City: A Mixture of Old and New Media

The majority of the chapters in this book describe what might nowadays be called ‘traditional’ inhabited information spaces: collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) or virtual worlds. Although not all CVEs centre on computer–rendered 3D graphics, the paradigmatic CVE does so. Shared 3D virtual environments are emblematic of CVE research, but have only gained public acceptance in the form of computer games. The focused engagement in such games is designed to fit with the closed world of the virtual environment. A player can become immersed in a game — closed off from the ‘real’ world — by attention as much as by apparatus. A PC at home can be as engaging as the head–mounted displays and immersive projection technologies in research labs. However, even a single–player non–networked game may be a resource for social interaction e.g. played by one person while friends and family shout advice from the sofa, order pizza by phone and slip into the kitchen to get more drinks. A computer game is a resource for far more social interaction than the software’s architecture may suggest. In general, the wider context of use is hardly modelled or represented in the system. Games’ internal data structures are designed to be decoupled, i.e. closed off from the other media people use in everyday life, and this decontextualised design approach has worked well in this domain.