Assignment 11: Virtual Worlds

I am not familiar with virtual games online so it came as quite a shock to me what is exactly entailed in these games. It’s an interesting concept being able to play different characters like in World of Warcraft and you have different tasks/goals that must be accomplished and gold to earn or as in Second Life, create a life the way you really want it that can possess similar qualities to “real life.” Neither of these two things really interest me and finding out that people spend 8 hours a day doing these things sounds pretty ridiculous. I think that some people lose the relationships and connections that they once had if they play in these virtual worlds. In the assigned reading titled: The Unreal Estate Boom one man lost his wife and child to these virtual worlds. It makes me conclude that people have lost where the drawn line is from life to virtual and they are not able to decipher the two. I for one go by the expression, “If I can see it and touch it then its real,” and in these virtual worlds, nothing is felt or can be touched.
I think that there are huge issues with putting real money into virtual worlds. When one spends money you generally get a materialistic object back and that is not the case in these virtual worlds. Wikipedia defines Second Life as “Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services with one another”(Wikipedia, 2008). Second Life allows a person to freely be a person that they want to be and in that case it may be worth it to use real money because they have a problem interacting socially in real life. Then again, many people may need to feel that this virtual game needs to be connected to their real life because they want to believe that it is real (again I think they have lost the defining line between real life and virtual). World of Warcraft on the other had doesn’t encourage the exchange of virtual reality “property” and “goods” for real money. World of Warcraft is more along the lines of fantasy terms with tasks and levels that need to be passed and accomplished. According to Newsweek, what makes World of Warcraft so popular is its social dynamics; it is an alternate world with a “medieval Matrix” twist (Levy, 2008). This is more of a game to me rather than Second Life because I find that it can be less easier to loose the definition of real life to virtual.
Comparing the open system (Second Life) to the closed system (World of Warcraft) I find it odd that people want to spend money on this that they cant physically touch. I can see why World of Warcraft doesn’t condone the spending of real money on its goods because certain lawsuits can arise and I don’t think any rules or regulations on this sort of thing have been addressed. This is why I think real life and virtual needs to be kept separate because people have the ability to get to involved and if they try to apply virtual things in real life it probably won’t add up correctly the way they think it should.

References:

Second Life. 2008. Retrieved November 7, 2008 from STS Wiki: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life>.

Levy, Steven. World of Warcraft: Is it a Game?. 2008. Retrieved from MSNBC.com: < tab_id="_2_1&url="%2fwebapps%2fblackboard%2fexecute%2flauncher%3ftype%3dCourse%26id%3d_61661_1%26url%3d">.