How will virtual environments (for example CAVE's) develop in the near future? What impact will it have on the way we live?

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (or MMORPGs to those who play them) have been around in one way or another since the early 1970s, however they have become massively popular since the earlier 1990s. This popularity has developed much further in recent years due to faster internet connections and better usability in terms of graphics and design.

However, with this widespread use, MMORPGs have created issues and caused incidents outside of their world. A lot of this crossover between reality and online gaming has come with the introduction of currency, which has a real exchange rate, and means players can earn enough on MMORPGs to devote all of their lives to playing. For example, in 2005 a man, Zhu Caoyuan, was murdered after an altercation about an online game, where an associate sold a sword owned by his character in the game Legend of Mir 3. This was an isolated incident, but behaviour of this nature could certainly become more frequent as players start spending most (if not all) of their time on MMORPGs. Although the majority of these games are fantasy based, such as Legend of Mir 3 and the phenomenally popular World of Warcraft, the game which has sparked most debate on society is Second Life; the game that produced the first MMORPG millionaire. In Second Life your character is a human, and, as the name suggests, you can run a normal life, own property and businesses, go to gigs and even get married.With this freedom and possibility of large amounts of real money, there has been a lot of illegal activity arising on Second Life, ranging from gambling and online prostitution to real-life paedophile rings posing as children.

Some of this activity is hard to police without shutting down MMORPGs like Second Life altogether, perhaps making the online money worthless in reality would stop a lot of it. However, some people’s real lives have become dependent on their online accounts and would be made bankrupt if that were to happen, such as businessmen who run sweatshops in the Far East to earn them online credits. These people, and those who are just enjoying the game in healthy amounts, would certainly object to MMORPGs being banned, but the opposite could be said for the family of Zhu Caoyuan and others whose lives have been ruined by this modern-day social phenomenon.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2005/03/30/virtual_sword_theft_results_in_reallife_retribution.html

“A Shanghai online game player has stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber sword for real money.”
“The China Daily newspaper reported that a Shanghai court was told Qiu Chengwei, 41, stabbed competitor Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his dragon sabre, used in the popular online game Legend of Mir 3.”

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1290719,00.html

“Second Life's polygon world is powered by that great tradition: money. Players buy and sell in "Linden dollars" - Reuters track their value each day, as they do the dollar or the pound. The presence of cash accounts for many of the seediest corners of such virtual§ worlds, whether it's players posing as minors to sell virtual sex in Second Life, or real-life Chinese workers in Shanghai sweatshops playing around the clock as "gold farmers" in World of Warcraft (worldofwarcraft.com). Gold farms are tightly packed buildings full of men hunched over computers, paid to play multiplayer games and earn credits that can be sold to rich Westerners who don't have the time to devote to advancing in the game. It's a kind of battery farm for grown men, but instead of laying eggs, the human chickens play computer games in which real currencies change hands.”