Massively Multiplayer Online Environments

Massively Multiplayer Online Environments An evaluation on the use of virtual worlds to provide information and drive decision-making. Alyssa Baca, D...
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Massively Multiplayer Online Environments An evaluation on the use of virtual worlds to provide information and drive decision-making.

Alyssa Baca, Donald Young, Jerel Tolentino, Josh Kudla, and Nik Ewing MIS304 Professor Fang  

An important key to gaining a competitive advantage in business is to harness the power of new technology before anyone else. By being the first to maximize the potential of a new technology, a company can streamline production, cut costs, and even increase value for customers. The continuously evolving nature of the internet has lead to a host of innovations where technology was directed toward company tasks for the benefit of everyone. By focusing on the increasing use of online environments to facilitate interaction and commerce among people online, we hope to show how businesses can gain from harnessing technology to reach a wider variety of customers and be prepared to conquer the leading edge of internet technology. By researching cutting-edge uses for online and virtual interaction, we intend to show that the future of the internet can be planned for in the present. As the internet heads towards a future driven by data, which is becoming increasingly linked, our experiences on the web will begin to become more personalized. The information you provide one website will become available on more websites where you have personalized information. This information will be mined so that your experience online can be customized in order to offer you products that you will be more likely to buy. This increased customization will also result in optimized web searches, offers for products, and localized news. There are security concerns linked to the sharing of this much personal information on the web. There is a high possibility that your information could be used for identity theft, harassment, and personal facts being revealed online. 2   

Another increasing trend in online activity is the use of avatars in places such as Second Life and other social networks. As interaction online increasingly heads towards this form of interaction, an increase in virtual worlds will not be far behind. As these virtual worlds grow and adapt to newer technology, they will become more realistic and head into the region of virtual reality. When the internet reaches a threshold where virtual reality dominates as the main form of interaction online, the lines to reality itself may being to blur. Realities posited in movies such as the Matrix may indeed be possible. As we head toward such a possibility, it becomes very important to define just how we will let this technology control our lives. By examining the training, leadership, psychological, and economical aspects of this emerging phenomenon, we hope to provide information that will drive decision-making for businesses. Training Logically, there is a huge advantage towards making mistakes in the virtual world rather than the real world. In virtual reality, a person can make mistakes, learn the repercussions of those mistakes, and know that there will be no harm done and just perceive it as an educational session. Virtual realities have come a long way from just being a typical video game that changed towards people actually living their lives through virtual realities. Nowadays, more and more businesses, schools, militaries, and healthcare providers are taking advantage of the technology in a newer form - virtual training. Virtual

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training will significantly increase performance from employees, provide easier feedback for schools, display real life scenarios for military, and simulate emergencies for healthcare providers. Virtual training will ultimately be beneficial for businesses in the future. As technology improves and a more diverse community grows, virtual training will be crucial for the future. It will provide better preparation for people, whereas, if one were to have a mistake in real life, then there can be upset customers that can be detrimental to the business, declining performances in schools, lack of war skills by the military, and more errors for healthcare providers on patients, rather than virtual patients. That is why virtual training is taking over virtual worlds. Businesses today can be conducted through virtual realities and is a good source for training employees through tactical training. By conducting simulations, businesses are more likely to improve their staff employees with better collaborative skills, customer service improvements, and other real time scenarios that can be tested through virtual realities. The most popular simulation linked to most businesses today is Second Life, which is a virtual world game like World of Warcraft and Sims Online. More and more companies, academies, healthcare providers, and the military are starting to use Second Life for fundamental training, management, and collaboration. Second Life’s features are very similar to playing video games, although the distinct difference is that the game has an outcome that can be analyzed. This feature in Second Life aims to find new ways for businesses to learn to work together and train for specific areas of need. 4   

Businesses can use the virtual reality technology to conduct meetings with employees across the country, or even around the world. By training employees through a virtual training session, businesses will save ample amounts of costs from training employees on the job and making mistakes on the job. Cutting costs in a tight economic crunch is very difficult to do while making proper decisions that do not hinder the performance and growth of a business. Therefore, by making mistakes and analyzing them for use of the real world, virtual training will make a big impact in an employee’s production. Businesses such as General Electric, Canon, and Cisco have been increasing their usage of developing their employees through virtual training like video game simulations that teach technical skills such as equipment repair, network maintenance, and customer service in a realistic and efficient way. “Video games teach resource management, collaboration, critical thinking, and tolerance for failure,” says Ben Sawyer, a consultant from Digitalmill Inc. Why pay someone to fly to a training facility when you can do all the training in front of a computer and learn anything and everything needed for the business? Employees are known to be avid video game players, therefore, they can easily adapt to the new training methods provided by the businesses. Even if the market for corporate training programs is small, it is rapidly increasing as technology grows and the need for a rapid improving economy increases. Simulations have made a huge impact in training military soldiers. Virtual training for the military has been around longer and has significantly proved to

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make an impact in wars and real life situations. In the military, virtual environments work well in the application of military simulations. They provide accurate simulations of real events in a safe and controlled environment. The benefits of this are that they are much more cost effective than placing their military soldiers in real vehicles, or in real physical simulated situations. Virtual reality not only helps for training, but it also helps for the military to analyze their own strategies towards battlefield positions and military maneuvering. Video games such as “America’s Army”, “Air Force Delta Storm”, “Fleet Command”, “Close Combat: Marines”, and “SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALS,” have all been specialized video virtual reality games for their respected military fields. These games have each helped prepare soldiers for the real life war situations and have also saved the costs of military expenses. Video games like these also create a recruiting tool for future military soldiers as well. Healthcare providers also are benefiting from simulations by making training easily accessible for a large number of students aspiring to become doctors and surgeons. The benefit of this is that practicing operation on a virtual person eliminates common mistakes made in the real world giving medical students real interaction that were never possible before. The future outlook of healthcare providers using virtual training is booming, and even though it is given throughout medical school training, sooner or later, it will be a common norm for practices for doctors and many health care providers. Currently, doctors are taking advantage of new technology by using virtual reality in performing robotic surgeries. Doctors have already conducted 6   

successful remote surgeries by using robots and online connections, which further proves that virtual training will be beneficial towards the future of healthcare providers. In March of 2008, the Imperial College of London's Hamlyn Robotic Centre for Surgery has been utilizing remote and robotic surgery and it is a stepping-stone towards a more virtual-like future for doctors and surgeons. Virtual reality in education is starting to grow as well. Schools are starting to use the virtual world to explore other parts of the real world . This is beneficial to schools because they are cost-effective and because they would eliminate the hassle of conducting unnecessary field trips. Many schools can benefit from virtual reality training by using distance learning and still receiving 360-degree feedback from teachers. What is already more common are online courses given as a substitute college class. This helps for distance learning and for people that have every day jobs and as new way of learning. Virtual training in schools is beneficial for students as they will learn time management and will be able to pursue many other activities that will enable them to enhance their way of live. The outlook for virtual training will boom as well because many people will have busy schedules and in turn can educate themselves throughout their busy schedules at their convenience in their own home. Virtual training will have a variety of options to educate students in the future and students will have a new way of learning.

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Virtual training is not yet perfect. Virtual training does have many holes and many questions to be answered. Employees partaking in virtual training might respond negatively during their training and therefore will not have any benefit from the training itself. They can take advantage of the lack of reality and just take the virtual training for granted. This would be the next step to phase out in the future, to find better control and regulate virtual training. Businesses can find a way to control those behaviors and make sure that their employees do the best job they can. Schools can regulate on students who take the virtual training for granted and conduct real life consequences. The future for virtual training will be very beneficial for schools and is only at the brink of expanding worldwide. Leadership The utilization of MMOs to nurture, foster, and apply business application knowledge is increasing. Matthew Kirdahy, stated that these online games provide people with the chance to assume leadership that might not have the opportunity in real life (2004). A Harvard Business Review article concurs that games have similar organizational and structural problems as a business including: “recruiting, assessing, motivating, rewarding and retaining talented and culturally diverse team members; identifying and capitalizing on the organization’s competitive advantage; analyzing multiple streams of constantly changing and often incomplete data in order to make quick decisions that have wide-ranging and sometimes long-lasting effects” (Reeves, 2008). Players must

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band together for economic and social reasons by forming guilds. The CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, Michael Morhaime, whose company is the maker of the popular online game World of Warcraft that has over 10 million registered users playing an average 22 hours a week, thought fans would prefer the singleplayer experience, but found the opposite to be true. “The reason behind that is it’s such a social experience,” stated Morhaime (Kirdahy, 2008). “The games are allowing players to gain the experience, motivation and encouragement they need to one day be CEO of a company.” (Kirdahy, 2008). "Every human has this genetic predisposition as a leader, artist, whatever it might be. You can nurture that nature much quicker with MMO's. There were all these great leaders out there [who] never had a vehicle to have them rise to the top," stated Trey Ratcliff, a gamer that received the fostering and encouragement from gaming to now become a CEO (Kirdahy, 2008). Leadership stars do exist within the game, such as guild leaders organizing successful teams of over 100 players for over a year (Reeves, 2008). These guild leaders are proving that they possess the leadership skills that are required in a business environment; the game is nurturing and fostering these qualities. Online tools exist for players to understand what type of leader they are, in the hope of becoming a better leader. One website talks about the difference between being a friend and boss and how those might affect each other. It continues by discussing management and leadership tactics and styles, much like a business course would include, such as, “How do you keep

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your players motivated?” and “How do you respond to high turnover?” (Daylight, 2007). If the online game lingo were taken out of these websites, one could easily confuse the entries as a business management book, proving that real leadership qualities exist within online gaming. While gaming, players can seamlessly transition between giving orders and taking them. Leadership is decentralized and non-hierarchal with a nonexistent power distance. Furthermore, impromptu leadership arises within the game, since all the resources and information are available to everyone (Reeves, 2008). Businesses can cultivate leadership qualities from within their organizations by decentralizing power and providing transparent information to its employees. “The game generation believes in skills, they don’t believe in taking orders” (Beck, 2004). Additionally, leadership demands speed; decisions have to be made instantly in a game, which can translate to a strong, determined and powerful leader in real life. However, especially with an uncertainty of the future of how business will conducted, the games leave lessons on how leadership and business are redefined. There is no room allowed for politics, where a friend of a boss might be rewarded in a business environment, games are made up of acquaintances passionate about a similar goal. Additionally, guilds develop an atmosphere of intense honesty (Reeves, 2008). The alternative would prove too costly for all the players involved, which in turn leads to less group conflict because of the brutal trust relationship established. Moreover, real-time transparency of 10   

information and statistics are available to every player (Reeves, 2008). Businesses can take a cue from these games, instead of relying on centralized leadership on top with all the information and employees with limited knowledge. Particularly with the onslaught of business corruption, such as Enron or AIG, transparency can help keep the organizations accountable while giving the resources to employees to make instant and better-suited decisions. Transparency allows players to make the best possible decisions for the greater good of the team, at any given moment, because all the information is readily available. Moreover, a nurtured, developed trust developed between all the leaders and subordinates because the subordinates have access to the same information as the leaders, so they can see the logic behind a decision, knowing no one is being deceitful. Instant rewards create great motivation, as players receive divided loot or points for a job well done. This can translate into business rather than having employees wait for a year-end bonus (Kirdahy, 2008). Beck argued that gamers are naturally global, especially when compared to their predecessors of the baby-boomers (2008). Online games are available worldwide to anyone who has Internet access, so naturally, these gamers will think with a global mindset. Every player is on the same level with the only bias formed based on performance. The online gaming community is a prime example of the globalization that the business sector is striving for in its global markets.

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Conversely, online gaming may be hindering some other applications of real world business practices. Obviously, a difference between gaming social skills and real life social interaction exists (Reeves, 2008). Online socializing only can relate to a limited degree to real life experiences. In addition, the Harvard Business Review article mentioned that the problems teams face in online games are clearly defined and framed (2008). In real life and in the business arena, problems have to be identified, framed, and analyzed quickly and efficiently before even getting to start tackling the challenge. However, even with these “negative” aspects of online gaming, MMO’s still can be a great tool to foster future business leaders. Psychology Although many people enjoy MMO games it is important to look at the psychological aspects of them such as whether they can become addictive. There have been many studies regarding online game addiction that have shown that these virtual worlds become more of a reality to some people and less of a virtual game. Just like everything in life, moderation is important. An article from Forbes.com mentions that about 8.5 percent of young adults exhibited signs of addiction to gaming. They explain that when gaming interferes with school performance it can be destructive. In most of the addiction articles, studies are performed on young adolescents. This shows that most adults are able to play these types of MMO games and not let it interfere with their personal lives. However, some adults are not always able to 12   

subdue their need to play these types of games. Multi user games are designed to have people interact with each other and assist players in gaining value and rewards. In many games, you are able to communicate directly with people from other countries who play the same game and even form an online friendship or even in some cases an online relationship. While those who decide to form relationships from these types of games do not always work, some actually help provide a conversation piece for those who do decide to meet face-to-face. While not everyone who is on a MMO game is looking for a relationship, many are just there to forget about real life problems and use it as an outlet to escape from the everyday worries. There is also a website on the internet, Widows of Warcraft, which targets couples who have become victims in an addiction to MMO games and seek advice. It also provides a way for people to share their stories on how these games have impacted their lives. Most posts on the website are questions regarding their loved ones being addicted to these games and how or what they should do about it. One blogger mentioned that when she had just arrived to her boyfriend’s house on a Friday night to hangout, she was greeted by his mother who motioned to show her that he was playing an online game. She ended up spending most of the evening with his mother and never once got a hello from him, leading her to believe that he could care less about her and more about the game he was involved in. Needless to say, they argued about his game addiction, which lead to a breakup and a mother telling her daughter that she deserved someone better. All of this was due to a simple game. The existence of these types of websites is a good 13   

indication of what damage online games can create and how this affects families and relationships. Despite the cases involving couples being victimized by video game addictions, the idea of using these type of MMO games in the workplace can be a very useful tool to help promote a family oriented environment and to build camaraderie. An example of this would be the online company Jinx.com. This company thrives by selling merchandise that pertains to geek and gamer culture. Within the website, they have a community link where registered users can interact with each other as well as the Jinx staff. This strategically tailored section appeals to gamers by offering trivia and an inside look into the companies’ MMO world. To help build teamwork and develop a stronger family environment, the entire Jinx staff engages in an MMO guild on the popular game World of Warcraft. The team runs weekly raids for the purpose of increasing employee satisfaction and company morale. Not only does this increase worker productivity, but by posting their progress in their community section, they are able to connect with their customers and keep them engaged and coming back to their site for repeat business. This company is a great example of what an MMO game can do for a business psychologically. In addition to MMO’s, virtual reality games are vastly becoming more popular in the medical world. A game called Snow World is a game created for the sole purpose of helping burn victims forget the real world pain that they are experiencing. When a person suffers from third or fourth degree burns, it can 14   

be a very painful and excruciating experience, especially during the physical therapy that is required to help the skin recover. Many patients feel a great deal of pain during these physical therapy sessions and on a scale of 1 to 10, many report the paid as a 10. This can make it very difficult for the patient and for the doctor who administers treatment. Some of the patients are in so much pain that they are sedated for most of the therapy. The Snow World game creates a virtual world where players become immersed in an icy cold environment where they throw snowballs at different targets as they travel around. When the patients are involved in the game, their minds are quickly distracted from the pain and they focus on the game. The creators of this program designed a headpiece big enough to have the patient fully covered by it in order to make their viewpoint completely on the game and to keep the outside area not visible. Some of the results were very astonishing, where the pain level went from 10 to a virtual zero. Patients have responded very well to the game and seem to enjoy it immensely. This product is a great example of how virtual world games can be used for therapeutic purposes. Dentists are actually using the same idea when they install a television screen on the ceiling and allow patients to watch a show or play a videogame while they have their teeth worked on. Many people are afraid of the dentist, especially children, and they pay less attention to the painful instruments that are used in their mouths and more on the cartoon or videogame on the screen. The mind can pay many tricks on you and make things seem more painful than they really are. That is

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why, in this environment, video games can be an important psychological feature in the workplace. According to a study of 199 gamers, 41% of people between the ages of 18 and 69 played online games to escape reality. Also 7% of those studied were dependent on gaming. These addicted gamers exhibited signs similar to other forms of addiction. The ability to advance and develop a separate persona and the persistence of the game are cited as factors that increase the potential for addiction to these games. The ability to interact with other people also contributed to the draw for those who became addicted. This study also cited research that pointed to the fulfillment of goals and the desire to escape as the stronger draws to online gaming. This study mentions that there is a relative lack of in-depth study into the psychological and addictive qualities of MMORPGs. This necessitated the need for this study. An online questionnaire was developed and placed on various MMORPG forums, which players often frequent. The study defined those players who spent more than 2,100 minutes a week playing MMORPGs as excessive gamers. These excessive gamers displayed behaviors consistent with addiction, including withdrawal and social problems stemming from their gaming. Those classified as excessive gamers where also more likely to feel that it was easier to socialize with people online than in reality. A large portion of these people said that they would prefer to socialize with their friends online than in reality as well. The study showed that even though those people who played excessively spent a large amount of time

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playing, not everyone who played for similar long lengths of time considered himself or herself addicted. Economies Making money in MMO’s is relatively new to the business world. Businesses are starting to take advantage of the fact that so many people around the world are putting thousands of hours in a virtual world annually. Many of the popular MMO’s charge a monthly subscription to play, but third party companies cannot take advantage of that. So, many of the companies rely on in game advertising or designing and selling their own products in the game to make money (virtual merchandise). Some of these MMO’s are so complex that they have their own thriving economies inside their virtual world where people can buy and sell virtual land for real life dollars. These are only a few new and innovative ways of businesses harnessing economies that exist in games to create and make real world money. In the recent years, big companies like Pontiac have spent millions of dollars to advertise in MMO’s. Pontiac advertises in Second Life, which is a game that allows you to life an alternate life in a fictitious world. Pontiac advertises their cars by allowing the user the ability drive and fix up a Pontiac. Currently, Pontiac is one of the most successful big name advertisers in Second Life with average weekly visits of 4,656. Although advertising in a game like Second Life seems promising because there are more than 400,000 residents that logon on a weekly basis and 1 million in a month, only a few big 17   

companies have done well. Companies like IBM and Playboy are doing really well in Second Life; on the other hand, Reebok and Comcast are struggling to get a mere 96 visits a week. You do not have to be a huge well-known company to make money in these virtual worlds. Currently in the virtual world of Second Life there are at least 55,000 people getting a positive cash flow from doing business. Second Life promotes creativity from its users to create an item or idea and try to sell it to make some money. Some users create their own clothing store and create their own clothes to fill their store in hopes of other players stopping by to make a purchase. Some people who play Second Life are already making enough income through these virtual worlds that they can live off it. It is just like in the real world, when you establish something that people like in order to develop a following and that is what these entrepreneurs in Second Life are doing. In many MMO’s, there is usually some form of currency used in order for the players to purchase in game items. This fictitious currency has a real life dollar conversion value which opens up doors for people to make money selling fictitious currency. In China, there is are companies that hire people to play World of Warcraft to farm for the in game money, which is gold, and sell it for real life cash. The employees that they hire make about a dollar an hour and all they do is go around a certain areas and farm for gold. They have a technique that they use to make farming for gold more productive and that is the use of

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bots. A bot is a non-user controlled character programmed to follow the real player and collect gold to maximize productivity. During an average 8-hour day, one Chinese worker can farm one thousand U.S. dollars worth of gold. Although the workers do not get even a fraction of the money, a lot of the money goes into the many computers that they have to maintain and the World of Warcraft monthly subscription. There is a huge downside to this technique though. The only way you can use such a bot is to hack into the game and illegally create your bot to do the stuff you want it to do. Blizzard, who is the developer of World of Warcraft, is finally catching on to this illegal activity because the farmers are abusing the game and making it unfair for everyone else. In business, not everything is right and ethical, but if people see opportunity, they will often try to take advantage of it. The Chinese companies who do the farming are constantly having their avatars banned from the game, which forces them to repurchase the software. The farmers continue to further develop methods so they do not getting caught. These Chinese companies are very smart in their use of techniques to make money in World of Warcraft. Since they are always being banned and losing the money of not only the monthly subscription, but also the high-level character that they built up, they are now using the free-trial monthly subscriptions to build up their avatars to the highest level within a few weeks. Then once they have it built up to the max, they place the avatar up for sale while they use it for farming for gold. Thus eliminating the subscription fee, lowering the chance of losing a high-level avatar for no money, and still being 19   

able to farm for gold with the bots because they only use it to farm for a short period of time. Some of the high-level avatars can go for as much as a thousand dollars. This shows the demand for people to have good avatars and the demand for people to pay real money for a fictitious currency. One major company that is trying to take advantage of the fact that there are so many people who play online virtual worlds is Microsoft. Microsoft’s Xbox Live it cashing in on its virtual economy by hosting superior online gaming network. Xbox Live is more than a service for playing video games; it is quickly becoming more of an entertainment hub for movies, TV shows, and even music to its consumers. Microsoft is buying up deals with huge movie and music companies to obtain the rights to sell certain movies or music to keep their subscribers on Xbox Live as long as possible. Microsoft just recently created a deal with Netflix to steam movies in high definition to the peoples’ TVs. They are making all the right moves right now just by giving their subscribers what they want. Many subscribers eventually want all digital entertainment to be in one box and Microsoft is helping them realize this goal. Xbox Live is how Microsoft is going harness the power of business in the virtual entertainment sector. Just like many of the popular MMO games, Xbox Live has its own currency called Xbox Live points. It could have been just as easy to use actual dollars instead of these points but Microsoft feels that having these points might make its customers thing that they are buying something cheaper than it really is

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because the product cost 100 points which is roughly equivalent to $2.50. Also by having these points, Microsoft is cashing in on this revenue right away because these Xbox Live cards are prepaid. The customers are also more likely to spend the total amount of points because they cannot redeem them for cash. It was a smart move for Microsoft, but a very risky one because their customers could have just as easily rejected their model. Expanding more on Xbox Live, Microsoft is promoting user-generated content, just like Second Life. They believe that if they want to survive, they have to be embraced by both the developers and the players, not only one or the other. Microsoft came up with an ingenious idea of letting players create their own games to play and to sell on the Xbox Live Marketplace. By doing this, Microsoft can have some assurance that if they end up losing some of developers to their competitors, they will still have this community of player made games to support them. Microsoft is trying to do the same thing with Xbox Live as they did with their other products such as Office and that is by having the superior product with a large following. As the players are making games to sell on the marketplace, the other players are paying a small amount of money to play them. Xbox Live gives the creator a huge percentage of the revenue that they get for selling the game and only takes a small portion as a fee for supplying the forum to sell their game. If any of the games becomes a huge success, Microsoft will give them a huge bonus and the right to be sold in the Xbox Live Arcade where all of the developer made games are placed. Just like Second Life, Xbox Live has proven that involving the user to help with the 21   

progress of their service, instead of forcing the user to play by their rules, is the way to improve your product even more. In MMO, Xbox Live, and games like Second Life, we are seeing how businesses can harness virtual worlds to their advantage. Virtual worlds could one day be the standard for doing business, where all daily business is done in huge 3D environments and anything is possible. Business people can host business meetings and schedule events and parties using these systems and at the same time not be limited to who and how many people could be invited. We could be looking at a future where these virtual worlds begin to blur with reality. Our job, our family, and our wealth could all be in huge servers, spread out through the world. The possibilities are endless, even though virtual worlds are still quite new to us, we must first learn how to crawl before we learn to walk. Conclusion Anyone willing to take on the challenge of harnessing new technology to gain an advantage in the competitive market will have many obstacles to overcome. The technical expertise, training requirements, and complexity of such an undertaking create a large barrier to entry for those who attempt to master the field. Anyone who manages to overcome such challenges will be rewarded with expertise and abilities not available to others. They will also be the first able to provide superior products and services in the market.

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What will occur in the future is anyone’s guess, but with the everincreasing importance of technology, companies who invest in this field will be the first to take advantage of it. Wherever this technology may lead us, whether it be to virtual worlds or further advances, it will always be important to determine how these systems will affect how we learn, think, earn money, and are lead.

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References    Training  Baumann, Jim (1993). Military applications of virtual reality. Retrieved April 19, 2009, Web site:  http://www.hitl.washington.edu/scivw/EVE/II.G.Military.html  Devaney, Laura (December 2008). Why some students prefer virtual schooling. Retrieved May 9,  2009, from eSchool News Web site: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top‐ news/index.cfm?i=56217  Jana, Reena (March 2006). On‐The‐Job Video Gaming. Retrieved April 20, 2009, from Business  Week Web site:  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977062.htm   Nicole , Daniella (June 2008). Virtual Health Care: Online Doctors' Office Visits Coming Soon.  Retrieved April 29 2009, from Associated Content Web site:  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/802291/virtual_health_care_online_doctors .html  Rubenstein, Grace (November 2007). Virtual Training, Real Teaching: The Promise of Distance  Learning for Educators‐to‐Be. Retrieved April 22, 2009, from Edutopia Web site:  http://www.edutopia.org/teacher‐education‐online  Strickland, Jonathan (2007). How Virtual Reality Military Applications Work . Retrieved March  20, 2009, from HowStuffWorks Web site: http://science.howstuffworks.com/virtual‐ military5.htm    Leadership  Beck, John C. and Mitchell Wade (2004). Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping  Business Forever. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.  Daylight (2007 October 5). What Kind of Leader am I?. Retrieved April 19, 2009, from Guild  Guide ‐ Helping Create Strong Guilds Web site:  http://guildguide.blogspot.com/2007/10/what‐kind‐of‐leader‐am‐i.html 

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