (not “one media logic” but “moulding forces”); and cultural sensitivity of research (not “closed systems” but blurred cultural thickenings).

After his lecture, we gathered in groups, to discuss how far our own present research projects are related to questions of mediatization, reflecting upon three questions: “What does mediatization mean for your present research?”, “How far are your research fields moulded by the media?”, “What does this mean methodologically for your research?” Obviously, given the subject of this Summer School, we all considered mediatization a useful approach four our own researches.

Within the post I will try to give a brief overview of our excursion to St Pixels, some history on the formation of the ‘virtual church’ and some insights into the type of feeling and questioning this experience instigated in me, and the group at large.

There was an air of excitement on the day of our excursion to St Pixels. We had all made our simple cartoon-style avatars earlier that day and were keen to test them out. After having spend a great deal of time the previous week within Second Life, which is very closely modeled on the physical world, it was kind of a breath of fresh air to see the very simple mainly text-based web environment and the lack of emphasis on creating a ‘beautiful’ avatar form.

On the home page of St Pixels it is stated:

one of the most important functions of this site is to provide opportunities and resources for worship (http://www.stpixels.com/headline-news)

But what is worship when it happens from behind a screen? That was one of the questions we hoped to uncover, as we all filed into the dimly lit computer lab and took our relevant places behind the rows of screens, ready to enter St Pixels! As we entered the conversation started almost immediately – or as soon as everyone had made their way to the porch – and there was a flurry of tapping keys as we all tried to figure out which avatar contained which person… Then Mark, who was leading ‘The Sermon’ arrived and we were led into ‘The Sanctuary’ for conversation and worship.

St Pixels: A short History

St Pixels was originally created from a magazine called ‘The Ship of Fools.’ It was launched on April fools day as an online magazine. It wasn’t long however before ‘The Ship of Fools’ moved from a simple online magazine, to a virtual community. Shortly after this came “The Ark” ” (2003) where as quoted from their website was presented as “Big Brother meets the Bible” (Jenkins, 2008) . As with the popular TV show Big Brother, the various Biblical Character’s spent time living together on an ark with a fully viewing audience voting off the least popular character every week.

Have you ever found yourself wondering what it would be like if you got some of the best known characters of the Bible together in a bar for a drink or two? How would they get on, these saints and sinners, these heroes and villains of the Bible? Would Moses compare beard lengths with John the Baptist? Would Eve offend Paul with her figleaf costume? It’s inevitable that some of the great saints would find it hard to spend even a few minutes in each other’s company. (Jenkins, 2008)

This was the motto behind the Arc’s creation. However the shift from a simple (vaguely educational) game came gradually:

Each Sunday during the game… The Ark’s [was turned] into a chapel, and… three of the Arkmates [had] the task of preparing Divine Service for everyone else to join in. (Jenkins, 2008)

As the organizers observed this practice  “with preaching, Bible readings, prayers and discussion, … [they considered] that this might be a way to realise the idea of online church.” However they questioned “How would it be if [they] detached the chapel from The Ark and ran it week by week as a virtual church?” And so the Ark’s chapel eventually grew into the “Church of Fools.” (Jenkins, 2008)

When they originally built the

Church of Fools, it was different in many ways … [they] were building a dedicated church environment (in Shockwave), rather than adding something to an existing online world. Church of Fools was self-contained as an environment and a project. (Jenkins, 2008)

What is the relevance of the Church of Fools existing outside any existing virtual framework or established community?  Perhaps this space is not so much about missionary (as it is not so easy to just wonder in) as it is about trying to come to grips with the essence of ‘church.’ As reflected in our conversation at St Pixels: is it the bricks and mortar that makes a church a church?

The Church of Fools was a three-month experiment and when that site came down everything was put into question. However “what had happened during the time [they] were open was that a small community of people had grown around the 3D church. That community has continued via a bulletin board website, despite the loss of 3D, and is now called St Pixels.”

Lasting Impressions

When we interact within a virtual space we do so without our senses. The loss of touch being perhaps the most poignant when interacting with people.

From childhood experience we learn to trust those who touch us tenderly, says Dreyfus referenced by John Weckert (2005:107); trust is based on feelings of security that babies get in their caretakers’ arms. But this experience, according to Dreyfus, is missing in the online world.  (Barbovschi, Diaconescu, 2008)

These senses however, I would propose, are replaced by imagination and fantasy. Perhaps a more text-based environment allows for more of this imaginative projection to occur? “At the moment that touching loses its sensory, sensual value for us… it is possible that it might once more become the schema of a universe of communication” (Baudirillard 1993). I am considering this because most of the group found the St Pixels experience to be more engaging than the Second Life version. Now this could be partly because of the Second Life neighborhood, the fact that it is linked to a world. Perhaps it is not so easy to forget the vampires, sexually explicit (im)material and shops just around the corner?

As stated by Evan Thompson in his paper on Empathy and Cognition

the individual human mind is not confined within the head, but extends throughout the living body and includes the world beyond the biological membrane of the organism, especially the interpersonal, social world of self and other. (Thompson, 2001).

So perhaps immersion is simply an expression of us in the world and this undoubtedly includes the digital world, but what level of immersion do we hope to achieve when we sit down in front of a screen?

So, perhaps I am wrong in my statements regarding Second Life, perhaps it is more simply I am wrong for it, as I cannot effectively immerse myself? As stated by Robinson (2007) of the UU Church of Second Life:

there is a spirituality of good conversation and real connection with people, and that spirituality is not in the least dependent on whether the connection happens in person, by letter, or by playing with avatars in virtual reality.

This shows that despite the complexity of the system we are acting within, even as avatars we still act human. In the virtual space, our “connection” is still person to person.

Some people consider these immersive religious environments to be games, for others they are a call to worship, for others still a curiosity (or a space to explore.) But I feel like part of the great success of the St Pixels environment is that it is playful and self-reflective. It is stated within Jenkins paper RITUALS AND PIXELS: EXPERIMENTS IN ONLINE CHURCH:

we wanted to debate, satirise and create laughter about that, from a committed faith position. We believed that self- criticism is an important part of faith. (Jenkins, 2008)

I would say that St Pixels knows (or at least the members) KNOW that it is at the end of the day St Pixels is a chat room with a collection of bits attached to it, however I don not think this diminishes its impact or power. In fact I think it is this honesty that allows people within this virtual church the opportunity to feel the ease to ‘play’ a bit with the concepts, conversation and narratives within their religon.

We saw an example of this when one of our members accidentally discovered a hack, which allowed his avatar to become invisible ‘and all were amazed and asked unto him, however did you do this?” I think secretly everyone wanted a go at going ‘poof’ and disappearing. So perhaps at heart we are all Homo Ludens (Man at Play) and it is this playfulness and adaptability perhaps that allows us to take the abstract concepts we have created and move them creatively into any new ‘space,’ including the digital.

This excursion within the digital has built on my personal conception of technology and thus my understanding of the ‘way’ we are engaging, being mediated and ‘working’ (through) it. This is emphasized by Stiegler’s statement “the interior milieu is social memory, the shared past [is] that which is called “culture.” (Stiegler, 1998) So perhaps the ‘virtual’ could be viewed as a culture developing over time as it develops us and perhaps it can be theorized that „in a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstructed as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space“ (Hayles, 1984)

I think that throughout the interview the group kept coming back to the base question: how does spirituality translate from a physical to virtual space? Perhaps this can be explored through Turkle’s statement:

Once virtuality is taken seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies and is it different in different cyberspaces? (Turkle, 1995)

At July 29 morning I arrived in Bremen, I went there to attend the summer school „How virtual is reality?“. I have many questions about reality and virtuality role in human social life, about the border that separates and unites this two worlds; about methods and theories to explore and explain what virtual space is? So we had 10 days to find out the answers to these and many other questions about virtual worlds and media-related issues.

At 05.08.2010. in Summer School we had the opportunity to listen to Marga‘s lecture entitled: „The Role of Ritual: Experiencing Death in Internet Ritual“. Marga Altena is a historian of visual culture working as a researcher, teacher and publicist. She is specialized in the use of images in historical research. Marga participated in the project Netherlands’ Refiguring Death Rites. This Interdisciplinary program aims to investigate new ritualizations of death in the Netherlands. She performed a postdoctoral research on the representation of death in films, television shows and weblogs. In this lecture she shared with us her findings and experiences. I am very grateful for the meeting with Marga Altena, because this lecture encourage me think about death, how it is mediated by the media; in this essay I will try to reflect my understanding of her lecture(you should choice).

In the lecture Marga shared their research and experiences about the depiction of death, not so much on the internet, but on the images and at the TV shows. Professor Altena’s lecture urged to think about representation of the death in various media: literature, painting, photography. I found that the death of display largely depends on the form of media, what is used. We can compare, how death is depicted or represented in video games, literature, cinema, television shows, news broadcasts, second life as well. We can see that different media have different abilities to speak with audience. Death is the category of existential philosophy – the death gives meaning to our life. We can find it in our culture that people had thought about death since long, long time ago. If we write key words „Death in Paintings“ in Google we can find a series of paintings that speak about this topic; and different representation of death in these paintings are apparent, historically and religiously.

From these few paintings we can see that, dead or dying person is the central subject of the painting it even emits light, around of it we can see that the people mourn; other characters are tilt their heads, or a grimace of pain prevented from viewer. In this way, by analyzing paintings – symbols, colors, shapes, lights and people -, we can understand death rituals in different religious tradition and time- prayer ritual, farewell ritual, appeal to the God, the black mourning clothes, and lighted candles. Also the Christian tradition represents itself with a picture of Jesus crucified, what is actually image of dying God’s Son. When we enter a Christian church, we can find this picture (of course in different interpretations), and Christian bow their head and pray in front of this picture. But here also we can „read“ cultural tradition and ritual from old days – to the death convicts crucify.

Since the birth of photography people have the opportunity to gain a true vision of reality in the image. Through photographic images of the 20th century. and the 21st Century people have the opportunity to look at the events associated with death: the war scenes, car disaster, a series of accidents and so on. These images are not only testament of history, but they are emotionally powerful, they shock the viewer, require the viewer to turn away, sometimes even we feel ashamed of our lives in front of picture.

When we listen to news that in some country had happened a huge tragedy, for example, an air crash, which has more than 100 fatalities, usually we catch these messages but in cognitive way, it is only fact for us. The death can reach the people, if there is direct connection with people: it affects the people or their relatives; friends or people are virtually identifying with somebody else, who is experiencing the feeling of death (character in book, movie, animation movie, TV show and so one).

Marga Altena in her lecture spoke about TV reality show in the Netherlands, which was attended by people with diagnose-death. A reality show, like the picture or photograph can be a witness of history. We can analyze, discuss about it, but it will not leave the viewer indifferent. I think the aim of the show was to create conditions for these people to live every day full fill with emotion, love, happy as well as they can, and it is opportunity for viewers to think about meaning of life, they have time to evaluate theirselves and the people around them. Marga Altena showed us the fragments of the show, where we saw existential messages from participants and emotions of them, and care, pain of relatives; it spoke to every viewer in the classroom. Again, there appear rituals and traditions associated with death – prayer, farewell, and lighted candles. But it all was just a background, the focus was the emotional experience, what actually is virtual experience, but it was so real.

Here we can realize what really is a virtual experience. Thank you for that. Virtual experiences usually need external incentives – TV screen, theater, book, toy or something else. However we can recognize that virtual world really is in our head, when we know the full story we identify with object or person. Today virtual experience is mediated by digital media, and it is the way how people learn many things today, it is the way how people enjoy different kinds of feelings. Me as a teacher should recognize, that virtual spaces may be the future of contemporary education. And here I found the answer – virtuality is part of reality. Now we have two spaces which both are real, but one of them virtual reality and another real reality.

‘Go forth and do likewise’
- L. Nader [1]

In a figurative way, ‘ethnography’ spells ‘doing’. As fun as it is to read about ‘doing ethnography’, eventually one has to do it in order to know what it is all about. Luckily we had enough time to practice during the second session of the 4th of August and luckily I can write about it. So in the upcoming 10.000 characters I will share my experience of that session with you all, not only telling you about the bizarre things we encountered but also providing you argue how these practices can be related to the literature.

But first, let me start with some general notes on the ‘verb’ ‘ethnography’, especially on doing ethnography in the ‘virtual world’. In one of the hallmark works on the practices of ethnography which goes by the elucidating title ‘Ethnography: Principles in Practice’, Martyn Hammersly and Paul Atkinson explain in detail how to ‘do’ ethnography and what kind of problems one might encounter while ‘doing’ it. [2] The subjects under investigation are ranging from creating a research design, thinking about foreshadowed problems, getting access, doing fieldwork and writing an ethnography. Although this work is not related to doing ethnography in the virtual world (although they do refer to it on page 137-139), the principles they discuss are easily transferable to the digital world.

For instance, gaining access to the field, doing fieldwork, conducting interviews and writing ethnographies are principles that are the same in real world as well as in the virtual. However, method-wise one could argue that there are differences between doing ethnography offline and online. Boellstorff, for instance, argues that although the practice of being in the field is often the same as in real world, the practices of obtaining data are quite different:

‘[The] ability to do things like saving chat logs and record audio or video is a great boon in comparison to actual-world enviroments where audio recording can be disruptive and one is often forced to rely on memory or hastily handwritten notes.’[3]

However, this ‘boon’ has a downside. Boellstorff explains:

‘Ethnographers of virtual worlds often face the challenge of filtering through large amounts of data. My own data set constituted over ten thousand pages of fieldnotes from participant observation, interviewing, and focus groups, plus approximately ten thousand additional pages of blogs, newsletters, and other websites.’[4]

So although the method of doing fieldwork in the virtual has a great overlap with real world fieldwork there are substantial differences, especially when it comes to the amount and collection of data, but also ethical considerations. This will be further elaborated below. For, we move from the theoretical aspects of doing ethnography to the practices of fieldwork in Second Life.

Doing Fieldwork in Second Life

Although these theoretical considerations are all very interesting, in the end it is about doing it and experiencing the practices of fieldwork in the virtual world of Second Life. In order to practice a little, the group was divided into three smaller groups who were suppose to find a ritual space in Second Life. While looking for one, my group member Simon found a place where some Residents were about to perform a daily ritual to worship the Goddess (in this case, Artemis, although the chat-logs reveal that many participants worshiped their own Goddess, e.g. Gaia, Hera and Cerridwen), so we decided to join them in the ritual.

The ritual took place inside some sort of square temple with forest-like walls and a starry heaven on the ceiling. Inside the temple there was a square pool with elevated edges on which participants could meditate (the meditation would start automatically as soon as one clicked on the red balls on the side of the pool), facing a statue of a goddess. When I asked how the ritual was to be performed, one of the ritual leaders responded as follows (this quotation was taken from the chat-log):

‘Here’s how devotional works: We start w/the Charge of the Goddess in voice, so make sure you can hear, then in text, we state a single daily intent in the present and assertive tense , then state random gratitudes in random order, just jump on in, ok? After that, we will spin the energy we’ve created, which is also in text (or maybe voice). The entire ritual lasts about half an hour.’

And this was basically how the ritual was performed: they began by pointing out one of the Priestesses to read out the Charge of the Goddess (unfortunately, I didn’t save the Notecard of the Charge) in voice-chat, after which people randomly gave thanks for what they experienced in the past or made promises to themselves for the upcoming day:

‘[06:13] Worshipper 1: Today I push aside the negativity of the past and step into the positive.
[06:13] Worshipper 2: I will listen to what the Goddess has planned out for me
[06:14] Worshipper 3: I will stay on task today, move in the flow, and remain balanced . I am doing those things that are important to my higher self and I allow for change in my life.
[06:16] Worshipper 4: I am grateful for my ability to keep my house clean, while I have so many visitors’.[2]

During this phase people were also randomly chatting with each other in the local chat or commenting on each others daily intents, which was not a problem for anyone (at least, not publicly). After speaking out their daily intents, one other priestess was invited to ‘spin the energy’, which was done in text and basically describes the daily intents transform into energy that is spinning around above the pool, turn into crystals which are taken up by the Goddess, who then fills them with Her thoughts and advice, after which She ‘toss[es] the new crystals out into space, these crystals seek out those who need them […] who need their lessons and then merge with the right person, at the right place, in the right time feel infused with ‘Divine love’. After this ‘spinning’ the participants answered with the sentence ‘so mote it be’ and the ritual leaders were thanked and complemented by the participants.

It is difficult to relate such a short practice of participant observation to the much more comprehensive body of literature about doing ethnography and participant observation. However, a few remarks can be made. First, we never explicitly stated to the participants of the Artemis ritual that we were doing ‘research’ (i.e. that we would analyze their actions and sayings), but acted as interested ‘newbies’. This method known as ‘lurking’ might be very convenient, since you don’t have to explain what you do and ask for permission to be there, or run the risk of being kicked out the the island. On the other hand, there are some ethical considerations involved in doing ‘lurking research’, for instance when it comes to asking permission for an interview, which officially should be done with a consent stating that the interviewee understands what is going on and gives permission.

Furthermore, some might not even like being studied. Second, one of the major problems of virtual ethnography is the vast amount of data that can be collected. As said above, in ‘real world’ ethnography the researcher is forced to focus because not everything can be written down, but in a virtual world, chat-logs can be saved and websites can be copy/pasted. This means that after a few years of fieldwork in a virtual world, the amount of data can run to tens of thousand of pages of data, which has to be analyzed as well. Besides that, what I encountered in doing our fieldwork practice was that it was hard to write down the movements of the participants and at the same time keep up with the discussion, so in the end the field notes mainly consisted of chat-logs and not really of notes on ‘bodily’ movements. In ‘real world’ ethnography, keeping up with actions is much more easily than keeping up with the spoken part.

Although these remarks are far from exhausting, what can be said that an important part of considering methods of fieldwork in the virtual is that the researcher should constantly reflect his or her actions in order to improve the methods of virtual ethnography.

Conclusion

In this essay I tried to relate theory of ethnography on both the ‘real world’ and the ‘virtual world’ with the practice of doing ethnography in Second Life. Using the example of the Artemis ritual, I tried to reflect on some of the methodological issues involved in doing research in Second Life. However, these are my personal notes on my personal experiences with the field, and things could be very different for other researchers. It is therefore wise to keep up with the discussion concerning methodological issues, and not to take the experiences of other researchers at face value.
Thus, in the end, there is only one piece of advice to experience the relationship between reading about ‘doing ethnography’ and actually ‘doing’ it. And for this last piece of advice I would like to let someone else speak:

Kurtis Blow, from 5.20-5.38.

Notes

1. Nader, L. ‘From anguish to exultation’, in P. Golde (ed.), Women in the Field: Antropological Experiences (Berkeley, Calif.; University of Calif. Press 2nd ed. 1986), 89.
2. Hammersly, Martyn & Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles in Practice (New York & London; Routledge 3rd ed. 2007).
3. Boellstorff, Tom, Coming of Age is Second Life (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton University Press 2008) 75.
4. Ibidem, 75.
5. Needless to say, all the screen-names of the participants in Second Life are changed to assure they remain anonymous. Furthermore, typo’s a left in the quotations.

On Wednesday, Greg Grieve, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, encouraged those interested in virtual-world ethnography to “Be Different.” He outlined a theoretical framework for his several-year research in Second Life that provides an explanation for the possibility of immersion in virtual worlds, a crucial aspect of participant-observation ethnography. Network analysis or simply “lurking” on communities in the online world are decidedly unworkable ways to arrive at the “thick description” most ethnographers still strive to provide in their discussion of cultures. Instead of static websites, one must interact with, and become immersed in a virtual social space.  If one abides by the requirements of theorists such as Tom Boellstorff, a certain sensorial realism must be present in the virtual space for the subject to become engaged, while Alex Golub emphasizes the performance of shared projects, such as World of Warcraft raids, as critical to fostering deep immersion. Grieve added a new dimension to the discussion by, almost ironically, ushering in a discussion of the body.  But is this so ironic? Rather than arriving at a definitive place, Greg’s discussion led us to consider some of the productive differences that a discourse of body, as opposed to simply terminology such as “identity,” provides in the analysis of Second Life immersion.

The virtual body can be examined as a lived body, although it is not necessarily the “meat” of corporeality. One can observe some of the extension of the lived body in (virtual?) instances besides Second Life (SL). For example, one’s scent and those things which carry one’s scent can prove to be powerful areas for possible violation, to the extent that the boundaries of one’s body are called into question. Is a photograph a virtual body, an extension of one’s corporality, when it is used in certain ways? On the part of SL participants, there is a level of care for the virtual body, in the form of an avatar, that breaks down the sharp distinction of Real Life (RL) and SL. Grieve had noticed in previous research with students, that when they were asked to create “different” avatars, intentionally genderless, deformed, or at the limits of what was ordinarily constructed by players, the students would more frequently refer to the avatar as an “it” or an other, where previously they more comfortably enlisted “me” or “I.” I, too, confirmed this tendency in my language when I constructed a mutated, gender-bending, but still vaguely humanoid avatar.

Examining gender can be a powerful framework for illuminating some of the bodily aspects of immersion in virtual situations. When creating an avatar on Second Life, one is restricted by some of the same gender regulations that occur in Real Life. Other MUDS offer up to 10 gender options from which to begin avatar creation, while SL still holds to two “basic” starting points. In his long time spent on SL, Grieve has found that there is a tendency for SL to mirror not only behavioral, but also the bodily {tendencies}  of west-coast American, white, hetero-normativity. Female hair, Flexi hair, is an overwhelmingly popular modification for SL avatars, reinforcing a RL gender tendency. Those with female avatars can download exaggerated “sexy walking,” while “shopping for gender” for both (of the two recognized) genders reveals a majority of options familiar to RL. Working closely with Buddhist activities on SL, Grieve found that at a certain temple where the kesa robes were offered for free, the attire was by default fitted for male avatars. The practice of SL marriage, among other phenomena, shows the paradigm of serial monogamy being replicated in the virtual world.

Of course SL users are at an advantage compared to those restricted by RL bodily norms. Though there is a definite foundation of  the above-mentioned norms off of which all of the “differences” play, the possibilities available to one constructing a virtual body are much enhanced. If the body is “the chief technology to create the self,” by making one’s avatar very small (“Tinies”) or by creating avatar that is half-human, half-beast, for example, the virtual body becomes a novel new beginning for selves. The practices, behaviors, and thought processes that emerge when a user becomes immersed in such a virtual body are new combinatory selves that are part RL, part SL. If there is an “identity” here, where does that identity call home? Is it the body in front of the screen, or the virtual body in which they become immersed? Since the identity comes out of both, one is tempted to invoke Donna Haraway’s cyborg to describe these new bodies. The cyborg has both biological and artificial values, breaking down the sharp distinction between body and the machine, and thusly disrupts orderly power structures. The SL body is a lived body, a body of practice, while also constructed of pixels. A biological entity controls this body’s every movement, and this body becomes part of a feedback loop to create that “user’s” greater sense of “being in the world.” Both machine and biology are at play to create a virtual cyborg body. And indeed, these novel SL bodies are disrupting orderly power structures, first and foremost those that are carried over from RL into the virtual world.

The virtual ethnographer can examine where some of the tension is by intentionally entering into a community as a body that is very “different” from its norms. Reactions and interactions between the virtual community and the “different” body can reveal the ways that community makes meaning. Also, by creating a virtual body markedly different from one’s RL body, the user and virtual ethnographer both are going to engage themselves in new ways as the virtual body affects the ways that they behave. If, for example, one wants to understand the “Tinies” community in SL, one must become one, even if this creates dissonance between one’s RL identity and the SL body. Eventually, this extension of one’s body will affect one’s behavior in that environment, and immersion will occur, as those practices become one’s regular way of performing in that virtual body.

As an exercise, the Summer School participants were asked to create a “different” avatar, and then attempt to make friends in the SL world. This bodily difference could occur on one of two fronts, or possibly both: either one could construct a virtual body that we felt in no way represented our RL selves, or one could create an avatar that was quite different from anything encountered among the norms in SL. Often the latter was inclusive of the former, but in a few cases, the former could be a very normative body for SL avatars, and therefore cause little tension with other SL bodies, while making the user very aware of their presence in an unusual body, and therefore unusual set of practices and interactions. Many of us created ridiculous, monstrous bodies in which to attempt to meet new people. http://www.flickr.com/photos/53429689@N02/4936082640/

Some of us created avatars that were quite human, but in some way not representative of the SL preference for thin, fit, well-endowed, white avatars. Another of us attempted to become a standard SL fetish body, the “Furry,” and was promptly met with the difficulty of recreating a specific “stylized repetition of acts” that was totally unfamiliar to him. My avatar was not a part of any established SL body category, and although I was pleased with my creation as an artist, I was hesitant to present this body as my body.

The results were suggestive of the ability in SL to test boundaries with fewer adverse reactions than in RL. Nadine’s Shrek-like body was met with kindness and friendliness, as she received a compliment on her body (something along the lines of, “you’re the prettiest one of those [green monsters] that I’ve seen!”) as well as her accessories (purse), and had little trouble making friends. The harshest reaction, which is arguably a terrible existence in the long term, was that of no reaction at all. Sometimes one would be ignored in one’s attempts to converse or to interact, and would simply have to move on to a new environment. However, in such a short span of time, it is impossible to discount that this reaction was less about our different bodies, than because we all came across as obvious “newbies,” struggling with the movement of our virtual bodies and not knowing common modes of speech. In any ethnographic study, there is no substitute for time spent in the field. “Being different” is a very useful tool for gaining new perspective on living in a virtual body, but little workable results can be gathered without a longer period of immersion. And perhaps the best method for understanding SL communities is to become immersed in several bodies at different levels. One avatar can be a very engaged participant that does not attempt to create much friction in the community, while another may be an occasional visitor to the community that likes to irritate the boundaries of that group, but is capable of provoking useful responses (A non-believer that engages the group in heated debate; a believer that does not use the same language; a participant that refuses to use a normative body for that group, etc.) There will be, of course, different levels of immersion depending on how much and with what intensity you perform in certain bodies.

Regarding virtual bodies as such indicates an interest in the ways that a self is constructed and shaped by something material. The need for a sensory map that is equivalent to the RL body is done away with in favor of the concept of “lived body” so that the avatars of SL can be looked at the same way many theorists examine body today. In this case, much of the evidence of bodily practices in SL will be visual, but should not be regarded as static projections or abstractions of identity. Instead, ethnographic work, participation, can be a way to reveal to ways that these virtual bodies have an effect on RL bodies and identities, and vice versa. For many users, not only their identity, but that they consider as the “stuff” of themselves has extended into the pixilated world.