The next tool for social science experimentation should allow for macro level, generalizable, scientific research. In the past devices such as rat mazes, Petri dishes and supercolliders have been developed when scientists needed new tools to do research. We believe that Virtual Worlds are the...

Games like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot occasionally produce natural experiments in social science: situations that, through no intent of the designer, offer controlled variations on a phenomenon of theoretical interest. This paper examines two examples, both of which involve the theory of...

There are perhaps two ways to think about “worlds as experiments”. Making a world is an experiment in itself, an attempt to build anew a place for people to be. In this sense, to experiment is to try something new, to fiddle around with the tools at hand and see what happens. The other sense...

This article argues for using virtual worlds as experimental environments for social science questions at the macro level. The authors can foresee two major objections to this approach and will address them as to show why they do not prove to be significant. The first being that virtual worlds...

We use a 575,000-subject, 28-day experiment to investigate monetary policy in a virtual setting.The experiment tests the effect of virtual currency endowments on player retention and virtual currency demand. An increase in endowments of a virtual currency should lower the demand for the currency...