Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

he often used the Internet for “finding similar buildings, and get some inspiration about how a RL
building of this type was created.” Caitlyn explains how she used online resources to collect
Superhero pictures to show at the museum. Internet was also used to facilitate asynchronous
communication (i.e. email) and file transfer. For larger files, flash-drives were used to exchange
files in face-to-face meetings.
Especially in the Metrotopia project, the semiotic potentials of transmedia resources (i.e. movies,
comic books, computer games) significantly shaped the team’s collective meaning-makings. In fact,
a considerable amount of design-related discussions were on the appropriation of these transmedia
resources into the designed places in SL, such as translating the visual/graphical characteristics of
comic books into 3D virtual environments and avatars. Caitlyn explains how she was able to find
“movies that are superhero movies”, and “video games that are superhero games”, in addition to
the MMORPG which was the “only one real superhero MMORPG” at the time. For her and the
design team, the question was “what to do in SL” Caitlyn and the design team found various
semiotic and material resources to replicate (or in some cases appropriate) the genre conventions,
and the overall semiosis of visual and interactive elements was based on consistence with the
aforementioned media categories.
PAL’s initial ideation process was also the result of similar transmedia logic to Caitlyn’s reasoning
for building in SL in relation to other platforms. Co-designers have evaluated various possible
media platforms and their affordances and constraints and developed concepts based on their
interpretations. For instance, the modular toy system LEGOs was an inspiration in initial design
prototype of PAL. The co-designers said they even generated some concepts on it, but never
followed through.
Another discussion is the comparison of processes of appropriating materials from existing
(inworld or online) resource libraries and/or creating objects from scratch. Although resourcecollecting
(or re-use of existing resources) may have the potential for the co-designers to save
significant amounts of time, the existing resource libraries in SL were often found disorganized,
complicated and inaccessible due to inefficacy. Design of Metrotopia contains a wide variety of
freebies and purchased items that were mostly collected by Aspen. Aspen refers to the recurrent
use of inworld resources as an important part of Metrotopia’s design. Furthermore, the variety of
resources that were used in construction of Metrotopia wasn’t limited only to artifacts, but included
scripts, textures, interactive components and pose-balls for animating the visitors’ avatars in
certain body poses imitating Superheroes.
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