John Sutherland entrevista a Edward Castronova en The Guardian. Castronova es el economista especalizado en videojuegos, especialmente MMORPGs, y co-fundador del blog Terra Nova que abrió este tema al mundo de la investigación académica (sobre su interesante historia hablamos hace ya tiempo y en Walrus publicaron un buen artículo). Entre sus útimas iniciativas está el libro Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games que aparecerá en Noviembre y el proyecto Arden, un mundo sintético (prefiere este término a "virtual") universitario basado en la época de Shakespeare.
En la entrevista Castronova predice que la experimentación y aprendizaje se trasladarán a los mundos sintéticos en pocos años:
JS: You talk of people being immersed in worlds rather than playing games. Why?
EC: With these synthetic worlds it's not clear what aspect of them is a game. There's plenty going on in there which isn't that at all. It's just people living, talking, interacting. There's no competition; it's never really
JS: But why does that matter on a wider scale?
EC: My professional interest is in what we can learn from this synthetic world. We've never had the opportunity to experiment ambitiously on a social level. We've never had the opportunity to say, "I'm Karl Marx and I have this idea called communism. Wouldn't it be neat if I could set up five societies that have exactly the same population, exactly the same natural resources and at year zero and try it out?"
JS: We could field test communism without killing 60 million people.EC: Exactly. We could do communism, we could do fascism, we could do America. You can experiment with any number of social designs. This is one of the futures I see for synthetic worlds in the university. I think in 15 years' time when someone in social science writes a PhD thesis, they'll be required to put their ideas to the test this way. Business schools are already moving in that direction. There are tremendous business applications. Universities should get very involved.
El poder trasladar las peleas políticas a un mundo sintético, mientras los ciudadanos disfrutamos de la vida, abre unas expectativas apasionantes ...
