Journal For Virtual Worlds Research

The Journal of Virtual World Research’s “The Dark Side” issue dives into some fascinating ideas about how evil is represented in the virtual worlds of digital games. This issue includes five articles elaborating on the motivations for evil acts and their outcomes, hostile competitiveness, classification of deviant leisure, how immoral acts are determined, and our ability to thwart these cruel activities in the virtual environments and games.

When we started planning the “Dark Side of Virtual Worlds” issue last year, NO ONE IMAGINED that humanity would be in ONE OF ITS DARKEST times – the age of COVID-19. Consequently, and of special interest to our JVWR community, much of the human activity now is virtual.

In the context of educational research, definitions of “impact” have proliferated alongside critiques of its efficacy and appropriateness, and it is important to consider the applicability of the term, as well as to reflect on how it can be shaped and defined.

In order to address these issues of increasing importance and relevance in virtual and immersive environments, this special edition of The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research brings together four articles to consider these questions in the specific field of education.

2019 marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, which was themed on ‘Pedagogy.’ Volume 2 Number 1 of the journal was the fruition of a vision of the late Leslie Jarmon, a pioneer academic in the use of virtual worlds and immersive environments for learning. Much has changed since the heady days of the late 2000s, yet many aspects have proved enduring.

This issue represents the concluding half of an effort to commemorate the occasion and aims to document both the present and emerging state-of-the-art, covering the adoption, design, enaction, scaling and translation of immersive and/or mixed-reality environments for learning, and in other contexts of education.

This issue, as with all JVWR assembled issues, aimed at highlighting the diversity of issues of virtual and real worlds. Three of the five articles chosen for this Assembled issue are concerned with questions related to the body, specially the gendered body, but each brings a different perspective: YouTube channels that revolves around gender, race and ethnicity; gender issues through avatar choice, appearance and identification; and the potential of a union between virtual technologies and body image. The other two articles discuss questions related to user generated content: links between creation, consumption and motivation in digital environments; and a methodology for the identification of relationships between networks of individuals.

Issue editors: Stephanie Blackmon, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA, and Patricia Anderson, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

Virtual worlds hold a tremendous amount of potential for research, education, and interaction. While the literature available on virtual worlds has increased over the years, there are still unexplored arenas as well as areas that require further conversation and investigation. Some of us are continuing to develop our avatars and hone our skills in virtual worlds, while  others are finding new ways to leverage the openness of these environments via unexplored opportunities within the virtual world. This Assembled 2015 issue contains selected peer-reviewed articles that start, and in some cases continue, discussions about the vastness and versatility of virtual worlds.

Issue editors: Samuel Cruz-Lara, LORIA (UMR 7503) CNRS – INRIA, Université de Lorraine, France;Sue Gregory, University of New England, Australia;Suely Fragoso, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil;Urs-Vito Albrecht, Braunschweig University & Hannover Medical School, Germany;Christopher Lueg, University of Tasmania, Australia

The six papers in this issue demonstrate some of JVWR goals. They are pushing our thinking about both the virtual and the real, they are presenting “new” academic science that go beyond the trivial, and they are taking a stand about the world. We encourage authors to follow the diverse models presented here.

Issue editors: Celeste Lovette Guichard, Savannah College of Art and Design; Laura Salciuviene, Lancaster University Management School, UK; Gary Hardee, University of Texas at Dallas, TX, USA.

An important single thread runs through this issue: the exploration of artistic “process”. The importance of process in various instantiations to all of these articles renders this issue more specifically about “ars” in the Latin sense -- ars being a skill or a craft that usually, but certainly not always, results in an artistic object. As Elbert Hubbard, the founder of the Arts and Crafts community of Roycroft, said, “Art is not a thing, it is a way” -- it is the “way” of art in virtual worlds that we invite you to read about in the following pages.

Issue editors: Leonel Morgado, INESC TEC (formerly INESC Porto), UTAD – University of Trás-os-Montes Alto Douro; Nelson Zagalo, University of Minho, Portugal

(Cover: Nelson Fernandes)

In this issue you will find selected papers from Slactions 2012 as well as other papers from 2012 about: Langauge Learning Anxiety, Management Practice in VWs (AKA vManagement), Weight Management for Young People, The Effect of Group Influence on Individual Choices (recap of the Asch’s 1951 experiment), Technical setup of OpenSimulator, and Virtual Archaeology.

Issue editors: Shu Schiller, Wright State University, USA; Brian Mennecke, Iowa State University, USA; Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA.

This special issue on “managerial and commercial applications” of virtual worlds aims to highlight research that makes a significant and novel contribution in theory and practice about virtual worlds in the business domain.

Issue editors:  Kenneth Y T Lim, National Institute of Education, Singapore; Young Hoan Cho, National Institute of Education, Singapore; Michael Vallance, Future University, Hakodate, Japan.

In this issue you will find perspectives from East Asia and Southeast Asia; the contrasts and comparisons are at once diverse and revealing - from David Herold's perspectives on games and gamers from China, to the work of Li and his team with similar community from Singapore, encompassing several other cultures, sub-cultures and scales of resolution at points in-between.

The papers chosen for this assembled issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research all argue the need for further research into human engagement with virtual worlds and beyond a discussion of the affordances of virtual worlds and their limitations.

This issue focuses on standards for virtual worlds, with special relation to MPEG-V, the ISO standard for connecting within virtual worlds as well as to real worlds.

This issue includes articles from the 2010 Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference including a review of potential usages for government, military and business organizations; the case of the Swedish Embassy in SL; the criminal justice system and a "think piece" on unconstrained global citizens. The issue highlights some of the unique dimensions of Virtual Wolds that relate to governments & military.

This issue includes articles from the SLACTIONS 2010 Conference.

This issue  also marks the Journal's move to a new website, it is a minor visual change, but major infrastructure change that will take us forward over the next couple of years.

This issue presents peer reviewed papers on research methodologies and case studies of how the particular methods are being developed and used in virtual worlds research both in the academy and industry.

In this issue - a conceptual framework for understanding the space that virtual worlds occupy in children’s life.

In this special edition on virtual-world goods and trade, we are pleased to present articles from a global cohort of contributors covering a wide range of issues. Some of our writers will be well known to you as distinguished leaders in the field, but it is equally our pleasure to introduce exciting new voices. Here you will find pieces written by academics, practitioners, journalists, a documentary filmmaker and perhaps the youngest contributor to JVWR who attends high school in upstate NY.

This issue is part of an effort to explore the fields of standards for virtual worlds. This issue endeavors to enhance, explicate, and analyze various aspects of standards and virtual worlds, and was designed to give a voice to the leading theoretical and practical players within this arena. The issue emphasizes the disciplines of economy and technology as critical harbingers to the endeavor of standards.

This special issue of JVWR on the theme of '3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare' provides a good sampler of how healthcare organizations, groups and individuals are currently using virtual worlds such as Second Life(R) and OpenSim-based worlds for a range of clinical and health-related purposes.

This issue is dedicated to exploring the breadth of designs, pedagogies and curricular innovations that are actually already being applied to teaching and learning in virtual worlds.

This issue of JVWR explores virtual worlds as contingent spaces. We examine them for their reliance on traditional cultural norms and practices, their challenges to such elements, and how they grow and evolve relative to the daily lives of their inhabitants. In every way, virtual worlds are constituted by multiple cultures, culture that is ordinary and everyday, culture that is evolving, confusing, challenging, and possibly dangerous and exhilarating as well.

With so many people making the virtual leap many marketers are eager to join them and stake their claim in this new landscape. Unfortunately for many their efforts have failed to live up to expectations and they have since withdrawn. So what, do we need to do differently in virtual worlds than we do in the real world in order to achieve success? In this issue we aim to stimulate dialogue by exploring what, if any, differences exist between real world and virtual world consumer behavior. Topics addressed include body image, virtual goods and brand value.