Edward Castronova's 2001 Virtual Worlds: A First Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian frontier provides a compelling and thought-provoking look at how the economics and societal functions within virtual worlds may have a lot more real-world implications than one might expect at first glance. These places where some people spend more time than in their "real" worlds is not so much a fantasy world, because it is integrated into the real economy.
A lot of developments have been made in the almost 8 years since this was written, and many of his predictions seem to be coming true even faster than he expected, with the growth of these large-scale virtual world platforms. However, the growth is happening at a pace that will leave people behind who dont have the know-how, leaving us with real-world implications and ramifications for those who cannot keep up.
After reading this article, and recalling a CNBC Special I saw over the summer highlighting the economic impact of the virtual goods, it is incredible how this is connected to the real economy. Not only that, but with recent developments, people have begun to create a lot more because they are allowed to make money off the land that you create.
But what is the biggest concern to me, is that the more people enter into these worlds, and the more that corporate interests follow in order to find more profit for their products, the more we are losing our sense of physical being in the world. But what is driving people into these worlds in the first place? What has happened in our real lives that has made these graphical-lands more appealing? Couldn't all the time spent "trading" virtual goods and developing the avatar's skills to enhance their abilities be better spent developing our own abilities and working to fix the large social crises of our time?
From an economic standpoint, is all of this activity really benefiting the greater economic good of our country at all? Aren't our dollars better spent on other things? I still don't necessarily understand completely why people buy virtual goods. It seems no different than spending $100 in an arcade only to win enough tickets to buy a $10 toy, and then being content that we got that toy, only because of the "hard work" of game-playing we went through in order to earn all those tickets. The tickets somehow become more valuable than actual money through the experience created in the games, and the logic and rationality is thrown out the window.
I also think its very hard to do any kind of accurate study within virtual worlds, because the people are generally self-selected. The ones who spend the most time in these worlds are going to give you an inaccurate representation of what the population at large does within the world. What one is observing is a tiny niche of the population who chooses to participate in this world more than others. And so, in my mind, they will acquire higher capital within this world, putting those who spend more time outside of the world at a disadvantage.
Perhaps it still is a unique laboratory for research on human society. We see similar human behaviors boiling to the top, especially when it comes down to interactive economic decisions. However, I just dont see it becoming a positive thing when it becomes the most important forums for human interaction. If it is, we have lost a lot of what is truly important, and that is real, physical human interaction. If this is really the future, where "families will gather around a virtual kitchen table with their own avatars", we will have lost one of the most important social units of history.
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