Reflecting on Virtual Worlds

I got lazy over the holidays and did not post a blog entry last week. I apologize for that. I did, however, spend a fair amount of time reflecting on things as I am accustomed to doing over the winter holidays. One of the things I reflected on was the significance of virtual worlds. And, as the title of this blog is Ranting and Reflecting, I thought a little reflecting might be in order.

It was a little over two years ago that I stopped caring about the real world and started caring about virtual worlds. I know how bizarre this sounds but if you will bear with me over the next few paragraphs I think I can make some sense out of it.

I used to be obsessed with the real world; particularly in the areas of history, geography, literature, philosophy and technology. Over the past twenty or so years I have listened to hundreds and hundreds of recorded books. (I am a slow reader so listening is much easier for me.) I have listened to thousands of hours of recorded lectures. I was an obsessive viewer or documentary cable channels such as History and Discovery. And, in recent years, I had become a news junkie. But, just a little over two years ago, all that changed. I discovered virtual worlds. And now I study virtual worlds with the same passion that I used to apply to the real world. Am I crazy? Or, it there an important underlying logic to this shift in focus?

Galileo is credited with the observation that people studying the natural world should not waste their time with what is actually "out there". Instead, he suggested that we should study idealizations of things in the natural world. Anyone who has had an undergraduate physics class has heard of some of these elementary idealizations such as a frictionless inclined plane, free fall in a vacuum, or an ideal spring. These thing do not exist in the world. They are constructs abstracted from things that exist in the world for the purpose of study. Relativity theory would be largely unexplored if we actually had to observe real world object traveling at the speed of light.

Centuries later Max Weber made a similar suggestion for social science. He observed that things like bureaucracies do not actually exist even in the social world. And yet to study the social world we need "ideal types" - concepts abstracted from the real world for he purpose of study. The real world is a messy, unruly and uncooperative place for study. By abstracting the essense of some phenomenon and studying the essence, we can make much bigger strides in understanding what is out there.

It isn't just scientists that do this. Writers of fiction do something very similar. They abstract the essence of human experience and motivation and call it a plot. They study the plot in the abstract and see how it will unfold. You can learn a great deal about life by reading a good novel. In fact, you will learn a great deal more about life from a novel than you will ever learn by reflecting on your own experiences. It is this process of abstracting the essence and then studying the abstracted essence that gives us such profound intellectual purchase.

In much the same way, virtual worlds are an abstraction or an idealization of the real world. They allow us to abstract the essence of our experience in an idealized environment for the purpose of study. While all those tapes that I listened to on history, philosophy, literature, and science have given me insight into what has happened, the time I spend studying virtual worlds gives me insight into what "can" happen. And in a rapidly changing world there is value in knowing what is coming as well as what has come and gone.