Fantasy Regnant (2007 NMC Summer Conference Opening Keynote)

For years, gaming technology has been considered an area of opportunity for universities. Edward will argue that the opportunity phase has passed, that we will now be forced to adapt to the new world that digital fantasy gaming is creating. That new world is more than 3D; more than immersive; more than online; more than entertainment; more than communication. It is all of those things, and one thing more, a new source of Meaning - a critical contribution of the games industry, very little noticed. All together synthetic worlds make a new frontier, and frontiers dramatically disrupt the old world. Edward will talk about how the new world, with its new maps of meaning, will reshape society within a generation.

About Edward Castronova

Edward Castronova (PhD, Economics, Wisconsin, 1991) is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is an expert on the economies of large-scale online games and has numerous publications on that topic, including a book entitled Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Edward studies synthetic worlds: online environments where thousands or even millions of users share a persistent, fabricated geographic space at the same time. These places, billed and sold as games, actually seem to be offering something more than mere entertainment. They act as a fantastical alternative to ordinary life, and as such they pose a significant challenge to business-as-usual in ordinary society: markets, public policy, politics, law, romance. In the area of economics, for example, one pressing issue involves the extent to which people are paying real money to buy items for their game characters, thus blurring the distinction between the game economy and the real one. And this is not the only way in which synthetic worlds threaten the lines we have drawn between fantasy and reality. As a parent and a gamer, he is both excited and concerned about these developments. The objective of his work is to increase our understanding of this technology.