MDM Students Reflect on the RSVP Mixed reality picnic

RSVP Picnic in first and second life 1, originally uploaded by J0@nn@.

A week after the Contemporary Art Gallery RSVP Picnic event hosted at the GNWC Centre for Digital Media the students discussed their impressions and feedback on the event.

Event Description:

"The Contemporary Art Gallery presents RSVP - a series of dinner parties as unscripted social performance enacted by everyone in attendance, as part of the 2007 LIVE Performance Art Biennale, October 19 - 28, 2007.
Guests including Masters of Digital Media students, faculty, second life and first life educators and Second Front performance artists discussed performance and identity over picnic lunch in both worlds.
Guest-curated by Germaine Koh, ECI sessional faculty member, hosted by Joanna Robinson & Ian Verchere at the GNWC Centre for Digital Media in first and second life. "

General Feedback:

- There was a disconnect between virtual and real picnic – attention drawn to one or the other

- Facilitation between worlds was needed and was provided by Joanna but since she was not clearly defined as 'leader' this could have been more successful

- 'Weird' experience, even though eating lunch and chatting is something we do often in everyday life

- How to particpate was not defined in keeping with the unscripted social performance mandate - this made it awkward, not sure what to do

- Some students performance was centred on their SL avatar, others felt they were performing in first life for our guests at the first life campus, representing the MDM (Masters of Digital Media) program

- RSVP – Framed it as “respond please”

- Being together in the room made a different dynamic, than if we were separated in diferent rooms

- Students found themselves waiting for artist to give her performance, the professor to direct or either to give them explicit sanction to perform

- A 'Team leader' would be useful (video game guild style) to direct group action

General SL feedback:

- The SL experience is Exploratory
- SL is a Social space – a space of chatter
- SL general feels like it is lacking sense of purpose, lack of direction
- No explicit goals to orient participants unlike WoW

Talking about Emergent Play:

- Use of emotes in Wow to communicate between horde and alliance
- Metaphor of SL as a festival with many sub events simultaneously occurring

Examples of gaming Emergent play:
- Reppapropriation
- Mass suicide or town death by poison
- Seasonal quests
- Conga line
- Suggested motivations of boredom, showing off
- “Transgressive play” - pushing the limits, finding the rules and breaking them
- Emergent play requires an observer

Examples of Second Life Emergent Play:
- Different borders and rules to transgress
- Scandalous behaviour, inappropriate in some first life spaces
- "Excessive violence" and PvP
- Griefing
- Or can every Second Life activity be considered "emergent play"?

Another interesting comment about SL and reflexivity:

- SL can make you think more consciously about your first life performance and behaviour, because the rules that govern us in first life are different