Every time someone mentions it, all I can think of are the countless times 'hackers' have tossed flying dicks on all of the characters.

I can picture it now- a plant, flying away, with Ford Econoline written on it.

I saw a new virtual world the other day: Virtual Lower East Side: "a ridiculously-realistic virtual version of New York City’s Lower East Side, a.k.a. the place where every angst-ridden, music-loving teenager dreams of running away to."

What a fucking waste of money.

For example, you can make a male avatar and a female avatar and have them say the exact same thing in the exact same place, and measure how the participants react. The only variable that changes is male vs. female. In real life, there are all kinds of other variables, since the male and female experimenters would actually be different people and they react in often unmeasurable ways. Plus, the virtual experiment would be much less expensive and time consuming (very important in social science).

That's a very simple example, and you always have to consider how the results generalize to the real world, but there are situations where virtual experiments are very justified.

Plus, in a world where every teenager is growing up with video games and MySpace, studying virtual worlds for their own sake (ie, not generalizing to the real world) is becoming very relevant.

I personally think this is an example of the bloated NGO field that does not support long term structural change. And, I think virtual communities sound utterly boring. BUT, lets say a million teenagers use this and someone could come up with a good STD prevention ad, then, well, if it works it works.