Virtual World Journalism: implications for the real world?

Last night I was co-moderator of a panel on "virtual world journalism" at New York Law School's annual State of Play conference (co-organized by my Berkman Center colleagues). The panelists were all people (all men) who report about what goes on in virtual worlds like Second Life, Sims Online, etc.

One of the panelists has quite the cool job: Wagner James Au is an "embedded journalist" in Second Life - and his job (salary paid by Second Life) is to report on events, people, and phenomena in that one particular virtual world.

As a somebody who has spent no time in these worlds (although some would argue that the blogosphere is another virtual world), I asked why the panelists think news editors ought to care about coverage of virtual worlds. The answer: increasingly, things that happen in virtual worlds are having a real-life impact. One example: people are actually making real incomes by selling virtual goods created for other members of their virtual worlds to buy with virtual cash, which actually translates into real cash. There are also fund-raisers to help fund real-life causes - albeit sometimes done in more, er, outlandish and creative ways than you would see in the real world. As people's activities in virtual worlds increasingly have real-life impact on people's economic and social situations in the real world, coverage of virtual events will become more important.

A couple of the panelists made another rather interesting point: that virtual world journalism as a genre is much more experimental, interesting and creative than real-world journalism, because people are free to do whatever they want and must be inventive to capture the attention of their fellow gamers.   Might virtual world journalism start influencing the techniques of real world journalism?   Perhaps we shouldn't dismiss that possibility.

James Au made another interesting point: virtual world games like Second Life are worlds created and built by the users. There is no set plot or set endgame: the people who join create their own avatars (personas), homes, neighborhoods and countries - through which online societies evolve. He believes this is the ultimate form of "user created content", and is thus ties in with the world of blogs and other forms of participatory media.

As somebody who hasn't played a video game since Tetris in the early 90's, the session certainly gave me a fresh angle on the future of citizens' media, broadly defined.

Comments

[csven]

I agree. Real world journalists should be aware of what's going on because I believe much sooner than most expect, things are going to get really interesting. Allow me to tie a few topics together:

- PLM software (used to link far-ranging corporate activities; today's Wall Street darling - tomorrow's open source hosted app)
- 3D software (the basis for both videogames and real world manufacturing; prohibitively expensive 6 years ago, now free)
- rapid-prototyping technology (the future of lots of product and the great equalizer between China's manufacturing muscle and the U.S.... between corporation and individual; still used sparingly in corporate R&D, but now used by some artists for sculptures)
- GoogleMap, Virtual Earth, and other real world data collection/retrieval activities (everything digitized, tagged and put into online databases; U.S. military's cutting edge tech in '89 is now on the wristwatch of a hiker)
- telepresence and robotics (programs underway now to facilitate future battlefield surgeries from a hospital half-way round the world while Littoral combat ships send in retaliatory waves of hive-minded UCAVs to attack an enemy; surgeries once conducted "in the blind" are now practiced using patient scans to construct 3D models which are RP'd, after which doctors don cybernetic gloves and conduct delicate surgery inside the body using a video feed)
- augmented reality (from jet engine schematics in a Boeing maintenance facility to everything in the world linked to information in real time... and available to everyone via a mesh network; once the stuff of multinationals is now a city-wide game of Pac-Man for geeks)
- virtual worlds (more powerful, more empowering, and where most of the software comes together; from the military labs to videogames and now back to the military as recruiting tools)
- the Long Tail or what I now call the ecoToroid (with all the above tools in the hands of consumers, the curve/shape shifts and morphs with wide-ranging effects; people who once depended on companies for jobs and products are given the tools to develop their own products and employ themselves)

How do wholesale changes in almost everything we do affect our societies and our cultures? This is all coming together at an alarming pace imo. This is at the level of the industrial revolution. Those only reporting on the real world are missing the other one - the side that is going to eventually have dramatic affects not because it's a "game", but because it's all the corporate tools of yesterday but more powerful, easier to use, and packaged as a game.

[Boris Anthony]

Immersive Web is definitly a very big "upcoming" thing and is why it is vitally important we infuse it with everything we've learnt on the web in the last few years. Second Life is cool and all but it is closed technology, centralized and owned by a for-profit business. We must begin encouraging and where possible funding development of Open Standards, Open Softwares, distributed architectures, etc, to promote widespread and healthy dissemintation of "virtual" (what does that mean really?) Immersive Communication Environments.

[The Nirvana Poster]

Oh yes, what an interesting time to be alive. I don't think we've even begun to understand the implications of modern technology to our forms of communication. Mediums are so foundational to not only HOW things are communicated but WHAT gets communicated and I don't think anyone can predict how this is going to shakeout.