Impact of Virtual Worlds

                I was really sad that I was out of town for last week’s class.  As someone who’s pretty involved in the online gaming community, I was curious as to how others who are less experienced felt about virtual worlds.  Anyways, I was thinking about the impact of virtual communities and their effects on society.  Naturally, we could think of impact in terms of real world transactions like virtual economies in Eve Online or Second Life (there are interesting articles about millionares solely from activities made on their avatar; see below).  Something else that comes to mind are the cultural effects of massive communities like WoW. 

More recently, League of Legends (a game that I play and follow quite a bit) had their final championship tournament for season.  The competitive scene is part of a growing e-Sports phenomenon, where spectators are able to watch their favorite players through online streaming, much like other sports.  This year, the championships were held in Los Angeles, CA and had about 9 million unique viewers.  Now, of course, this number is minimal when compared to major sporting events like the Superbowl, which draws more than 100 million viewers (but comparable to NASCAR at ~8 million).  However, what was really interesting was that the ~4 day event soaked up 5% of North American bandwidth through online streaming.  To give some numbers for comparison, Netflix uses most bandwidth at 25%, while Facebook uses a meager 2%.  

As our culture becomes increasingly immersed in technology and electronics, I wonder how e-Sports and virtual worlds will develop.  E-sports is already commonplace in many Asian cultures such as South Korea and recent sci-fi movies have dramatized futuristic societies with integrated virtual worlds (Total Recall, Gamer, Matrix).  In what other ways will these virtual worlds leave their mark on the “real” world. 

"Anshe Chung" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung