&lt;p&gt;History of the (Virtual) Worlds&lt;/p&gt;

Steve Downey

doi:10.21061/jots.v40i2.a.1

Abstract

Virtual worlds represent a small but dynamic sector of the computer technology field with global applications ranging from art and entertainment to online instructional delivery and educational research. Despite their worldwide acceptance and usage, few educators, researchers, or everyday gamers fully understand the history and evolution of virtual worlds – their genres, platforms, features, and affordances. Many of the innovations we readily recognize today (e.g., user creation of in-world objects in worlds like Second Life) began as grassroots efforts by gaming and computer enthusiasts who were long on passion but short on documentation. The end result is a twisted and often thorny history for a technology that now actively engages hundreds of millions of users worldwide and millions of users within education alone. This article synthesizes histories and definitions from virtual world developers, industry leaders, academic researchers, trade journals, and texts in order to form a coherent historical narrative of events that contributed to the evolution and shaping of the virtual worlds as we currently know and use them in education and society in general.

Highlights

Combining elements from these three definitions and including an emphasis on the essential element of people, a new definition results:
Virtual worlds offer an awareness of space, distance and co-existence of other participants found in real life spaces giving a sense of environment
A well managed game of Dungeons and Dragons could be seen as a synchronous, persistent network of people represented by avatars

Summary

Prior Definitions

While many scholars have sketched out informal definitions, formal definitions have been more rare. Richard Bartle, creator of text-based virtual worlds in the 1970s and 1980s, defines the “world” part of “virtual worlds” this way: “a world is an environment that its inhabitants regard as being self-contained. It doesn't have to mean an entire planet: It's used in the same sense as "the Roman world" or "the world of high finance" (Bartle, 2003). Using Castronova’s definition, a chatroom or a shared document would be a “virtual world.” While these definitions refer to shared spaces, they do not explicitly identify the people and their social network (which must always result from any sharing) as essential to the definition. A virtual world would be an empty data warehouse

Discussion

Applying a combined definition