Synchronous Chat Rooms for Storytelling
My Live Web experiment this week consisted of trying to find a publicly accessible synchronous chat room and using it as a vehicle for digital storytelling. While this sounds like an easy task, I can assure you it is not. Typing in the keywords “chat room” into Google yields hundreds of results, most of them filled with pornography and spam.
My first attempt involved “chat-avenue.com” – I could barely get a word in edgewise amongst the link spammers and people who wanted to discuss sex, sexual positions and love/hate/fascination/disgust of various sexual minorities.
Screen shot of my first attempt. This chat room (available at chat-avenue.com) was filled with spammers and people who wanted to talk dirty. This seemed to be the norm as I tried to find a usable online venue.
I continued poking around a bit but kept running into the same issues with finding a hospitable space. Next I decided to try out telling my story to a friendlier, less anonymous group of people. My job over the last nine years has involved building what is called a “Learning Management System” for a small college in central New Jersey. This system, called SOCS, contains a chat room that I built a few years back. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to use this technology so I gave it a whirl – unfortunately none of my students were online each time I tried to use it.
Foiled again!
I then decided to try a different approach, so I began searching for some non-traditional chat rooms and came across a 3D, avatar driven chat room service called IMVU. The site lets you create a 3D representation of yourself and – from there you can join a number of decidedly non-creepy chat spaces filled with pretty nice people.
Creating a chat avatar
My avatar in a 3D chat room. Note that the chat appears in a traditional chat pane as well as animated bubbles that hover next to an avatar's body.
Chat bubbles in action
I found that rooms in IMVU are capped at 10 participants, which made telling a story a lot easier. It’s harder to “lurk” in this kind of setting, and people tend to engage you more than in a standard, text-based chat space.
After getting acquainted with another avatar I began to tell her (him?) a little bit more about myself, including my story (which involves a trip to Spain and a wine tasting tour.) Here’s what I found in regards to telling stories in this medium:
- Text is very low bandwidth. You are limited by your typing skills, and conversations will continue to go on without you if you are too slow. I’m a relatively fast typist so this wasn’t too much of a concern, but I did find myself tripping up on occasion.
- In addition, most people in chat rooms are very facile with using abbreviations or l33t speak to get their messages across fast. I was born in the 70’s and prefer to use full sentences, so this put me at a disadvantage.
- While there seems to be an emotive subsystem built into IMVU I was not able to effectively use it. I find that with text chat it’s hard to get across subtle points that we instinctively convey using body language. I find that I use a lot of emoticons to make up for this.
- On a related note, I found that I wasn’t able to “read” my audience as well as I could in a face to face environment, and as such I’m not sure if my message was being received well by others.