Building an ecological knowledge of virtual worlds
1
Environmental Science & Policy, University of California at Davis, Davis, California, USA
2
Sciences Biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Ecology, Ecosystem Science
- Keywords
- Virtual world, Ecology, Ecosystem managment
- Copyright
- © 2014 Montiglio et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Building an ecological knowledge of virtual worlds. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e473v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.473v1
Abstract
Virtual worlds supporting massively multiplayer games have become so complex that they exhibit temporal and spatial dynamics mostly driven by interactions between players. In this respect, virtual worlds resemble closely natural ecosystems. Studying the ecology of virtual worlds is an outstanding opportunity for ecologists as well as the game industry to collaborate in order to test several aspects of ecological theory difficult to study in nature, and build manageable, resilient virtual worlds.
Author Comment
This is a first version of a commentary pushing ecologists to study the ecology of the fascinating virtual worlds supporting multiplayer video games.