Jane noted the invitation to the first academic conference held entirely in a virtual world conference, but a recent article in Science follows it up. This particular conference, organized by Bill Bainbridge, started with the hypothesis that virtual worlds are ideal sites for social scientific experimentation, and followed through with an interesting experiment on the population of researchers of virtual worlds themselves.

The article is quite reflexive about the nature of conference interactions as part of building science as a community of practice, as well as the many ways this synergized with the particularities of World of Warcraft as a platform for scientific dialog.