Its not just tech-savvy computer addicts who are spending hours of their time a day on Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Researchers and scholars around the world are turning to online venues to garner new insights on issues ranging from economic development, monetary policy, human behaviour, and philanthropy. To this group of interested academics, online virtual worlds are more than just fun and games.

At Cornell University – Professor Robert Bloomfield is using Second Life to teach students about regulatory policy, based on the principle that the lack of such policy in the virtual world makes it somewhat similar to the U.S. economy of 100 years ago. As he explains in a recent Business Week article, “Virtual worlds like Second Life give students an opportunity to understand what the purpose of regulation is, why it arises, what forces drive it to look ultimately the way it does.” And we can expect this sort of research to only increase in the future, as new programs continue to emerge that evaluate and study the role of such virtual worlds in society, and vice versa. According to Business Week, Bloomfield is also working on “Worlds for Study [whose wiki you can check out here], a project he initiated that will bring together professors and tech experts to develop a virtual world platform just for teaching and researching business.”

The basic premise behind this research is the belief that people in a virtual world will act much like those in the real world – motivated by incentives and deterrents, be they economic or social. That said, you have to wonder, when your forty year old neighbor is donning the avatar of a 20 year old to peruse his second youth Second Life in, how much of a replica of real world behaviors can these venues truly offer? From an academic standpoint at least, Bloomfield and others seem to believe the macro similarities will outweigh the micro differences.