As popular as social networking portal Facebook is these days, no amount of apps and widgets can remove the limitation of Facebook being a website. There are limited ways in how Facebook users can interact with each other as opposed to individuals who reside in multiuser virtual environments like Second Life. Shared space, collaborative environment, and room for user created content all facilitate creativity at the individual and group level that for Ward and Sonneborn (2011), researchers at University of Alabama and Syracuse University, is worth taking a peek at in order to further our understanding about the nature of creativity.
Although there are many different definitions of creativity in academia, Ward and Sonneborn (2011) opted for using the Four C model of creativity, which conceptualizes creativity as having four different theoretical constructs; Big-C, little-c, mini-c, and Pro-c (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). Big-c is about eminent contributions, ideas that revolutionize the world. Little-c deals with everyday creativity where people alter their behavior in order to tackle some particular day-to-day problem. Mini-c is nascent form of creativity that is inherent to any learning process. This type of creativity rears its head when people, for example, make choices in solving a problem by depending on their personal proclivities, choices that experts in the given domain would not have considered a viable option. Pro-c is creative endeavors by experts in a given domain that has not yet resulted in cultural, social, or historical impact.
In Second Life, there may not be any instances of Big-C creativity but there are plenty of examples of other three types existing in virtual reality. Just dressing one’s avatar up in unique ways qualifies as an instance of mini-c creativity. Moreover, users with programming experience have the freedom of creating and selling avatars that makes people look like a set of rings that change color, or pulsating crystals, or 50 feet tall dinosaurs (Ward, 1994). Such creations are strongly illustrative of little-c and pro-c creativity occurring at the level of avatar designs.
From a creativity standpoint, altering the appearance of one’s avatar is just the tip of the iceberg as users in Second Life have the freedom of creating virtual buildings and landmarks that perfectly mimic and in some ways even surpasses their real world counterparts. For starters, there is a great imitation of Sistine Chapel in Second life wherein users can walk or hover up to paintings in the building and examine them to their heart’s content. Globe Theater, a building that once existed in Shakespeare’s time now endures as a virtual structure in Second Life where individuals use it as a platform for enacting a wide variety of Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, since this is virtual reality, while watching plays the viewers are able to use any viewing angle they desire, resulting in there being no bad seat in the house.
One of the most amazing examples of Pro-c creativity in Second Life comes from a virtual museum where well-known 2D paintings of artists like Van Gogh are displayed in 3D. There is a 3D version of Starry Night, for instance, where individuals can move around the village depicted in the painting and then look up to see stars from the painting. Transforming 2D paintings into their 3D representations is not only a genuinely interesting endeavor by its creators but also provides the museum visitors a visual experience that is un-imitable by the original 2D paintings in the real world.
Finally, one cannot speak of creative endeavors without acknowledging the social nature of creativity (Sawyer, 2007) that necessitates individuals to expose themselves to thoughts and ideas of others who do not share their background. Virtual worlds are no slouch on this topic as professional conferences with size of hundreds can and have been held in Second Life before. One of the more famous examples of a collaborative project to be held in Second Life has been Studio Wkitecture, a venture that resulted in dozens of architects coming up with architectural plans for a telecommunications facility and a health clinic for one of the poorest regions in the country of Nepal.
References:
Kaufman, J.C., & Beghetto, R.A. (2009). Beyond big and little: the four C model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13, 1-12.
Sawyer, K. (2007). Group genius: the creative power of collaboration (pp. 24-37). New York: Basic Books-Perseus Book Group.
Ward, T.B. (1994). Structured imagination: the role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive Psychology, 27, 1-40.
Ward, T.B., & Sonneborn, M.S. (2011). Creative expression in virtual worlds: imitation, imagination, and individualized collaboration. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 1, 32-47.
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