Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds is a fairly new concept but has been very popular recently. A lot of my classmates must be familiar with the game "SIMS. I used to play this game when I was in high school but never understood the point as I enjoyed the things I did in the real world better than the game itself. Contrary to my views, the game seemed to gaining popularity and since then have been many new versions of the game. This was primarily because virtual world can be used in multiple ways as mentioned in the articles for this weeks class. I was amazed at the range of activities that could benefit from the virtual worlds.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Avatar II: The Hospital", published on April 13, 2010 mentions the use of virtual world to train nurses and the medial staff for emergency situations. By creating models of the future possibilities of a famine or a hard to deal with patient, the medical staff is provided with a close to real life experience and trained on how they should face a problematic situation. It is mentioned in the article, "In addition to the disaster drills, Second Life is increasingly being used to train medical and nursing students in clinical skills. Medical schools traditionally have run such exercises using computerized mannequins, which can be programmed to exhibit certain symptoms. But each mannequin costs about $65,000, so there may be just one for every 50 or 100 students. In Second Life, though, every student can take on a nurse or doctor avatar and practice interviewing virtual patients, filling in medical charts and making diagnoses." Virtual world allows the training to be price effective and the same benefit is provided to the business world as well. In one of the readings for this week it was mentioned that employees at IBM have meetings int he virtual world saving the cost on travel and is more effective than a mere phone call providing the "sense of space".

On the other hand it is important for us to understand the cons of the use of the virtual world.  Are we losing the sense of reality? An article in the New York Times titled "No Budget, No Boundries: It's the real you" it is mentioned how Ms Rayna is able to fulfill her fantasy for multi-strap platform sandals and other expensive real world items for a much cheaper price. It saves her money and lets her live her life in the virtual world, but it's still encouraging materialism.  Virtual worlds seem to be a boom for the professional world and teaching, but is it beneficial to use it for personal use?  Was the want for the real world items not enough that now we would want to purchase materialistic items for our items online?  Virtual worlds to me translate to escape from the real world: Instead of facing our problems in the real world and making it a better place, we are creating a second world and trying to stay under the impression that we have control over our lives.  Virtual worlds provides the sense of a society and space, but what about the real society we reside in?