Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

and appreciation. He says “if you charged him [Curiza] with the usual wage by the hour of a
creator, this sim would be extremely expensive.”
During the PAL interviews, both Curiza and Shaggy mentioned the discussions of entrepreneurship
and earning a significant amount of money is SL, which they associated with the media hype
around SL. In fact, not only Curiza, and Shaggy talk about the hype aspect but also Xavier and
Caitlyn mention the hype as one of the first reasons why they have heard of SL in the first place. On
the other hand, Shaggy mentions that his answer to newbies who want to get rich in SL is always
the same: “if you came to SL for money, just go away, not your place. You won’t see the interests
of SL if you just want money.” For Shaggy, the actual reward for content creation in SL is the social
reception and appreciation, as well as learning and exploration. However, Curiza focuses on a
similar aspect and takes a more optimistic stance towards the future business potentials of SL: for
him “it’s still an investment, because (…) sooner or later there’ll be massive people coming in.”
The configuration of PAL’s design team shows significant differences from the Metrotopia team in
terms of the conditions in which participants engage in collaborative design projects. In the PAL
case, co-designers had long-standing inworld friendships, and their contributions were shaped
mostly by their personal interests rather than a professional contract. In Curiza’s words “[t]here
wasn’t really any strategy back then, because [we] were friends and this was something new.”
Curiza, AmyLee and Xavier have been involved in PAL since the beginning, although their roles
and contributions change in each version. Their inworld relations also contextualize their
collaboration preferences, and methods of working together. For instance, Curiza lived in Xavier’s
old sim before PAL idea was generated, and he was volunteering for Xavier as a “police officer.”
Similarly, PAL’s current members are often included as officers, who are - as Curiza explains –
“people who have been sitting there all the time anyway.” On the other hand, the two cases show
similarities in terms of their makers’ intentions, especially considering how both Caitlyn and Curiza
aimed to generate places for particular types of avatar interaction with reference to their
professional affiliations, which are also influenced by their personal interests.
Power relations and division of tasks in the Pop Art Lab project
Therefore, In PAL project, the structure of the design team show differences in terms of its social
history, and the situations in which the team’s internal power dynamics reached its current
condition. Since PAL’s design team is based on inworld friendships and voluntary participation ,
rather than a professional contract, decision-making was based on more flexible grounds, and
respecting each other’s’ efforts becomes even more important. For Curiza, who runs the project and
owns the sim, “when you work with people and you can’t pay them, you have to respect what they
do.” In his view, this is partly because people invest time and effort in their designs and they expect
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