Introduction

Yossarian has presence. Under the proper conditions, the rational airman from Catch 22 (Heller 1961) has stronger presence in the book than in the film. Grace Archer has presence, and for devotees of the radio play (BBC 1951 - present) this is at least as compelling as that of Lara Croft is for devotees of the computer game (Gard 1996). Most readers will have experienced phone calls which are followed by a jolting adjustment to the absence of the person on the other end.

For the purposes of collaborative virtual environments, at least, experiencing the presence of other characters, agents or participants is closely allied with experiencing one's own presence in that environment:

The minimum level of social presence occurs when users feel that a form, behavior, or sensory experience indicates the presence of another intelligence. The amount of social presence is the degree to which a user feels access to the intelligence, intentions, and sensory impressions of another.   (Biocca 1997)

This paper will argue, from the standpoint of some recent work in philosophy and cognitive science, that the two forms of presence - our own presence in an environment and the "literary" presence of characters - are closely linked; and that this may provide useful pointers for maximising the impact and immediacy of CVEs.

What is "presence"?

Lombard and Ditton (1997) survey the literature and identify six definitions of presence:

1. social richness
2. realism
3. transportation
4. immersion
5. social actor within medium
6. medium as social actor

The overwhelming majority of work cited by Lombard and Ditton, however, deals with broadcast, visual, non-interactive media. It therefore seeks to measure presence under definitions (2), (3) or (4); and in many cases its motivation appears to be to maximise the power of the medium as a social actor which persuades users to buy goods. This work may, in a sense, be regarded as the mediated wing of the study of "flow" as theorised by Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) from observation of unmediated experiences; with the exception that in unmediated experience interaction is not problematised. Ikuya Sato's participant study of Japanese motorcycle gangs (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988), for example, reasonably enough takes language and nonverbal communication as givens.

That work which the present author has discovered dealing explicitly with interactive media, at a higher level of abstraction than the impact of the visual, auditory and tactile features of the interface, concentrates on plot. For example Cooper and Benjamin (1994) propose terminologies for describing the notion of "plot" in an interactive context. Kelso, Weyhrauch and Bates (1993) describe the Oz system, which serves as a prototype structured context for experimentation with the problematic relationship between plot and participatory interaction. The point of the Oz project is that the relationship is problematic.

It seems that the field is young and open enough that contributions from perhaps-unexpected quarters may be of use, and it may help to take a step back.

We should be alarmed that the psychologist Richard Gregory (1996) invokes a concept not dissimilar to "presence" in attempting to resolve the notorious philosophical problem of qualia. (David Chalmers's 1997 bibliography lists 862 papers and books relevant to the problem.) As briefly as possible: the redness which you experience on perceiving a British mail-box is a canonical example of a quale. Gregory proposes that qualia serve to distinguish the present - our subjective reality - from memories and hypotheses. In the terms of the debate over presence in CVEs, a quale could be described as that which "flags" an experience as one of presence. [1]

The problem of a strict definition of "presence" is thus linked suggestively with the key problems at the intersection of philosophy and the study of consciousness. While thrilling and seethingly vibrant, this field of intellectual endeavour cannot be relied upon to produce timely guidance to designers of CVEs. Let us take a moment to decide whether attempts to define "virtual" are more fruitful; particularly those of Pierre Lévy.

What is "virtuality"?

The earliest definitions of "virtual reality" were by practitioners and were mechanistic. Introducing VR at SIGGRAPH 1989, Jaron Lanier defined it as:

... a simulation of a reality that can surround a person that's created with computerized clothing. It's rather like the physical world in that it's an externally perceived reality that you perceive through your sense organs and the physical world. You perceive sensation on the outside of your eyes and your ears and your skin, and what you do in a virtual world is you put on clothing that generates stimulation right on top of those sense organs. There is a special pair of eyeglasses called a head mounted display that you wear over your eyes and through the head mounted display you see pictures that are three dimensional stereo pictures. When you move your head in one direction the pictures move in the other direction to compensate for your motion and it creates the illusion that you're moving around inside a space that's just out there and stationary.   (Lanier 1989)

Lanier did allude to the ontological questions raised, in describing the very early work on shared virtual spaces:

... the interesting thing is that there's other people and you have interreactions with them, and it really becomes like another reality. It's a very interesting kind of reality. It's absolutely as shared as the physical world. Some people say that, well, the physical world isn't all that real. It's a consensus world. But the thing is, however real the physical world is - which we never can really know - the virtual world is exactly as real, and achieves the same status.   (Lanier 1989)

This states, from Lanier's experience, that the reality of virtual reality is equivalent to the reality of actual reality - but does not address what its "virtuality" may be about. In his recent attempt at a synthesis of the issues, Lévy defines "virtualization" thus:

... virtualization involves a change of identity, a transition from a particular solution to a general problematic, the transformation of a specific and circumscribed activity into a delocalised, desynchronised and collective functioning.   (Lévy 1998:44)

This definition is rooted in French philosophy and critical theory. In particular, it is a reasonably successful attempt at an accessible treatment of the concept of "deterritorialisation" proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1972). [2]

Lévy also takes from Deleuze the idea that the virtual is not defined in opposition to the real: "The possible and the virtual obviously possess a common thread, which explains the frequent confusion between them. Both are latent and not manifest. They imply a future rather than deliver a presence... " Whereas latent possibilities may become manifest as real stuff, latent virtualities may arrive as actual events:

Deleuze's (1968) declaration that the virtual exists was almost certainly designed to be provocative to philosophers. It may now be less so to practitioners. Using these definitions, any act of communication is an event which arrives [3], and recorded language is the original virtuality:

Since its Mesopotamian origin the text has been a virtual object, abstract, independent of any particular substrate. This virtual entity is actualized in multiple versions, translations, editions, instances, and copies. Through the process of interpretation, by giving meaning to the text here and now, the reader continues this torrent of actualization.... Faced with the configuration of stimuli, constraints, and tensions offered by the text, the reader resolves the problem of meaning in an inventive and always singular manner. The reader's intelligence erects a mobile and irregular semantic landscape among the smooth pages of the text.   (Lévy 1998:47)

Again, this definition is rooted in post-modernist understandings of the text and the ways in which meaning is created in and/or by a reader:

Listening, looking and reading ultimately amount to a kind of self-invention. By initiating the attempt at signification that comes from the other, by laboring, digging up, crumpling, and cutting the text, incorporating it within ourselves, destroying it, we help erect the landscape of meaning that inhabits us. The text serves as a vector, a substrate, or pretext, for the actualization of our own mental space.   (Lévy 1998:50)

Compare the following attempt at explaining the impact of theatre:

The reason (we) take pleasure in seeing the images is that in the process of viewing (we) find (ourselves) learning, that is, reckoning what kind a given thing belongs to: "This individual is a So-and-so". Because if the viewer happens not to have seen such a thing before, the reproduction will not produce the pleasure qua reproduction but through its workmanship or colour or something of that sort.   (Aristotle Poetics 48b)

It is possible, with a little suspension of disbelief, to read Aristotle as a thorough post-modernist here - or to realise that there is a core to this philosophical project which is beyond fashion and will contribute to whatever comes after post-modernism.

Lévy makes hardly any explicit reference to "virtual reality" in the commonly popularised sense of a navigable cinematic experience. His concern is to generalise, and with the rest of the French philosophy crew he uses the word "text" in "its most general sense: an elaborated discourse or deliberated utterance." He insists later that:

Virtuality has absolutely nothing to do with its image, as supplied by television. It does not refer to some false or imaginary world. On the contrary, virtualization is the very dynamic of a shared world; it is that through which we share a reality. Rather than circumscribing a realm of lies, the virtual is the mode of existence from which both truth and lies arise.   (Lévy 1998:184)

Lévy argues, then, that essentially the whole of culture lies in the realm of virtuality. On the one hand, he is at risk of the kind of over-arching generalisation which sounds much better in French than in English and which may leave the practical Anglo-Saxon wondering whether it has been spread so wide as to become meaningless in any particular. He could, indeed, be said to have virtualized virtuality.

On the other, this author is convinced that there is a useful insight here. The distinctions between possible/virtual and real/actual clarify arguments about "realism" in mediated communication. If all mediated communication, (or indeed perhaps all communication) falls into the same category - the virtual - then we have a clearer basis on which to determine what lessons from one medium may be applied to another than we would have if we regarded one medium as special because it alone is virtual.

It may be, of course, that the novelty of CVEs - enabling scholars to tell stories in new ways about all media - illuminates the existing media more than the new. It may also be that nothing is as new as we think it is. Lévy acknowledges the possibility of bedazzlement by the impression of newness:

We know that during every historical epoch, humanity has felt as if it were experiencing an important transformation. This may help us put into proper perspective any similar impressions concerning contemporary events. I cannot, however, abandon the idea that we are currently experiencing a significant change in forms of collective intelligence.   (Lévy 1998:144)

Collective intelligence - or extelligence?

Does such a term as "collective intelligence" demand a flake alert? It certainly evokes the language of mysticism. It was the title of Lévy's previous (1997) book. He now defines it thus:

... we could define collective intelligence as a fully distributed intelligence that is continuously enhanced and synergised in real-time. This new ideal could replace artificial intelligence as the myth that drives the development of digital technologies and reorients the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of mind, and anthropology toward such questions as the ecology or economy of intelligence.   (Lévy 1998:122)

At one level, this term "collective intelligence" expresses something which many readers will have experienced:

No less than the utilitarian search for information, it is the vertiginous sensation of plunging into the communal brain that explains the current enthusiasm for the Internet. Navigating through cyberspace allows us to parade our conscious glance through the chaotic interiority, the tireless drone, the banal futilities and planetary fulgurations of the collective intelligence.   (Lévy 1998:145)

It will be apparent, however, that Lévy has something more general in mind. Compare:

The cultural counterpart of intelligence is an external feature, which we shall call extelligence.... Extelligence is all of the "cultural capital" that is available to us in the form of tribal legends, folklore, nursery tales, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, and so on. However, extelligence is not just a matter of "keeping a record". The intelligence of each individual allows them not only to access to cumulative body of extelligence, but to add to or change it.   (Stewart and Cohen 1997:243)

This is not tainted with French Philosophy. Stewart is Professor of Mathematics, and Jack Cohen of Biology, at Warwick University - which in May 1998 overtook Oxford in the Financial Times university league table. Stewart and Cohen develop a comprehensive overview of current debates concerning consciousness, and extelligence is the key outcome of their materialist synthesis. Another key concept is "complicity" - a slightly whimsical coinage for the process whereby "two or more complex systems interact in a kind of mutual feedback that changes them both, leading to behaviour that is not present in either system on its own".   (Stewart and Cohen 1997:63) The passage above continues:

Lots of people have discussed this kind of interaction in terms of Karl Popper's "Third World", Teilhard de Chardin's "noösphere", or Medawar's "extrasomatic evolution". Our notion of "extelligence" differs from these, we think, and from the general word "culture", because we look at the external influence from the point of view of each complicit individual.   (Stewart and Cohen 1997:243)

Your extelligence, then, includes all the elements of what it is like to be you which do not reside in that unlikely grey goo in your skull. From now on, this (whether through your acceptance or rejection of it) will form a part of your extelligence; and should you choose to respond, a part of the author's extelligence will thenceforth reside in you.

Extelligence inhabits the realm of the virtual, as defined by Lévy. The invention of the virtual is what made it - and human intelligence - possible. What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we inhabit to a far greater extent a virtual world - one which supports questions like "What distinguishes humans from other animals?"

A modest proposal: reduce noise

It is surely the point of a CVE, in the terms discussed here, to serve as a channel of communication between the parts of the participants' extelligences.

A very simple lesson for the design and dramaturgy of CVEs can then be drawn from the earlier channels and media: presence is maximised by reducing noise. Books and papers are edited to remove features which would trup the reader ip and disrupt the experience of presence - typographical errorss as noise. Similar principles are central to film editing, starting with the rules on how characters may and may not make entrances to and exits from the frame - which minimise "narrative noise". Shannon's work on information theory enabled telephone systems to create a virtual space of voice with precisely the quantity of mechanical noise compatible with presence; but one need only listen to a phone-in interview on the radio to realise that realism is not the goal. Sheridan (1996) alludes indirectly to this goal and provides a methodology for evaluating to what extent it has been met:

[We] measure presence according to the amount of noise required to degrade the real and virtual stimulation until the perceived environments are indiscriminable.

In none of the above cases is realism - presenting the world to the reader as it appears through their senses, as if we had any access to those qualia - a criterion. These words do not resemble extelligence: literacy must be acquired and a certain amount of prior reading done before they stand any chance of arriving as an event in your mind. Eisenstein's invention of montage broke with realism and made film possible - once audiences had learned to read it, taking the pleasure in that learning to which Aristotle points in the passage above. The complex systems which are the reader and the medium, in other words, develop complicitly.

The goal of realism in CVEs is arguably a category error, if the real and the actual are distinguished. The alternative goal of reducing noise allows the participants to maximise for themselves the arrival of events of communication. At times, to be specific, the sparsest of channels may be preferable to the richest - allowing the participants, perhaps, collectively to "close their eyes to think together". At times, unreality or surreality will be distinctly preferable to realism. Indeed:

For poetic effect a convincing impossibility is preferable to that which is unconvincing though possible.   (Aristotle Poetics 61b)