“In their continued quest to plumb the mysterious depths of human interactions, some sociologists have stopped watching people—and started watching their avatars,” we’re told in an article on Ars Technica.
“While playing World of Warcraft and traipsing through Second Life might not sound like traditional academic disciplines, they are increasingly important for research into virtual communities. This burgeoning subdiscipline even has its own publication, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.”
And you can even get paid for examining how people represent themselves in the virtual world when they’ve got access to internet speed. Here are a few examples:
• Professor Shaowen Bardzell of Indiana University, relied on “two years of ethnographic observation, interviews, and artifact analysis” to study “The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life,” recently published in the above mentioned journal.
• In 2008, the University of California’s Bonnie Nardi received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to study American WoW players and their use of game mods, after having already performed similar research in China (PDF).
• The National Science Foundation has been riding the virtual worlds train for years. Since 2007, it has passed out $378,644 to a Carnegie Mellon University prof who wanted to look at why virtual communities so often fail—and why big successes like Wikipedia and WoW persist.
• The NSF gave a University of Nevada-Reno professor $90,000 to develop a prototype Second Life client accessible to the blind (yes, really).
• And a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team picked up $350,000 (courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) to investigate “research ethics for Internet based studies.”
“When you realize that WoW [World of Warcraft] has twice as many worldwide subscribers as Scotland has people, it suddenly makes more sense to spend resources trying to understand a group this large—and the federal government has been doing exactly that.”
Tags: Internet Speed