Ethics in Virtual World Environments Research

Abstract

With increased use of virtual worlds in education, training, military, arts, engineering, architecture, astronomy, medical, physical sciences, and many other fields, research in the field of distributed virtual world simulation environments has increased manifold in the last decade. This astounding growth has motivated us to think seriously about issues related to ethics in such research. Awareness of ethical issues is not only a responsibility of the researcher conducting research in virtual worlds, but also for ethics committees and institutional review board members. In this chapter we provide an overview of the past and current research attempting to identify ethics issues related to distributed virtual world simulation environments research. We raise questions related to virtual world research ethics that researcher and ethics committee members should ponder, and we provide several references for the reader to engage in thought provoking further study and discussion.