The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:27am on Tuesday, 11th November, 2025:
Anecdote
Yesterday evening, I gave a presentation in the Virtual Worlds Museum about the history of virtual worlds.
As is often the case when a new technology arrives, those who practise it tend to think that all that went before it is of little relevance. Black-and-white silent movies were dismissed by sound movies, which were dismissed by colour movies, which were dismissed by 3D movies, and so on — yet they were all movies.
The Virtual World Museum is mainly about virtual worlds in the sense of VR/XR, with a social and building focus. The people they interact with are aware of games, but not really concerned with them. Because VR social worlds are seen as being distinct from game worlds, the people working in that domain are now learning for the first time some of what we've known about in games for quite a while (the example that most struck me yesterday was their discovery of the concept of parasocial relationships).
The Virtual World Museum exists because so many VR social worlds come into being then disappear, meaning that anything anyone creates in them is lost. They have a teleportal that connects to multiple virtual worlds in a nicely-visualised fashion, which is quite impressive. It reminds me of some of the maps of the Internet we had back in the day (although those were on paper, of course).
My presentation was 15 minutes long and concerned the history of virtual worlds. The short length was because I wasn't the only speaker, and in a VR environment people don't want to wear the headsets for more than an hour or so. It was an edited version of the slides I put together, made to look nice by the organisers of the event. You can see it at https://mud.co.uk/richard/VWM.pdf. It's necessarily short, as I said, so if you want to see the source that I developed it from, that would be my CE217 lecture 1, which I've uploaded to https://mud.co.uk/richard/CE31701.pdf. It's the full lecture, so is topped and tailed with irrelevances about the module, but the bulk of it is virtual-world history stuff.
I had trouble with my microphone using the Engage system that interfaced to the presentation venue. It worked fine the first time I tried it, but the second time it didn't. I think Google Meet may have messed with it, but it could have been my security software. Fortunately, in anticipation of this, I'd loaded Engage onto my laptop and it worked fine from there, although apparently I sounded a little tinny. I have a cold at the moment, though, so some degree of tinniness might have compensated with the stuffiness to make me sound more human.
The audience at the presentation were very polite, given that they were all rigged up in VR gear watching a stiff character read from slides. Still, that's what my students used to have to put up with, so I can legitimately claim it's my presentational style.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).