Relive08 Blog

Edward gave a very thought provoking and interesting presentation.

Edward Castonova doesn’t spend time in Second Life but games and virtual worlds are important. And it’s not teenage boys that are online gaming, more likely to be 33 years old and a high chance that they are women. Virtual Worlds need to be more than a replication of the real world. Virtual Worlds have expanded, just look at Lord of the Rings, for example. But the gaming industry needs to look more at audio which
helps develop a better sense of virtual reality.
But what is real? We are surrounded by virtual or fake elements in everyday life – even mock facades on houses. Edward explained how the economics works in virtual worlds, using the Cuban cigar as an example and ’shadow pricing’. The same economic logic used in the real world is also used in the virtual world. The virtual economy is growing exponentially. Anywhere with good internal technology and low wages are good for ‘Gold Farms’ eg China, Eastern Europe and other South East Asian countries.
Science has contributed towards infant mortality and increased life expectancy. Even if we invest a lot of money in science, we are still unclear of the benefits. He suggests that we don’t have a tool for doing controlled social science experiments, we can only theorise, but virtual worlds give us this opportunity to
carry out tests.
There is also evidence of The Proteus Effect (Yee and Bailenson), “I found that participants in taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in a bargaining task than participants in shorter avatars.”
The law of demand was proved in experiments in Arden (but it wasn’t a ‘fun’ environment and people didn’t go in to ‘play’.) And nothing in particular is planned for Greenland apart from making a fun game which will produce research subjects. “Greenland is a game of late neolithic society. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have begun to settle into farming communities.” The public sector should invest more money in such games; research subjects will pay $15 per month to play!
Virtual worlds are ordinary human communities where people are trying to improve the way they live. This is no different from J R R Tolkein’s Middle Earth. He didn’t create that for productivity, it was about his life. Tolkein asked why we shouldn’t want to live in fantasy? Edward argued that it’s fundamental to human nature to not want to live this way. It’s natural and acceptable to try not to be always in that world.
This is the bit I like: virtual worlds are not ESCAPE but REFUGE, somewhere to restore ourselves. We are trying to get ‘home’, home for the human mind, where we can be at peace and free.
Then there is the question of fertility and virtual worlds. People who adopt virtual lives will have fewer babies!
Will we make as big a mess of the virtual world as we have of this world? If you consider migration from Europe to the US, it has impacted greatly on all of us. Similarly, virtual worlds are also going to have a massive impact on us. There should be special laws to stop us making a mess!
Final words: try out (in a virtual environment) how humanity could work better.

You can see the webcast of his presentation here: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1247