The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Online virtual worlds, electronic environments where people can work and interact in a somewhat realistic manner, have great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. This article uses Second Life and World of Warcraft as two very different examples of current virtual worlds that foreshadow future developments, introducing a number of research methodologies that scientists are now exploring, including formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of economic markets or social networks.

The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research

“…In the consumer sector, participation in synthetic worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft is estimated in the tens of millions (Hof, 2006;Nardi and Harris, 2006), while synthetic worlds are also emerging as interesting sites of experimentation among scientists, educators, and software teams (Bainbridge, 2007;Hut, 2008;Moore and Jackson, 2008;Schultze et al, 2008). In organizations, a number of dedicated synthetic worlds -such as Project Wonderland (from Sun Microsystems), ProtoSphere (from ProtonMedia), Olive (from Forterra Systems), and Qwaq (from Qwaq) -are being deployed within organizations for the purposes of supporting distributed collaboration, project management, and online learning and simulation.…”

Usability of Geographic Information: Current challenges and future directions

“…However, in traditional contexts in which automation has been studied -such as process (Bainbridge, 2007) and transport control (Sharples, 2009) -the emphasis has been on changing the way in which a user either interacts with technology or in which data are presented to support decision making and strategy selection (Parasuraman et al, 2000). However, in the case of GI the automation is primarily focussed on data processing and conversion; what needs to be further understood is whether the introduction of this automation, which results in the protection of the user, in fact reduces the quality of the mental model of that user.…”

Detecting Covert Networks in Multilingual Groups: Evidence within a Virtual World

“…Accordingly, analytical techniques that assume an in-depth semantic understanding of the content of each message may be realistic in some settings, but are untenable when evaluating covert network structures. Virtual world environments possess similar covert structures and, as a result, may represent useful platforms for testing theories and analytical techniques that deduce these covert structures (Bainbridge, 2007).…”

“…Virtual worlds offer rich social interaction and collaboration that parallel realworld communications in many facets (Messinger et al, 2009). Furthermore, virtual gaming environments are renowned for their dynamic and unpredictable nature (Bainbridge, 2007). However, in a virtual world, participants were not actually engaged in crimes or war allowing researchers and participants to freely discuss their behaviors.…”