Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

and Curiza mention, new coming avatars often spend little time in a place if it does not make sense
to them, whereas visitors who invest time and effort will seek to comprehend what lies beneath the
surface level:
AmyLee: We know that the weakness for now is the information to visitors, and the way we
deal with the first 10 sec on the sim (some people leave in 5 to 10 sec as they don't see the
point!)
Here, AmyLee and Curiza reflect on their experience and learning in SL, as they acknowledge the
interpretive and transformative agency of their users.
Curiza: It’s like having a book; and if you read the first 10 pages, it’s not really exciting. But if
you get hooked on it, then you get much more out of it. So that’s how I see many sims in SL;
that is, if you invest some time in it, you also get paid back in rich experience. But if you just
look around and say “Oh there is no people”, then you don’t get anything.
Even though the overall design includes several alternative solutions to welcome the guests, to help
them understand the island and learn what PAL is about, some visitors do not understand the main
concept. Curiza relates this to the various conditions in which different visitors may engage in PAL.
Curiza: So now, we kind of said “Ok, our visitors are very diverse.” Some come because they
search in Music, or in some style, some genre. And they get us. Other people come because
they have heard that the design is nice. And then other people just come by accident, or
because they find us on the ‘Destination Guide’ and want to check it out.
To sum up thus far, the analysis shows that the design of PAL has also been affected by the
construction of its experiential meaning potentials by the co-designers, and the relations of these
semiotic potentials are closely interrelated with the interpersonal and textual components of the
meta-functional framework. According to the co-designers, the visual language of the exterior of
PAL reflects its primary function, and aims to exclude certain types of semiotic associations by not
including certain features. The analysis also points to the relations between the affordances of
design elements and the potential social activities are important in construction of the experiential
semiotics of the virtual place. On the other hand, the co-designers are aware of the diversity in the
potential visitors’ conditions of engagement; thus, they generate design solutions in order to
communicate more efficiently with newcomers. As one significant example of this, the entry point
to PAL is also mentioned as a significant feature in its design:
Curiza: The TP is very important, you know, where you place the TP. We could’ve sent them
directly into ‘Rock’ music dome, or whatever, but we kind of let them fall down (smile). So I
would say we force people to explore.
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