Virtual immigrants in the virtual world

In western tradition, Exodus is a history of redemption. Castronova said that now, people leave for the second time and rewrite history. This time I escaped from reality and fled to the virtual world. Rushing to the Virtual World-How Online Fun Changed Reality, this is a new work by Castro Nova, a senior gamer, the world's leading pioneer in online game virtual economy research and an economics professor at Indiana University in 2008.

In the past few years, more and more people around the world have spent more and more time on online games, leaving reality and entering the virtual world, forming an increasingly large-scale virtual society and virtual economy. Castronova predicts that the cumulative butterfly effect will change our social climate and real life in the next 20-40 years. Because the design of game virtual world covers a series of rules, such as economic system and social system, like the design of public policy in the real world, it involves the evaluation of people's interests and the arrangement of the optimal process of governance, and is regarded as a basically similar activity. Therefore, with the inevitable process of fleeing to the virtual world, public policy formulation can learn from the virtual world and improve the happiness of human beings in the real society.

The key to understanding the above inference is to understand pleasure. People spend time playing games because they are fun. Fun/fun, a kind of perception and emotion, has always been an important component of human happiness and the core proposition of the game industry in the past 30 years. Designers of game virtual worlds make rules, create social order, and maintain the continuous operation of virtual society and economy. The purpose is to make people who participate in this world have fun as much as possible, find satisfaction that the real world can't give, and enhance personal happiness. However, in Castanova's view, the existing public policy design in developed countries pays too much attention to utility and fails to fully understand and understand the importance of people's happiness. When people gain enough practical experience in the virtual world, they will demand the change of public policy in the real society.

Strangely, Castronova didn't mention that the virtual world of all games is the product of pursuing commercial interests. Although the core of this pursuit is to have fun around people, it may not present an ideal country because of the complexity of human nature and fun experience.

Castronova trusts the designer of the game virtual world and is addicted to his positive experience in World of Warcraft. To a certain extent, there are other classic online games in World of Warcraft, which are supported by the concept precipitation of their own society. Freedom, equality, openness, each player invests time in free competition, chooses a variety of occupations, improves the level of skills, participates in clubs, and is recognized. Online games, which originated in the west, have evolved into the so-called Korean "kimchi" mode in the East-fighting monsters, upgrading, PK, and repeating it again and again. The power struggle related to rank and equipment is the most fascinating place for players, and it is also a portrayal of the real society in the East. Players worship and pursue power through the competition of time and money in the game world. Such a virtual world is just a helpless projection of the real world, which basically runs counter to Kastlova's practice of guiding public policies in the real society.

Escape from the virtual world, more people participate in the experience and practice, rather than escape to the virtual world of commercial games, it can not set its own rules, the number is limited. Even in the game world, people's experience of fun now needs a more open and complex economic and social system and a more realistic simulation of the real society. Such a world cannot be dominated by a few game designers as gods. This is why Second Life, an open virtual world, is now popular. In such a world, the definition of fun is different from that of games.

The more open virtual world platform, because it gives players the greatest autonomy from content to rule production, has become the best place for social, economic and political practice and innovation, and has attracted global attention. Virtual and reality are moving towards integration, mutual education and guidance. At present, in SL, there are * * * countries established by residents themselves, and there are also innovative practices in economy and finance. The practice of virtual world has been linked with the real world, and public policy not only draws lessons from the experience of virtual world, but also begins to regulate it.

The future envisioned by Castronova is still based on the technology of scientific and technological progress. Only when more people practice the virtual world independently and form a positive awareness of knowledge can we change the reality. Since 2008, the open source virtual world technology has made rapid progress. In the next 3-5 years, everyone can escape to their own virtual world. Everyone is a designer, who can make his own rules and have more escape options.

Facing the same problem, Second Life with Castronova and Cory, which just resigned at the end of last year, has a broader and deeper vision. Although Corey's "The Geography of Collapse" is only a long article, how the 3D virtual world finally completes the mission of reconstructing time and space by the Internet and expands the space for human free practice and innovation is more weighty than Castro Nova's prediction about fun.