Setting boundaries on simulated environments

For this week’s readings, I read the Hine article about defining boundaries first, followed by the recommended reading about the epidemiology research potentials through gaming environments like WoW. My initial concern about this type was research was that the participants of the study would only include a subset of gamers playing a certain type of game, and would always exclude non-gamers. If the study in fact intended to research human behaviour in response to specific outbreak circumstances, I would not be comfortable studying only a very limited set of potentially similar people. Reflecting on Hine’s article I tried to come up with ideas about how to “set boundaries” in terms of selecting/recruiting participants and designing simulation environments to mimic gaming environments for the purposes of studies related to human behaviour. I think it would be quite challenging to recruit a non-biased set of participants that are sufficiently representative of society as a whole and study their interactions in a simulated environment. The idea of simulating a real world environment seems to be slightly biased to begin with as there is someone somewhere making decisions about how the environment will work ahead of time. I remain un-convinced!