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Robert Bloomfield an accounting professor at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y. who researches virtual worlds. Virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are attracting massive populations and some bigger than real life countries. Scientists are now playing these online games to enable them to learn more about real life.
It is estimated that 73 million gamers play online. Professor Bloomfield and others claim that researching behaviours in virtual worlds sheds some light on the effects of public policy, and with an added ease, thanks to these tools at hand. The research is not perfected, but the potential is too strong to ignore, says Bloomfield. The size of the population is the attraction, compared to national polls - 1,000 respondents; Second Life offers 11.7 million avatars that can be scanned for data.
"I got into this because I was talking to the Financial Accounting Standards Board," which develops standards for publicly traded companies in the US, Bloomfield says. "They have a lot of questions about the effect of legislation, and it's very difficult for them to see before the fact what the policy effects will be."
Researchers and economists would ideally like to create two virtual worlds, to compare against each other, but relying on grants, they are not able to complete against existing Virtual Worlds with teams of programmers and multi-million budgets. These ‘experiments’ that have been undertaken in commercially successful virtual worlds have generated some big reports, even though the environment is not ideal.
Bloomfield is currently analysing is data from a virtual stock exchange within Second Life. The analysis will show how unregulated markets behave. So far the study has shown that small investors do not do as well as the CEOs of the companies in which they invest in, especially companies with only one avatar running it. The more distributed the control of a company, the better the returns for investors.
There are still sceptics that say virtual worlds offer no comparison and it is just a game.
Source: CSMonitor
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