Interesting discussion going on at Terra Nova: Structuration, Synthetic Worlds-Style: LOTRO and Emotes, with good independent commentary by Esther at Glod'n Epix. Do you need pre-scripted social emotes to help social group behaviour? Are emotes (also as visual animations) necessary to create the experiece of presence in a world? What happens when you dont have emotes available as social handles? All spawned by the apparent lack of greeting emotes (???) in the Lord of the Rings MMOG, that I have yet to test out myself.

Have to think more about it, but I believe emotes was initially invented to make up for the total lack of visual and corporeal clues in the first text-based virtual worlds. Present virtual worlds are explicitly graphic and all avatars have bodies others can see, so perhaps emotes are not as necessary as they once were, as long as players are provided with methods to express themselves with their bodies or to convey emotions. However, if you want to role-play in virtual worlds, I guess some form of emote system is still necessary to convey subtle nuances of thoughts and behaviours, that cannot be expressed in direct speak, prescripted animations, or player-performed visual behaviour? (fyi, by the latter I mean that you can use ordinary movements like running and jumping to also express emotional states by using them in a particular way, combination or context)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:12