Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

music inside SL.” For her, designing a virtual place for music means offering “very good visual
experience along with the music in the sim” as her “signature.”
Xavier has also been involved in PAL’s design since 2008, and he designed the first version of PAL
in cooperation with AmyLee. In the current version, Xavier designed the club and generated the
textures for the 600+ cubes that generate PAL’s dominant visual field. Xavier is a Danish urban
planner and architect, who has been working on large scale real-world building projects as well as
computer game designs. He also has a special interest in producing and archiving textures, and he
describes himself as a “Photoshop freak.” In addition to graphic software, Xavier has 3D modeling
skills for using several external software, as well as generating sculpted prims in SL. Xavier’s initial
interest in SL was professionally oriented. He mentions how he became curious about the VW
when he was informed about a large-scale Danish architecture firm’s initiative to build the virtual
headquarters for IBM in SL. He mentions that his general interest in SL transformed from a
professionally oriented one to having fun, whereas after a while he was engaged in professional
projects in SL, too. Xavier built a race track in SL and managed a number of sims, while he came to
the conclusion that it is not possible to build a “sustainable economy” by designing things in SL.
He also mentions the differences between designing real-world buildings and virtual places, and
how he had to “forget what [he] learned as an architect” because “it becomes a limitation” when
one wants to “invent a totally new approach” for designing virtual places. Currently, he transfers
most of his game-design activities from SL to specialized game engines (i.e. Unity and Unreal)
mainly because of the world’s limitations to create a satisfying interactive experience. Xavier’s
designs are still on the market in SL’s official online store 3 .
Finally, Shaggy is a French engineer, who describes his occupation as “not the creative type of job.”
In fact, this is one of the major reasons why he is in SL as a builder, as he states that exploring
other people’s creative works is his main interest. Shaggy is a close inworld friend of AmyLee, and
he has taught her how to design in SL. His involvement in PAL project was facilitated by his
friendship with AmyLee. He worked with her in construction of the overall layout, and generated
the idea of using cubes to generate the three-dimensional grid that forms the ground plane of PAL.
Although Shaggy has been in SL for three years, he says that he hasn’t been interested in the social
interaction aspect, which is also probably why he hasn’t been involved in many collaborative
projects (in his terms). Shaggy has been generating content in SL for years, but he describes SL as
the wrong place to try earning money. For him, what makes SL interesting is building and
exploring other people’s creations; and the reward is not necessarily money but social recognition
3 https://www.xstreetsl.com
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