Strive Notes

The Telegraph’s Chris Stevens has an interesting article about how people are taking real life vices into virtual worlds. He says, “What began as an idyllic retreat for gamers and sci-fi fans has begun to sprout rotten polygons. From real-life murders and underground sweatshops, to money-laundering and child prostitution, virtual landscapes such as Second Life have shown that our migration to online worlds can be as traumatic and destructive as our colonisation of real ones.”

The article goes on to describe:

• How Second Life has begun attract some of the internet’s seedier characters.
• The partnership between Big Brother producers Endemol, and games-maker Electronic Arts, creator of The Sims.

• Sony, who are soon to release the PlayStation 3’s virtual world, Home – a kind of hybrid between Second Life and the social-networking site Facebook.
• How seriously players take these virtual experiences. It has been claimed that some players died when they forget to eat and others have killed in the real world as a result of disputes in the virtual one.

My view? Just as in the real one, virtual societies reflect humanity and that includes its darker aspects. But think back to when the Internet was first popularised. We had these same dicussions about the morals of the online world then. But still, we embraced of the World Wide Web, choosing to ignore some of the risks and mitigate the others by implementing new technologies and legislation. The same thing will play out in the virtual world.

Fearless Sherrilynne Prediction: by 2011, we’ll have trouble remembering how we ever conducted commerce without virtual worlds.

Filed under: public relations