Book Review
Book
Review: Exodus
to the Virtual World—How Online Fun is Changing Reality by
Edward Castronova. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. 256 pages. $24.95.
Buy book.
Attention video game industry insiders and game aficionados: Don’t wait another minute—stop what you are doing, and grab a copy of telecommunications professor Edward Castronova’s new book, Exodus to the Virtual World—How Online Fun is Changing Reality. For anyone trying to understand where video gaming is headed and how the industry is likely to affect everything else, this is an absolute must-read.
Famous from his stints as video gaming expert on 60 Minutes and as author of Synthetic Worlds, self-described video game scholar Edward Castronova does what academics are not supposed to do…he writes a piece of easy-to-understand fiction. This is fiction because it’s about the future, 20-40 years from now. Castronova describes a collision between virtual worlds and our real world that results in a better world. I’m not sure I totally buy that particular vision, but more on that shortly.
Technologically speaking, the world we live in today is far different from the world we knew only five years ago. Computers are far more powerful and they are connected by faster and wider pipes. In the gaming world, that has enabled a move from isolated desktop-based gaming to vast, inter-connected virtual worlds. Today, at any one time, tens of millions of people dwell and interact in virtual worlds like Worlds of Warcraft and Second Life. Within a year or so that number (worldwide) will regularly be in the hundreds of millions. Within ten years the number could conceivably be counted in the BILLIONS. That translates into a large percentage of the human population choosing to spend a great deal of their time every day in virtual worlds as opposed to the “real” world.
This represents a huge human exodus from the real world to the virtual world—a vast migration. Why are people choosing to do this and what are the implications of such a migration? What will this mean to our families, societies, and economies? What will this mean to our personal relationships and to our other relationships, including the one with our government? Government? Yes, this relationship in particular will be affected, as Castronova sees it.
According to Castronova, the reason people are choosing to migrate to virtual worlds is that the real world is not such a fun place, and virtual worlds are cleverly designed from the get-go to be very fun. Of course, we all know that human beings spend their time doing fun things whenever they can—regardless of what parents and/or their governments have to say about it.
Naturally, as more and more people spend more time in virtual worlds designed to provide fun experiences, when they’re forced to come back to the real world they tend to increasingly arrive with expectations that the real world should be more fun. Why, therefore, can’t real world processes be designed to be more enjoyable than they are? Already people are asking why learning and training have to be dull and tedious. Castronova says there will inevitably be pressure applied by virtual inhabitants to real-world institutions, and those who run them, to re-shape our world into a more fun environment.
That may seem a bit of a stretch considering that those who run the institutions right now are organizing themselves to restrict and control interactive gaming. But it makes sense that when hundreds of millions of people spend significant portions of their time in these virtual worlds, things will inevitably change. The fact is they already are, and it’s just the beginning.
Many companies (including my own) are focusing on using interactive technologies to make learning more fun and more effective. Virtual economies are now springing up to accommodate real business life in virtual worlds, and it’s no secret that something as fundamental as human sex life has already been vitally affected by the virtual world.
At this point, game design can only be described as embryonic, but as time passes, we can only imagine to what extent game design will be incorporated into the things we do. As more ways are created to let people actually sustain themselves and make a living in virtual world economies, the migration will only accelerate. According to Castronova, this will force policymakers and institutions to respond and accommodate the desires of virtual-worlders.
Maybe.
But in my mind it is as equally possible that policy-makers may very well welcome the departure of millions of people to virtual worlds. Maybe the migration will represent a huge drop out of society, so that the number of people left paying attention to the real world, its problems, and the people managing those problems will radically decline. If only about half the people in the U.S. who are eligible to vote are actually voting now, how many will actually care enough to vote in the future when there are even more virtual alternatives available?
I don’t know, but I know that Castronova has “gone where no man has
gone before” and is asking some very stimulating questions.
It may be too soon to agree on
all the answers, but he has certainly taken the time and effort to frame
the right questions, and there’s no doubt about it—for anyone involved
in video gaming, this book is an exciting peek into the future.
About the Reviewer: Raymond
Hutchins is president of the
SimGame Exchange, an
organization that helps businesses use interactive gaming technologies
to improve business performance. He is also the president of the
Interactive Gaming and Simulations Alliance in