Virtual Worlds 2007: Togetherness: What Drives the Virtual Human Connection

Here are the notes from the Afternoon community panel featuring some friends of mine including Giff Constable, Betsy Book, and Robin Harper to name a few.

Insularity is one of the biggest issues with virtual worlds. There is a privacy value but to maintain the connection and value of the connection it is important to be able to take the relationship with you. A challenge that we all have is to help people take advantage of the anonymity and identity options. Are we interested in bringing in pieces of real life and making them available bit by bit at a time? We are becoming more compassionate as we learn more about each other through secondary spaces such as social networking spaces. Our social rules a re evolving with the technology. The tech has causes us to rethink how we deliver and disclose information as well as adjust our expectations of privacy.

One of the strong ties that bind together communities is fandom, but what creates the community is not the topic but the exchanges about the everyday life. Virtual worlds are spaces that are ripe as the mediums for this kind of discussions. Voice chat has been one of the real powerful tools that help facilitate community building. One of the neat things is using the chat tool as a back-channel to voice conversations. Making communication tools easier and more prevalent is the key to getting the community to gel and bond.

Part of the availability of the online space provides an amazing opportunity for cultural sharing. Moreover having the ability to communicate across native languages using translator programs provides a potential for person to person global diplomacy. In certain areas you can delineate and mark spaces and it is more of a human factor. The goal is to continue to keep the relationships in world alive while they are out of world.

One of the content applications is that with people that are housebound, or ill find that their virtual friends are their support system. At what point does the line between real and virtual friends dissolve and disappear. The reality is that friendship is a state not a location or something tangible. For older users location still seems to be a key component of their virtual experiences.