Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - World of Bizcraft 4
World of Bizcraft By Robert Bloomfield, Cornell University The Goal For two decades I have been conducting research on small-scale laboratory economy, using networked software to create financial markets that bring a couple dozen people together to trade for a couple of hours. At the suggestion of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, I began exploring technologies that might allow researchers to conduct controlled studies of far larger economies that would capture more of the institutional complexities of market regulation. This article discusses the opportunities of one possibility: a virtual world populated with a variety of business-oriented “serious games.” According to Abt (1970, p. 9), serious games “…have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement. This does not mean that serious games are not, or should not be, entertaining. We reject the somewhat Calvinistic notion that serious and virtuous activities cannot be ‘fun.’” Such a virtual world would enable educators and researchers to go far beyond the relatively simple settings that experimental economists have examined to date. By allowing participants to take on natural roles in business settings, virtual worlds can help students understand factory floors and trading floors, supply chains for potato chips and computer chips, marketing strategy, and (my own particular interest) how financial reporting regulations affect capital flows and financial markets. Outcomes in such worlds can also allow researchers to push their own frontiers of knowledge, much as experimental researchers have done, by constructing controlled environments designed to test specific hypotheses, rather than attempting to test hypotheses by looking at data generated for another purpose (and therefore not ideal data for testing the hypothesis in question). My goal is similar, but not identical, to the goals of many others who study or build virtual worlds. •
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A focus on study distinguishes my goal from the goals of existing game-oriented world makers, who seek purely to entertain (like Blizzard Entertainment, which makes World of Warcraft), or “to create a revolutionary new form of shared experience” (like Second Life). A platform used for study must not only consider educational goals in developing world content, but must have a variety of features that facilitate integration of inworld activities into more traditional forms of education. The platform must also grant instructors and researchers the control they demand over their students’ and research subjects’ inworld experiences, and the flexibility to modify those experiences to suit their needs. A focus on games is quite different from those who focus on non-game educational uses of virtual worlds, such as inworld streaming video, interactive three-dimension modeling, and new forms of business education. Naturally, however, a platform that supports serious games would ideally include many of the technological and educational non-game innovations. A focus on business distinguishes this effort from the many efforts to use virtual world to study other topics, ranging from art and architecture to literature and science. 4