Chameleon species: Anthropologically, I don't read the making of virtual Harbin Hot Springs in Second Life as the making of a game

Harbin ethnography:


... immersive experiences become possible in one's own bathtub as well as multimedia-wise.


Anthropologically, I don't read the making of virtual Harbin Hot Springs in Second Life (MacLeod 2008 - ) as the making of a game, or the ways avatars interact in virtual Harbin, as a form of gaming. And while at actual Harbin, I have occasionally seen people playing backgammon or chess on the Sun deck, I, in now way, interpret actual Harbin Hot Springs, as any kind of elaborate game. And while I suspect that Harbinites may have enacted 'Alice in Wonderland-like' chess games there in the past, this is a kind of elaborate, and very imaginative, kind of playfulness, and not a game. Play occurs there, emerging out of the context of the 1960s, where play itself was a response to the work of modernity, and while hippies may have seen the system as a big mechanical game at times, actual Harbin isn't a game. In significant ways, people come to actual and virtual Harbin to play, and the building of virtual Harbin is a kind of playing, too.


... Contemporary discussions of the virtual by key researchers (e.g. Terra Nova – June 16 2010) characterize the virtual as a social construct ...












(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/06/chameleon-species-anthropologically-i.html - June 19, 2010)