According to the BBC, a new review in the journal Science shows that some academics (those wacky social scientists, to be precise) are turning to online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life as a low-cost alternative to real-life studies in a world where spendy grants are increasingly hard to find. From the mundane ('Look! People stand the same distance apart online as they do in real life!') to the not-possible-in-real-life-thanks-to-IRBs ("large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes"). Earlier academic studies have shown that people share many behaviors on and offline, thus boosting the validity of such studies, but of course they're interested in the differences, as well.
The differences between online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft were also revealing, said Dr Bainbridge.
In Second Life, participants often only create one alter-ego or avatar and identify closely with it. By contrast most Warcraft players maintain several "alts" and regard them as possessions.
Both could throw light on how people create identities and how they seek to project themselves to others, wrote Dr Bainbridge.
Time will tell how more 'traditional' researchers view the validity of such methods (and their conclusions), but the increasing presence of virtual topics in even the most stodgy of academic fields mean it's not going away any time soon.
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