Collaborative Story-telling: Performing the Narrative of the Griefer
Second Life Community Convention, 2007
As World Wide Web transforms into Web 2.0 in the era of media convergence and becomes a full-fleshed computing platform serving Web applications to end users, it goes without saying that the traditional concept of the narrative born out of the print culture becomes inadequate, if not useless. Already, hybrid forms of storytelling that offer immersive and interactive environments have emerged in which readers are expected to perform activities that go beyond the mere act of reading. This paper will explore the transformation of narrative in the age of media convergence where the power of the media producer and that of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.
As a Web 2.0 platform, Second Life provides one of the most attractive environments for content creation, including stories, where users' performative acts facilitate the construction of different aspects of the metaverse. Moreover, its open-source environment provides optimal conditions for textual poaching which ultimately results in the construction of multi-platform narratives. In multi-platform narratives the stories are extended onto various diverse platforms, each one unique but all complementary. Such an erratic arrangement of narrative bits leaves the formation of texts to the user/reader and, more importantly, necessitates the redefinition of textual space. This paper will investigate the production and consumption of the narrative of the griefer as a performative act that forms various texts on different platforms that embody different characteristics and, ultimately, elicit different meanings of Second Life.
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