The Public Library in Virtual Worlds
Our final module for LIBR559m is about “Immersion” and social media. There are many examples of online applications that require you to immerse yourself in, what is an attempt at, an alternative reality, but the most well know example is Second Life. Like most of these worlds Second Life is a graphically rendered alternative society. You experience it a lot like a character in a video game. You can choose different attributes for your character or “avatar” and those attributes and pretty much reflect anything. Second Life differs from immersive video games in that it contains computer graphic representations, or imitations, of things you might find in our physical reality. You might be able to visit a pool hall and have your avatar pick up a pool cue and play “9 ball” against someone. Of course, you might also be able to go to a library and check out a book.
The idea of providing library services in these virtual worlds is something that we’ve been asked to reflect on for this course. While these services exist in some of these worlds, and definitely do exist in Second Life, I wonder about their overall usefulness. When I play a “first person” video game I do become immersed in the story and become the character. The last game I played with any sort of conviction was called Okami which is based on a Japanese myth involving a battle between good and evil. It was unique because your character is a wolf that can affect the world by using a paintbrush and different sacred brush strokes. With these special brush strokes, you could paint stars in the sky, make flowering trees bloom, draw a bridge to get over a river and even vanquish enemies with a quick slash of the brush. The concept was pretty cool and the game was steeped in Japanese folklore, which was also an interesting part of the diversion. It was quite an immersive experience and far from my own reality. I would play this game for hours. However, I never thought about bringing my “real life” into that immersive experience and I didn’t bring Okami into my real life. They remained almost wholly separate experiences.
I’m relating this here because there is an obvious similarity between virtual worlds like second life and first person video games. I think most people interacting with these virtual worlds are there to experience a different reality for a while. For me real public institutions, like libraries, are firmly rooted in my usual routine. As this article from The Psychology of Games points out, in order to achieve an immersive experience a player needs to “begin to favor the media-based space… as their point of reference”. I can’t really favour the media based space over my own reality if I’m finding the same services in both places. To me that just makes the virtual world redundant. I don’t want to be reminded about my real life when I’m immersed in a completely different reality. It kind of ruins the experience. It no longer feels immersive.
However, I still see virtual worlds as having a lot of potential, particularly in helping people who have difficulty functioning in our physical reality. People with disabilities or psychological issues can benefit greatly from services or even therapies that utilize virtual reality. Perhaps I would also be more interested in virtual worlds as a more environmentally friendly way to travel the world. For instance, I would love to be immersed virtually in an authentic version of the library at the British Museum in London for a couple of hours (or more), but I’m not intrigued at all by the idea of visiting the Vancouver Public Library in an alternate reality. The local branch in my real life is just fine, thank you.