Types of Virtual Worlds
There are a large number of virtual worlds in existence with memberships that vary from a few thousand to several million inhabitants. For the most part they can be seen as falling into one of two categories, the open-ended, non-structured (sandbox) virtual worlds, and the theme based, game-like Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (know as MMORPGs or MMOs).
“Real Life” Virtual Worlds
The first category has been more widely used for educational purposes. These worlds allow you to create your own environment as well as utilize environments created by others. They often simulate real life surroundings and activities. Academically, classes can be taught in these spaces, meetings or conference sessions held, and experiments and simulations created.
There are also virtual versions of real campuses to explore and virtual libraries that provide an online space for library resources, as well as virtual art galleries to display creative works. Sometimes the educational spaces are designed by faculty and other academic personnel, other times students can be highly involved in the building process. Generally these worlds provide a free basic membership for exploring much of their environment with fees for an “enhanced” experience such as building privileges or private spaces. Second Life is probably the best known of the these virtual worlds, while Active Worlds also has a strong educational presence with its own separate educational universe.
Imagination Come to Life!
The second category, MMORPGs, are more structured environments that are created professionally (often taking a few years of development with costs in the millions of dollars). They are theme based and generally draw their inspiration from literature and film. In a sense, they provide an opportunity to “live” in worlds that previously one could only observe and imagine. The most popular of these environments are medieval fantasy worlds roughly based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. These worlds attract millions of members from around the world and tend to be more technically sophisticated (thus requiring a more powerful computer). The most popular of these worlds tend to charge a monthly fee ($10-15 per month) in addition to the initial cost of the software. They have drawn interest academically primarily as a social phenomenon to be studied (virtual world studies) rather than as a tool for formal learning. However, MMOs have been used occasionally in classes for ethnographic study purposes, and for analysis of economic systems. There has also been ongoing research to determine the skills and knowledge that may be derived by active participation in these worlds and their communities outside of formal education.
At our college we have employed both categories of virtual worlds for educational purposes including several years of using Active Worlds for online and hybrid classes and using the very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG to simulate the “hero’s journey” in a science fiction/fantasy literature course.
