This thesis examines the activity of pleasure reading as conducted within three kinds of virtual environments: role-playing and adventure video games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, and graphical online social worlds such as Second Life. I ask how and to what extent different types of virtual environments are able to provide immersive reading experiences. This analysis relies upon the concepts of telic (purpose-driven) and paratelic (pleasure-driven) modes of reading, and I examine how virtual environments provide affordances for one or the other mode. How they do so usually has to do with how their situate reading materials in relation to the environment’s diegetic world, as well as whether the diegetic world is coherent and bounded. I conclude that while paratelic reading is encouraged in all virtual environments, role-playing and adventure video games are conducive to partially telic reading experiences, with players reading in order to better understand the diegetic world in which they act. MMOGs feature largely immutable diegetic worlds lacking normal relations of causality, but they still manage to some degree to encourage telic reading by circumscribing and enriching the world with lore. Virtual social worlds are generally unable to provide this sort of telic reading experience due to their lack of coherent diegetic worlds, and their effectiveness for paratelic reading is currently hampered by unwieldy interfaces and lack of innovation in the format of virtual books. Although MMOGs and social virtual worlds both feature synchronous collaboration between players with the potential for emergent narratives, neither has been able to leverage this advantage for the creation of immersive reading experiences. Finally, all three forms of virtual environment have inspired innovative user-created narratives and interfaces, but they have done so outside the contexts of their diegetic game worlds, in the sphere of participant culture. / text

Developments in video games over the last few decades have opened up many new kinds of musical experiences that pose substantial challenges to traditional understandings of music and musical agency. Virtual spaces grant us opportunities and freedoms to interact with music in manners that might not be prudent, practical, or even possible in the physical world. Players and creators of games have considerable license to play with music – to push the boundaries of music’s signifying and sensational potential within far-reaching narrative, ludic, and social contexts. This dissertation investigates how modern technologies of digital gaming enable and motivate such transgressive modes of musical engagement. Video game players, composers, and designers frequently employ (or otherwise interact with) music, noise, and speech in ways that deliberately or inadvertently violate technical rules, social expectations, cultural conventions, aesthetic norms, and ethical codes. Just as creators of games are constantly surprising gamers with innovative concepts and progressive designs, so gamers often come up with forms of emergent play that creators themselves might not have anticipated or intended. Though gameplay isn’t always explicitly transgressive, I argue here that it can be productively conceptualized as an activity that is largely bound up in potentialities for transgression. Play isn’t simply about make-believe, but additionally about re-making belief – about redrawing the limits of the imagination through accomplishments of acts previously unimaginable (or believed to have been outright impossible). The particular liberties that can be taken with (and in) games may ultimately teach us some profound things about what (we think) music is (and isn’t), how it works, what it’s good for, and why and to whom these questions should matter in broader social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. / Music

The purpose of this research is the creation of the framework for immersive Virtual Worlds (VW) development and evaluation of factors affecting user’s immersion experience in 3D virtual worlds. Three experiments have been conducted to evaluate different aspects of the immersion experience in virtual reality. The first experiment aimed to explore the influence of communication on users whilst performing certain activities in a virtual world. The second experiment evaluated how the real-world environment affects users in a virtual world. The third experiment examined the aspect of mobility as a main contributor to a user’s distraction. The fourth experiment partly confirmed previous findings and added new factors, affecting immersion experience. The results of all experiments formed a framework, containing factors which users considered as affecting them during their activities in virtual worlds. During the experimentation phase of this research a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used. The Grounded Theory (GT) methodology was applied for data analysis in qualitative part. The major contribution of this research is the framework of factors for building immersive 3D virtual environments. Another contribution is the evaluation of factors affecting users in such an environment.

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) have been with us for some years however the way people utilise them is evolving and their potential is unclear. This research attempts to achieve a better understanding of retail in CVEs by comparing this channel with the competing retail channels of ‘bricks and mortar’, or offline, and two dimensional navigation websites (2D websites), in order to identify their respective Relative Advantages (RA). This is investigated from the consumer viewpoint, as they are the ones who will ultimately shape CVEs by voting with their feet, clicks or virtual feet. By exploring the literature a model was chosen to guide the research. Furthermore, based on this model and other literature five key objectives were identified for further investigation. These objectives are categories of RA that must be explored when comparing retail channels. The first research objective is as follows: A RA of CVEs to the 2D websites for e-commerce may be the aspects of offline retail it includes that do not exist in the 2D websites. The second research objective is: A RA of CVEs retail compared to offline retail may be aspects of 2D e-commerce it includes that are not included in the offline retail environment. The third research objective is: Consumers may vary their intended usage of CVEs across the different stages of the purchase process because the significance of the dimensions of RA may vary across those stages. The fourth research objective is: Consumers’ usage of CVEs may be different for simple and complex products. The fifth research objective is: CVEs such as Second Life (SL) may have the RA of a higher degree of institutional trust compared to the 2D websites. The first stage of data collection used focus groups to clarify the objectives identified from the literature. The second stage involved interviews where these objectives were explored with participants that had relevant experience. Both stages were analysed using template analysis. The first contribution was verifying the relevance of the five objectives and identifying significant dimensions within them. The second contribution was to develop the model used for comparing retail channels by adding enjoyment to the criteria. The third stage of this research is a survey. This quantitative analysis supplemented the two qualitative stages by gauging the significance of the objectives and their dimensions. This enables the findings to be more useful to retailers in making the strategic decisions to achieve the optimum synergies within and between channels. Participants showed a preference for offline and 2D in most situations however there was evidence that enjoyment, entertainment, sociable shopping, the ability to reinvent yourself, convenience and institutional trust were RA of SL in comparison to one of the other two channels.

With the birth of “virtual worlds,” created a new space for social norms to evolve and change within a subset community. This thesis focuses on toxicity within the virtual world of EA DICE’s Battlefield V title. The goal of this research is to understand toxicity on a micro scale inside the world of Battlefield V from a gaming anthropological perspective. Along with understanding what toxicity looked like within the virtual world ofBattlefield V, the thesis obtained data for how the community and EA DICE employees perceived toxicity. This research has components of interviews with these members of the communities/staff as well as a netnography of the virtual world of Battlefield V gameplay. Findings and analysis were categorized under the themes of toxic language, power/freedom, virtual world creation, and gender toxicity. Battlefield V toxicity is ever evolving and shaped by player techne (player actions). Player chat consumes the majority of toxicity and therefore diving into toxic language was vital. Understanding the player perspective of power and freedom while gaming was just the first step as the thesis also dove into the developer’s perspective and analyzed the interviews with the backbone of Malaby’s (2009) contingency concepts to see how the developers have a large role to play when it comes to toxicity in games, even if they may not realize it. Just as in the “real world” the virtual world of Battlefield V also had a major theme of gender discrimination winessed and discussed via both community members and staff members of EA DICE. Overall, the goal of this research was not to find out if toxicity was “good” or “bad” but to simply shed more light on the complex topic within virtual worlds and open up research for other anthropologists to do further research on the topic.

Internet commerce has risen steadily for over a decade. During this period, innovations have occurred to make using the Internet easier and more engaging as a consumer online shopping experience. An innovation with increasing availability is the three-dimensional (3D) representation of an area where the user has an agent, called an "avatar," to navigate in a computer-generated environment. As technical options become available to view standard web pages through this innovation, virtual reality envionments may change the overall look of a website and may potentially change the way a consumer perceives a website and shape the consumer's purchase intent. In this study, an experimental design was used in which student subjects were asked to view a set of products derived from a search of a retail webpage. Some subjects saw the webpage in a normal two-dimensional (2D) format, while others were shown the same page through a program called ExitReality that converts 2D webpages into 3D environments. Tests were first done to compare the results of some common constructs, as found in the Marketing literature on websites, between 2D and 3D online retail shopping to identify the differences in a set of variables. Second, the variables were combined into a path model to compare between 3 groups: A group trained in 2D and untrained in 3D who shopped in a 2D environment; a group trained in 3D who shopped in a 2D environment; and a group trained in 3D who shopped in a 3D environment. The perceptions used in the study centered on Attitude toward the Site (AST) and constructs that were related to AST in various other studies. The path model was defined through the use of partial least squares (PLS) path modeling techniques, based on previous research, to align the use of the new 3D environments with existing theory. One key potential consequence considered was the purchase intent as compared to the three groups studied. This study is important for two major reasons. First, it is an important step toward understanding the possible effects from presenting consumer online retail shopping experiences that more feasibly imitate physical-world shopping experiences. As technology advances and virtual spaces become easier to create, companies may be able to apply the lessons learned through this study to better understand the potential benefits of converting online retail websites into 3D virtual spaces. Second, this study fits into the research conducted to improve the understanding of how website-related constructs work. For example, the extant literature has shown some contention regarding the best measurement AST and whether AST has an impact on purchase intent. This study provides useful evidence in that debate.

In spite of the growing popularity of virtual worlds for gaming, recreation, and education, few studies have explored the efficacy of 3D immersive virtual worlds in post-secondary instruction; even fewer discuss the ability of virtual worlds to help young adults develop creative thinking. This study investigated the effect of virtual world education on creative thought for university level students. Over the course of two semesters, a total of 97 university students participated in this study. Forty-six of these participants (experimental group) spent time in a specially designed virtual world environment, the V.I.E.W., while 51 of the participants (control group) met exclusively in a real-world classroom. Creative thought was measured before and after the intervention with the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Verbal Forms A and B. Although the experimental group's ending scores did not reach the level of the control group's scores, results showed overall statistically significant gains for the experimental group at p = .033. The experimental group also achieved greater gains in the subcategories of fluency and flexibility, with significance at p = .036 and p = .043, respectively. At the end of the course, independent raters measured the creativity expressed in student art critiques, using a scale developed for this study. No overall significant differences between groups were found in the art critiques, except in the category of spatial awareness, where the experimental group's scores were significantly higher than the control group's scores at p = .039. For both instruments, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to evaluate statistical data. Results suggest that immersive worlds can be at least as well suited as traditional university classrooms for developing creative thought—particularly in the context of art education. Implications for researchers, students, educators, and administrators are discussed.

We introduce an alternative method for open-world scene generation. In this thesis, Graph-based Wave Function Collapse (GWFC) is integrated with Space Colonization Algorithm (SCA) and used to place objects in an unstructured 3D environment. This combined algorithm, Space Colonization Graph-based Wave Function Collapse (SC-GWFC), leverages the constraint-based capabilities of GWFC and the ability of SCA to populate arbitrary 3D volumes. We demonstrate that objects of variable scale can be successfully used with SC-GWFC. Since this algorithm is run in an interactive environment, we demonstrate iterative modifications to a partially complete scene and incorporate PCG into a scene editing process. As part of the implementation, we also introduce our Scene Modeling Application for rendering and editing 3D scenes. This modeling application allows for editing and viewing constraints for our SC-GWFC scene generator. We evaluate the performance characteristics of SC-GWFC in the Scene Modeling Application to demonstrate that SC-GWFC can be used interactively. Through the application, users can specify adjacency requirements for objects, and SC-GWFC will attempt to place objects in patterns that respect these rules. We demonstrate the ability to place up to 5000 items on a terrain using our proposed SC-GWFC technique.

The current dissertation investigated sexual assault victimization in virtual worlds – environments, where individuals engage through avatars, offering a deep level of immersion and interactivity. As the usage of these virtual spaces grows, so does the concern for negative experiences that mirror the sexual assault encountered in the physical world. Despite this, there is a notable gap in the quantitative analysis of virtual sexual assault (VSA) victimization. This research aimed to fill this void by exploring the prevalence of VSA victimization over the previous year and identifying potential predictors of VSA victimization through the lens of cyberlifestyle-routine activity theory. To achieve this, the current research recruited 829 English-speaking adult participants, who used/have used virtual worlds via Mechanical Turk (MTurk) using CloudResearch, which uses the sample population within MTurk but produces better-quality data. The study found that 46.44% of participants reported at least one instance of VSA victimization. VSA behaviors were categorized into unwanted sexual advances, image-based sexual abuse, and non-consensual sexual avatar manipulation. Unwanted sexual advances were reported by 35.71% of participants, image-based sexual abuse by 33.29%, and non-consensual sexual avatar manipulation by 27.99%. Applying CLRAT, the study found that higher levels of online exposure, online proximity, online deviant lifestyle, and lower levels of online guardianship were correlated with increased VSA victimization. However, the study noted that traditional guardianship concepts needed refinement for virtual environments, as mere vigilance without active intervention was insufficient to prevent victimization. Limitations, suggestions for future studies, and implications are provided based on these findings.

This dissertation contributes to conversations regarding the impact of open user centered innovation on cultural production by focusing on the construction and production of religious products within one large-scale open user-centered technological environment, 3D virtual worlds. Particularly, this study examines how virtual world users construct (non-gaming) religious communities and practices and how the technology impacts the forms of religious expression these users create. Due to its existing religious sector and affordances for user-created content, Second Life (SL) was chosen as the context of study for this dissertation project. Building upon Von-Hippel's (2005) user-centered innovation theory, construction and production within three different user-centered religious communities in SL were explored. Using a comparative ethnographic approach over a 14-month period, involving participant observations, interviews and hyper-media techniques, the social construction of customized religious products amidst technical, social, and economic virtual/non-virtual structures were analyzed. Exploratory findings demonstrate that the democratizing of cultural innovation, that is the construction of heterogeneous cultural religious products by the everyday user, is a matter of patterned relational pathways. The greater possible patterned pathways the higher potential for democratized cultural innovation, an increasing number of users developing new ways of doing religion. The fewer patterned pathways the less the potential for democratize cultural innovation and the greater potential for reproducing within the virtual realm the same cultural frames that define the current social order in the non-virtual realm.