Institute For The Future

For The Horde! And For Science!

Last week the "first scientific conference held in Azeroth," the virtual environment of World of Warcraft, went off without a hitch, and only a little griefing. 

 

John Bohannon reports on the conference in a recent article in Science, replete with multimedia accounts of the experience.  This particular conference, organized by Bill Bainbridge, started with the hypothesis that virtual worlds are ideal sites for social scientific experimentation, and followed through with an interesting experiment on the population of researchers of virtual worlds themselves.  Once I got over my shock that an NSF program director is a duel boxer, the results are quite interesting and (to a player of said game) hilarious.  The article is quite reflexive about the nature of conference interactions as part of building science as a community of practice, as well as the many ways this synergized with the particularities of World of Warcraft as a platform for scientific dialog.

More broadly, both the content (questions of identity, sensory experience, social and environemental impact) and the conference itsself is a launch-pad of "blended reality."