There is a growing recognition of the importance of virtual worlds as environments and media that carry the potential for social and cultural innovation by making possible new forms of social relationships based on communication among avatars. The articles in this special issue exemplify some aspects of this potential but also point out some of the many questions and unsolved problems that follow with innovation and the continuous development of virtual worlds. The two key concepts of virtual worlds and innovation are both widely used concepts that refer to emergent and rapidly changing phenomena without sharp contours or clearly defined boundaries. In the context of this special issue, we treat both virtual worlds and innovation as emergent phenomena in flux.Some of the features of virtual worlds, however, may also be seen as stable. According to Bell (2008) and Schroeder (2008, virtual worlds depend on stable, persistent digital infrastructures. Moreover, the online presence of gamers and residents is referred to by digital symbols and signs -be they avatars, space ships or green dots -and the technological platforms are accessible 24/7 over longer periods of time. They appear to be stable technologies and platforms, almost permanent. How is it, then, that we see them as emergent phenomena in flux?Our focus in this special issue of Convergence is on social and cultural innovation in and with virtual worlds which means that the technological innovation of the digital platforms and of the technology in itself are not our primary interest of reflection and analysis. Social and cultural innovation are phenomena of a fluid nature, subject to continuous change: the way we see and understand ourselves and each other, the way we experience exciting and extraordinary events or seek inspiration by thought-provoking art installations, the way we build virtual communities of high ideals or take the opportunity to live out behaviours otherwise not acceptable in our everyday life, these are all examples of human relationships with distinctive features that hold the potential for creative and innovative responses to new environments.

Over the past five years, millions of actors have found it meaningful to move in and settle down in the Metaverse, for example, as an adventurous shaman in an advanced role-playing game such as EverQuest or as a businesswoman in the social world of Second Life. In this article, the main question therefore is: how do the actors and gamers of the two types of virtual worlds make sense of their avatars and the worlds when they act and communicate using their avatars as personal mediators? Participatory observations inspired by virtual ethnography and in-depth video-interviews were conducted to answer this question. The analysis of the substantial amount of empirical data draws on the concepts of intermediaries and mediators from actor-network theory (Latour, 1991, 1998, 2005), Sense-Making methodology (Dervin et al., 2003), social psychology (Yee, 2006), and experimental economics (Bloomfield & Rennekamp, 2008). It is shown how the actors create a personal story and history of their avatar that transforms them into the mediators of being in the virtual world, and also how the avatars act as the mediators that transform the actors themselves. To identify, understand, and keep track of the many transformations of meaning, Nick Yee’s motivation factors (relationships, immersion, achievement, escapism and manipulation) have proven helpful also to the analysis of a social world like Second Life. In future studies, it is recommended that we study further the sense-makings of motivation factors such as creativity and experimentation.

This chapter identifies some of the fundamental conditions and factors that affect collaborative project work on the Net. Understanding them is fundamental to developing key qualities in Net-based collaborative learning such as confidence, reliability, and trust. We argue that: (1) Collaboration and social interaction develop in continuous oscillations between abstract and meaningful frames of reference as to time and place. (2) Such oscillations condition the creation of a double identity of writer and author modes in social interaction. (3) Collaborative work creates an ever-increasing complexity of interwoven texts that we have to develop strategies for organizing. (4) One such important strategy is the negotiation of roles among the participants. Having established this theoretical framework, we discuss how to deal with these conditions in an actual Net-based learning environment, the Master of Computer-Mediated Communication program at Roskilde University, Denmark.

This chapter proposes that technologically enhanced learning should be understood and evaluated by means of a combination of analytical strategies. These will allow us to analyze it both as seen from the macroanalytical or “outside” perspective of a rich social, cultural, and technological context, and from a microanalytical or “inside out” perspective of individual sense-making in learning situations. As a framework, we will be using sense-making methodology, and a model for causal layered analysis. Our area of attention will be limited to the “remediated classroom” of constructivist, net-based university education. Problematizing some common assumptions about technologically enhanced learning, the authors define 10 questions that may serve as the basis for a research agenda meant to help us understand why the many visions and ideals of the online or remediated classroom are not more widely realized and demonstrated in educational design and practice.

This research sets out to examine the ways in which actors relate to choices regarding the design of avatars. The empirical data of the analysis is found in three case studies: one case from EverQuest®, the guild leader Sia with her shaman avatar Gelinu, and two cases from Second Life®, the businessman Thomas with his avatar DC Aspen and the businesswoman Helle with her avatar Helle. Virtual ethnography and iterative video interviews with actors were conducted while they acted with their avatars during 2006–2010. Findings from the video interviews of the case studies suggest that we extend the representational and psychological analysis to explicate the multiple, fluid and emergent relationships between human actors and non-human avatars. Semiotics and actor-network theory are some of the theoretical references contained within the analyses of the three cases mentioned. The article concludes that the relationships of actors with their avatars can be seen as instances of semiosis, i.e., triadic … -relations that mutually and continuously translate the actor-networks of actors and their avatars. It is suggested that this understanding of avatars as interpretants and mediators in ‘companionate’ relationships, characterized by acting ‘with’ rather than ‘as’ the avatars, will help us interpret and understand avatars as transformative phenomena in flux with blurred boundaries and not only as bounded representations of actors in relation to projection, identification, self-construal and identity-making.