This article argues for using virtual worlds as experimental environments for social science questions at the macro level. The authors can foresee two major objections to this approach and will address them as to show why they do not prove to be significant. The first being that virtual worlds are not like the real world; therefore, one cannot generalize from events within them. The second of these foreseeable objections states that human society is too complex to be controlled in the way that controlled experimentation requires. Humans discover things by building environments suited for exploring the questions the authors have a rat maze is a very abstract environment, yet it is useful for exploring very general questions of mammalian cognition. The authors conclude that virtual worlds are no less valuable, on net, than other established experimental tools. The next stage in toolmaking, after Petri dishes, rat mazes, and supercolliders, should be virtual worlds.
The next tool for social science experimentation should allow for macro level, generalizable, scientific research. In the past devices such as rat mazes, Petri dishes and supercolliders have been developed when scientists needed new tools to do research. We believe that Virtual Worlds are the modern equivalent to supercolliders for social scientists, and feel they should be the next area to receive significant attention and funding. The advantages provided by virtual worlds research outweigh the costs. Virtual worlds allow for societal level research with no harm to humans, la rge numbers of experiments and participants, and make long term and panel studies possible. Virtual worlds do have some drawbacks, in that they are expensive and time consuming to build. These obstacles can be overcome, however, by adopting the models of revenue and maintenance practiced by the current game industry. The returns from virtual worlds being used as scientific tools could reach levels that would self fund future research for decades to come. However, at the beginning an investment of funding agencies seems to be necessary.
Every massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) begins new players at Level 1. The player must grind his or her way through many early levels to reach any kind of decent reward for the hours invested. Compared to films going back to Rocky and television shows such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), there is no montage to fast-forward through the work involved in reaching the game’s reward. What is it about online games or the player that makes such work so compelling? Why would hard work, something that is often avoided in the daily grind of an 8—5 job, be forced upon the videogame player—often to his or her delight? To address these questions, we use Ian Bogost’s concept of unit operations to evaluate the concept that ‘‘hard work is rewarded’’ as it relates to various media, including films and videogames, and to analyze the historical and theoretical implications of the concept.
We report results of an experiment on prices and demand in a fantasy-based virtual world. A virtual world is a persistent, synthetic, online environment that can be accessed by many users at the same time. Because most virtual worlds are built around a fantasy theme, complete with magic, monsters, and treasure, there is considerable skepticism that human behavior in such environments is in any way “normal.” Our world, “Arden,” was designed to test whether players in a typical fantasy environment were economically “normal.” Specifically, we tested whether fantasy gamers conform to the law of demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded. We created two exactly equivalent worlds, and randomly assigned players to one or the other. The only difference in the two worlds was that the price of a single good, a health potion, was twice as high in the experimental world than in the control. We allowed players (N = 43) to enter and play the environment for a month.
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