In order to understand what to do with virtual worlds, we have to understand how people

use them. In order to understand how people use virtual worlds, we have to understand use them. In order to understand how people use virtual worlds, we have to understand

how they make sense of them. And what I want to talk about today is the idea that in

order to better understand how to create virtual worlds people will be more likely to want

to use, we have to understand a specific type of sense-making they do when they engage

with them. This specific type of sense-making revolves around metaphors. [30 seconds]

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Virtual worlds are media products intended to replicate, reproduce and represent aspects

of the physical world, physical people, and the activities people do in the world. There are of the physical world, physical people, and the activities people do in the world. There are

a great expanse of virtual worlds currently operating over the Internet. Some are designed

primarily to be places of play. Others are designed primarily to be user-generated spaces of

socializing. For this study, I looked at one of each of these two types: City of Heroes, a

massively multiplayer online role-playing game; and Second Life, a user-generated social

world. [30 seconds]

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This study was part of the multi-study, three year project housed at Roskilde University in

Denmark. Using an experimental framework, 14 people with relatively little experience Denmark. Using an experimental framework, 14 people with relatively little experience

with virtual worlds engaged with the two worlds mentioned, as well as a video game and a

movie. During the experimental sessions, they were asked to talk aloud about their

experiences. After engaging in all sessions, a comprehensive interview, designed with

Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology, asked them to go in-depth into their experiences, and

how they relate to each other, and to their lives outside of the experiment. [30 seconds]

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It was during these comprehensive interviews that I noticed how often they would use

metaphors to describe their experiences with the virtual worlds. The analysis for this paper metaphors to describe their experiences with the virtual worlds. The analysis for this paper

lead me to trace the use of metaphors for understanding sense-making as a cognitive

process to Lakoff & Johnson’s 1980 work “Metaphors We Live By”. From their trajectory of

research, we get the theorization of how metaphors are used in situations of learning and

problem-solving; that is, how metaphors are useful for sense-making the unfamiliar. This

“metaphorizing” can then be theorized as part of the sense-making process people go

through when involved in situations that are novel to them – such as for my participants

engaging with a media product with which they had little to no experience. [60 seconds]

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The themes that emerged from the grounded coding all dealt with how the participants

were making interpretive links between the virtual world and the physical world. Thus, were making interpretive links between the virtual world and the physical world. Thus,

metaphors highlighted participants' attempts to draw connections to the physical world to

help them make sense of what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why they

were doing it the two virtual worlds. From this thematic analysis, the metaphors could be

categorized into five types of comparisons between the virtual and the physical. [30

seconds]

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Danika compared the feeling and appearance of emptiness of Second Life to physical spaces

and places that either are the opposite of such a feeling (a bazaar) or possibly represents and places that either are the opposite of such a feeling (a bazaar) or possibly represents

that sense of loneliness (a space ship). "I think [Second Life] was very empty. I mean,

because compared to the bazaar metaphor, it's kind of crowded and people are all

haggling, and, I mean, this is very bare and kind of barren. So it had the feeling of kind of

being on a space ship or something like that, I think." [30 seconds]

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Morten compared the feeling of being unable to control his avatar in City of Heroes to

being a toddler in the physical world. "So I'm like, I'm like walking like I'm a toddler around being a toddler in the physical world. "So I'm like, I'm like walking like I'm a toddler around

in this world where people are trying to kill me. And I'm just like I go, you know, very

simply moving around." [15 seconds]

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Torben compared the feeling of uncertainty we can all appreciate: meeting new people at

an academic convention to meeting people in Second Life. "Although I'm thinking of a an academic convention to meeting people in Second Life. "Although I'm thinking of a

possible parallel could be being at a scholarly conference where you don't know anyone

and you have to chat people up and you walk up to people at the opening reception or

whatever." [30 seconds]

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Morten compared the feeling of how you connect with people in Second Life to other

technologies he felt are better for making those connections. "[Second Life] was like a technologies he felt are better for making those connections. "[Second Life] was like a

social network basically. Like where you were just walking around in a social network,

instead of just, you know, moving around your mouse around Facebook or MySpace or

Twitter or whatever they call it." [30 seconds]

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Grette compared the feeling of how she had to perform quests in City of Heroes by finding

clues to the detective genre she has become familiar with throughout her life. "[City of clues to the detective genre she has become familiar with throughout her life. "[City of

Heroes] was kind of like a detective story, or something like that, where I had to solve a

certain problem and there were clues along the way." [15 seconds]

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Across these five categories, a total of 42 instances of unique metaphors from 28 situations

were coded and recorded for subsequent analyses. With just a basic frequency distribution were coded and recorded for subsequent analyses. With just a basic frequency distribution

, we can see that there were more metaphors used in discussing Second Life than City of

Heroes. This comparison helps us to see that, for these participants, engaging with Second

Life was perhaps a less familiar situation to them, thereby generating more metaphorizing,

drawing in more from their physical world experiences to make sense of their virtual world

experiences. [45 seconds]

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From these 14 people, we see that they were using metaphors to describe, to themselves

and to me, how they experienced the new media product of these two virtual worlds. In a and to me, how they experienced the new media product of these two virtual worlds. In a

sense, the metaphors were acting as a bridge; the participants were bringing into the new

experience what they knew from their lifetime of experience in the physical world via the

metaphors. [30 seconds]

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This bridging may have been spurred along by the idea that these media products are

deliberately attempting to replicate aspects of the physical world in how they are designed. deliberately attempting to replicate aspects of the physical world in how they are designed.

Thus, to better design these worlds, we could use the metaphors people have to better

understand what metaphors are related to better experiences of engaging. Further in this

paper, I conduct such an analysis, linking metaphors to how they particularly helped or

hindered the person’s experience with the virtual world. The implication is that if we are

designing worlds for specific purposes, such as education, training, socializing, and gaming,

then we need to measure for how people are metaphorizing their experiences during any

beta-testing or user-centered design. [45 seconds]

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