Pixiq

More and more people show, on places like Flickr, photos of their trips in the real world... along with pictures taken in virtual worlds. They think of them as “real photographs” that also represent a memory of a place and people.

From Second Life to Entropia and all the different virtual words people visit nowadays, and also within the various games people play, mainly the new generation of MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Games), photographs are taken. If gamers already did “printscreen” their heroes in regular solitary games, the online world, with its social aspect, made the idea of taking pictures of the group or of themselves even more appealing.

So it is not strange, when looking at places like Flickr and other social photo-sharing services, that one finds images taken in the real world mixed with images of imaginary worlds that only exist inside computers. Second Life was, for a long time, one of the most active places in terms of “virtual photography”. Regular inhabitants and casual visitors tend to take snapshots of the places visited, as any other tourist would do at a regular real world destination.

And because in Second Life you can find, along with imaginary places, reproductions of some real world places, from Venice with pigeons and everything else, to a town square in Barcelona late afternoon or Paris as it was in 1900, an irish pub with a real group playing traditional music through streaming, visitors tend to “snapshoot” away as any tourist in holidays.

If by now you’re smiling, thinking that it’s kind of strange to have people “taking pictures” in virtual worlds.... think twice. Because after all photography is a way to capture virtually – or at least in a latent form, with film – an image. Only through a chemical process it is possible to see what is there. And with digital photography, it’s even less different: pressing the shutter or the “printscreen” key is not much different. You still try to compose and use light the best way you can.

Some will say it’s a fad and that it will go away, but they might be wrong. Since the very first virtual worlds and games that people tend to “take pictures” of themselves or their characters in those worlds/games. In 2002 a specialist in tourism studies, John Urry, from the Dept. of Sociology at Lancaster University, wrote about the role of photography in touristic migration in the world and how it detached people from the reality as most of them just saw the world through their viewfinders. Somehow it’s the same experience you have in virtual worlds, where the visual experience is paramount.

John Urry mentioned also the theme-parks, popular at the time, as a kind of hyper-realism much appreciated by photographers, something that the writer Umberto Eco mentionned also, in 1986, in his book Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality.

Virtual worlds are, after all, like theme-parks – recreation of imaginary or real places, offering, like the Paris 1900 universe in Second Life, a travel in time option not easily available in real life. So they’re a new destination for people looking for something different.

I’ve been travelling that road too. Since back in the eighties that I write about computer games and virtual worlds, and technology in general. As a journalist I’ve been curious to explore various areas, from aviation to photography, from nature to high-tech gadgets, from real to virtual. And I’ve been playing games since the eighties, and taking pictures within those virtual worlds all the way. I’ve a huge collection of images from lots of games played all these years and I am not ashamed to show them besides my real world pictures. They’re different, but they abide, to a certain extent, by the same rules of composition and, sometimes exposure (in many worlds you can define time of day, cloud coverage a.s.o.) and they work as memories from moments in time.

Either flying in Flight Simulator or at the helm of an Entreprise class starship in Star Trek Online, I tend to take pictures of the adventures lived. I’ve never been to Australia in the real world but I’ve been flying there for fun in Flight Simulator, and taking pictures. And although I’ve been to Los Angeles a few times, I never had the chance to fly close to the Hollywood sign. I had to take a picture of that moment… in Flight Simulator.

Pictures of my visits in Second Life are also part of my collection. Like the one taken at the door to the Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum, or the fantastic late afternoon seascape you can see on the gallery on top of this page. I’ve had a character in Second Life for many years so my collection of pictures is huge.

Since 2007 I’ve been living as a hobbit in Middle Earth… well, in the game Lord of the Rings Online, and I’ve been taking pictures all the time. I’ve a collection of pictures of me and my two sons (we all play the game) and they’re as important to us as the pictures we’ve from real life. They represent a moment in time that we gathered together some place within the vast game landscape, to take a “photograph”.

You can find some of my photos from Lord of the Rings Online and Star Trek Online  published at the following links:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2007/12/14/one-shots-playing-with-family-and-friends/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2009/04/30/one-shots/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/04/01/one-shots-tranquility-panorama/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2009/04/08/one-shots-family-reunion/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/03/30/one-shots-the-day-of-rest/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/03/23/one-shots-everyone-say-cheese/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/03/03/one-shots-i-can-see-my-house-from-here/ 

Because Lord of The Rings Online is so vast and has such a fantastic imaginary landscape, I’ve been travelling the land and taking pictures everywhere, creating some fantastic imagery, even panoramas, that represent now almost four years of fun as a photographer in a virtual world. It’s a way to show what I’ve done and where I’ve been. When in February 2007, during the beta phase of the game, I reached Rivendell, after a dangerous travel through Middle Earth, I could not resist to “take a picture”. So I placed my in-game character at the time between Gandalf and Elrond, and snapped away. It was a sign that photographs, even in virtual worlds, also let us show what we always want to say with our images: either “I’ve been there” or “look how beautiful this is”. And today, living inside computers, all photographs are virtual, after all.