Second Life, Video Games, and the Social Text

Instead of being a world apart from material reality, the virtual world Second Life is intertwined with larger trends associated with Web 2.0 and the "eversion" of cyberspace. A number of recent scholars have begun to explore the relation of textual studies and video games. Games represent sophisticated ideas of what it means to enable on a digital platform the dynamic, networked, collaborative construction of the social text, broadly conceived. A game space is not an infinite virtual reality, but is instead a possibility space in multiple dimensions. Videogames offer humanists serious models for potential networked events of their own—embodied, intermediated, and out in the world.