vvv:v documents new initiatives taking place across several American law schools to use Multi-User Virtual Environments as teaching tools or settings. MUVEs afford law teachers significant new capabilities ranging from group discussions with higher “emotional bandwidth” than text chatting, to simulating complex systems that would be difficult to experience in realspace, to exploring the legal and pseudo-legal dimensions of an emerging Metaverse.
Educational researchers prefer the term “MUVE” to lend their work a more serious air, but most people are more familiar with the term MMORPG — Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. MMORPGs are hot topics, especially since researchers discovered that their economies rival some nations. Companies in this sector are portraying their technology as analogous to the Web in 1992, a claim that has some credence when you start to appreciate that at its best, MUVEs are platforms and not just products.
In this blog I hope to document the work of pioneering legal teachers in this medium, the early adopters who see the promise of a new medium to push education towards ever more effective, engaging, or even just entertaining directions. I look forward to new experiences that I cannot now even imagine.
