Note to visitors: MSC is paused indefinitely. This is a legacy website, for the time being. The Resources are still useful.
Welcome to the Metaverse Society of Criminology.
This is our info-hub, scheduling center, and publishing website.
What’s the Metaverse Society of Criminology (MSC)?
Let’s start with, what is the metaverse? It’s a digital place perceived through a virtual reality (VR) headset as a physical, or “real,” three-dimensional (3D) space. The metaverse offers new opportunities for crime, control, and the study of them. The MSC’s purpose is to usher criminologists into this new world. The trip’s inevitable, but let’s do it faster, with bigger and better payoff, at a lower cost.
Borderless criminology
The MSC is a place-based, criminology-focused, learned society. This makes it like ANZSOC, ASC, BSC, ESC and other criminology societies. They meet in-person, on the phone, and video-conference. They will use the metaverse. But they’ll never be like us. The MSC is the first place-based criminology society without physical borders.1 Spatial distance and barriers are inconsequential. The VR headset is a vehicle to anywhere and to anyone in the metaverse.
Metaverse criminology and you
There are two types of metaverse criminology: it’s a place where people meet to discuss criminology-related matters; and it’s a subfield devoted to metaverse-related crime and control. As a place, this includes the metaverse as a conference room, lecture hall, and laboratory for criminology, for example. As a subfield, metaverse criminology may be taught, researched, or applied. Naturally, there’ll be many more criminologists who meet in the metaverse than become subfield experts. You don’t need to know anything about the metaverse to participate in the MSC. You don’t need a VR headset. Just show up at a meeting.
Mission, vision, and meetings
Our mission is to increase the quantity and quality of metaverse criminology, as a place and subfield. To achieve this, we host public meetings in the metaverse and publish the “results” as micropublications. To attend in 2D, you may pop-in or RSVP to get a calendar invite. It’ll be like a Zoom meeting, except some participants are avatars interacting in a virtual 3D room. If you attend in 3D, you’re an avatar interacting in that room, who sees people in 2D on a big floating flatscreen. To attend in 3D you must RSVP because otherwise you can’t get in (unless you’re already a “Member”). Links to RSVP are on the page below.
Per our CC BY license, it is ok to “fork” this society into something new if you give us attribution. It’d be nice to stay together, but it’d also be good to split, eventually. As scientists, we *need* to encourage trying different things. Should you fork the MSC, please give us credit as version 0.0.
