'Why Virtual World Economies Matter'

Phi Delta Kappan, 2018

In recent years, virtual play spaces have become enormously popular among young children around the world. As yet, though, there has been relatively little research into the ways in which children interact on such sites and what they learn in the process. This article describes a study of kids’ experiences with one such virtual world, Club Penguin, created by the Walt Disney Company, which was for many years a leading online destination for children ages 5-10. The author focuses specifically on the commercial nature of Club Penguin, concluding with suggestions for parents, teachers, and researchers as to how they can help today’s young children to become conscious customers and responsible digital citizens.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Virtual worlds constitute a growing space for collaborative play, learning, work, and e-commerce. To promote study of this emerging realm of activity, we suggest a typology adapted from C. Porter’s (2004) typology of virtual communities. The five elements of the proposed typology include (1) purpose (content of interaction), (2) place (location of interaction), (3) platform (design of interaction), (4) population (participants in the interaction), and (5) profit model (return on interaction). We argue that this five-element typology facilitates identification of (a) the historic antecedents of virtual worlds in gaming and social networking, (b) future applications of virtual worlds for society, education, and business; and (c) topics for future research.

Turku School of Econonomics: Series A, 2011

International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy, 2012

The debate covered in this paper gravitates around the intangible nature of virtual goods – many people consider them worthless, and predict them a fate similar to that of Second Life, which currently has only 18m users and struggles to re-create excitement in its potential among investors, brands, and consumers. The concept of virtual consumption is first discussed from a socio-philosophical perspective, placing it in the context of the postmodern society, and then motivations for virtual consumption are presented. The paper proposes conclusions and recommendations which may help companies think about the virtual goods model in a strategic way and fully exploit its potential.

Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, while other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds, as well as across the boundary which appears to separate them from the rest of users’ lives. To tie these two threads together, and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, I propose adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix, and outline a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other, and furthermore how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds.

International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 2012

Virtual worlds have emerged as important socio-technical artifacts in contemporary society. They have enabled unique business models in the digital economy. This paper presents a rich account on how virtual worlds have transformed modern society and how they have been presented as having outstanding benefits and promise, with examples of successes and failures. The goal is to synthesize the research and demonstrate an accurate understanding of this novel artifact and its multi-facet consequences. In addition, and more importantly, this review proposes a research agenda for the information systems discipline and assists in identifying critical issues on virtual world technologies and strategic management practices. The objective of this study is to establish a foundation for research on virtual worlds.

This article questions the preconceived notions that participants in virtual worlds are essentially consumers. Building on the existing scholarship around virtual worlds and notwithstanding the current character of virtual worlds, this paper explores aspects of End User Licence Agreements and notes the unfairness of their provisions, particularly the imbalance between user and developer interests governed by such contracts. It argues that the contracts cannot be regulated with consumer protection legislation, as interests such as property or intellectual property are beyond the scope of consumer protection regimes. Finally, recognising the phenomenon of constitutionalisation of virtual worlds, the article argues for stronger regulatory solutions in this domain, in order to strike a more appropriate balance between competing interests in virtual worlds.

2008

Business opportunities provided by 3-D virtual worlds and "serious gaming" (adapting computer-gaming technology for business use) are beginning to emerge. The CIO membership of the Society for Information Management's Advanced Practice Council (APC) commissioned research to track these opportunities and the management implications. Early experiments of virtual world and serious gaming applications fall into three categories-those that use social presence capabilities, those that use visualization capabilities, and those that use simulation capabilities. This article discusses each of these categories, together with examples, and provides thoughts on other future applications. It also describes the APC's own first-hand experience of developing SIMSIM, an "island" located in Second Life, one of the most popular virtual world platforms. Although the business promise of virtual worlds and serious gaming is largely in the future, the enabling technologies are maturing rapidly. Both the upside potential and downside risk of these platforms are too high for businesses to ignore. By 2018, virtual worlds and serious gaming will likely be major, even dominant, platforms for business applications and opportunities.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Communications of the Association for Information Systems

This teaching case considers the challenges and opportunities faced by an entrepreneur in Second Life, one of the more popular virtual world environments. Second Life provides the economic and technological platform required for immersion, social interaction, and the potential of private enterprise. Many entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the various business opportunities offered in Second Life, and a number have earned significant income through their in-world creations and services. Stuart O'Brian, the CEO and founder of VirtualCircle, was one of the early pioneers of virtual commerce. Over the last three years, his organization faced multiple business and technology challenges while negotiating the hypercompetitive and turbulent environment within Second Life. However, he now questions the sustainability of the ever-changing and agile business model that enabled the success of VirtualCircle. Stuart also faces questions regarding avenues of future growth and is grappling with issues concerning interoperability and the replication of his prior success in other virtual environments-and the real world.

ACM SIGMIS Database, 2007

Journal For Virtual Worlds Research

This is a brief essay, we call "think-pieces", designed to stimulate a discussion on a particular topic. For this series of essays we propose the following question: "Consumer behavior in virtual worlds, is it really any different to the real world, or is it simply a case of 'old wine in a new bottle'?"

… Journal of Business Science & Applied …, 2010

Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly popular revenue model for massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs), social networking sites (SNSs) and other online hangouts. In this paper, we argue that the marketing of virtual goods currently falls short of what it could be. Game developers have long created compelling game designs, but having to market virtual goods to players is a relatively new situation to them. Professional marketers, on the other hand, tend to overlook the internal design of games and hangouts and focus on marketing the services as a whole. To begin bridging the gap, we propose that the design patterns and game mechanics commonly used in games and online hangouts should be viewed as a set of marketing techniques designed to sell virtual goods. Based on a review of a number of MMOs, we describe some of the most common patterns and game mechanics and show how their effects can be explained in terms of analogous techniques from marketing science. The results provide a new perspective to game design with interesting implications to developers. Moreover, they also suggest a radically new perspective to marketers of ordinary goods and services: viewing marketing as a form of game design.

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2010

Virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life enable consumers as producers, that is users can choose to be passive consumers of content, active producers of content, or both. Consumers as producers poses unique challenges and opportunities for both operators and users of virtual worlds. While the degrees of freedom for usergenerated content differ depending on the world, instances of consumers as producers can be found in many virtual worlds. In this paper we characterize consumers as producers with the help of four "lenses"-social, technical, economic, and legal-and use the lenses to discuss implications for operators and users. These lenses provide a complementary analysis of consumers as producers from different angels and shows that an understanding of it requires a holistic approach.

In the modern, ‘disenchanted world’, magic and mystery have by large been banned to the world of fiction: the realm of literature, film and, more recently, online computer games. From a modern perspective, fantasy fiction may instigate a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ but it can never threaten the modern distinction between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction on which a ‘disenchanted world’ is based. In this article it is questioned whether this analysis can be upheld by presenting a case study of online computer games. First, it is demonstrated that these ‘games’ are based on the fantasy genre of J.J.R. Tolkien and have evolved from ‘interactive fiction’ in the 1980s into the current, three-dimensional virtual worlds that defy the definition of fiction. The second section consists of a content-analysis of four popular online games (Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft) to empirically explore the culture, social structure and economy of these online worlds and their potential meaning and appeal to the players. The analysis demonstrates that these virtual worlds break with modernity and its discontent as analyzed by sociologists such as Weber, Durkheim and Marx: they hark back to an ‘enchanted world’ suffused with magic and mystery, reconstruct a stateless society with clans, guilds and ‘meaningful’ communities and encourage players to regain control over the means of production. It is concluded that the emergence and popularity of online worlds are indicative for a problematic modern distinction between the real and fantasy, fact and fiction. Virtual worlds of fantasy may instigate ‘real’ enchantments.