Virtual worlds affect behavior, profs say

Ian Bogost, an assistant professor from Georgia Tech, designs video games featuring mundane scenarios like waiting in line to go through security at an airport or working at a copy shop. Tom Boellstorff, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Irvine, will publish a book this spring based on his experiences in the virtual world Second Life through a muscular avatar with Tribal tattoos named Tom Bukowski.

“These virtual worlds are so new and changing so quickly,” Boellstorff said. “They’re bridging the gap between play and work in new and creative ways, and sometimes scary ways.”

Bogost and Boellstorff were part of a panel of technology experts that weighed in Tuesday at UC Irvine on how video games and virtual reality affect how people interact with each other. The discussion was co-sponsored by HumaniTech, a center at UC Irvine’s school of humanities, where graduate students and faculty look at the connections between culture and technology. The program sponsors a lecture series each year exploring a different topic. This year’s theme is “Serious Play: The Practices of Everyday Life in Video Games and Virtual Worlds.”

“By simulating the process of everyday life, video games can become political,” Bogost said.

He cites the popular online game “Darfur is Dying,” in which players can experience being a Sudanese child chased by gun-carrying Janjaweed militiamen, as an example of how video games can serve a political purpose.

Far from child’s play, Bogost’s career illustrates how video games have become ingrained in Western culture, and even have become a topic for scholarly study.

Bogost, who studies what video games say about culture, has parlayed a childhood obsession into an academic career and has put him in semi-celebrity status. He was co-designer of the first official U.S. presidential election video game for Howard Dean in 2003 and has been a guest on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”

Like Bogost, Boellstorff combines work with play through focusing his research on virtual worlds. His book “Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human,” will be released in spring 2008. Boellstorff has spent most of his academic career studying gay and lesbian Indonesians, but now applies his skills as an anthropologist in the virtual world.

Boellstorff used the same methods anthropologists use to study tribes in the Amazon rain forest to study the online virtual world “Second Life,” where people can take on a new identity, buy a house or get married.

“There are some seriously new things in the virtual world and some things that are old,” Boellstorff said. “The way disabled people use virtual worlds. Two people can inhabit the same body, or, in one case, nine people.”

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected].