Key Texts - Dave Wharton

Synthetic Worlds - Edward Castronova

This book has given me an insight into how the world of gaming has grown from being a simple pleasure to becoming an economical and political phenonemon over the past decade.

• (Star Wars Galaxies) Some characters are better than others: faster, better looking. They can be bought and sold, most often on eBay. As I write this, a Jedi type character from a fantasy based on Star Wars costs over $2000.

• Typical users spend 20-30 hours per week inside the fantasy. Power users spend every available moment. Some 20 percent of users in a recent survey claimed that their fantasy world was their 'real' place of residence! 
• In Asia, people who have lost virtual items becasue of game-server insecurities and hacks have called the police and filed lawsuits. The police have made arrest; courts have heard cases; and plaintiffs have won.

Exodus to the Virtual Worlds - Edward Castronova

I decided  to study this having read Castronova's previous book. This text starts to uncover reasons for why the virtual world is becoming so popular that in the near future, our real world may start to model its institutions on games.


"Distinguishing reality from symbol is not free. In fact, bo act of cognitive processing is free. Processing is thinking, thinking requires mental resources, and therefore our processing of media is selective and incomplete. We cannot notice every detail in our environment. Moreover, we will not notice, understand, and retain media information according to how important it is judged to be by deeper motivational systems".
(p93)

Communities in Cyberspace - Edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock
I started looking through this book to find out the relationship between online communities and the real-world. The text presents strong views on the effects of cyberspace from different sources.

Here is an interesting quote I found on the 'evolving virtual world'...


"In the world of biology, changes in signaling behaviour may occur quite slowly, over evolutionary time. In the world of human interaction, changes can occur quite quickly. If excessive deception makes a signal lose meaning, it can be replaced by a more reliable assessment signal or the community may begin to punish deception".
(p54)