Colloquium: Edward Castronova

Please join us for the School of Informatics and Computing Colloquium Series.

Speaker: Edward Castronova, Telecommunications, IUB

Date: Friday, September 11, 2009
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

Virtual Worlds As Petri Dishes

Abstract: Controlled experiments are an important empirical method and have led to amazing advances in the natural sciences. In the social sciences, controlled experiments are typically possible only at the micro level: 100 college students as subjects, doing things for a couple of hours, in return for pizza money. Yet most of our pressing problems (terrorism, global warming, hunger) live at the macro level. Massively multiplayer online games have a macro level: Millions of people spend years making choices with deep emotional investment, and those choices create clearly visible persistent macro structures, structures that seem quite similar to parallel real-world structures (markets, cities, hierarchies, networks). Early research suggests the similarities are not an illusion. Unlike the real world, but like petri dishes, virtual worlds can be finely tweaked and closely observed. Does this new technology herald the onset of rapid advance in social science, a "golden age" not unlike natural science from 1650 to today? What are the prospects for building virtual worlds for research? Finally, what are the first steps toward testing out such a notion?

Biography: Edward Castronova is Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. Castronova is a founder of scholarly virtual world studies and an expert on the societies of large-scale online games. Among his academic publications on these topics are two books: Synthetic Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Exodus to the Virtual World (Palgrave, 2007). Professor Castronova teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the design of games, the virtual world industry, and the management of synthetic societies. He has created two virtual worlds: Arden, a small-scale example of a Shakespearean virtual world, and Greenland, a large-scale futuristic MMOG. Outside his academic work, Professor Castronova makes regular appearances in mainstream media (60 Minutes, the New York Times, and The Economist), gives keynotes at major conferences (Austin Game Conference, Digital Games Research Association Conference, Interactive Software Federation of Europe), and consults for business (McKinsey, Vivendi, Forrester). In the longer run, Professor Castronova aims to develop virtual worlds for studying human society. That is, he is trying to design games that can serve as macro-scale Petri dishes.