Virtual Worlds, Real Science
Science News (10/27/07) Vol. 172, No. 17, P. 264; Vastag, Brian
"Virtual worlds such as the online game environment World of Warcraft are being increasingly tapped by behavioral scientists as a resource into social dynamics. Tufts University's Nina Fefferman points out that infectious disease computer models are limited in terms of accurately projecting human behavior, and virtual worlds, which involve real human interactions, sometimes on a vast scale, can help fill this void. She presented this argument in a paper she co-authored with University of North Carolina epidemiology grad student Eric Lofgren based on observations about a virtual plague epidemic that ravaged the World of Warcraft population. Fefferman notes a group dynamic during the outbreak in which thrill-seeking characters willingly entered disease epicenters, a phenomenon that could conceivably be paralleled in the real world. "I tend to think that it's more realistic than we acknowledge, that there would be motivations for people to go to the disaster," says director of the National Science Foundation's Human-Centered Computing Cluster William Sims Bainbridge. Fefferman now wants to intentionally unleash a virtual plague on a game world to study its effects, and she contends that such a scenario could be used to enhance the challenge of game worlds by offering players the opportunity to collaborate on a cure or build hospitals, for instance. With game companies reluctant to participate in such experiments, some academic researchers are building their own virtual worlds to test their theories, but success has been spotty. A $360,000 NSF grant was awarded to a team headed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robert Kraut to study interactions in World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, and other online social centers, while University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School professor Dan Hunter has termed this emerging discipline "computational social science."
