Virtual Worlds Part 2

These were the questions that I had for the articles this week:

1. In the virtual worlds journal article, the study focuses on the different shopping experiences tried by various companies in Second Life. A lot of the articles we have read over this semester have focused on various strategies businesses have tried to make a profit from these new realities. My question is, what other experiences are being replicated in the virtual realm and what effects will this have on the experience of humanity over time?

2. Over the course of human history, humans have been over coming barriers of all sorts; geographical, intellectual, economical, etc. Regarding our desire as humans to interact with one another, it seems like all we are missing is a way to instantly transport our physical bodies to anywhere in the world. From the articles and the videos we have watched, it is clear that in substitute of teleporters people are using virtual worlds as a common ground that everyone has instant access to (depending on their connection speed). Should this meeting in a virtual forum be replicated in the “real” world, would we see similar interactions?

3. One thing made clear in the article on virtual world ethics is that when dealing in cyberspace as in real-space there will be vandals to deal with; in this case hackers. More and more, various aspects of our lives are appearing online. Therefore, are we going to need to add some of the counter aspects to the cyber world and could those possibly be the jobs of the future? For example, creating a cyber police force to “arrest” hackers?

Like many weeks, I feel that my questions were not greatly touched on, but that could be because the types of questions I ask seem to be on topics that we do not have a chance to cover in class.  I can try to answer my first and third questions though. In class, we spoke of Chinese online “gold farmers” who essentially are paid to grind through games and obtain high demand items to sell to other players. While this example does not take place solely inside the virtual worlds, it is a replication of hiring people to do the grunt work so that others can benefit. Ethics aside, the gold digger job reflects the transformations taking place regarding possible jobs for the future. If we as a society are going to center more and more of our lives around technology, then we will need unskilled jobs as well as skilled jobs for people to do. Perhaps instead of trying to directly translate jobs to cyberspace we should be stripping jobs down to a basic category such as skilled, unskilled, or grunt work and see what facets of society will require such jobs.

A slightly random thought: during class we watched a video of someone creating an object for Second Life. Just about anyone can do it or could figure out how to do it similar to how people of various skills create websites. One only needs so many people in order to maintain a site and arguably this theory could translate to those who create Second Life objects or just virtual world objects in general. The only flaw with utilizing these virtual worlds as a method of obtaining an income though is it is only feasible if the site continues. I do wonder if it is not the time to start figuring out how to add some regulation type institutions into some of these worlds. I could easily see a panic if too many people stake their livelihood on a virtual world only to lose everything in one day and not receive anything for it…very similar to the Great Depression.  It will be interesting to see where this will end up in 5 or 10 years.

Tags: virtual worlds