Welcome to Virtual Worlds

Everyday, people buy, sell, trade, study and travel in real life. More and more often, they do the same thing in virtual online communities sometimes referred to as “metaverses” or “digital worlds”. Represented by avatars -a digital representation of themselves – they live a “second life” with new opportunities for networking, teaching, experimenting, and even making money. Businesses, investors as well as not-for-profit organizations invest in these worlds. They explore them in order to open dialogues with distinct target markets and demographics. L’Oreal, Sony, Toyota, Coca-Cola, and GreenPeace are just a few examples.

All of these universes use their own virtual money, which has an exchange rate against euros and dollars. For example, each month, 9 million USD are exchanged on LindeX, the official Second Life currency exchange.

(graph. source: http://www.cyfernet.org/cyfar08/preconference/web2/sl.ppt)

And money encourages malicious behaviour!

First in Seoul, during the last AVAR conference, and then in Laval, at the EICAR conference, Igor Muttik and myself had each proposed a paper on this topic. They are available here and here.

In these papers, we explain that virtual worlds as well as massive multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) have encountered many criminal issues like in the real world””identity theft, stealing of virtual assets, extortion, money laundering and even paedophilia. I focused my paper on examples of attacks conducted from the inside as well as the outside of Second Life and World of Warcraft. In his paper, Igor devotes a substantial part to predicting future trends by analyzing existing market and technological shifts.

KZERO Research has just published a study on the overall virtual world population. They announce 303 million registered people in 21 different universes. A year ago, Gartner predicted 80% of Internet users will have a virtual avatar in 2011, the 2008 figure demonstrate that we have arrived at around 21,6%. Most of these universes are inhabited by young populations from 10 years to 20 years of age. Habbo Hotel is credited with 90 million members. The cartoon universes of WeeWorld or IMVU have more than 20 million young subscribers each. Adults seem to prefer Second Life which is credited with 13 million members.

(enlarged picture available here)

This last study confirms the kids and “tweenager” preponderance in these virtual worlds. Even more prolific than I’d imagined it’d be. Parents must be aware of the interest their children have in investing time in these universes where all kinds of things are allowed and all kinds of propositions are offered. Here too, education, dialogue and vigilance must be favoured.