How to Do Things with Mouse Clicks: Applying Austin’s speech act theory to explain learning in virtual worlds

Abstract

This article addresses learning in desktop virtual worlds where students role play for professional education. When students role play in such virtual worlds, they can learn some knowledge and skills that are useful in the physical world. However, existing learning theories do not provide a plausible explanation of how performing non-verbal virtual-world actions (e.g. performing a virtual chest examination in a virtual hospital) can lead to the learning of the physical world equivalent. Some theories are particularly implausible because they claim that students learn to perform physical world actions by acting on the virtual world in an embodied way. This is implausible because learning requires a high degree of correspondence between the learning performance and the target performance, and there is insufficient physical correspondence between the performance of a virtual-world action where students click on a mouse to make the avatar take actions and the physical-world equivalent where students perform the action with their own body. In this article, we use Austin’s speech act theory to provide a more plausible theory of learning in virtual worlds. We show how non-verbal virtual-world actions performed by avatars can function as performatives and as performatives, they can correspond sufficiently to physical world actions to explain how performing non-verbal virtual-world actions can lead to physical world learning.

Keywords:

• learning theory
• speech act theory
• Austin
• virtual worlds

Notes

1. There are other examples where an insufficient physical correspondence shows that embodied experiential learning is an implausible explanation for the virtual-world learning of non-verbal ‘physical’ actions. These examples include: trainees regulating their ‘physical’ exertion by pressing buttons as the means of evacuating from a virtual underground mine (Garrett, 2012); and social workers choosing a suitable ‘physical’ position for their avatars vis-à-vis the client by pressing the arrow keys during a virtual home visit (Wilson et al., 2013).

2. Also drawing on speech act theory, Powers (2003) gave a more sinister example of the real-world effect of virtual actions. Powers argued that the victim of an alleged rape that took place in a text-based online system can suffer real, non-physical effects such as shame.