The Allegory Effect: Metaphoric Immersiveness in Second Life

and CroquetGardner Campbell

Director, Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology

University of Richmond

Alice’s Adventures Underground

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

The Four Elements

• Play

• Metaphoric Stimulation and Immersiveness

• Recursion

• The Allegory Effect

Vygotsky, “The Role of Play In Development”

“Superficially, play bears little resemblance to the complex, mediated form of thought and volition it leads to. Only a profound internal analysis makes it possible to determine its course of change and its role in development.”

“In play thought is separated from objects and action arises from ideas rather than from things….”

Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development”

“The primary paradox of play is that the child operates with an alienated meaning in a real situation.”

“The primary paradox of Second Life or Croquet is that the person operates with a real meaning in an alienated situation.”

People wanted to hug goodbye, but one of them hadn't set his character up properly to do it: "Sorry, dear, took hug attachment off. I'll have to dig it out of inventory later," he responded.

Stephen Totilo,MTV.Com News, June 26, 2006

“A child does not behave in a purely symbolic fashion in play; rather he wishes and realizes his wishes by letting the basic categories of reality pass through his experience. The child, in wishing, carries out his wishes. In thinking, he acts…. In play, action is subordinated to meaning….”

“[P]lay creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development.”

“From the point of view of development, creating an imaginary situation can be regarded as a means of developing abstract thought.”

“A thought to Donne was an experience; it

modified his sensibility.”

“An experience in Second Life or Croquet is

a thought; it modifies our sensibility.”

Metaphors We Live By

“Metaphors are learned when two experiences happen at once.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 2003

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”

T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets”

“But metaphors are not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive much of the world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.” Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, second ed. (2003).

MUVE: Multi-User Virtual Environment

Recursion: the lucid dream

• Second Life: flight, dancing

• Croquet: modeling

• Result: metacognition (but beware the infinite regress)

• Potential result: the enfolded sublime

Recursion: don’t just follow the tracks

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, brilliant analogy by Alice W. Campbell

The Allegory Effect