Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

As technology is making advances in our society, the use of virtual worlds is becoming more and more prominent. From personal experience, I can tell you that video games often bring users into an addictive virtual world that proves to be extremely difficult to withdraw from. During a few of my teen years I, like many others, was addicted to Blizzard Entertainments “Warcraft III The Frozen Throne”. These types of games bring you into a cyber society that at the time seems much more fun and appealing than the real world. The detrimental effects of this way of thinking are more than apparent. I would fall into this virtual world for hours at a time as the feeling of fatigue and hunger were nonexistent. Extreme examples of this problem prove to be fatal; A 28 year old man died in a Korean PC café in 2005, while playing StarCraft for 50 hours straight. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm). The addictive nature of these virtual world games are evident as the man didn’t sleep and had very little to eat during his playing marathon while literally pushing his body in exhaustion.
However, there are many pros to virtual world games and applications as well. Second Life is a good example of how you can bring the social and intellectual aspect of society into the virtual world. The interaction abilities in Second Life are much like that of real life and allow you to connect and mingle with new people. Also, I believe Virtual worlds foster a level of creativity unattainable in the real world. You can let your imagination run wild by having your avatar fly, or be able to live in the ocean as in Second Life or turn into a magical priest as in World of Warcraft. In addition to creating virtual avatars, technology now allows you to relive the virtual experience of a whole neighborhood such as the lower east side in VLES (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/arts/television/06itzk.html ). As people are spending increasingly more time on the Internet, I think that the future of Virtual Worlds is bright. People seem to enjoy socializing in a virtual society just as much if not more than real life. I think software such as Second Life and MMORPG games such as the WarCraft series will continue to boom and become increasingly integrated in real life as the demand is expanding.