Venice, California and World of Warcraft: Persistence and Ephemerality in Playful Spaces Silvia Lindtner and Bonnie Nardi Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425, USA {lindtner, nardi}@ics.uci.edu Abstract Persistent digital media extend content beyond immediate ephemeral interactions and conversations. Systems such as email, instant messaging, digital kiosks, social networking sites, and wikis collect large quantities of electronic data and store it for later use. How will people encounter and understand these data now and later? How do people move between the ephemeral and persistent in everyday settings? Can persistence exist beyond visible data? We have been exploring these questions through field studies in an urban setting and an online game. This paper is a preliminary exploration of issues that have arisen in our empirical research on the ways people move between persistent and ephemeral media. In this paper, we investigate an expanded concept of persistence which renders ephemerality as a complementary element during processes of communication and interaction. Drawing on previous work and findings from our empirical studies, we argue that seeing persistence and ephemerality as intimately linked opens up possibilities for analyzing and creating new design spaces and forms of interaction with digital media. 1. Introduction An important trend in conversation research is to broaden the definition of conversation itself, moving toward a concept of conversation that incorporates ephemeral and persistent elements such as visual feedback, bodily interactions, performative activities, and multimodal exchange of information [1, 3, 4]. We will use the term “conversation” broadly in our discussion to incorporate the elements identified in these studies. Bergstrom and Karahalios described how abstract representations of interaction rhythms and conversational patterns can provide a valuable conversational cue within collocated spaces [1]. boyd and Heer illustrated the ways in which conversations emerge around a user’s playful engagement with others’ profiles in the online social networking platform Friendster.com. They suggested that analysis of everyday conversation must move beyond words, observing and incorporating the rich data of the voice and body [3]. In a study of a community bulletin board, Churchill et al. reported that iconic conversations such as scribble drawings were often created in lieu of things that the illustrator preferred not to say out loud. The visual and textual exchanges through the board were considered conversation by users and were often “played out concurrently with the spoken conversation” [4]. In our work we have been considering relations between persistence and ephemerality, thinking about persistence not in contrast to ephemeral aspects it overcomes, but as a complementary element linked to ephemerality to render experience meaningful. We will explore the ways in which both the ephemeral and persistent are of value for collaborative and reflective activities. How do ephemeral conversations interleave with persistent digital and non-digital artifacts? What roles do persistence and ephemerality play for reflection on past and ongoing activities? To investigate these questions we draw on our ongoing research of two playful environments, urban street play and collaborative play in an online video game. Our arguments about persistence and ephemerality are not about play per se; we happen to have been studying playful environments, which provide rich data for investigating collaboration and new forms of interaction [2, 11, 15]. Thus, we believe that our findings provide a deeper understanding of the everyday practices that evolve around persistent and ephemeral media. We do not use the street and the video game as a point of contrast or comparison between online and offline, virtual and physical, or any similar binary; indeed we found interesting similarities between the environments. Our studies demonstrate that in both environments, ephemeral conversations are beneficial for highlighting specific persistent artifacts and making them more meaningful in everyday use. We found that persistent conversations may change in