Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

In the above quote, Curiza explains how he imagined himself in the position of potential PAL
visitors, who he imagines may have the same aspirations or the like. On the interpersonal level, his
primary rhetorical intention was to communicate that listening to music in SL is different
compared to other online platforms. Curiza’s decision to use SL as a platform was the result of his
intertextual reasoning, assessment of his experiences with various other social media platforms
and in SL, and his interest in the VWs particular affordances to facilitate a new (‘more immersive’)
form of music-listening experience.
Curiza: I thought “Ok, Curiza. You can’t be the only one in this SL world, who needs, who
wants a place where they just could come and relax without people expecting you to talk, and
chat, and party and dance.”
However, Curiza soon realized that the ways in which the co-designers embed their intended
meaning potentials do not necessarily make sense to visitors of the place the same way. As Caitlyn
also mentions, the visitors ask questions about the represented meaning potentials, and they
associate the frameworks of understanding with which they are familiar. In this way they seek to
understand how to socialize and interact in this particular context. The challenge for PAL’s codesigners
was not only to provide visitors with a multimodal experience but also to inform them
about what the place is and what it is not:
Curiza: But people thought it was a club!! And when people come to a club in SL and there is
no people, they TP [teleport] away!
Curiza: And it was NOT a club and I hated that … Well, it is fine to run a club, but it is massive
work because you need hosts all the time, you need to have parties all the time. (…) It is fine to
be at a party. (…) But it is not the same when you host the party. Because when you host a
party, everyone wants you to be there. And reply in open chat, and reply in IM. And it gets
very stressful, for me.
Curiza’s second comment above refers to the semiotic potentials or meta-functions that determine
PAL’s primary function, as he emphasizes the experiential differences between PAL and a so-called
virtual club. His perspective also describes a phenomenological experience, because his practices
within PAL as the owner and manager of the sim are affected by the range of possible social
interactions in the place, which is both constructed and represented by its design. Therefore, the
experiential meta-function of PAL as a virtual place in SL is determined by the way it is designed,
and Curiza’s understanding of this aspect includes particular definitions while excludes certain
others. Although both PAL and the aforementioned ‘virtual clubs’ present affordances for listening
to music, attending live performances and socializing, PAL’s emphasis is on content-experience,
and not on the socialization aspect. PAL attempts to facilitate new activities, new multimodal ways
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