It isn't surprising that the people most interested in hypermedia and virtual reality are the people in Hollywood. They pioneered the very first form of VR when they created film. The basis for your virtual experience is the human imagination. Fantasy is looked down upon by society as a wasteful diversion, but the human imagination is a very powerful thing. Because of the power of the human imagination, simulation can be more convincing than reality - it can be hyperreal, more real than real. The beginnings of drama lie in this fact; by acting out the life and death of the god Osiris, the Egyptians were partaking in the reality of the god.
The word "virtual" carries a strange sort of connotation to it. It comes from the Latin vertus , which means truth. However, virtual would mean, parsed in a strict sense, "truth-like": something that is not quite true but appears to be true. Most importantly, the word carries a sense that what is going on is less than true, or, as it might be put another way, totally fake or unreal. Thus, "virtual reality" becomes a bit of an oxymoron. It might be better called "virtuality" - the state of being real-like. Still, we are in a bit of a dilemma. Clearly, we are dealing with an intermediate category. It's not quite fake or unreal, but it's not quite true or real either. It's liminal - somewhere in between.
Through the medium of virtuality, we are creating virtual cultures. The majority of these cultures right now are text-based; they are the now well-known MUDs and MOOs of the Internet. (These stand for Multi-User Dimensions and MUD Object-Oriented environments.) Basically, these virtual communities have many of the features of real-life ones. Some are anarchic, encouraging the worst sorts of role-playing, deception, flaming, and identity-switching, in the pursuit of goals ranging from bestial coupling to avant-garde storytelling. Others are well-ordered, determined to maintain rules of conduct governing how participants are to interrelate and establishing a firm hierarchy of control over features of the virtual world (users, wizards, archons, etc.)
It's not surprising that the designers of these virtual worlds were first players of fantasy role-playing games. At first nothing but strategic war games with miniatures, FRPs eventually diversified to allow people to become characters and thus role-play superheroes, wizards, and cyborgs. The first text adventure game (and thus one-person virtual world) was the game Colossal Cave (alias Adventure), whose creators were heavily influenced by Tolkien, medieval faire re-enactments (such as those put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism), and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. What MUDs and later MOOs pioneered was what people originally enjoyed with FRPs - the ability to role-play with many other people at the same time in a shared fantasy world. Only now people could even take on the ability of creating rooms, objects, and commands.
There are problems in cyberspace (just as there in the real world) of virtual stalking, virtual harassment, virtual bullying and domination, virtual theft, virtual murder, and even reported cases of virtual rape. On the other hand, just about every joyous event that occurs in the real world has happened now in cyberspace. People have held virtual weddings, virtual birthdays, and virtual anniversaries. But the interesting thing, of course, is that the 'participants' in all these events are not real. They are simulated personae (characters) created by real-life human beings which may or may not reflect anything about their real identity. And the worlds in which these interactions take place are on everything from alien planets to alternate histories.
However, the main liability of these virtual experiences is that due to the low bandwidth of the Internet at the moment, they are all text-based. People use their imagination, mostly, to transcribe words on the screen into events in their head. When passions become raised and virtual combat or eros is about to begin, typing fingers begin moving rapidly. However, this is not the only kind of virtual world available to people. Just because this is the interface to which people have become accustomed does not mean it is likely to remain so, for long. Virtual reality devices now allow people to engage their sense of vision and hearing in a 3-dimensional immersive simulated environment.
The dataglove, headmount, and microphone now also allow people to manipulate, look about, and move through that environment using voice, head motion, and gesture. Still, there is much about these virtual worlds that seems very much unreal. Objects have no appearance of solidity or weight. Most things still appear like collections of polygonal facets rather than smooth, continuous surfaces. The laws of physics do not seem to be present, allowing vertical movement and motion through solid walls. Other senses, such as smell, taste, and touch (sensations of heat, cold, pressure), are not engaged. When people turn their heads, their field of vision moves much more slowly than it would in the real world, resulting in vertigo.
Some of these problems are technical; a large part of them are based on the limited model of what VR should be. It's clear that in the American cultural imaginary, what people desire when they talk about virtual reality is something like the Star Trek holodeck. An immersive space that is created for the person without bulky equipment to wear over the head and body. Most importantly, a space that seems as real as reality itself, yet which is (unlike the real world) subject to reprogramming and redesign by the user, so that they can experience, for example, the world of a fictional 19th-century English detective.
The technology responsible for this in the virtual world of Star Trek television is holography, which somehow works mysteriously in conjunction with force fields to create holograms with solidity and mass. However, other worlds of film suggest other routes - the movies Brainstorm, Total Recall, and Strange Days offer a neurally-directed technology which allows people to insert experiences (perhaps recorded from the brains of others or generated artificially) into their minds directly. This technology is no longer science fiction. Already, there has been some success in restoring vision to the blind by utilizing electronic technology directed at the visual cortex. This is but one possible application.
In all likelihood, what will come next is some form of integration of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web with the interactivity of MUDs, using the VRML and HotJava programming commands. People will be able to 'see' the 'avatars' (personae) of other participants, 'hear' their voice, and possibly even move about with them in a 3-dimensional graphical space. At first, simulating interactions beyond conversation will be extremely difficult, but inevitably due to the preferences of a large majority of Internet users, the next interactions between participants to be programmed into these virtual worlds are likely to be sexual, combat-oriented, or competitive.
Regardless of what form virtual worlds take, the anthropologist is forced to ask, are the shared interactions and community norms of these worlds truly a culture? All the main components of one of the classical definitions of culture are present. There are material infrastructures (MOOs allow members to create objects and assign them properties), social relationships (hierarchical, gender-based, and others), and ideological systems (people who don't share the beliefs of fellow MUDDers and violate community norms may find their ability to participate restricted). But there are all sorts of problematics going on here. All the people who are currently role-playing characters in the virtual world are themselves members of real-world cultures. Much of their behavior in the virtual world is shaped in part by their real-world socialization.
Are simulated situations in a simulated world a culture? In calling this virtual culture, the sense of ambiguity in the term is once again called into play. Well, it looks a lot like culture, but isn't quite. After all, culture grows out of adaptations to real-world environments; no one is born into a virtual world and no one ever faces the possibility of real death in one either. Certainly, the imaginary for a large part of these virtual worlds comes out of science fiction and the Western imagination. So, are 'virtual' ethnographers of these virtual cultures doing something that is only 'virtually' anthropology? Well, I'll shock you by saying that perhaps the answer is yes. But so what?
As others have pointed out, culture is also about the transaction of meaning. It's about the investment of human energy into symbolic interactions of various kinds. And people invest a vast amount of energy into these virtual worlds - for the same reason that you invest a lot of emotion into that film you saw at the theatre. People feel real pain and loss when their virtual characters are eliminated. They experience real despair when other participants in their virtual world abuse, harass, and exploit their characters. Some derive real satisfaction from the role-playing which is possible in a virtual world, and the shifting of identity it permits. Women can feel a taste of male perogative, the handicapped what it feels like to not have a disability, the black to exist in a universe of subject color variation far beyond the day-to-day dichotomies they normally experience.
These symbolic interactions that occur in virtual worlds are no more or no less real than the ones in the 'real' world. As symbol-making and transferring animals, humans experience even physiological responses from encountering symbolic objects - arousal from pornography, cold sweat from haunted house rides, nausea and discomfort from motion simulators. The human brain is a powerful world-generating device, and perhaps four percent of humans (diagnosed with what psychologists call the 'disorder' Fantasy-Prone Personality Syndrome) experience vibrant fantasy worlds of their own imagining much of the time. There is no culture without some form of mythic system, some sort of collective unconscious 'populated' with images and symbols.
Though there are those who say that the distinctiveness of humanity in nature comes from its rationality, tool-making capacity, or linguistic capacity, there are also those who suggest that perhaps it is just as equally true that humanity is the animal that plays (homo ludens), imagines, and makes-believe. Imagination is a distinct human capacity, but one that it is often quickly socialized out of youth in our society who are inculcated as they are forced to deal with the reality principle. In times before writing and computer disks, it was the basis of human mnemonic arts. Even today, visualization is used as a means for promoting human health and fighting cancer and other diseases. Imagination works to fix the attention of the person.
Perhaps cyberspace is a consensual hallucination. From the point of view of sociologists who follow Peter Berger's ideas of the social construction of reality, the real world is too. What cyberspace is, most importantly, is the space where your attention is when you are interacting with other people through electronically-mediated communication. In this sense, people began entering cyberspace through the use of the telephone at the beginning of this century. This amount of attention is growing exponentially. It may have started as a trickle. But now people are known to spend days on MUDs, only relinquishing the terminal to fulfill absolutely non-ignorable biological needs. This may have real-world consequences for the people, but it should not be seen merely as some form of addiction or escapism. Something more complex is going on.
In some cases, people derive satisfaction from virtual worlds because they feel a real-world sense of alienation and a lack of friends or peers. They may be fanatically devoted to a certain science-fiction author, and virtual worlds enable them to associate with and befriend people who share their devotion. Still others relish the possibilities in being able to take on virtual identities that are stronger, sexier, smarter, more powerful, etc. than they are in real life. Many find that virtual worlds challenge them (to solve puzzles, escape dangers, find exits) in ways that the ordinary world does not. But this does not explain in toto the fascination people have with virtual worlds. Many find single-player computer role-playing games quite boring. MUDs allow people to interact with other people in ways that transcend distance and difference; in that sense they are just like nations, the other kind of imagined community.
I wish to argue that anthropologists should be paying some virtual attention to virtual culture. It will require a new form of participant observation and a new form of ethnography. If we are moving toward a post-literate, post-textual era, anthropologists may need to start using hypermedia to describe the world of the hyperreal. "Thick (textual) description" may no longer do. Though the anthropologist may need to add skills to their repertoire in order to keep up with virtual culture (entering the field may require new hardware and take on new meanings), they will find a lot of interesting things to chew on as humanity approaches (in the Christian calendar, anyway) its second millennium.
Thus, we see rebellious teenagers disrupting civility on the PMC-MOO, men attempting virtual rape, heterosexuals bashing gay characters, real-life egotists attempting to dominate every virtual situation and interaction in their search for attention. Fortunately, the unexpected intervenes, and these people often discover surprises that force them to question their assumptions. Their rape 'victim' turns out to be a man; the young girl they were trying to seduce is really a middle-aged woman; the easily intimidated nerd is actually their real-life boss. Some people find these sorts of identity-switching games rather discomforting. But perhaps they can serve to help dislodge some rather ethnocentric and chauvinistic positions, and that can only be for the better. Virtual worlds are perhaps one of the few places where you have nothing more to go on than the content of a person's (virtual) character in judging them.
Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1