Creating Virtual Crowds in Text and VR -- Exploring Social Constraints and Affordances (for Coders and the Rest of Us)
Creating Virtual Crowds in Text and VR -- Exploring Social Constraints and Affordances (for Coders and the Rest of Us)
Submitter: Dennis Jerz, Seton Hill University, jerz@setonhill.edu
Abstract:
From the earliest NPCs of the MUDs and MOOs of the pre-WWW Internet, creating virtual agents to populate digital environments has been an important part of digital world-building. This Making & Doing session will explore the unique conventions, embedded assumptions, and creative possibilities built into two very powerful content creation tools: the text-adventure toolkit Inform 7, and the 3D/VR Unity Game Engine. Digital culture has been social long before Facebook rebranded itself as "Meta" and announced its plans for its 3D VR "Metaverse" (borrowing the name from the escapist digital corporate experience in Stephenson's dystopian 1992 novel Snow Crash). I’ll reference recent developments in the development of Facebook spinoff Metaverse, in the context of Lewis Mumford’s conception of the city in human history, and explore the constraints and affordances of our shared global experiments in relying on virtual communities during a time of pandemic-related physical isolation. My intent is to create a general introduction that illustrates the constraints and affordances associated with using two tools with the same general function (a well-documented software development environment designed for the creation and sharing of virtual experiences), but employing two very different procedural modalities (textual and spatial).
Areas of STS Scholarship: Urban STS, Method and Practice, Information, Computing and Media Technology
Authors/Participants: Dennis Jerz, Seton Hill University
