Abstract

This article proposes a hybrid, transdisciplinary reading of Second Life Venice’s constructed environment as exhibition within that virtual world. What is exhibited there is the emotional resonance of ideas of Venice, saturated by nostalgia and intermittently haunted by absence. Far less a reconstruction of the actual Venice, past or present, Second Life Venice is what cultural theorist Henry Jenkins calls an “evocative space” (“Game Design as Narrative Architecture”). That is, it is less about real-world geography than the visitor-builders’ reimagining of actual Venice in and through “existing narrative competencies” (Jenkins).