Comments on: Virtual Peace

I think it is an interesting idea to use simulation technology to teach cooperation to resolve conflicts. However, I am skeptical of how useful Virtual Peace is/will be. For one, while Virtual Peace does have a fair degree of immersion due to voice chat, emotion animations, and real-time MMO style collaboration, as I said before in an earlier post, the game-like graphics to detract from Virtual Peace's goal. I think this tool does a great job simulating the difficulties in resolving large scale conflicts among multiple parties, all with different motives, but it may fall short in the teaching aspect becuase at the end of the simulation, many users may just remember it as "a game" due to the video game graphics and style of play. Another reason I have for being skeptical of this technology is becuase its creators, Virtual Heroes, are very hypocritical. They are, of course, brilliant for developing this technology, but another one of their simulation games they created, "America's Army," serves to do the exact opposite of creating peace. I think this fact will give users of Virtual Peace a harder time taking what they get out of the simulation seriously, knowing the simulation's creators also made a war game. I do think the idea is a good one, but we need to develop technology, and our motives, more before simulations like this can be fully appreciated.