Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live--both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 4 reviews)

Attention migration

The central theme of Exodus is the concept of "attention migration". That is: that more and more people choose to immerse themselves in synthetic worlds (Castronova's word instead of "virtual worlds") - MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games), like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Today they have at least 16 million registered users, and the number is increasing quickly. Also, some of these synthetic worlds function like alternate societies with their own norms of conduct, citizenships, economies, codes and policies and so on. In a information society where attention is central, the increasing attention spent on synthetic worlds will (according to Castronova) create a "atmospeheric event"...
Castronova writes well and he discusses this social phenomenon and it's probable future impact in an interesting way. Though at times I think the discussion becomes a little repetitive, and I can't totally agree that "real" societies will have to become more "fun" and gamelike to compete with the synthetic counterparts. But it is a fascinating thought.
August 22, 2008

Misleading title for an interesting book

This book was not what I expected. It is primarily a reflection on lessons learned through development of digital games that could be applied to real life. The author doesn't seem to have any expectation that they will be applied exactly as described and doesn't address the myriad details that would need to be dealt with for that to happen, but the whole concept provides a lot of interesting food for thought.

For example, two general themes that cut through a lot of the lessons are the importance of fun and the idea that people's experiences playing digital games are likely to influence their expectations for how things should work back in the "real world" outside of games. So if the book had been called something like "Real Life Lessons from Digital Games," it would have delivered well on the expectations set by the title.

As it was, I found the title misleading for a couple of reasons. First, while the title refers to "Virtual Worlds" most of the lessons relate specifically to game-based virtual environments. Social worlds such as Second Life are discussed, but the author specifically acknowledges the fact that these are quite different from game-based environments which have clearly defined goals, roles, rules, rewards, etc. Therefore, if your interest relates more to open-ended worlds, such as Second Life, that are used for a variety of purposes and are not focussed on a single unified game, then there may be less in this book for you than you would guess from the title.

Second, the Exodus part of the title made me think that the book would talk more about what will happen within virtual worlds when more of us spend more time in them (e.g., How will it change the ways we work, play, communicate, consume, etc? What are the legal and political implications since so many more of our interactions will involve people from other countries?), but as stated previously the book is more about how interacting within virtual environments will change our expectations for interactions outside of those environments. Related to this is the idea - which seems to stem in part from the games versus more multi-faceted worlds distinction made previously - that we will at any one time be in either the virtual world or the real world and not both simultaneously (at least in terms of our attention). My own belief is that over time virtual worlds will become integrated with the other parts of our lives just as the Web is now, but that type of integration is only discussed briefly in the book.

January 06, 2008

Disappointing in many respects; Read Synthetic Worlds instead

I read and thoroughly enjoyed Castronova's first book on the subject: Synthetic Worlds. And, as in SW, Castronova is at is strongest in Exodus when he explains the "realness" of virtual worlds. The main thesis of Exodus is that because synthetic worlds are more fun, people will increasingly choose to spend time in them over the real world, and that, eventually, the real world must remodel itself, taking cues from virtual worlds; eventually the real world must become more fun. Exodus, though it has a few interesting new contributions, is terribly repetitive book that takes way too long getting to the substantial points. When it finally does, it is shallow in its descriptions and analyses of how, exactly, the exodus to synthetic worlds is going to radically affect the real world.

The biggest flaw (among the several I found in the book) is Castronova's thesis itself - that the real world will eventually have to model itself on synthetic worlds. The flaw is evident in his use of "migration" as the metaphor for what's going on with synthetic worlds. He explains that a family migrates from Old Country to New Country, and then tells its friends back in Old how great New is. Eventually, after hearing how great New is over and again, those that stayed put in Old put pressure on their government to change the country, to make it more like New. Castronova provides no historical examples of this, and I don't know my history well enough to know if this is how it has happened in the past, but the flaw in the metaphor is, and Castronova admits this himself, that the synthetic migration isn't physical, and therefore not permanent. It's super-easy to switch from real to synthetic, or among various synthetic worlds. This undermines not just his metaphor, but his entire argument...

A better metaphor, one that incorporates the ease of movement between places/activities, would be engagement in different activities, like sports: I play baseball when I want to hit home runs; I play football when I want to score touchdowns; I don't complain that I can't hit a home run in football. Or even more broadly: I go to the gym to work out; I go to the library to study. I don't complain that I can't run on a treadmill in the library. Why wouldn't this be the result of synthetic worlds? I hop into WoW to partake of the "good vs. evil" shared lore. I hop into SL to sell virtual real estate. I hop into the real world to go for a run, eat lunch, take a nap, kiss my spouse. Why should I expect to be able to do any of these things in the other worlds? Once it's established that the synthetic worlds provide fun, and that the real world does not, why/how does it follow that the real world must aspire to be more fun, like synthetic worlds? Why would I demand that the real world also be fun?

Castronova's argument that people will go where their utility is highest points to the same problem in his argument. He thinks synthetic worlds provide the highest utility, so off people go. But it's not as simple as "the world with the highest aggregate utility wins." There are different goods to be achieved in different worlds, so people will always come back to the real world for the goods that only it can provide (Castronova raises the issue of childbirth/rearing in a different context, but I think it's an adequate example of what I'm talking about here). Now, maybe some day in the future it really will be possible to hook up electrodes and "virtually" experience things we once thought we could only experience in the real world: eating a cheeseburger, having sex with our partner, giving birth to a child. But I think we are far from that point and can still easily say that there are just some things that we can only do in the real world. It seems more likely to me that we'll end up in a future where we go to synthetic worlds for fun, but still come back to the real world for other activities, even if they aren't fun.

January 02, 2008

Read this book

This is a very interesting book that deserves more attention than I fear it's likely to get. The author has used his experiences with synthetic game-worlds to write a thought-provoking look at the social landscape of the future, and craft a compelling argument for the way games will influence "reality" in the years to come.

The author has more game-experience than I was expecting when I picked up this book, and has avoided the easy traps and overgeneralizations that often plague writers who are attempting to explain or interpret synthetic game-worlds. This lends his thesis on the economics of fun a verisimilitude that makes even his more extreme predictions seem a likely vision of what-might-be. Not only is this a book for the interested game, but even more it's a book for the businessman, and the policy-maker, who will more and more benefit from his insight into the games people play.
December 23, 2007

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