ABSTRACT
There are perhaps two ways to think about "worlds as experiments". Making a world is an experiment in itself, an attempt to build anew a place for people to be. In this sense, to experiment is to try something new, to fiddle around with the tools at hand and see what happens. The other sense of experiment is more mundane: Experimenting is a scientific protocol, a recipe for knowledge discovery. This chapter concerns itself with experiments in the second sense. It talks about using synthetic worlds to conduct experiments along the lines of the scientific protocol, analyzing the possibilities and problems of doing synthetic world experiments. Natural science has discovered what needs to be known about global climate, ballistics, nutrition, and disease. Social science is beset by severe methodological problems. Moving away from experiments, a researcher can observe historical data and see if it accords with a theory.
