The following is part of a conversation I had with the colleague mentioned previously who is a teacher of technical writing in English:
Lian end station
The people all get off the tram that has just arrived. The doors close, and the tram glides off back to town again. You are standing on the platform at the Lian end station. The cool, fresh breeze caresses your face tenderly. The spicy smell of the forest, fields and marshes that surround you fill you with a strange desire to explore and immerse yourself in nature for a while. In front of you you can see the station building. It is painted a dull red colour, with a thin white stripe along the edge of the roof. A sign says simply, 'Lian'. There is a seat alongside the wall of the building On your left is a gravel track leading to Vaadan. To go that way, type 'walk'. Slightly more to the right is a path leading up a steep hil to Lian Restaurant, which you can just see at the top of the hill.
To visit the restaurant, type 'up'. Other obvious exits are: 'south' to the lake at Lian, 'west' to the viewpoint and Pat's house. To return to town again, type 'back'.
Blue_guest is here.You say, "Hello again. Here we are at Lian station. What do you think of this?"
You say, "You can talk in all the "rooms" that we visit"
Blue_guest says, "I look around, and think that I am no loner in Kansas"
You say, "I thought I could try asking people who come in here if they get any "images" in their head when they read the text"
You say, "No, sure, Lian is far from Kansas.."
You say, "but you maybe mean "no longer in Kansas", not "no loner in Kansas"?"
You say, "this is another problem that you often make mistakes when you write fast"
You say, "it's a bit too "messy" to correct all the samll mistakes"
Blue_guest says, "Yes, the machine did that again. But maybe I am no loner in Kansas either. But here, do I see anyone else, or have we left everyone on the tram?"
You say, "OK, I didn't think about that, so you thought there were othe people on the tram?"
You say, "well if you look at the description of the station you will se that everyone got off, and I guess they all have started off on their walks while we are standing here talking"
You say, "I have ideas for many 'building projects' later. You can make walks in the country, and extend the Dragvoll center too..."
You say, "I also thought that we could make a writing classroom at NTH with your students. What do you think?"
You say, "maybe they can help you build the classroom?"
Blue_guest says, "Yes. A novel idea. I think it would work for the feasibillity projects, because so much of the planning has to do with the students being able to imagine themselves in real situations"
Blue_guest says, "They could try out their questionnaires on each other, and do a practice interview"
You say, "fine, but they will probably need some time to practice at "playing" first?"
You say, "are you going to talk to them about this?"
You say, "I think this is a very good form of practice in organizing one's thoughts spatially"
You say, "one way of thinking abstractly, but at the same time concretely .."
Blue_guest says, "Yes, exactly"
We then went on to discuss the possibility of using the MOO for her classes[12], something which has yet to be realized. We also discussed some aesthetic aspects of designing the virtual environment
Blue_Guest says, "San Marino? Sounds like a good place to develop feasibility projects and to have fun looking at the cultural text. "
You say, "yes, why not...we are planning a seminar on aesthetics, representation, interpretation and poetic language"
Blue_Guest says, "Sounds great. Tell me more"
You say, "That's another issue, you see. These virtual worlds need some poetics and aesthetics to be interesting"
Blue_Guest says, "Isnt the train station at Lian an aesthetic? It does have that dimension"
You say, "so I thought that it would be nice to try and arrange some discussions and activities around making the most interesting, or aesthetic, or poetic dscriptions, you know, thjings like that can be fun"
You say, "Yes, I tried to be aesthetic, but does it work for everyone? What do people in fact experience? What is possible with just words?"
You say, "see, there are a range of different things that one could work with, try out and discuss while doing it"
You say, "if I type "look" now, I get the "space" description again"Lian end station
The people all get off the tram that has just arrived. The doors close, and the tram glides off back to town again. You are standingon the platform at the Lian end station. The cool, fresh breeze caresses your face tenderly. The spicy smell of the forest, fields and marshes that surround you fill you with a strange desire to explore and immerse yourself in nature for a while. In front of you you can see the station building. It is painted a dull red colour, with a thin white stripe along the edge of the roof. A sign says simply, 'Lian'. There is a seat alongside the wall of the building On your left is a gravel track leading to Vaadan. To go that way, type 'walk'. Slightly more to the right is a path leading up a steep hil to Lian Restaurant, which you can just see at the top of the hill.
To visit the restaurant, go 'up'. Other obvious exits are: 'south' to the lake at Lian, 'west' to the viewpoint and Pat's house. To return to town again, go 'back'.
Blue_Guest is here.You say, "so now we could discuss it critically"
You say, "any suggestions?"
You say, "or comments"
Blue_Guest says, "Do you want to experience the aesthetic in the virtual context of culture, a social world? Ok, Ill press look"
You say, "well, it's more a question of what does, and does not "work" for different people in these kinds of environments"
You say, "so that means that both have to type 'look' if they want to discuss something"
You say, "It is also possible to leave "notes" lying around like the Newspaper at the lab"
You say, "people can "pick thes up" and read them"
Blue_Guest says, "I understand now (about the look). But about the notes. Do you insert them in the same way you insert this sort of conversation?"
Blue_Guest says, "Or do you have to enter a special code like look, west, or south?"
You say, "no, the look command is related to 'objects'"
You say, "but it should be possible to look in different directions"
You say, "what you do then is make a different space that corresponds to each look direction, and make the entrance to this space
Blue_Guest says, "Maybe the looking in different directions brings us back to the issue of aesthetics. People look in different directions to experience the aesthetic"
You say, "this is a bit more involved to discuss, but yes, I agree that these things are tied to one another"
You say, "what we see depends both on how, and where we choose to look at the world"
This shows how the textual environment of the MOO itself can retroactively become the subject of discussions related to creating the physical (and socio-psychological) context for subsequent interactions in the virtual environment. If participants are fairly well routined at creating and changing the textual descriptions of the virtual space (something which is becoming more and more easy as World Wide Web interfaces with MOO environments are being developed), this gives many possibilities for experimentation and development of ideas for modelling physical and social environments purely at the conceptual level (before one for instance begins to develop these into more complex models using 3-D graphical representations). Working through written text alone has the advantage of being highly flexible, creative and evocative, seen in relation to the much more detailed, and technologically demanding modelling processes necessary to create the same kinds of environments using three dimensional visual imaging and modelling tools. Well written text descriptions of situations and contexts can be highly suggestive and often open up for highly creative (abductive) interpretations, giving new ideas which are relatively easy to implement processually as new and improved text drafts which can be examined and discussed further, without necessarily there being a need for making very detailed descriptions. The MOO environment seems then to be a very good tool to use in the early stages of planning much more complex projects. The dynamicity and interactivity of a MOO makes it also a good place to collaborate later on in the development process, for evaluation and coordination of various aspects of the project at a metaconceptual level.
After these few experiences with developing as MOO myself I decided to spend some more time looking at existing MOO environments that are already established in order to see what kinds of solutions other people had found to the organisation of various kinds of activities in MOO's. I was also interested in various design issues related to building a virtual environment for research purposes. The discussion I had with the teacher of technical English above on the textual aesthetics of the MOO environment is of course rather important in relation to the way in which the virtual environment creates a context of situation, and in a wider sense, a context of culture for the interactions that go on there. As any architect, anthropologist or biologist knows, the nature of the perceived environment (and the semiotic processes that constitute this) we are in has a great deal of influence on how we actually behave, interact, communicate and even think there.
Another more technical issue that is important here is of course the functionality of the interactional norm-systems offered by the programming codes and systems built into the virtual environment in relation to the different kinds of sociocultural activities and interactions that are supposed to go on there, and in relation to the needs and wishes of the different types of people who will take part in these activities and interactions. Generally these seem to be issues which are relatively simplistically developed and implemented in existing MOO's - one might ay that the fundamental evolutionary parameters for the growth of MOO-culture are at an early stage of development as yet. This is one reason, too, why it is very important that the development of future MOO environments is done on an strongly interdisciplinary basis, and that plenty of time is used to evaluate and discuss the kinds of basic implementational issues mentioned above. In the next section I shall refer back to some of these issues and try to give some examples from the larger MOO's that I have visited in the course of my investigations.