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Leisure and entertainment

Reading and Use of English | 1BSU

1 Work in pairs. You are going to read an article about 3 Read paragraphs A–G. Note down a phrase that
virtual online worlds. summarises the main idea of each paragraph.
What do you know about virtual worlds? Example:
Why do you think people create avatars in virtual Para A: what users can do in Second Life
worlds? (An avatar is an image or virtual representation
of a person.) 4 Now choose from the paragraphs A–G the one

2 Read the main part of the article (but not the missing which fits each gap in the text. There is one extra
paragraphs A–G). paragraph which you do not need to use.

When did the fi rst virtual world games appear?
Why did Second Life become less popular?
How does the writer expect virtual worlds to develop in
the future?

Your guide to virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional spaces where
It was this range of creative possibilities that grabbed the
you can interact with other people, collect items and build
attention of the media and marketers, who saw it as a new
structures, and communicate via a virtual representative of
way of communicating and selling online. BusinessWeek ran a
yourself called an avatar. They have been infl uenced by various
cover story called My Virtual Life, explaining breathlessly that
science fi ction writers, along with the movie The Matrix.
‘big advertisers are taking notice’. Wired magazine ran a special
1 travel guide to Second Life, while Reuters assigned a full-time
reporter to cover news that unfolded there.
The origin of virtual worlds goes back to early games such
as Maze War, which was developed in the early 1970s. The 5
game included eyeballs as avatars, there were maps showing
The fact is that even though computer hardware and bandwidth
the levels, and it was one of the fi rst games played on linked
have improved over the years, Second Life still requires
computers and eventually on a forerunner of the Internet.
sophisticated computer systems and a lot of practice to master
2 the interface. The number of registered avatars is misleading:
many people simply try it out and give up, while others have
In a research paper they wrote: ‘At the core of our vision is the multiple avatars. A more representative number for regular
idea that cyberspace is a multiple-participant environment. users is the number who have logged in during the past seven
It seems to us that the things that are important to the days, which is quite low.
inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities
available to them, the characteristics of the other people 6
they encounter there, and the ways in which these various
Despite these diffi culties, media companies are still fascinated
participants can affect one another.’
with virtual worlds and continue to develop them. For example,
MTV created a whole range of virtual worlds based on the
content of its original television shows and other companies
Most early virtual worlds like these faded because the hardware have created worlds for students and teens. Even if today’s
and bandwidth requirements were too stringent, and they never Second Life doesn’t satisfy the mass market, dozens of other
established hardcore user bases as dot-com funding dried up at virtual worlds will certainly spring up, designed to cater for
the turn of the millennium. specifi c tastes and interests.

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