Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Still Waiting on Second Life Entrepreneurs

Matthew Bowen has a good post up at Prevention Works on the doings at Second Life, the online virtual world that has had a bunch of “people” plopped into it, thinking they can survive on prevention and being reasonable. The rape, fraud, and bullying that are becoming issues there tend to belie that assumption, and I don’t share his optimism (big surprise, I realize) that the inhabitants will all work it out together. It’s more likely, I think, that the next evolution of the game will be the development of law and law enforcement, which will later evolve punishments and sentencings. There’s still time to get ahead of the curve and create some designs for studying this and seeing how the evolutions parallel what we’ve come to (and don’t) in the supposed real world. I’m still seeing dissertation here for some enterprising grad student in a forward-looking department. (IOW, lotsa luck.) Provocative discussion by Matthew, worth following for the rest of us.

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