This weeks reading on Synthetic Worlds by Castranova was very eye-opening from the very beginning. He begins off saying his goal was to persuade an intelligent, skeptical reader that this vision of virtual worlds was worth thinking about. Throughout the course I have been probably one of the biggest skeptics you could find in terms of just about everything involving Second Life. What Castranova calls an “interactive epiphany” is something that I feel that has happened to me within the progression of the course. Being emerged within the online virtual world changed my perspective on how I think people can interact with others, the truthfulness behind those relationships and how people manage their livelihoods within them. He poses the questions of “why do we care?” or why SHOULD we care that these things are happening. I now think that we should care because it is all around us and slowly but surely will captivate everyone lives. Online and Virtual Worlds are becoming more prevalent as technology continues to develop, that it is something one should care about, seeing that it may be their future. Not only to look at it in that perspective but to see and understand the consequences that could happened if it happens to take that direction. Castranova talks about how one can become “vulnerable to the possibility of toxic immersion, of losing consciousness in that place”. I think that vulnerability is probably one of the biggest things that one can face while being part of a virtual world. Losing one’s grasp or sense of reality is also seen as a scary thing that can possibly happen. With all of the questions that we have explored and taken in to consideration in terms of virtual worlds and online play i’m still left with one and it’s will reality cease to be reality? Will online/ virtual world really become the way of life and how things are really done? Things are done so virtually and so synthetically nowadays that i wouldn’t write off this question just yet.
