virtual areas for places

If we are to make places, we need a stretched-out continuum around us that offers regions and directions that invite inhabitation. Places need an expanse, but that need not be physical space.

Virtual worlds are created whole, rather than cut from some larger space. They provide an expanse in which actions can be embodied. The virtual places of most computer games offer a limited expanse that has no outsides or wasted space -- though you may be able to see mountains drawn in the distance, you can't quit the game and go off hiking in the hills.

A game, or a conversation, could take place in a virtual world comprised solely of the grammatical place, perhaps -- reminiscences of No Exit -- one room with some furniture and no exterior. Yet even then, the place would have a sensed expanse that allowed appropriate movements: turning towards the mantel, looking away from one's companions, and the like.

However, a virtual world could also be much larger than the social places established within it, containing unused virtual real estate to be developed into inhabited places. Virtual places are created within virtual spaces, by grammars that make use of features of the virtual space, just as happens in the physical world. But the virtual space and its background features are also our creations. Even so, the creation of the background regions and the creation of the places are not the same, and they can interact. We will have to learn how to use the revisability of virtual locales to solicit the mutual creation of the place, the community, and the norms of action in the place.


Index
virtual places
Place theory outline

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001