Diseño de espacios y herramientas que apoyan los procesos de enseñanza-

What gamers brought to the subject of immersion, according to Castronova, is that their perspective is centred on subjectivity, well-being and “enhanced suspension of disbelief” (289); without these, immersion would not be possible. In this sense Castronova points to Pierre Levy’s idea that “the virtual is a kind of real becoming” (287), a core idea

presented as well in Munster’s aesthetic theory, that harks back to Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of [logic of] differentials,the fold and indeed becoming. One may say that Munster’s idea of becoming is crafted from her interest in and affinity for the baroque: for her, “the digital is part of a baroque event” conceived so that a “baroque flow now unfolds genealogically out of the articulation of the differential relations between embodiment and technics” (2006 5). For Munster, this is an event responsible for generating logics of differential that produce a dynamic ‘force-field’ of aesthetic pulses (against each other). In this field of forces she thinks that:

the binary pairs that have populated our understanding of digital culture and new media technologies—physicality and virtuality, analog and discreet states, real and hyperreal—can be seen to impinge upon each other rather than be mutually exclusive. The effect of these areas’ convergence and divergence is to produce ever-new and consistently mutating outcomes. (2006 5)

In this sense I refer to flickering meaning and mutable identity as a particular ‘outcome’ revealing the sway effects of digital aesthesia. Regarding the idea of the fold, it is interesting to observe that Deleuze also turned to the baroque, analysing the work of Gottfried Leibniz to grasp the notion and process of the fold as simultaneously form and process. From this, I envision an articulation between embodiment, techniques for self-

representing, and technologies responsible for producing blocs of sensation8 as a shift from spatial to temporal regimes at the hands of every resident in SL that lives as a simultaneous processing within a collective experiencing of aesthesia. In the next section of this Chapter, I will return to Munster’s distributed aesthetics, but for the moment I will recapitulate the conceptual lay-out traced thus far around virtual aesthetics as a set of experiences emphasising a sense of community through immersion, illusion, suspension of disbelief, becoming, differentials and the fold. These conform the polyphonic axiology around which an approach to virtual world aesthetics is feasible and imaginable.

Users are deeply interested in experiencing virtual worlds and selves collectively: the presence of a community helps to create a truer sense of reality in a context where one can experiment with subjectivity, but also compete (for attention) and have fun, and above all else, where one can sustain a cognitive, lucid and aesthetic melding

(Castronova 292). To me, Second Life is a good example of this widened and evolving reflection on virtual environments in connection with the real world, as immaterial as it is excessively charged with data and information. Virtual worlds behavioural research like that of Fox, Bailenson & Binney, and Duchenaut, Wen, Yee and Wadley, among others, enters into play here. These researches have stated clearly that emotional and affective components are tightly involved in the feeling of presence in virtual environments. The first set of researchers (Fox, Bailenson & Binney) have studied the extent to which synchronous reactions, behavioural and psychological responses are elicited by virtual world’s user interaction. The latter have conducted research around SL demography and the hybrid paths to follow for an understanding of identity and personality-shaping issues in ‘actual’ life, derived from virtual ‘avatarian’ existence. Hence, since there is no

specific plot, goal, score or rules to follow in SL, portraying it as a ‘game’ would be misleading. SL is indeed a social environment or experiment occurring in virtual worlds. Nevertheless, in this thesis, I intend to demonstrate how the meaningful achievements in the social, economic, cultural and personal planes in SL, are symptomatically ‘goal

8 _{This is Deleuze and Guattari's description of the grouping of sensations into affectual moments that occur}

in aesthetic experience. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translator H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), in Munster 2006 173-174.

oriented’ activities, and these are dependent, largely, on one’s personal and collective narratives, or, to borrow a term from Paul Ricoeur, emplotment: “the development of a kind of story line or assignation of roles between a character—a subject—and a narrative in which the order of submission between one and another can oscillate” (Ricoeur 20). The use of the term is not gratuitous, since a substantial part of the enticing and

meaningful situations that avatars in SL may be involved in, through interaction, are ultimately goal-oriented narratives. Ricoeur’s main thesis in Oneself as Another sustains this point: he affirms that the correlation of commitment and thought—the ‘attestation’ of the being of selfhood—is where attestation comes to mean:

a kind of belief … attestation belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe-in.’ … The

kinship between attestation and testimony is verified here: there is no ‘true’ testimony without ‘false’ testimony. … [C]redence is also trust. This will be one of the leitmotifs of our analysis: attestation is fundamentally attestation of self. (21-22)

What is notable here is the idea of credence as trust. In SL, I think, the ‘feelings’ apprehended in the process of attesting become propelled and sustained by: 1. the persistent nature of the three-dimensional space (which elicits the

acknowledgement of a temporal continuum, i.e. avatars building a sense of a past and present time, despite operating in a virtual, artificial space);

2. the hyper-communication tools available for residents; the transforming and enhancement of presence; and

3. the issue of inverse presence, a phenomenon that has gained attention from researchers lately, and one that, within the confines of my research, I would describe as a teleological counterbalance to Castronova’s enhanced suspension of disbelief.

Briefly, inverse presence is the recursive illusion that virtual game players and SL residents, at some point, have the sensation of being immersed in ‘non-mediated’ experiences, when of course they are; and the inverse sensation is also true. In other words, the ‘cultured’ utterance that virtual experiences are real to the extent they can

trigger the reverse illusion: the sensation that some experiences of the actual (real) feel like being mediated when they are not:

If (tele)presence is the illusion of nonmediation, then inverse presence is the illusion of mediation. Two interrelated types of illusion of mediation can be identified, one involving the form of experience and the other its content. When an individual says something such as, “it looked like a postcard” or “it felt like a movie,” they are reporting similarities in the form of nonmediated and mediated experiences, and confusion between the two. When they suggest that the

unfolding of events was “like a movie” (i.e., scripted or artificial) they are pointing to similarities in (and confusion about) the content of nonmediated and mediated experiences. Ultimately, when people experience presence they think (at some level) that the mediated world is “real,” while when they experience inverse presence, they think (at some level) that reality is mediated. (Reeves Timmins & Lombard 496)

Among several paradoxical conditions of virtual existence, this one reflects the extent to which avatars inhabiting, producing content and socialising in SL contribute to

multiplying and making opaque single versions about the purpose of having a second life and what its goals are. In Linden Lab’s own words, the main objective of SL is the creation and maintenance of social relations, the edification of a virtual society and the objects, spaces and narratives necessary to populate it: a collection of cultures designed and shaped at residents’ will (Rymaszewski et. al.).