I created this 10-minute introduction to Virtual Worlds (think Second Life, but also online games like World of Warcraft and social networks with ‘rooms’ like Cyworld) for the panel on “Legal Developments in Virtual Reality” at the American Bar Association’s Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw. I shared the limelight with gaming lawyer Sean Kane, IBM’s legal strategist for virtual worlds Steve Mortinger, and Mark Rasch, with Andy Grosso moderating.
In my remarks, I advise folks to keep an eye out for these Virtual World trends: open source to create your own worlds, public grids, virtual workspaces, serious gaming, casual gaming, and the return of virtual reality technologies (now that we have more interesting places to visit, maybe it’s time to start digging those gloves and goggles out of the closet).
The legal types seem to be most interested in virtual property rights and regulating money transactions, but we had time to talk about fun stuff like the virtual ’strike’ against IBM in Second Life. A continuing point of controversy: the terms of service for most virtual worlds give users little recourse if a company decides to suspend or delete their account. But what if I built and furnished my whole mansion online?
While prepping for the Virtual Worlds panel at American Bar Association National Institute on Cyberlaw, I kept running into papers from a great journal called CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Here’s a taste of their research results since 2007:
College students
- More internet use by college students leads to more school life satisfaction.
- Time spent playing video games has a negative correlation with college GPA.
- More time IMing at college is associated with greater difficulty in concentrating on academic tasks. More time reading books leads to less ‘academic distractability’.
- College students with a ‘high sexual disposition’ (erotophilic) on the Sexual Opinion Survey are more likely to click on a link to unsolicited internet pornography. Antisocial students are even more likely to click.
Gaming/MMOs
- MMO players spend an average of 22 hours per week online.
- A great college student experiment: students are randomly assigned to play arcade games, console games, solo fantasy/adventure games, or MMOs for a month (minimum one hour per week). MMO players reported significantly more hours played, worse overall health, worse sleep quality, but also greater enjoyment in the game, greater desire to continue playing, and more online friendships. MMO players reported more interference with real-world socializing and schoolwork.
- About 75% of MMO players have made ‘a good friend’ online. 55% of female players have met an online friend in real life, 37% of males. 43% of females have been ‘attracted to’ another player. 15% of females date other players. 39% said they would discuss sensitive issues with online friends that they wouldn’t discuss with their real life friends.
- 21% of MMO players prefer socializing online to offline. 57% of gamers had engaged in gender swapping.
- Warcraft players rate their characters more favorably than they rate themselves.
- 18% of online poker players are problem gamblers (according to DSM-IV criteria). Problem gambling is best predicted by negative mood states after playing, and by gender swapping during play.
- Super Monkey Ball 2 players experience brain wave (EEG) changes when they pick up bananas (consistent with increased cortical activation and arousal), fall off the edge of the game board (consistent with motor functions), and reach a game goal (consistent with relaxation).
- For Taiwanese students, online game players are more extroverted and more open (creative, curious, open-minded) than non-players.
- Teams that wear red in first person shooter games are significantly more likely to win than teams that wear blue. Players also perform better in warm (reddish) lighting than cool (bluish) lighting.
- People with a more physically aggressive personality play violence-oriented video games in a more aggressive way.
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Finally, official confirmation that I have the best job in the world…and that the hours and hours I’ve wasted spent playing Civilization IV have some redeeming social purpose…I got to play Civ IV in class!
I recently helped Nina Bakisian run a session of her graduate seminar on Games and Simulations in Learning. Ever since one researcher used Civilization to successfully engage inner-city middle school students, there’s been renewed interest in using commercial games for education (instead of the ‘educational games’ I had to play as a kid, like Oregon Trail).
vs. 
In class, we downloaded the free demo (good for 100 turns) and jumped right in–the tutorial is too slow for most. But with a bit of coaching, people had no problem setting up their first 2-3 city civilizations, choosing buildings and technologies, and encountering other civilizations. At the end, I showed them the editor which allows you to change anything in your world, and how to create and download new scenarios for students to play. I actually thought at the end, hey, this could work.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 