Selecting a World (Uru: Myst Online)

Abstract

The chapter considers the goal of consonance, achieving a functional harmony between a person and a virtual world that makes it a suitable environment for an avatar based on that person. Most computer games in which the user assumes a virtual identity are violent, but the person revived here was a very nonviolent woman, so there was a challenge finding a suitable home for her. First, she entered a relatively popular and quite spiritual online role-playing game, Aion, then discovered half way through its levels of experience that she would be forced to become unacceptably violent if she continued. Therefore, she took the advice of a leading female researcher on virtual gameworlds to shift to one based on puzzle-solving rather than combat, called Myst, thus illustrating one of the boundaries of the genre, and showing how a gameworld need not be popular to serve quasi-religious purposes. To provide a broad overview of the possibilities, she explored Myst in three very different forms, briefly the original solo-player computer game, more extensively the unpopular Internet-based social sequel, Uru: Myst Online, and very briefly the active Myst community in the nongame virtual world, Second Life.