As afficionardos know, it can take 15 or 20 hours of avatar-walking to cross the virtual landscapes in the biggest online games. [Or so I have read; if you have specifics on this, let us know.] Most—but not all—of these landscapes are traversed as places of contest. But videogames offer multiple pleasures, one of which is the excitement of polishing off a "Boss" and then finding yourself in a new level with a novel visual world. If you take yourself into that new space with the subjectivity of a tourist [sans weapon, perhaps even with a camera], you might experience something akin to the sublimity of 19th century landscape esthetics.
Here's a link to Betsy Book's Traveling Through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds. [If you're unfamiliar with multi-player online games, you can check out this site.] She writes:
...virtual worlds are presented and experienced as exotic travel destinations for “online tourists” and how they make extensive uses of travel and tourism metaphors. It will show how virtual world owners use travel industry imagery and messaging to attract visitors and how virtual “photography” serves to reinforce each world’s conceptualization as a tourist destination. Along the way, readers will be taken on a sort of virtual tour of these worlds themselves. Each section of the paper contains several illustrative “photographs” of virtual worlds that can be viewed by clicking on the blue underlined text of each image title. [...] 
John Urry observes that tourism is constructed by and mediated by a “tourist gaze." While all senses may be engaged during an offline tourist experience, it is primarily the act of gazing at (and photographing) various objects, landmarks, and views that defines the tourist’s experience. Some virtual worlds include sound effects and voice chat but a virtual tour is above all a visual experience because of the nature of the medium. The visual consumption of artificially constructed sights is even more central to a virtual tourist’s experience than it is to an offline tourist’s experience only because virtual worlds do not yet fully engage the other senses.
Urry also notes that many offline tourist sights have become increasingly “hyper-real” with the “construction of ‘themed’ environments waiting to be viewed by the omnivorous visual consumer.” Virtual worlds are the epitome of “themed environments.” In fact, many of them have multiple themes in one world, making them the online equivalent of theme parks. They take the concept of hyper-reality to the next level by leaving corporeal reality behind altogether. And yet most virtual worlds feel like familiar places. They use the same visual semiotic systems that are used in the offline world, and in the case of tourist metaphor, replicate them as closely as possible.
In virtual worlds, “recreation” equals “re-creation,” not just of a visitor’s work-weary psyche, but of reality itself. [...]
A photograph in a virtual world takes the form of a screen capture: a digital image of the computer’s screen captured at a specific moment in time. Virtual tourists take photographs for the same reasons offline tourists take photographs. They want to commemorate their travels, obtain a visual record of enjoyable experiences, and show evidence of their experiences to friends and family. The most enthusiastic virtual photographers create elaborate online photo albums and corresponding travel journals to record and share their virtual world adventures. There has some engaging samples of this activity, including a Photo Club, a Screen Shot club, and several photographic travel journals. 
[I'm thinking it could be fun to assemble a gaggle of media anthropologists for nightly treks of virtual tourism. For a Minnesota boy, it would like guiding a group of academics around the Mall of America.]
Comments