More Serious Talk About Fake Worlds
by Mike D'Anna 
Mar 23rd 2006 at 1:00PM
The UK's Guardian Unlimited has a new article online about the growing
importance in our life of virtual worlds...or, 'Synthetic Worlds', as gamer-turned-academic Edward Castranova
apparently prefers to call them.I wonder how long it's going to be before some university somewhere offers a course in 'virtual sociology', or some such...it can't be too far off. And if playing games is the only requirement for the degree, maybe I can finally fullfill that dream of being a professor one day...
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Janae Mar 23rd 2006 1:35PM
can't wait til someone tries to write their postgrad thesis on the barrens chat :D
jer Apr 4th 2006 12:11PM
Concordia University in Montreal has a course called sociology of cyberspace:
"SOCI 221 Sociology of Cyberspace (3 credits)
This course offers a critical examination of the role of electronic communication, information technology, and the Internet on public culture and the organization of social behaviour and interaction."
It deals with a lot of issues surrounding avatars and social interraction online. We couldn't get accounts for wow or anything but we had a field trip to There.com (eewww) as well as some text based muds. It was fun and the professor was working on gaming theory as his research.
The course is listed in the calendar here