Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Games and Culture
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
1555412009343574v1
4/4/396    most recent
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Castronova, E.
Right arrow Articles by Falk, M.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Virtual Worlds

Petri Dishes, Rat Mazes, and Supercolliders

Edward Castronova

Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, castro{at}indiana.edu

Matthew Falk

Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

This article argues for using virtual worlds as experimental environments for social science questions at the macro level. The authors can foresee two major objections to this approach and will address them as to show why they do not prove to be significant. The first being that virtual worlds are not like the real world; therefore, one cannot generalize from events within them. The second of these foreseeable objections states that human society is too complex to be controlled in the way that controlled experimentation requires. Humans discover things by building environments suited for exploring the questions the authors have a rat maze is a very abstract environment, yet it is useful for exploring very general questions of mammalian cognition. The authors conclude that virtual worlds are no less valuable, on net, than other established experimental tools. The next stage in toolmaking, after Petri dishes, rat mazes, and supercolliders, should be virtual worlds.

Key Words: virtual worlds • experimentation • Research Infrastructure

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Games and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 4, 396-407 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1555412009343574
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?