Week 8 - Instant Messengers and Virtual Worlds.

Well, today our tutorial task was a fairly simple one really, we were to use and state the various differences and aspects of 3D and non-3D instant messenger (IM) programs. Seems simple enough right? Wrong. First of all I tried out ActiveWorlds which is basically a group of 3D worlds where people can chat, and build houses, and generally do all the things that you can do in real life etc. Well, to start with, trying to run this on the uni computers under Firefox caused the PC's to crash. This was the first wonderful experience. So two restarts later and I had it up and running in Internet Explorer (IE). I was pretty impressed by how quickly all the items loaded and the draw distances etc. The second program I attempted to use was Habbo Hotel. Well, after booting the client, making a character, creating a user name and password and finally entering my email address, what could you suppose happens? Thats right, their server gives me a dead response and it tells me to basically start again. This I did not like.

So, now that I've gone over that I can tell you that I decided to compare ActiveWorlds to the non-3D IM service that I chose. It seemed the lesser of two evils. Now the main IM program I use is MSN messenger service (MSN). This has one very very vast difference other than the simple 3D/non-3D user interface. MSN in NOT a chat room, it has or at least had access to chat rooms, but was not one itself. So in effect, to talk to people you had to know their email address (through prior contact) to add them. This is probably the main difference between the two, and also the main reason for the other varying differences. To start with, people in ActiveWorlds were immediately crass. I think that the main reason for this is the simple anonymity of the world. People log on with a new persona and new image, and they can say and do whatever they like with no social backlash. This is avoided in the IM world of MSN however mainly because you generally know who the person in that you are talking to and plan to have a more permanent connection, and thus are more polite.

This idea is pretty similar in most messenger systems. Most 3D services are more like chat rooms than actual IM services and this is where the real difference comes in, rather than the actual 3D environment. Finally though, when we compare a 3D chat room, to a purely text base chat room (rather than IM system) the trend seems to move in the other direction. Where people feel slightly more responsible to their 3D persona and image, than they do to simply a text based name. Therefore you tend to get more vulgarity, and less social care when entering into a purely text based environment.

So, I suppose to sum things up, what I've really discovered about the differences between 3D and non-3D messenger services comes down to the level of social responsibility and the level of social backlash that people believe they are accountable for.