There has been considerable interest in recent years in the study of virtual worlds and computer/video games. This interest can be broken down roughly into the following four areas:
- Pure research
- Knowledge and skills acquired while gaming
- Games as educational models
- Virtual Worlds and Games as teaching/learning tools
In this post we’ll take a look at the first area, pure research, with a focus on virtual worlds.
Virtual worlds with their millions of participants worldwide has drawn considerable interest as a social phenomena. They represent fertile grounds for research and study in such varied fields as psychology, sociology, economics, education and even law. What are the implications for those who spend 20 or more hours per week on average in these spaces and for the future when many more people will be inhabiting these worlds while at work, study, play and when socializing?
Virtual World Studies
Virtual World Studies is an emerging discipline with the cooperative blog Terra Nova functioning as a centerpiece for the exchange of ideas among a number of virtual world scholars. If you doubt the serious nature of their inquiry, spending a few minutes browsing through the posts and discussions will probably convince you otherwise.
Annual conferences such as the Games, Learning and Society Conference and the State of Play Conference bring together researchers and others interested in virtual world and gaming studies.
Research Examples
1. Blogger Linn Sovig, a graduate student from Norway, recently completed her Master’s thesis entitled “Gameplay politics in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.” In her blog she suggests that her university should develop a multidisciplinary virtual worlds study program that would attract students from a range of majors. Some of her suggestions for course topics include:
Virtual World Law.
Game theory.
Studying Virtual Worlds – Methodology.
Technological Determinism – Medium Theory – Culture of Techniques.
Economy – social and monetary.
Psychology – extension of selfism.
Language – speech, chat and avatar body language.
The Aesthetics of Geography.
2. A recent Ph.D graduate from Stanford, Nick Yee has been researching interpersonal relationships in virtual worlds since his undergraduate years as a psychology major. His work, known as the Daedalus Project, has involved over 40,000 virtual world participants and been used in as “course reading at academic institutions, such as Stanford (History of Computer Game Design), UC Berkeley (Research Topics in HCI), U. of Washington (Intro. To New Media), U. Mass (Social Issues in Computing), Loyola New Orleans (Interactive Media), and Haverford College (Foundations of Personality).”
In an upcoming blog entry we’ll look at the knowledge and skills that research suggests people may acquire by playing computer and video games and by participating in virtual worlds.
