The Effect of Virtual Worlds Virtual Worlds have become a trend and it affects the people in several ways. They become less social, they hide behind their fake characters and waste their money on virtual items. Being attached to unreal life is making people relay on being unknown and instead of living the real world, they tend to make the Internet an essential element in their life. Staying unhidden makes people unsocial; they lie, cheat and live an unrealistic life. They start to make the virtual world as their place to live, they make new characters that are called avatars, and these characters usually resemble the person who made it. Most of the people, or “users” as they are supposed to be called, since this world is a game and not an actual place, have a habit of making their avatars look how they really want to look in real life, they show how they actually want to be instead of their own looks and personality. This may reveal how most people dislike their features in the real world and this may be the most reason why people prefer virtual worlds instead of the real world. Nowadays, computer-generated worlds, which are not real, have become the most used worlds between people. They gave people the ability to be who ever they wanted to be, thus making each and every user’s life a lie.
Virtual Worlds have affected the lives of many people in the most negative way; they lead to obesity and loss of concentration.
“In one experiment conducted at Cornell University, for example, half of a class students was allowed to use Internet-connected laptops during a lecture, while the other had to keep their computers shut. Those who browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well they retained the lecture's content.” Nicholas Carr.
In this quote from “ Does the Internet Make People Dumber” article, the writer gave us an example of how Internet and virtual worlds have led to students doing poorly on tests and sometimes fail their classes, which is one of many reasons why virtual worlds are not the ideal way for people to live. Having fake identities can lead to many psychological disorders that could result in living a life completely different than yours. In a research done by J. Bailenson, he noticed that people would react in real life, the way their avatars react in the virtual world. For example, if a user’s avatar is cute and attractive, the users would act like it even after they are done playing, while on the other hand if a user’s avatar is mean and grump, they would be almost or exactly the same as they act in the game. (Virtual Worlds!) In addition to the previous, Virtual Worlds have become the main reason for people to less social, or anti-social, than they used to be before the invention of the Internet. One person would spend hours and hours in an online virtual world without being exposed to human interaction. In one game, the World of Warcraft, people would play for 20 hours a week in different worlds and would pay a lot of money just to have the best weapons or clothing for their avatars. (How Second life Affects Real Life) Moreover, spending time online and on Virtual Worlds can affect the health of the users. In an experiment made by Jesse Fox, a Stanford graduate, she found out that avatars could affect the health of their users. She chose 75 volunteers and assigned an avatar to each and every one of them, and then she made them into three groups. One group had avatars that were increasingly looking like them, while the other two had some avatars that slightly looked like them and some that looked nothing like them. The group with the look-alike avatars saw them run on a treadmill for five and a half minutes everyday, which resulted in them doing a one-hour treadmill session everyday. The second group, with the slightly look-alike avatars saw their avatars just walk around, this lead to nothing, and so did the third group. Fox stated “What I'm hoping to find out by picking apart these mechanisms is what motivates people and why this works, If you are energized by seeing yourself run, maybe you can put an avatar on the bottom of your computer screen for five minutes and it would persuade you to go to the gym.” (How Second life Affects Real Life) In conclusion, the creation of Virtual Worlds, and the misuse of it have cause a very stressful turbulence to the human generation. People became less social, unhealthy, and it have led to people living fake lives for the sake of becoming what they could not become in the real world.

References
Carr, N. (2012, May 5). Does the Internet Make You Dumber?. Wall Street Journal, p. 1.
Chen, E., Richards, K., Thrower, J., & Gillum, E. (n.d.). Virtual Worlds!. Stanford University. Retrieved January 5, 2012, from http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/cs201/projects/virtual-worlds/psychology.html
Dell, K. (2008, May 12). How Second Life Affects Real Life - TIME. TIME.com. Retrieved January 6, 2012, from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1739601,00.html