The dangers of a totally immersive online world?

My bad, sorry. At any rate, someone asked about playing D&D in RL. Usually it just involves imagining your character and your cohorts in some sort of situation that's run by the Dungeon Master. He gives you choices on what to do, you roll a bunch of various-sided dice to see if your roll beat the probability, and either good things or bad things happen to your character. You can use little metal statues to represent yourself on a map but they aren't necessary. See here for a complete description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

Ironically, just like real life, those who do the equivalent of vegging out on the sofa in front of TV are probably not getting much of a neural workout ...

Anyone know of video glasses with a 1024 x 768 display?

The highest I see around is 800 x 600.

Years from now many are going to compare waht TV was viewed at as a time waster to that of today useage of computers and online games.

I think it's kind of moronic to blame a medium and not the content/what you do with it, as being either good or bad for personal development.

If I watch the news, background/opinion programs or documentaries on TV, I probably get a different mental exercise, as watching reruns of 'The price is right'.

If I'm in SL scripting or designing or discussing current opinions, I probably get a different mental exercise, as spending 2 hours yelling 'WOOOT' while dancing.

YMMV

oh so what is then? or who ? as humans we have options to be hee of not yes. But to what extent that waht this topic is about.

I've got this simple equation:-

Too much SL + lack of sleep = drama

Now...i'm no drama queen. I have a good full RL, and i see SL as a wonderfull enhancement. But i find there can be a downward spiral. If i spend too much time in SL i sleep less...then what happens in SL seems to get too important...and so i do more SL..and sleep less..and so on.
I also know that SL is much more fun when i have a rested mind and plenty of RL input.
Now i take nights out and rarely do SL during the day.
However i can easily see how anyone could end up spending most of their waking hours in SL. Some people may have no choice due to health issues of course and SL must be a huge benefit then. But many more i guess choose SL rather than sort out issues and problems they may have RL. But i ask myself...if you were of that mind and there was no virtual world perhaps you would just have chosen another way to hide from Rl problems?
Drink, drugs or self harm perhaps? These are solitary completely destructive pursuits.
At least SL is about sharing..and i bet that for every person whos not washed for a month and is living like Howard Hughes there another one whos taken strength from the people they "meet" in SL and maybe even avoided doing something far worse than spending time in front of a screen?

Rona Jaffe wrote a novel along those lines. She called her game Mazes and Monsters, and I believe that was the name of the novel too.

I see some at http://www.cybermind.nl/Info/PriceList_USDollars.htm that look ok for fifteen thousand dollars.

some need a mind to use it right?

Dangers. huh. thats fun.
Lets see:
Given a human population increase more and more people will live closer together or live on places that can be labeled as "outland" (like most of australia or canada ).

Isolation and stress due to crowded places are serious health problems, not only but also in space missions.

Given that, immersive VR is going to stay.

I think there may be a danger to the long term user.

The environment is devoid of true human interaction in the sense that you have no exposure to body language, the tone of voice (for the most part - some people use voice, most still don't), the expressions on people's faces.

The grid is set up such that you cannot steal from others - except in some of the most damaging ways possible. Intellectual property is stolen all the time, and citizens find ways to abuse what little power they have by arbitrarily limiting the rights of others. Sim owners, in particular, are a law unto themselves, with few checks and balances to limit bad behavior on their part. I have heard of a few instances of people being separated from hundreds of thousands of Lindens in virtual land transactions gone bad.

The point being that some of the bad things that could be happening are impossible, yet some of the really horrible things are nearly impossible to regulate.

Children are on the grid, and there are a lot of them. Some are protected by adults, or even having their presence facilititated by those adults (who should know better themselves). These children are getting a very skewed idea of social interaction by experiencing day to day existence in SL, which by necessity reduces these social interactions to a mere caricature of what they would be in real life.

This substantive limitation affects everyone - one's perceptions and perspective can be heavily affected by this, and people often make bad decisions based on little or no information as a result. While one or two such decisions don't amount to much, over a protracted period of time - several months or years - it can add up to an unnatural shift in the development of the character of that person. I think if there's a danger in long-term usage of Second Life, it's that. It's especially relevent for underage users, as they haven't got the cognitive skills to recognize what's happening to them that adults have.

Right -- she based it on the mistaken case cited earlier. Makes for excellent storytelling, I'm sure.

Mr. Venkman makes some points about children, which I can understand being concerned about, but I'm more concerned about the standard peer culture inside our high schools, which can be quite vicious and full of urban legends, negative peer pressure, anti-academics, and pro-dangerous-behavior. Those forces iRL are much more powerful than we usually credit. I'm not particularly worried about teens on the main grid, aside from the basic rulebreaking issue.

Well put, Cyn - I believe all these things are affected by participating in virtual environments of various sorts. Many teens are already blinkered by a lack of depth, personal resonance, and/or responsible parental guidance in their day to day lives.

This makes them much more at risk for such activities as cyberstalking, contributing to the delinquency of minors, various "anonymous" crimes involving identity on the internet and the theft thereof - both in terms of being victims and in some cases as perpetrators as well.

Being on the grid can heighten this negative experience for teenagers and even under-mentored young adults, who spend most of their social energy in virtual environments, in chat rooms and talking on Skype or IM-ing each other as their primary social interaction. It gives them a very warped view of reality, and can have serious deleterious effects on their moral and ethical values since they don't see most of the people they interact with online as being real flesh and blood people.

Even in my youth, with no "virtual" worlds in the mix, the inside-the-school peer culture was poor -- and I was in an educated middle class area. One can worry about teens on the grid, but I think it is being penny-wise and pound-foolish to worry about it very much. The real problems are in real life.

I'm more interested in effects of virtual life on adults, however.

a scenario I've thankfully beaten.