Designing Virtual Worlds to Facilitate Meaningful Communication: Issues, Considerations, and Lessons Learned

摘要

In many ways, our experiences interacting with one another in traditional, face-to-face environments inform our beliefs about effective communication. In traditional spaces, we rely on seemingly innate abilities to process multisensory cues, sounds, gestures, and inferences both to make and to offer meaning. As such, we often design our communication technologies to amplify the same senses and process of our past environments and project them into future ones. Speakers amplify sound. Cameras expand sight. Haptic devices extend touch, and so on. Together, we use our technologies and our techniques to create communities and to convey shared experiences. Turkle (1995) suggested that, although humans manifest individual identities in words, deeds, and other media, computer-mediated environments offer a unique medium for embodiment and expression. Simply being unique, however, does not make a technology useful. In fact, the principle of least effort (Zipf 1949) suggests that people will follow the most convenient process and use the most available tools for finding information and connecting with others. For a communication medium to be useful, it must not only enable embodiment and expression, it must also do so in as clear and explicit a way as possible. Computer-mediated technologies, such as social networking websites, online multiplayer games, and some simulations are examples of media developed with the primary goals of facilitating and supporting the social nature of communication.