Second Life
Monday, April 23. 2007
My roommate brought an interesting "game" to my attention today called, "SecondLife". The basic premise of the game is that you are a person living in a world (populated by virtual representations of other real people). Revolutionary, right? This one seems to be done well, though. You can create/sell stuff and there seems to be a whole economy in place.
So I know I'm a weird kid. I thought marcoeconomics was one of the coolest classes I took in college (and I took a SCUBA class). I had 3 immediate thoughts:
1) This is the perfect setting for people to perform experiments in economic policy that would be too devastating to try in the real world.
2) This is an interesting system were one could study creation of wealth.
3) How can I exploit this to make real money?
The last two really get me since I completely don't understand how the world economy is not a zero-sum game. It obviously isn't. Our living standards are way higher than they were 5,000 or even 200 years ago (on average, without addressing inequality which, I know, is a bad standard. look at ireland). Furthermore, this game's generation of "crap" seems to be pretty limitless. If I want to spend the time in the in-game 3D modeler, I can build it. And to make it nifty, I can program scripts to modify my object's behavior. Seeing as I've had a class in 3D modeling and plenty in programming, I deem that I could probably manage to sell something. People love spending too much money on useless crap.
And as I was playing, something REALLY odd hit me. I was speaking in spanish, and reading Portuguese. Let me clarify that have never studied Portuguese and couldn't speak it if my life depended on it. And the bits of spanish I didn't know, I was picking up from context. And this has happened before. Playing Battlefield 2 at different times, I was put into teams with people from different countries. Can gaming be a tool for second language acquisition? It might depend on what time you play, which leads me to another small point.
There are events (like yard sales) listed for specific times, in specific time zones. Coming to Ireland has made me acutely aware of bother language and time (or time zone) issues in communication. Working for a certain company in the past exposed me to the same issues. Could games be training youngsters in global economics/supply chains?
So lets review:
+ Exposure to market economics
+ learning about value-added through increased modeling/scripting proficiency. (to me, this would teach that knowledge leads to economic success, a lesson governments have been trying to teach for years)
+ exposure to multiple languages
Seems like a bargain if a kid were to leverage this for education. It has a few risks/downsides... but the exposure to real (and motivated .. ie, not chat rooms) language while never leaving your home could be invaluable.
So I know I'm a weird kid. I thought marcoeconomics was one of the coolest classes I took in college (and I took a SCUBA class). I had 3 immediate thoughts:
1) This is the perfect setting for people to perform experiments in economic policy that would be too devastating to try in the real world.
2) This is an interesting system were one could study creation of wealth.
3) How can I exploit this to make real money?
The last two really get me since I completely don't understand how the world economy is not a zero-sum game. It obviously isn't. Our living standards are way higher than they were 5,000 or even 200 years ago (on average, without addressing inequality which, I know, is a bad standard. look at ireland). Furthermore, this game's generation of "crap" seems to be pretty limitless. If I want to spend the time in the in-game 3D modeler, I can build it. And to make it nifty, I can program scripts to modify my object's behavior. Seeing as I've had a class in 3D modeling and plenty in programming, I deem that I could probably manage to sell something. People love spending too much money on useless crap.
And as I was playing, something REALLY odd hit me. I was speaking in spanish, and reading Portuguese. Let me clarify that have never studied Portuguese and couldn't speak it if my life depended on it. And the bits of spanish I didn't know, I was picking up from context. And this has happened before. Playing Battlefield 2 at different times, I was put into teams with people from different countries. Can gaming be a tool for second language acquisition? It might depend on what time you play, which leads me to another small point.
There are events (like yard sales) listed for specific times, in specific time zones. Coming to Ireland has made me acutely aware of bother language and time (or time zone) issues in communication. Working for a certain company in the past exposed me to the same issues. Could games be training youngsters in global economics/supply chains?
So lets review:
+ Exposure to market economics
+ learning about value-added through increased modeling/scripting proficiency. (to me, this would teach that knowledge leads to economic success, a lesson governments have been trying to teach for years)
+ exposure to multiple languages
Seems like a bargain if a kid were to leverage this for education. It has a few risks/downsides... but the exposure to real (and motivated .. ie, not chat rooms) language while never leaving your home could be invaluable.
