Work IN Virtual Worlds –
– Dr. Judee K. Burgoon, et al – StrikeCOM (University of Arizona)
A limited virtual world – ROTC students. Have to communicate to find assets that they are going to call an airstrike on – but someone in there has been told to deceive the rest to protect the asset – the task is to seek out the deceiver.
What is a lie? Deceivers reinforce wrong information – a lie of omission.
Media richness – does the detection ability go up with more f2f contact? No – people seem to be better at detecting lies in just text – the liars are good at using subtle social signals.
– Cory Onrejka – Second Life
An environment – wants you to log in like you do to your operating system. Academics have begun using it to build curricula and virtual institutions. Also used for providing therapeutic communities
Work ON Virtual worlds
The Daedalus Project – Nick Yee – Stanford
Who Plays? Average age 26; Only 25% are teenagers; 8-16% females; age not correlated with use; 8% spend more than 40 hours a week playing; 70% of users have spent 10 hour or more continuously in the game; 80% play with someone they know in real life
Cory Onrejka – “World of Warcraft is the new golf!”
People are buying condos in Beijing based on sales of virtual currency to people in the US.
Price of developing a single player game is $5 – $20 million – multiplayer games are more.
Virtual Property rights – there’s a big market for buying and selling virtual property – we don’t have good legal understanding for virtual property, though it’s coming. But we already trade virtual properties – like stocks. The Chinese already recognize virtual property. They have government programs promoting the trade in virtual property. This could lead to a massive capital shift to China.
Oren Sreebny 