Emory Business School Looks at Virtual Worlds

With graying hair, a grizzled face and a penchant for bow ties, Benn Konsynski, professor of business administration at Goizueta Business School, doesn’t fit the typical stereotype of an online gamer. But you should never judge a book by its cover: Konsynski takes his games very seriously — and he isn’t the only one. In fact, on Monday, Goizueta was filled with a variety of people from across the nation — academics, businessmen, tech enthusiasts and IT professionals — who all share the belief that gaming is much more than child’s play. Video game enthusiasts flocked to the B-School for the public portion of a two-day conference entitled “Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics, and Society” and organized by Konsynski, David Bray, Emory Ph.D. candidate in the field of information systems, and Holli Semetko, Emory’s vice provost for international affairs. The conference, sponsored by The Halle Institute, the B-School, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, featured a series of panels, each four hours and 15 minutes, where conference-goers were given the chance to hear from and ask questions of academics and entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of the growing virtual-world phenomena. Experts at the event included John Zdanoski of Linden Labs, the company backing the virtual world Second Life, and Chris Klaus, founder of the Atlanta-based virtual world Kaneva. While some may find four hours of video-game discussion excessive, a growing interest in the industry shows that virtual worlds ought to be taken seriously. According to Edward Castronova, associate professor of telecommunication at Indiana University and expert in the field of online gaming, only about 0.3 percent of the world’s population spends time in some kind of virtual environment, but the economic activity in these worlds rivals that of small countries like Jamaica — and is actually growing at a much faster rate.

It may seem odd to talk about the economic activity in virtual worlds, but experts insist that just because the goods and services that users create in these worlds are nothing more than ones and zeros doesn’t mean they aren’t real. A high-level character on World of Warcraft can sell for upwards of $1,000. “We’re dealing with the top of Maslow’s hierarchy,” said Castronova, referring to a psychological theory that states people first fulfill basic survival needs before working to achieve more abstract social and personal goals, “but a huge fraction of the economy in the developed world is the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.” And considering a prediction made by the Gardner Group, a leading information technology research and advisory company, that by 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users will have some kind of virtual-world presence, this virtual economy will become even more important. But even beyond the numbers, these life-like environments are already proving themselves to be useful on a highly practical level by breaking down some of the barriers that exist in the real world. In an interview with the Wheel, Michael Rowe, manager of IBM’s 3D Internet and Intraverse, explained how virtual meetings in Second Life allow for people to collaborate over great distances in a far more meaningful way than, say, your typical conference call. “People show up early [to virtual meetings], people chat, they socialize and they don’t leave at the end of the meeting,” he said. “They build those personal relationships.” And he speaks from first hand experience: Rowe became good friends with a business colleague, Ian Hughes, by working with him in a virtual space for a year and a half, before they finally met in real life six months ago. These virtual worlds can also act as “petri dishes” in which groups can do experiments and simulations that would be impossible in real life. During an interview with the Wheel, panelist and a Standford Professor of Communications Byron Reeves described such an experiment during which he had his students create Second Life avatars with various skin colors and then sent them out to interact with other online characters. “You can test the effects of race in a way you could never do experimentally,” he said. The low cost and highly flexible environment that virtual worlds like Second Life offer also makes them great places to do training that would be difficult otherwise. Karen Ngowe, the senior instructional technologist at Northrop Grumman, a contractor for the CDC, has been investigating the possibility of using the online game to train public health professionals to respond to large-scale disasters. Working with an independent organization called Play2Train, a group that develops locations and equipment for training in Second Life, Northrop Grumman has run a miniature-sized mass vaccination simulation meant to explore the capabilities of the system.

But in spite of their great potential, virtual worlds in some ways still fall short. Ngowe cites issues with the scalability and stability of the Second Life platform that prevents it from doing massive training scenarios. “The platform right now, especially with Second Life, is not very scalable,” she said in an interview with the Wheel. “By the time you get more than 20 avatars, everything slows to a halt.”
Other conference attendees and panelists agreed and voiced concerns about the interoperability between virtual world platforms, as well as problems about complicated user-interfaces. “Today there’s not an open platform that embraces all the things that you need to be successful,” Klaus, founder of Kaneva, told the Wheel. He added that someone needs to do for virtual worlds what Apple did for the MP3 player: “They applied a very simple interface, and made it cool and slick.” But ultimately, experts believe these problems will be solved. Throughout the conference, academics and business-types alike made references to the early Web. “This feels very much like 1994 with the Internet,” Konsynski said in an interview with the Wheel. “[And] the possibilities are as extraordinary, if not more in many ways.” Those who scoff at the virtual worlds, he went on to explain, are like the critics of the early Internet: “They’re just not seeing the possibilities.” In fact, this widespread skepticism of virtual worlds may be its biggest drawback. Although changing perceptions about virtual worlds is a difficult task, Castronova believes time may make it unnecessary. “I think there’s a demographic problem that’s slowly being solved. It’s hard for people to understand these things if they’re not young, so folks under age 25 don’t have too much difficulty grasping the whole thing,” he explained in an interview with the Wheel. “[But] if you haven’t played video games its really hard to grasp what’s going on.” www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=25071