3pointD.com

Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and perhaps the person who’s done most to advance the study of MMOs as an academic discipline, has launched a new Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University.

The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds. . . . Our goal is to learn about this technology and deploy it for research and education. The Initiative holds a bi-annual series of conferences, the Ludium, and is building Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, a massive synthetic world.

In an email Ted recently sent around, he mentions three main features of the initiative:

1. Research: Analysis of synthetic worlds, report results through papers, interview, speaking engagements, and a blog.
2. Construction: Building synthetic worlds for the purpose of research and education. More on this in September.
3. Community: Ludium conferences, academic game groups, an in-game guild.

The in-game guild is forming in World of Warcraft, for “self-directed exploration within a friendly, supportive group,” and is meant to be limited to “members from within a fairly tight professional circle.” If you think you qualify, there’s information about how to join in this blog post.

The post is from Synthetic World News, a new blog that’s associated with the intiative. Authors’ names aren’t appended to the posts, but I’m assuming they’re from Ted. Ted is also one of the lynchpin authors at Terra Nova, one of the smartest blogs about virtual worlds, whose authorship rolls have swollen in recent months.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. The Initiative hopes to use their Shakespearean world to “provide users with a fun experience that also immerses them in the narrative, language, and culture of the world’s greatest writer. It will also serve as a laboratory for research on macro-level social phenomena, and the impact of the technology on those who use it.”

I’m looking forward to reading their studies, but I’m not convinced that World of Shakespeare is the best place to examine “macro-level social phenomena, and the impact of the technology on those who use it.” One challenge (once the main challenge of actually building the world is met) will be adoption. I could be wrong about this, but my feeling is that Arden promises to be a heavily role-played place, judging from clues in Ted’s book and his Terra Nova oeuvre. It’s generally harder to recruit players into such worlds than into a place like WoW, where you can smacktalk as much as your teenage heart desires. It should be an interesting exercise, though, to examine social interactions in a place like that (assuming it is role-played). Do encounters in a role-played world mean the same thing as encounters in a world in which we are more “ourselves” (whatever that means)? And why do we hear so little from the various studies that are apparently going on in places like Second Life and There.com (which some would argue are better places to study the nature of online interactions). In any case, I look forward to hearing about the Initiative’s answers.