On Monday, 2nd June, the AVEA project at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) organizes an open research seminar on so- called virtual economies.

In the seminar we focus on the following question: “Why should economists and social scientists be interested in virtual economies?” Through discussion and presentations by academic researchers and industry representatives, we investigate the potential of conducting quantitative research on virtual economies that is of interest to mainstream, “serious” researchers.

(more…)

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that enagages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research.

For more information please visit: http://jvwr.org

Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team. 

Video Clip: False Belief in Second Life (MOV) (WMV)

(more…)

The objective of this chapter is to introduce the element of trust and risk under alternative environments, and to analyse the electronic grocery and the virtual retail environments. Therefore, we provide the key findings from an empirical survey of UK grocery retail consumers purchasing from the Internet.

For more information about this book chapter please get in touch!

Reference: Bourlakis, M., Papagiannidis, S., & Fox, H. (Forthcoming). Trusting the Avatar: An examination of trust and risk factors in electronic and virtual retailing. In T. Kautonen & H. Karjaluoto (Eds.), Trust and New Technologies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

The aim of The International Journal of Role-Playing is to act as a hybrid knowledge network, and bring together the varied interests in role-playing and the associated knowledge networks, e.g. academic research, the games and creative industries, the arts and the strong role-playing communities.

For more information please visit the Journal’s web site: http://play.blogs.com/rp/

A software bot that masquerades as an ill-mannered human user within Second Life is being used by UK researchers to investigate the psychology of its inhabitants, by starting a conversation with users and deliberately invading their personal space to see how they will react. The “SL-bot” was created by Doron Friedman, Anthony Steed and Mel Slater at University College London who are interested in comparing the way people act inside a virtual world with real-life human behaviour. Read more here.

Edward Castronova’s book ‘Synthetic Worlds The Business and Culture of Online Games’ explores the implications for business and culture of online games. A recommended book for those interested in MMORPGs.

The 27th annual Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference will be held May 1-2, 2008 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (more…)

The first Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is now complete and available in both web and PDF formats at http://metaverseroadmap.org/overview/.

Electronic Commerce Research: Special Issue Call on Metaverses 

I HAVE AN AVATAR THEREFORE I EXIST: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN METAVERSES

Millions of users from around the globe participate in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, 3D worlds that are often considered the next generation Web. With their user base growing at an exponential rate we are already experiencing the development of a phenomenon that may be as significant as the Web itself. The rapid development of MMORPGs and metaverses is likely to bring about significant business as well as social, legal, policy, methodological and technological opportunities and challenges. This special issue aims to explore these and contribute to this rapidly expanding field by focusing on issues relevant to electronic business and management.

For more information please visit: www.ebusiness-newcastle.com

The following paper was accepted to the 1st Biannual International Conference “Strategic Developments in Services Marketing“. The paper is very topical as recently a number of real and virtual banks have appeared in metaverses. For example, MindArk auctioned five licences for Project Entropia, one of which was bought by Anshe Chung. The most interesting thing here is that they aim to offer the first financial market and financial services infrastructure that spans multiple virtual worlds.

Banking in Second Life: Marketing Opportunities and Repercussions

Savvas Papagiannidis, Michael Bourlakis, Michalis Vafopoulos

ABSTRACT
This paper presents two cases of real banks operating in metaverses, and more specifically within Second Life, in order to highlight the potential of such worlds as business and marketing platforms. We present the way the selected banks develop a business and marketing presence in the three dimensional environment by looking at the similarities and differences among their approaches. Subsequently, we emphasise the marketing implications of their approaches by examining the customer relationship management repercussions. At the end we provide further insights into this evolving and dynamic business phenomenon, highlighting specific avenues for future research.

Key Words: virtual worlds, electronic marketing, banks, customer relationship management, metaverses, Second Life

The Technological Forecasting and Social Change entitled: “Making real money in virtual worlds: MMORPGs and emerging business opportunities, challenges and ethical implications in metaverses” is now available for download (as a corrected proof) from the ScienceDirect web site.

The following paper has been accepted for presentation as a round the table paper for the British Academy of Management (BAM) 2007 Conference.

From E-retailing to Meta-retailing: Evolution or Revolution?

Savvas Papagiannidis, Michael Bourlakis, Feng Li

Abstract

In this paper we examine one facet of the emerging phenomenon of metaverses, that of retailing, and consider whether the attributes of virtual environments result in evolutionary or revolutionary changes. The discussion is undertaken within the context set by Second Life, one of the most popular metaverses.

Keyword: e-retail, meta-retail, metaverses, Second Life

The Money Programme is apparently the first BBC programme that was shown in full in a virtual world. The programme entitled ‘Money Programme: Virtual World, Real Millions’ was broadcasted on the 1st of June at 19:00 UK time, and then again at 20:00 and 21:00. By virtual world they really mean metaverses, as the BBC has broadcasted its programme before on the web (e.g. the World Cup games). Isn’t the web as virtual or real as Second Life is? This raises an important issue over the definitions and the terminology used. The word virtual refers to things that live in our imagination. Well ‘traditionally’, in human imagination, I am an avatar remember? Metaverses may be projections of the imagination, but they are real. I have an identity which is real and hence I am real, right? Referring to them as ‘virtual’ misses some of their ‘real’ essence. Personally, I prefer using the word metaverse which implies a synthetic world, highlighting the fact that these worlds are digital artifacts of human actions.