Making Sense of Virtual Worlds

Science is concerned primarily with observing, recording, and interpreting data. The information gleaned is used to support, modify, or deny existing theories, and occasionally to propose new theories. In “hard” sciences, such as physics and chemistry, hypotheses can be tested through experimentation. It is rare the same experiment performed under the same conditions will produce different results; in a sense, for hard science there is a “right” answer which experimentation leads toward discovering.

Contrastingly, “soft” science deals with facts that can and do change depending on conditions; this is because at heart they defer to the ever-transforming marvel that is human nature. Quantum physics aside, in hard science there is a fixed relationship between theory and experiment: Your opinion on how rocks are formed may change in the light of new evidence, but the behavior of the rocks themselves will stay the same. With soft science, this is not the case: An anthropologist can, merely by collecting data, change the very behavior being observed. Similarly, although with most hard science the experiments can be intrusive, with soft science they can’t be. “Let’s break up this crystal to see how new crystals form from the remains” is fine; “let’s break up this community to see how new communities form from the remains” isn’t.

Hard science is concerned with what is real. When it comes to virtual worlds, therefore, they don’t have a lot to say about them. Virtual worlds may be useful as sources of inspiration, perhaps, or as applications for physics simulations, but they don’t raise any new issues.

Soft science, on the other hand, has a lot to say about virtual worlds. People follow the lines established by the “great thinkers” ¹, but there is nevertheless ample opportunity for original work. There are three basic attitudes:

• Virtual worlds are just one of many areas of interest to the particular scientific discipline. The job of the researcher is to make sense of virtual worlds and to address any questions peculiar to virtual worlds that arise. Whether virtual world designers make use of the results of any analysis isn’t as important as how much it advances knowledge in the subject field

• Virtual worlds are subsumed by the discipline. They are merely exemplars of some greater area of study, and can only really be understood in that context. Virtual worlds are claimed as a subfield, which may or may not have something new to say about the discipline in general.

• Virtual worlds are tools for the discipline. They can be used to some greater purpose in their application than in themselves. Researchers are more interested in what they can do with them than what goes on in them.

Insofar as discussing the acceptance of virtual worlds is concerned, the third of these is not particularly useful. This isn’t to say there is not a lot of valuable work in the area that might be of direct relevance to designers; indeed, the chances are that some of it will be very helpful indeed, its being applied in nature. However, from the point of view of assessing the status of virtual worlds in the wider scientific community, this is not hugely important.

Similarly, the second attitude (virtual worlds are subsumed) also downgrades virtual worlds. They are regarded as a subdiscipline, rather than a discipline unto themselves. Again, therefore, virtual worlds don’t come out of any analysis in this context as being a particularly plausible independent field of research.

Thus, although I’ll spend some time going over the highlights of the second and third of these attitudes, I’ll concentrate on the first one.

I do mean “concentrate,” too.