Playing the virtual world: The social construction of virtual reality in the entertainment industry.

摘要

An important activity in communication and culture is the creation of texts, according to linguistic anthropologists (Silverstein and Urban, 1996). In the 1990s, virtual reality game producers created co-texts of virtual reality by fixing the phenomenal, or the discourse of virtual reality from research and development, and reanimating it in entertainment centers. Critics of these games created a serious-leisure divide but their critiques tended to ignore contextual differences. Using a case study of Virtual World Entertainment, this work demonstrates how the recontextualization of virtual reality resulted in at least three forms of technological differentiation within popular culture. First, virtual reality games are an example of technological variety within the broad label of virtual reality. The games were distinct from other institutions in their use, audience interpretation and site relatedness. Second, entertainment companies integrated virtual reality into their multimedia strategy. This intertextuality between different technological platforms allowed players to demonstrate their competence to participants familiar with the array of texts. Furthermore, virtual reality was metamorphosed and reinterpreted in popular culture. It was borrowed and applied to other forms of leisure, such as animation, online graphics delivery, or arcade and home consoles. Virtual reality game companies had to continually revise their products and change their use of the term in this fast-changing environment. This ongoing adaptation of virtual reality illustrates what anthropologists have called the processes of entextualization and co(n)textualization (Bauman and Briggs, 1990). The entextualization process involves the borrowing of a form from one context, embedding it in another, and reanimating it for its new context. This study explores the interactive and on-going stylization of virtual reality in popular culture in relation to these "iterations of textuality." It contributes to the social studies of technology by showing how context is a product of this stylization by producers and their audiences' performances.