Making Sense of Virtual Worlds

Science is concerned primarily with observing, recording, and interpreting data. The information gleaned is used to support, modify, or deny existing theories, and occasionally to propose new theories. In “hard” sciences, such as physics and chemistry, hypotheses can be tested through experimentation. It is rare the same experiment performed under the same conditions will produce different results; in a sense, for hard science there is a “right” answer which experimentation leads toward discovering.

Contrastingly, “soft” science deals with facts that can and do change depending on conditions; this is because at heart they defer to the ever-transforming marvel that is human nature. Quantum physics aside, in hard science there is a fixed relationship between theory and experiment: Your opinion on how rocks are formed may change in the light of new evidence, but the behavior of the rocks themselves will stay the same. With soft science, this is not the case: An anthropologist can, merely by collecting data, change the very behavior being observed. Similarly, although with most hard science the experiments can be intrusive, with soft science they can’t be. “Let’s break up this crystal to see how new crystals form from the remains” is fine; “let’s break up this community to see how new communities form from the remains” isn’t.

Hard science is concerned with what is real. When it comes to virtual worlds, therefore, they don’t have a lot to say about them. Virtual worlds may be useful as sources of inspiration, perhaps, or as applications for physics simulations, but they don’t raise any new issues.

Soft science, on the other hand, has a lot to say about virtual worlds. People follow the lines established by the “great thinkers” ¹, but there is nevertheless ample opportunity for original work. There are three basic attitudes:

• Virtual worlds are just one of many areas of interest to the particular scientific discipline. The job of the researcher is to make sense of virtual worlds and to address any questions peculiar to virtual worlds that arise. Whether virtual world designers make use of the results of any analysis isn’t as important as how much it advances knowledge in the subject field

• Virtual worlds are subsumed by the discipline. They are merely exemplars of some greater area of study, and can only really be understood in that context. Virtual worlds are claimed as a subfield, which may or may not have something new to say about the discipline in general.

• Virtual worlds are tools for the discipline. They can be used to some greater purpose in their application than in themselves. Researchers are more interested in what they can do with them than what goes on in them.

Insofar as discussing the acceptance of virtual worlds is concerned, the third of these is not particularly useful. This isn’t to say there is not a lot of valuable work in the area that might be of direct relevance to designers; indeed, the chances are that some of it will be very helpful indeed, its being applied in nature. However, from the point of view of assessing the status of virtual worlds in the wider scientific community, this is not hugely important.

Similarly, the second attitude (virtual worlds are subsumed) also downgrades virtual worlds. They are regarded as a subdiscipline, rather than a discipline unto themselves. Again, therefore, virtual worlds don’t come out of any analysis in this context as being a particularly plausible independent field of research.

Thus, although I’ll spend some time going over the highlights of the second and third of these attitudes, I’ll concentrate on the first one.

I do mean “concentrate,” too.

Geography

It might surprise many designers to discover that geographers have an interest in virtual worlds. They do. They are interested in spaces, they regard cyberspace as a space, and virtual worlds are an exceptionally good example of the concept in use.

Note, there is a distinction ¹ between space and place. A space is an abstraction that groups objects of a particular type under a set of fixed rules; a place is a region (under adjacency rules) of some space. For example, matter operating under the laws of physics gives us the 3D space we call reality; Athens is a place in this space. Historical events operating under the laws of causality give us an “event space;” the French Revolution is a place in this space. Mathematicians are particularly fond of spaces, and will readily refer to name spaces, function spaces, and object spaces.

Spaces are distinguished from sets by the imposition of their governing axioms. Although it is true to say a place is a subset of its space, these axioms mean there is far more to the relationship than that: Things can be inferred about one place relative to another place in the same space. This is because places are connected to other places under adjacency rules, through which they can influence the character of these other places. Whether the spaces are real or imaginary, discrete or continuous, finite or infinite, it is with the study of the rules that underlie them that geographers are ultimately concerned.

In terms of virtual worlds, this means they are interested in:

• Virtual worlds as places (what they comprise).

• Virtual worlds as instantiated spaces (what comprises them).

• The (hopefully new) forms and relationships underlying virtual worlds.

As places, virtual worlds constitute one small part of the data space known as the Internet ²; other parts include the World Wide Web, email, instant messaging, bulletin boards, and Internet relay chat (IRC). Formally, “cyberspace” covers anything implemented using information and communication technologies, and therefore includes non-Internet forms of interactive digital data transfer, such as television and telephones. However, in practice it is with the conceptualization of these technologies known as the Internet that most of the research in this area concerns.

Geography begins with maps. Maps formalize the space to be mapped, and determine the nature of the adjacency relationships. Maps, like spaces, can be multidimensional; they are only, however, abstractions of the space ³, illustrating solely what is important from the point of view of the cartographer or the person using the map. By making a map of a new place, a geographer can begin to understand the nature of that place and of the space in which it is located.

How easy the Internet is to map depends, therefore, on the viewpoint of the cartographer. Most places on the Internet have a real-world geographical association, in that they are located on servers or operate through routers that have a physical presence in the real world. Thus, one obvious way to map the Internet is to overlay a map of the real world with the locations of major nodes, using data traffic flows to show their connections.

This wouldn’t be a map of the Internet, though; it would be a map of the real-world network that supports it. The Internet itself is a construct in the mind; to map it is to determine those constructs common to the individuals who experience it. Fortunately, most people have sufficient experience of real space to conceptualize cyberspace in similar ways, guided by the underlying structure of the data being presented. Thus, for example, they will regard a web site as a location; a hyperlink to another web site indicates adjacency (a browser’s Back button making it bidirectional, at least temporarily). Distance is identical between nodes, therefore the map will be topological rather than spatial.

On any map of the Internet, virtual worlds are only going to show up as different from other nodes if the cartographer captures and reflects details that are prominent for them—number of simultaneous connections, or period of continuous connection. Even then, they may not have a signature any different from an Internet radio station. A map of the Internet in general only makes statements about the relationships between nodes and about the variables that these relationships consider. It can only respect variables that are meaningful across all nodes (for example, bandwidth, uptime, router connections); the place of virtual worlds in cyberspace can therefore be located, but only in those terms. Unfortunately, interesting though this information may be to geographers and network managers, it’s not something virtual world designers are going to regret not knowing.

Homing in on virtual worlds, though, and looking at how they are constructed, is a different story.

In their two hugely impressive 2001 books ⁴, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin lay out the foundations of Cyberspace Geography as a discipline. They map everything: infrastructure, traffic, web sites, email, bulletin boards—even some individual Usenet threads. In so doing, they offer different ways of looking at cyberspace for different purposes. Because virtual worlds use richer, more intricate spatial metaphors than any other Internet social space (IRC, chat rooms, email, and so on), one of these purposes is virtual world design.

Beginning with MUD1 ⁵, Dodge and Kitchin examine a number of virtual worlds, both textual and graphical. They reproduce player-drawn maps ⁶ of varying quality and scale, commenting on the ability of each to convey in a clear manner the salient points that would be of interest to users ⁷. They conclude that there are four main categories of space in a virtual world:

• A core public space, accessible to all characters.

• Private spaces, accessible only to individual characters, but directly connected to the core space.

• Private spaces that are disconnected from the core space—that is, only accessible using teleportation.

• Multi-scale spaces that break the rules of realism—for example, a house inside a grandfather clock.

The prevalence of private spaces will, of course, be related to the number of people able to build them ⁸; there will be more in a MOO than in a DikuMUD, for example ⁹. In builder-heavy worlds, spaces more distant from the core in spatial terms will be more distant in thematic terms, too.

Dodge and Kitchin examine other ways to map virtual worlds, apart from this “physical” approach. They reproduce maps created from data gathered by a LambdaMOO bot ¹⁰ concerning the social interactions of virtual worlds; these enable the trained eye to pick out cliques and other social groupings among players.

An important consideration for any kind of space is navigation: How do you get from one location to another (whether this “location” is a point, a person, or a web page)? This is, after all, one of the primary reasons people use maps. The classic work on navigation by individuals is Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City ¹¹, which describes how people build up a cognitive map of their environment and use it (among other things) to get from place to place. Lynch demonstrated that this “environmental image” is constructed in terms of five features:

• Nodes are distinct locations people can enter

• Paths are channels connecting nodes, along which people travel.

• Edges are borders that are difficult or impossible to cross.

• Districts are parts of the environment that share a common theme, look, or character. “The old town” or “the docks” would count as districts.

• Landmarks are strong reference points. The more important an object is, the more likely it is to be a point of reference. Being visible from far away is, in this context, considerably important.

Note these vary from person to person and from context to context. A path for a motorist may be an edge for a pedestrian; a junction may be a landmark for one, but not the other.

Although Lynch’s work concerned real-world cities, its principles can often be extended to environments in general. This was demonstrated categorically for textual virtual worlds in Andreas Dieberger’s 1994 Ph.D. thesis ¹², using results from two questionnaire surveys undertaken by Jolanda Tromp ¹³. Players of textual worlds have particular problems in that

• There are holes in the virtual world, where there “ought to be” rooms but there aren’t.

• Rooms are of different sizes, which players perceive only through their descriptions. A room that would take up several squares on a grid layout can still seem “small” to players.

• Exits are limited to eight compass points, plus: non-standard contextual exits such as “out;” hidden exits you have to work to discover; teleport exits that look like normal ones.

• There are unconnected rooms accessible only by teleport. Some exist for special purposes (for example, the virtual world’s mailing system), but this doesn’t have to be the case.

• Mazes that are fiendishly difficult to solve are not fiendishly difficult to construct.

• Z-axis movement (steps, ladders, cliffs, gradients, and so on) are hard to realize effectively.

• Distance is perceived in terms of time taken to traverse between rooms. Although this is related to the number of rooms passed through, inconveniences like doors and monsters can make a journey seem longer.

Nevertheless, even given these problems, Lynch’s model applies. Nodes are rooms. Major landmarks are rooms containing some special functionality or (very interestingly) ones where there tend to be other players. Minor landmarks are often where people find unidirectional movement ends—for example, the place where if you keep going east you suddenly find a wall that stops further travel in that direction. Paths are room exits or chains of rooms that get you from one landmark to another. Districts are used, but with theme being more important than look. Edges are only implied through room descriptions and the lack of exits at the “edge,” but rooms that have them will usually be on paths or act as landmarks.

Bearing this in mind, therefore, designers of virtual worlds should be able to construct their virtual worlds in such a way as to make them easier for players to navigate. Obvious nodes, paths, edges, districts, and (especially) landmarks should be provided to give players a sense of where they are and how to get to where they want to go; a sense of place, in other words.

Although this work was undertaken for textual worlds, Dieberger noted that graphical worlds (which have few of the “unrealistic” spatial problems that textual worlds do) were even more amenable to this kind of analysis. Designers should not simply assume people will find things to use as landmarks: They should follow the lead of urban planners and actually provide them. Furthermore, they should provide them in a structured manner, rather than as an accident of geography ¹⁴. In textual virtual worlds, they can go one step further and provide landmark-seeking commands ¹⁵.

Unrestricted teleportation is perhaps the greatest threat to the geographical integrity of a virtual world, as it breaks all the adjacency rules that make a space anything other than a set of points. Designers should therefore be careful to ensure it isn’t overdone. The other major problem (which affects textual worlds more than graphical ones) is the virtual world’s geography should be relatively stable. Experienced players don’t want to have to check all their maps every time there’s an update “just in case” the designers added a few new rooms somewhere off the beaten track, and inexperienced players will think you’re playing with their heads.

Geographers look at how space appears and how people (through their maps) visualize it; although they can offer up general principles relating to what makes a geography understandable and useful, they are not immediately concerned with designing spaces themselves. This may change if geographers seize on virtual worlds as test-beds for their theories of geography; geographers are already being called on to advise in the construction of geographically correct virtual worlds ¹⁶.

There is, however, a group of people for whom the design of space is precisely their main interest: architects.

Architecture

Architects think about spaces for reasons that differ from those of geographers. They are interested in the physical construction of objects within a space, yes, but also in the functional and aesthetic values they can project through such a construction.

In the real world, buildings are designed to fulfill some purpose. This purpose (and the proposed budget) provides the hard parameters within which architects operate. What about cyberspace, though? It’s clearly a space, but then so is the space of possible solutions to a crossword puzzle; architects would not be concerned with the latter, so why should they be concerned with the former?

The answer is that cyberspace in general, and virtual worlds in particular, share with the physical world features important to architects that more abstract spaces do not. In a good introduction ¹ to these issues, Anna Cicognani derives five interrelated characteristics that describe what makes a space interesting to architects:

• Possibility of action. It must be possible to effect changes of state within the space.

• Livability. It must be possible to dwell in the space. This implies that the space can be organized into structures.

• Construction of communities. The space must be social, in that communities should be able to develop by acting on the space while existing external to it.

• Time organization. Only through alterations to space can changes in time be detected, therefore the space must be organized such that these changes can be perceived in a manner that allows them to be mapped onto some consistent (“actual”) time organization.

• Spatial organization. It must be possible to orchestrate the space into structures to allow it to be worked with and studied.

Architecture is about organizing space (or, more specifically, about arranging things into space), therefore of these conditions the fifth is the most important. Virtual worlds satisfy all the criteria.

Some of the same observations about the nature of virtual spaces that were made by geographers Dodge and Kitchin also show up in architect Peter Anders’s book Envisioning Cyberspace ²; this also has large tracts devoted to virtual worlds, and should be on the bookshelf of anyone who takes the design of virtual worlds seriously. Anders advances a thesis that certain types of space are bad for the well-being of the virtual world as a whole (at least if it’s a textual world). Textual worlds use episodic movement rather than dynamic movement—that is, you move a room at a time ³. This contradicts any illusion of conventional “real” space, but is nevertheless so compelling that it forms the basis for all the features that make the virtual world a “world.” The reason it can do this is because players are willing to discard their disbelief, and buy into it. This means they trust the designer to maintain their faith; if the designer pops them out of their immersion, it amounts to nothing less than a betrayal.

Virtual worlds where players can build, transfer this trust to the builders. Unfortunately, many builders do betray it (largely through ignorance or incompetence). As Dieberger also noticed, there will be rooms with non-intuitive connections, “black hole” rooms you can enter but can’t leave, and areas unlinked from the “orientation space” where players enter the virtual world.

Unsuccessful rooms that people never visit will be abandoned; anyone who does enter them will find nothing of interest—not even other characters—thereby contributing to an overall sense that the virtual world is “empty.” Although the central space is generally occupied, the further away from it you are the less likely you are to meet anyone by chance. This robs the virtual world of the spontaneous interaction that gives it much of its immediacy. Everything seems static.

Anders notes one of the problems is that people will usually teleport to locations if they can, rather than walk there. This means they are unlikely to bump into people on the way, of course, but it also suggests they won’t explore. In graphical worlds, you can “see” into adjacent locations, and go over to look at anything that seems interesting; in textual ones, rooms act as their own boundaries, so players are blind with respect to the contents of adjacent rooms ⁴. If people don’t explore, they have less chance of coming across anything (or anyone) new. Exploration can help socialization.

To give players more opportunity to meet people, Anders therefore makes the following recommendations:

• Restrict teleporting.

• Make all private room, link into the general space.

• Have multiple entrance points, for multiple local hangouts.

Although these only officially work for textual worlds with a lot of building, they’re sound advice for all other virtual worlds, too. The fewer anomalies that players must suffer to experience a virtual world, the better; the more opportunities to meet one another the better, too ⁵.

Anders makes a distinction between textual and graphical virtual world design because he sees the former as using cognition rather than perception; information is conveyed in symbols rather than in senses, and space is inferred rather than experienced. One way to interpret this is that for graphical worlds you feel that you are part of the environment, whereas for textual worlds you feel that the environment is part of you. This may partly explain the difference in attraction of the two systems.

Although real-life architecture and virtual world architecture are not the same ⁶, the desire of virtual world designers to mimic aspects of reality (for reasons of immersion) means that many of the processes involved are the same, particularly where there are social concerns. Architects are interested in virtual worlds, and virtual world designers should be interested in architecture.

Social concerns, of course, arise from the presence of large numbers of people in virtual worlds. Where there are people, there will always be other people willing to study those people. When the people share a space—or perceive that they do ⁷—it’s time to call in the anthropologists.

Anthropology

The discipline of science concerned with the study of other cultures is anthropology. With ever-dwindling numbers of unstudied cultures, it is unsurprising that anthropologists should take an interest whenever new cultures develop on their doorstep (as they have in virtual worlds). That virtual worlds have not been flooded with anthropologists, however, can perhaps be ascribed to three factors:

• The traditional view that virtual worlds are games and therefore not worthy of serious study ¹.

• The fieldwork for virtual worlds isn’t as exotic and exciting as that promised by the real world.

• These cultures are so new, they could well be considered to be a subculture of that of the anthropologist, which makes their study sociology rather than anthropology.

Nevertheless, formal anthropological work has been undertaken for virtual worlds, some of it producing results of interest to virtual world designers.

There are several subfields of anthropology, not all of which are applicable to virtual worlds. In his excellent modern anthropology textbook ², Daniel Bates lists these as

• Biological anthropology. Also known as physical anthropology, this concerns the study of biological variations among populations. It has virtually no applicability in the context of virtual worlds ³.

• Archaeology. Archaeologists investigate the relationship between the artifacts people create and their behavior. This is unlikely to be applied to virtual worlds for many years, as the people who created the artifacts still live and their behavior can be assessed directly rather than deduced from what survives them.

• Linguistic anthropology. Linguistic anthropologists study the way language is constructed and used, and from this come to understand the nature of the culture it supports ⁴.

• Cultural anthropology. This is what everyone generally thinks of by “anthropology”: going out and living among a population for months on end, observing and recording aspects of their everyday life.

There are, furthermore, two different results of anthropological study. The first is the ethnography: This is a detailed examination of an individual culture that is purely descriptive; it paints a detailed picture of a culture, but offers no interpretation of the results. An ethnology, on the other hand, attempts to discern cultural patterns of behavior from the ethnographical data. Ethnographies describe the way things are; ethnologies explain why things are the way things are.

Ethnographic data usually begins with a demographic study of a population to determine where the cultural boundaries lie. In 1996, for example, Gamespot undertook an influential survey ⁵ of players of multi-player online games of all kinds; it uncovered different patterns of play for players of different types of games. Although useful for identifying possible areas that may be worthwhile as subjects for individual study, this kind of data snapshot has only a limited shelf life if the rate of change of player behavior is unsettled ⁶.

Virtual worlds, as (in this context) a subfield of multi-player computer games, do have a long enough history to have achieved some measure of stability. The earliest serious attempt by a non-player to collect ethnographic data about virtual worlds only was Herbert Emert’s 1993 survey ⁷, which was formally an investigation into the social effects that playing in virtual worlds had on the players themselves. It succeeded in discerning the different attitudes players had, particularly in why they played (that is, the presence of different player types).

Unfortunately, early surveys (and there were several that followed—Usenet requests for people to respond to questionnaires were a seasonal event at term paper time for several years) regarded the players of virtual worlds as a single community—something that hadn’t been true since the days of MUD1 (and even that had a distinction between its “internal” and “external” players, who played at different times of the day and rarely overlapped). Later studies ⁸ by non-players made a distinction between “adventure” and “social” virtual worlds, but still treated them as if they were communities as a whole.

Some aspects of virtual world culture are universal, of course, and others aren’t but are prevalent in many related worlds. This degree of homogeneity is caused by inheritance from parent worlds and the occasional arrival of immigrant players bringing ideas from more distantly related worlds. Nevertheless, individual virtual worlds must be regarded as the entities in which values are passed from one generation of players to the next, and it is therefore individual virtual worlds that anthropologists must study if they are to learn about these cultures.

Anthropologists studying virtual worlds will stay in a single one over time in the same way that in the real world they would stay in a single village. Expeditions to neighboring “villages” to examine differences and similarities of behavior are possible, but on the whole the research is based in one place.

It is interesting to consider whether large-scale virtual worlds that exist in multiple simultaneous incarnations have different cultures across those incarnations. The evidence seems to suggest that although there may be differences when particular servers have been set up to attract a particular playing style (for example, PvP is allowed or not), in general the culture seems to be fairly uniform. In The Norrathian Scrolls (Nick Yee’s exhaustive demographic study of EverQuest), no strange age/gender combinations were discerned for individual shards; the composition of player populations was pretty much the same from one to the next. This doesn’t mean that their players would necessarily behave the same way, of course, but it suggests that if they don’t conform, then their behavior is not sufficiently outré to affect overall population balance.

Data gathering for individual virtual worlds has been conducted either for administrative use only or as a means to some non-anthropological end. Indeed, researchers who want to look at virtual worlds for one main purpose will often pick a particular one and study it in great depth. This can be viewed as a form of anthropological study. Dieberger’s work on navigation was focused entirely on Igor MUD ⁹, for example, and Pargman’s examination of community management arose from a study of SvenskMud ¹⁰. There have, however, been anthropological studies by anthropologists, for anthropologists, of virtual worlds.

The first of these was Michael Rosenberg’s 1992 ethnography ¹¹ of WolfMOO. Rosenberg joined this virtual world as a participant observer, and spent several weeks of regular evening play getting to know and understand it. Although his report only scratches the surface of what is possible, it nevertheless sets a high standard. Reading it, you get a good sense of what WolfMOO was about and how its players behaved; it’s like a first-person travel guide to a distant city that gets the facts over without the hyperbole. The value of this kind of work is perhaps made all the more clear by the fact WolfMOO is no more; Rosenberg’s ethnography is all that remains to reflect the culture that once was.

John Masterson’s 1994 ethnography ¹² of Ancient Anguish ¹³ draws directly on Rosenberg’s work, although it’s less formal and more speculative in places. He played Ancient Anguish for two years before writing his (unpublished, but widely read) paper. Many of his observations would be regarded as unexceptional in today’s virtual worlds, but of course part of the reason for this is because pioneers like he and Rosenberg made those observations in the first place.

Masterson put his field experience of Ancient Anguish to further good use, writing a 1996 master’s thesis ¹⁴ on the sociolinguistics of virtual worlds. In addition to Ancient Anguish, he also spent extended periods in two other adventure-oriented virtual worlds ¹⁵ for comparison: Paradox II and TrekMUSE ¹⁶. For linguistic anthropologists, virtual worlds (especially textual ones) are unusual because people write in them as if they were speaking. Formally, linguistic anthropology concerns language that isn’t written down, so on the face of it textual communication via a keyboard ought to be disqualified. It’s the fact the players consider themselves to be speaking that validates it; their words are as ephemeral as spoken words are in real life ¹⁷. Logging these communications is more like recording conversations than it is reading a book.

Linguistic anthropologists have looked at non-verbal communication in some detail. In real life, people use many physical gestures other than mere speech while communicating. Bowing is so ingrained in Japanese culture, for example, that people will often do so to individuals with whom they are communicating by telephone. Picking up on the nuances of this kind can be very difficult for anthropologists, therefore it’s very useful for them to be able to look at virtual worlds where all communication is by text only—there’s only one channel to examine. The first person to examine this in detail was Lynn Cherny, who in an 11-month study ¹⁸ of ElseMOO ¹⁹ categorized five different kinds of emote command as mechanisms for conveying non-verbal communication:

• Conventional action. These are actions that have a practical effect, much like any regular action. Example: “Name waves.”

• Back channels. These occur during conversations, indicating continued attention/ understanding. Example: “Name nods.”

• Byplay. Jocular meta-comments on conversation. Example: “Name dusts off some adjectives.”

• Narration. Comments usually related to real-life events, often indicating boredom. Example: “Name munches on a ketchup sandwich.”

• Exposition. Statements describing internal or factual background. Unlike the other four categories, these can be in any tense. Example: “Name hated the movie.”

Influential though this was, Cherny was later to surpass herself with a full-blown linguistic ethnography ²⁰ of ElseMOO, exhibiting the same kind of depth and scholarship seen in any other major sociolinguistic work. It’s very impressive; the discussion of the ethics of studying virtual communities is worth the cover price alone ²¹.

More pragmatic virtual world designers than I may wonder what there is in all this for them. Clearly, the more you know about virtual worlds, the better informed you are when designing one; however, why should sociolinguistic studies of particular virtual worlds be compelling reading? The potential of virtual worlds for sociolinguists has been apparent since Eva-Lise Carlstrom’s 1992 linguistic ethnography ²² of LambdaMOO; is there any traffic of useful information the other way, though?

There is, yes; or rather, there would be if designers were to take the time to look. Anthropologists offer a unique opportunity for designers to see themselves through the trained eyes of others; it is foolhardy to ignore the objective portrait of themselves that results. Anthropologists may not like it (they try to avoid altering any culture they are studying, so for members of that culture to act on an ethnography is anathema), but that’s their problem.

There are practical advantages, too. Take sociolinguistics: By looking at why people use the emotes they do, it is possible for anthropologists to draw up structured lists of commands that address these needs; virtual world designers have previously had to evolve such lists through requests from players (plus hours of thumbing through a thesaurus). Such emote lists are only of marginal use in textual worlds, where exhaustive sets of emotes have accrued over the years sufficient to cover all situations. For designers of graphical virtual worlds, though, these sets are unusable. It may only take seconds to add a new emote to a textual world, but for graphical worlds it’s a non-trivial exercise—it could mean a trip to the motion capture studio in some circumstances (expensive enough in itself, but ruinously so when it must be modified for all valid skeleton types). It’s important that players of graphical virtual worlds have available to them the same non-verbal forms of communication they can use in real life, but graphical worlds aren’t as expressive as textual ones in this regard. Players of graphical worlds can’t use free-form emotes like players of textual worlds do (except textually), and neither they can they expect every fixed-form emote to exist—it’s too expensive. Only some emotes can be implemented: The question is, which ones?

Sociolinguistics provides some of the answers. Rather than picking what players say they want, or what the designers think the players want, it’s possible to look at what players actually use and what they need to know is available (whether or not they use it). This means players can get on with the business of communicating, instead of having to attribute new meaning to bizarre combinations of whatever emotes the designers have actually provided.

This is just one example of where linguistic anthropology can be of possible use to virtual world designers; if you read Cherny’s or Masterson’s work, others will present themselves, too.

As for cultural anthropology, that also has things to say about virtual world design. Jen Clodius is a cultural anthropologist who immersed herself in DragonMUD ²³ (the oldest continuously running TinyMUD) so extensively it could almost be said she “went native.” In a series of short papers, some of which have already been cited here, she made a number of penetrating insights about why people in virtual worlds do what they do; in this sense, her work is ethnology rather than ethnography. For example, in a 1996 paper ²⁴ she describes how the players of DragonMUD developed and maintained a community of interest, touching on issues of identity construction to suggest why this may be. Developers of large-scale virtual worlds who rake in several million dollars in subscriptions monthly would do well to engage people such as Clodius to tell them how their community works, instead of operating in the dark (or worse, overreacting to the unrepresentative minorities who often dominate the public forums).

Ethnologies teach us about other cultures. By comparing behavioral similarities across many cultures, it is possible to discern universal patterns that can then be sought in more diverse cultures, including our own. This is, for example, how Joseph Campbell formalized the hero’s journey and why George Lucas was then able to use it for Star Wars (of which the virtual world Star Wars Galaxies is a direct result).

The first major thesis ²⁵ about virtual worlds, written by Liz Reid in 1994, was an attempt to identify patterns of cultural formation common to virtual worlds. She traced behavioral tropes back to the mechanisms that underlie virtual worlds, rather than the culture of the people who played them. For example: The reason people are more open in virtual worlds than they are in the real one is because of the anonymity virtual worlds afford them; it’s not because they come from a real-world society that emphasizes openness. Players have needs that virtual worlds can fulfill; however, if they are to satisfy those needs then they must live alongside other players. This implies they must develop a set of mutual understandings that support both their goals and their relationships; these feed back to provide a context to give meaning to their actions (and themselves). These are the cultures of virtual worlds.

Reid is right: Virtual world cultures are formed by the needs of the players, acting under environmental conditions both inherent to the access medium and provided by the virtual world’s designers. I would add, however, that these cultures rarely form spontaneously any more: It is possible to shape a culture in advance of its creation, because much of what new players learn about a virtual world they pick up from existing players. The original, seeding players therefore have a strong influence on the direction a culture takes; as most of these players will have played other virtual worlds beforehand, so some aspects of culture are passed from virtual world to virtual world to virtual world. As an illustration, consider whether the attitude to cross-gender play in virtual worlds would be the same today had they been invented in a right-wing, reactionary college in the Deep South rather than a British university notorious for its left-wing politics ²⁶.

Were virtual worlds to be created from nothing, quite different cultures could develop as per Reid; nowadays, though, much culture is passed on and therefore evolves, rather than forms. Furthermore, as increasing numbers of people become involved with the Internet, virtual communities are starting to have an impact on real-world ones. Given that (as always) the virtual is governed by the real, it therefore makes sense to suppose that to some degree at least, virtual society can be regarded as a subclass of society as a whole.

This brings us to our next topic: sociology.

Sociology

Sociology is the study of the organization, functioning, and development of human societies. It is very closely related to anthropology; basically, sociologists and anthropologists got to pretty well the same place but came from different starting points. Indeed, an excellent way to annoy a sociologist or anthropologist is to ask what the difference is between the two disciplines. It essentially boils down to three things:

• Sociologists study only industrial societies, whereas anthropologists concentrate on (but don’t restrict themselves to) pre-industrial societies.

• Anthropologists are big on qualitative methods, particularly participant observation (that is, immersing oneself in a society to learn about its ways). Sociologists are big on quantitative methods, especially making deductions from statistics.

• They have different traditions, and follow the theories of different individuals.

More and more, however, the distinction is becoming blurred. For example, Reed Riner and Jen Clodius ¹ explored the idea of using a virtual world predictively, to see how people might behave in a future Mars settlement; whether this qualifies as sociology or anthropology is anyone’s guess! My own personal definition of the difference is that anthropologists study other peoples, whereas sociologists study their own. I’m neither an anthropologist nor a sociologist, though, so feel free to ignore this.

So what do sociologists have to say about virtual worlds?

Well, it’s actually quite hard to pin down. There seem to be four areas of activity ², as follows:

• Cyberculture

• Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)

• Gender Studies

• General Sociology

Cyberculture is an interdisciplinary area concerning the study of online culture. Unfortunately (from the point of view of this book), it makes little distinction between virtual worlds and other sources of online culture. It’s basically a catchall for people who want to write about stuff with an Internet connection but are unable to do so within the traditional limits of their chosen field. Although some of the best books on virtual worlds I’ve found were stocked under “cyberculture” at the bookstore, most of what’s there typically concerns something else.

Cyberculture also suffers from an overly hip and trendy image, attracting a disproportionate number of authors who want to be seen to be at the cutting edge of the social sciences and are willing to pull out every polysyllabic word in their vocabulary to do so. Some of the best (and, from the perspective just described, worst) early papers on cyberculture were collected in The Cybercultures Reader ³; if you are interested in learning about the subject, this is as good a place as any to start. Although I refer to some of these papers later under more specific subheadings, I shall not, however, be examining cyberculture itself in further detail; it’s simply too amorphous. CMC and gender studies I do look at, as they have much to say about virtual worlds; so much, in fact, that they get their own sections (although CMC doesn’t get as much as gender studies).

This leaves us with general sociology. Despite the presence of virtual worlds on the syllabus of many university sociology courses, in terms of actual substance this isn’t actually a lot ⁴.

Nevertheless, the paper that introduced sociologists to virtual worlds is (by virtue of this fact) one of the most important ever written on the subject: Pavel Curtis’s Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities ⁵. In this, Curtis described observations made as a result of his experience as maintainer of LambdaMOO at Xerox PARC. After describing virtual worlds ⁶, he noted the following:

• Around 90% of LambdaMOO’s players connected from colleges and universities.

• At most 50% of the players had a computer science background.

• Around 70% of the players were male.

• A common phenomenon is that some males play female characters.

• Female characters are subject both to harassment and special (favorable) treatment.

• Although player names are varied, their descriptions are not. Characters who are “mysterious, but unmistakably powerful” are relatively common.

• Player anonymity is the most significant social factor in virtual worlds. Players do not feel at risk and are consequently less inhibited than in real life. Some of this disinhibition is manifested by irresponsibility, rudeness, pestering, and so on.

• To cope with offensive behavior, virtual worlds have a special class of players (the wizards) who have a policing role (among others). These players are treated differently by the other players; typically either with complete respect or with complete disrespect.

• When more than two people are in the same location, anyone passing through will tarry awhile on the grounds that something interesting may be happening.

• Gagging is available, but rarely used on LambdaMOO.

• Conversations in virtual worlds use emotes and smileys to supplement pure text.

• Partly due to the time it takes to type speech, it is common for several conversational threads to be extant simultaneously in a location, even when there are only two people involved.

• The disjoint nature of virtual world conversations makes it much easier to join in on one without appearing to be rudely interrupting.

• Large-scale gatherings of players can occur for specific events, of which virtual weddings are a particularly impressive example.

• Popular board games are often implemented and played in virtual worlds.

• The overall size of a virtual community is larger than the number of people actually playing at any one time. LambdaMOO had 700–800 different players connecting per week, but rarely more than 40 of them at once ⁷.

• Some players play so much that it’s a form of addiction.

• Players can achieve a social consensus about how they ought to behave. This differs from virtual world to virtual world, and from virtual world to the real world.

Most of this will seem obvious to players of virtual worlds now, and indeed it seemed so at the time, too. However, for those individuals who hadn’t encountered the concept before it was dazzling stuff. Almost all the sociology work on virtual worlds that followed took points raised by Curtis and ran with them; this may explain why gender studies in particular attracted more attention than might otherwise have been expected.

In his paper, Curtis also gives a definition of what constitutes a MUD (that is, a virtual world), or at least what distinguishes it from an Adventure-style game. He lists three major factors:

• MUDs are not goal-oriented; they have no concept of winning/losing, and record no scores.

• MUDS can be extended from within by the players.

• They generally have more than one player connected simultaneously; these players can communicate with each other in real time.

Although only the third item of these applies universally to virtual worlds (the first two work for LambdaMOO and other TinyMUD derivatives, but they don’t for even the AberMUDs and LPMUDs that were around when Curtis wrote this), nevertheless this definition has gained considerable currency. It is still seen occasionally in cyberculture articles by people who want to make points about virtual worlds without actually ever touching one.

Being a computer scientist rather than a sociologist, Curtis’s later work concerned practical uses of virtual worlds ⁸; in a social sciences context, it is therefore usually only referred to when there is a requirement to illustrate that virtual worlds have uses beyond mere entertainment.

Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities gave social science researchers a lot to think about, but it was by no means exhaustive in its enumeration of behaviors. Although Curtis never claimed it was, few sociologists have looked beyond it.

Graduate students surveying the literature for term reports ⁹ will discover the big issues are identity, pseudonimity, gender difference, and pretty much nothing else. The first two of these are related, and I discuss them in the next section; the third, I discuss in the section after that.

Because of this reduction of the sociology of virtual communities to a few key issues, it has been left to non-sociologists to explore new areas of social research in virtual worlds. This particularly has been the case in community management, where community service representatives have found themselves having to invent the theory that matches their practice as they go along. Amy Jo Kim, for example, who presented an influential paper ¹⁰ at the 1997 Computer Game Developers’ Conference on how to design sociability into online games, has a background in behavioral neuroscience.

The most outstanding piece of original research of direct interest to both sociologists and the designers of virtual worlds is Christian Carazo-Chandler’s study ¹¹ of population mobility in a virtual world (Ultima Online, to be precise, with a nod to EverQuest). Carazo-Chandler found that movement within a shard and between shards did occur, following theories of migration that apply in the real world; they could therefore be reasonably well predicted. Players had many reasons for and against leaving one shard, and for and against joining a new one (following a push/pull model). They would want to leave (push) because of:

• Housing shortages

• Lack of local services (such as vendors selling the wares you need)

• Change of character preference

• Harassment

• Their poor reputation

They would be thwarted in their desire to move (barriers) by:

• Housing shortages where they wanted to go

• Distance from starting point (where no instant transport is available)

• Lack of funds

• Too high or low concentrations of other players in target location

They would want to be somewhere else (pull) because of:

• Greater opportunity for adventure

• Different or more local services

• Higher levels of conflict

• Greater or less popularity of the area

• More social activities

• Proximity of friends

• Profit maximization

Virtual world designers who are of the opinion that players should be given everything they want might use these results as evidence to support their conjecture; players will move to some other virtual world if they find their needs are not being met.

This is true, but the barriers for cross-world movement are stronger than for in-world or cross-shard movement; it also assumes that giving players what they want is something they want.

Carazo-Chandler applies other models of population migration apart from push/pull. One of these, concerning circulatory movement, shows how individuals move location within a virtual world as their characters’ experience and abilities grow. This is again of use to the thoughtful virtual world designer, because it allows the connection of physical ¹² movement with the personal movement of the hero’s journey (not that the players would necessarily notice).

Carazo-Chandler is a geographer, not a sociologist, and was investigating population migration from the perspective of how players’ decisions to migrate are affected by the structure of their virtual environment. It would be nice if his work sparked sufficient interest among sociologists for them to investigate virtual world populations as populations, rather than as cultures or jumping-on points for ideological bandwagons, but I don’t expect it’ll happen.

Talking of geographers and sociology, it was Rob Kitchin who wrote the first comprehensive introduction to the social science of cyberspace ¹³. Chapter 4 of his book summarizes the views of sociologists and other cultural scientists concerning cyberspace in general, and virtual worlds in particular. He describes two main points of view:

• Cyberspace engenders disembodiment, allowing the construction of new self-identity.

• Cyberspace is where nature and technology merge, allowing the reconstruction of the body.

There’s no reason why anyone can’t experience some degree of each of these, of course; completely shedding the one (body or identity) completely frees the other, but there can be movement in both directions. That this occurs at the level of the individual indirectly highlights why perhaps sociologists haven’t taken to virtual worlds as much as they might have been expected to do.

Except in the case of the large, graphical virtual worlds that weren’t around when Pavel Curtis wrote his beacon paper, maybe virtual world societies simply aren’t big enough to permit sociologists to make general statements about them? Individuals are just too important. There is scope for looking at large-scale virtual worlds with player bases numbered in the hundreds of thousands; there is scope for looking at virtual worlds as a part of wider society—that is, from without instead of from within. At the moment, though, when it comes to looking at virtual worlds from a sociological perspective, researchers very soon find themselves discussing psychology rather than sociology.

Psychology

Anyone with the remotest interest in the psychology of players of virtual worlds must—that’s must—look at John Suler’s hypertext book ¹, The Psychology of Cyberspace. Much of it is 100% relevant to virtual worlds (he talks about them directly), and some sections are classics in their own right. Others are merely short monographs, but almost no subfield of Internet-related psychology goes untouched. Suler has something to say about everything I mention in the remainder of this review, and more besides. There are other, more cohesive and directed introductions to the subject ², but none that I have encountered are as comprehensive as Suler’s.

Psychologists have found many things to interest them in virtual worlds, but two topics dominate: identity construction and addiction. I’ll take these in the order in which they were first written; perhaps surprisingly for many people, this means I’ll be starting with addiction.

In 1989, the year Jim Aspnes wrote TinyMUD, Margaret Shotton of Nottingham University in England published a book ³ about computer addiction. It reported a formal study she had undertaken in the mid-1980s, comprising data from a number of questionnaires and psychometric tests, coupled with interviews. Shotton explicitly included players of MUD1 in her survey, and referred to that world during the discussion of the results; indeed, one of the people with whom she conducted extensive interviews was a MUD1 player.

Shotton confirmed some people were indeed computer-dependent, and they could be divided into three types:

• Networkers used the computer as a means for communication.

• Workers used the computer for programming and other work activities.

• Explorers used the computer to program in an investigative manner for self-education.

Networkers was the category into which the majority of MUD1 players fitted. Shotton discovered that they were less likely to suffer (from their dependency) in their real-life relationships than workers or explorers; that said, neither of these other categories were particularly bad either. There was no evidence to suggest that people who spent a lot of free time on their computers pained their family any more (or any less) than people who spent a lot of time playing golf or star-gazing through telescopes. Computer addiction is like an addiction to stamp collecting or photography, rather than like drug or gambling addiction.

Shotton actually goes further than this. Not only did she demonstrate that the intense use of computers doesn’t turn outgoing extroverts into pale, reclusive hermits, but she also suggested that for some people the experience was very positive. Given that the print media at the time were publishing scare stories about “computer junkies” ⁴, this was great news for the developers of computer games ⁵.

Most of what Shotton wrote about computer dependency continues to apply, even though computers and the Internet have now become mainstream. This has not, however, prevented people from talking about “Internet addiction” as if it were a worse social evil than gun warfare. It is only to be expected that when an individual indulges for long periods in an activity that their close friends and family don’t understand, it will be cause for concern; that doesn’t mean that the people who are concerned are necessarily right, though. Concern is best addressed (one way or the other) through information: Either an activity is basically harmless, or it’s dangerous enough to warrant intervention.

Sadly, some psychologists and psychiatrists side with the friends and relatives without even listening to the other side of the argument. Kimberley Young, founder of the Center for On-Line Addiction ⁶, conducted a three-year study ⁷ of Internet addiction and pronounced it generally a bad thing. People sit around in chat rooms when they should be saying goodnight to their children! Well yes, that is a bad thing, but then people sit around in bars or watch TV when they should be saying goodnight to their children; the Internet provides the opportunity to become obsessive about more things, but it doesn’t actually make people obsessive—they’re like that already.

Although I don’t doubt there are some things on the Internet that can cause real social problems (pornography, for example), lumping together everything Internet-based as if it were the same thing is, in my opinion, a mistake. I’m particularly unimpressed by Young’s profile of an “on-lineaholic” called Steve who is addicted to LambdaMOO (she follows this up with helpful advice for a recovery strategy he could use).

LambdaMOO? Excuse me? LambdaMOO is a place—how can you be addicted to a place? You can be addicted to what you do in a place, which in Steve’s case seems to concern increasing his low self-esteem, but you can’t be addicted to the place itself ⁸.

Besides, who is to say that the addiction isn’t a positive thing? Virtual worlds are places where social interaction occurs, which is more than can be said for many of the alternatives (for example, watching TV). People can be addicted to things for good reasons, not just bad ones; personal development is, I believe, one of the former. In this kind of situation, the dependency will disappear on its own after the individual has achieved their goal (assuming they’re allowed to); any “addiction” here is psychological, not physical.

David Greenfield takes a more open view of Internet addiction ⁹, recognizing that in many cases all that people need to do is cut back, rather than give up; in this sense, the “addiction” is really “intense interest.” His attitude is that the Internet can offer unique and stimulating experiences, and only becomes a problem when it truly interferes with daily life ¹⁰. This is good sense: Just because you have a virtual life, you can’t ignore the maintenance of your real life that is required to support it.

Dinty Moore summarizes ¹¹ the different points of view about why people can’t leave virtual worlds alone as follows:

• The players are addicted. Computer games are addictive, and gamelike virtual worlds are even more so because they blur into reality and players don’t realize they’re playing a game ¹².

• The players are learning valuable lessons. They get to meet interesting people, and can socialize better than in the real world. Some learn to code, too.

• The players are college students who will do just about anything to avoid doing academic work.

The third of these has probably more truth in it than the other two put together…. So, what does all this mean for the designers of virtual worlds? Well, it means that although virtual worlds may be highly conducive to activities that cause addiction, playing them is not itself inherently addictive. It means that when people do become addicted, whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on what exactly they’re addicted to. It means that people who satisfy every field test for addiction may actually be pursuing an important personal goal with great determination. It means that you could be doing people a favor if you allow them to complete their goal.

Oh, and it also means you shouldn’t go out of your way to make the activities in your virtual world addictive; that way lies lawsuits. Popular is one thing, but real addiction is something else.

The possibility of deliberately addicting players to activities in virtual worlds has been investigated in a series of articles ¹³ by experimental psychologist John Hopson. His work confirms that goal-oriented virtual worlds already have powerful addictive features of conditioned reinforcement, which explains why some players will run on a leveling treadmill ¹⁴ for months on end and still want more. A morally unscrupulous or unthinkingly irresponsible virtual world designer could tune what has evolved anyway to intensify the experience even more; if they did, however, they’d be advised to seek premium legal counsel about what to put on their product’s box about it.

Incidentally, Hopson’s work shows it’s possible to look at the reasons people play virtual worlds purely in terms of this casino-style addiction; in such situations, there’s no requirement that players are undergoing the kind of potentially life-changing personal journey I have described in this book.

Which segues neatly to the topic of identity construction….

Addiction and identity issues are actually related; for many people, the chance to escape from the physical body is greatly attractive, and therefore the search for identity could be the addictive quality that keeps many people playing in virtual worlds. This was a point suggested by the first paper ¹⁵ to recognize the importance of identity experiment in virtual worlds, written in 1992 by Amy Bruckman.

Bruckman began her research as an investigation into what the cyberspace envisaged by Cyberpunk writers might be like when it arrived; when she discovered virtual worlds, she realized that it already had arrived, and switched the focus of her inquiry. Over the course of a month, she studied a number of virtual worlds, but concluded that she’d have to concentrate on a single one if she was ever to understand the phenomenon fully. She selected TrekMUSE.

Following Pavel Curtis, she noted that male-as-female cross-gender play occurred fairly frequently, commonly as a psychological exploration, but occasionally as a practical joke; as usual with practical jokes, they’re only amusing for the perpetrator, not the victim ¹⁶. She did some investigation into female-as-male play, too, but discovered evidence only of the “psychological exploration” style of cross-gender play ¹⁷. She also found that although men treated female-presenting characters with excessive courtesy, they often did the same to male-presenting newbies, too.

In examining addiction, Bruckman came to the conclusion that although playing virtual worlds was habit-forming, most players were able to stop if they wanted to and few long-term players were truly “stuck” in them. This makes any decision as to the goodness or badness of spending lots of time in virtual worlds essentially a value judgment (that is, the point unhappily missed by many of the “Internet addiction” brigade).

Although Bruckman linked addiction and identity issues, they were soon to become separated. This is perhaps due in part to the tremendous influence of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto ¹⁸. This is a utopian thought-experiment that envisages human beings as cyborgs in order to make a number of stinging points about the direction that feminism should go. It starts by stating three areas in which age-old boundaries have become blurred:

• Human and animal

• Organism and machine

• Physical and non-physical

Haraway argues that the lowering of these boundaries admits the possibility of the future existence of cyborg life-forms, then tokenizes such an entity so as to explore the consequences of its existence on feminist thinking.

It’s due to the second and (because it’s related) third of Haraway’s blurred boundaries that researchers became interested in virtual worlds. Traditionally, psychologists have separated mind, fantasy, and information from body, reality, and materiality, but virtual worlds don’t fit into this scheme at all well. By examining virtual worlds, perhaps some new ways of looking at issues of identity could be raised?

Lynn Cherny, taking Haraway’s point that cyberspace makes the position of “the body” problematical, looked at ¹⁹ different ways by which the player is split between being a physical entity at a keyboard and a virtual entity encoded in a computer.

As Cherny is a sociolinguist, much of her paper concerns describing some idiosyncratic (from the point of view of other virtual worlds) communication constructs used by players of her pseudonymous ElseMOO. She noted that although most of these activities were for fun, sometimes they were used in ways that are most definitely not fun: She was distressingly spoofed ²⁰ at one point during her investigation, and recommended that for ethical reasons players should not be able to manipulate other players as if they were puppets.

As I myself have argued in this book, I concur that there is a split between the physical and the virtual self. Furthermore, I believe that it is a purpose—no, a duty—of virtual worlds to facilitate the reconciliation of these selves, for the benefit of the real-life ²¹ individual.

As for the manipulation of other characters, well that’s an expectation issue. If you know it’s going to happen, and the degree to which it’s going to happen, there’s not a problem. If there were, then stage hypnotists couldn’t manipulate willing subjects for a living. What Cherny objected to when she was spoofed was basically that she did not have an expectation that this would happen; even if she knew it was possible, it was still a betrayal of trust. When people go into virtual worlds that look and behave in ways consistent with a particular kind of environment (real or imaginary) such that they can expect to have a reasonable understanding of what it will be like, then if something happens within that understood context it’s (morally, if not emotionally) fine. For example, a player in a fantasy world who goes up to a snake-eyed necromancer NPC famed for his mesmeric powers can hardly complain if their character is made to run amok while clucking like a chicken; they may not like it, but they can’t say it was unfair. If, however, the same thing happened in the same virtual world while the player’s character was buying provisions at a mundane downtown store, there’d better be a very good explanation (or an easy defense against the assault), otherwise it would be unfair.

Unfairness occurs when it’s your understanding that nothing awful is, in the current circumstances, permitted to happen by the virtual world’s rules (physics or terms of service), then it happens anyway. This is whether the consequences of the unfairness are (in virtual world terms) tangible or intangible. Most problems with unfairness come when groups of people (especially newbies) have a false view of cultural norms and do one of the following:

• React to what they perceive as unfairness, but most people think is fine.

• Perpetrate something most people think is an unfairness that they don’t perceive as such.

Allowing players to spoof other players’ actions is an absolutely classic and obvious way to cause this kind of trouble. In MUD1, I didn’t even consider giving spoofing capabilities to anyone but the virtual world’s administrators; it beggars belief that regular players were ever allowed to use it in MOOs except perhaps in the most rigorous of role-playing situations ²².

Charles Stivale analyzed ²³ the different opportunities virtual worlds present for players to harass one another to various degrees; he found identity assault to be the strongest form of harassment. The most interesting part of his paper is his discussion of how players of LambdaMOO reacted following an incident of “virtual rape” (the specifics of which I discuss in the next section ²⁴). They spent a great deal of time debating ways and means to define what forms of action could be construed as serious harassment, and although the discussion eventually floundered on arguments about what constitutes free speech in a world where everything is typed (and therefore covered by the First Amendment), it’s interesting to note that one obvious solution—remove the ability to spoof—was never on the agenda. In adventure-oriented virtual worlds, these commands are usually far too immersion-busting even to contemplate for everyday use, yet in early 1990s LambdaMOO they were apparently regarded as indispensable despite their obvious potential for misuse.

The major work on identity discovery in virtual worlds is Sherry Turkle’s superb Life on the Screen ²⁵. This is a wonderful book by a very influential author. In it, she makes a number of central points in a clear, easy-to-follow style ²⁶, charting her own personal experiences, but including such a rich seam of anecdotal excerpts from interviews with subjects that other researchers will be quoting her for years. What I particularly like about this book is that I agree with pretty well all her conclusions, despite having come from inside virtual worlds, whereas she comes from outside.

As I already mentioned in my Chapter 3, her Chapter 7 is the big one insofar as virtual world theorists are concerned; it’s there she gets to the heart of the identity issue. Is identity unitary or multiple? Is it a structure of mind or an illusion? She observes that on the Internet people “build a self by cycling through many selves,” which previously in real life this was very hard to accomplish. Virtual worlds, because they provide reality-presenting environments, are where this happens most intensely ²⁷; she characterizes them as “laboratories for the construction of identity,” and looks at them in considerable detail.

Turkle poses a series of important questions, most of which are yet to be answered (although I make an attempt to address some of them in this book). Those of most interest to virtual world designers are:

• What kind of virtual selves do people make?

• Do real-world selves learn lessons from virtual selves?

• How do the different selves communicate with each other?

• Why do people do this?

Using a number of case studies to support her theory, Turkle argues that virtual worlds allow individuals to express unexplored facets of themselves, or facets that they are unable to manifest in real life. She concludes experience in virtual worlds can greatly encourage personal growth and self-awareness, but cautions they can also be places where people lose their way and become trapped. The mechanism for this is identity drift (she calls the changes slippages), where character and player merge, where multiple selves join to form what the individual believes is their true self.

As a clinical psychologist, Turkle is keen to identify explicit ways by which people can work through issues in virtual worlds in therapeutic ²⁸ fashion—for example, by role-playing their real-life situation (or an analogy of it) in different ways. However, she notes that some people can repeatedly replay the same mistakes, learning nothing from them; this only serves to harden their attitudes and they hate themselves all the more for it, like ghosts doomed forever to echo the reality of their former-life’s deeds. This is reenacting, not reworking; it’s much less common than reworking, but it’s a serious problem for those who fall into it. Virtual worlds allow people to find who they want to be, but it’s up to the individuals themselves to become those people. Maybe for some, the distance between existing self and ideal self is just too great to travel.

On the other hand, it may be the design of the virtual world itself gets in the way. As John Hopson noted, there are ways to keep people playing in virtual worlds that have nothing to do with personal development. This is a point also made by Jonathan Baron, who describes ²⁹ a dialectic between game worlds that emphasize development over achievement and those that emphasize achievement over development. His assessment is basically that the former are the goal, and that people who aim for the latter are asking for trouble in the long term. For hero’s journey reasons, I totally agree with him on that point.

Although, as Sherry Turkle describes, some people do deliberately create characters with different personalities to see how they work, I contend that most people don’t. When they experiment with an archetype (for example, a new character class ³⁰), it’s usually because they’re bored with their first one, curious about the new one, or think they’ll have some in-world advantage as a result; they don’t make a conscious decision about which direction their personality should go in next (or if they do, it’s because they’re psychology majors or have experienced psychotherapy). To be fair, Turkle doesn’t say that everyone thinks explicitly about what identity they want either, but it could be easy for people unfamiliar with virtual worlds to come away from her book believing that identity drift is something that happens to only a few players; in my experience, it happens to pretty well all of them.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to describe my own views on identity. Personally, I view an individual as having a core self (or agglomeration of selves, it doesn’t really matter), which projects itself through the filters of action and word to present images to other individuals. The filter can be changed according to circumstances, but in the real world it’s difficult to do this because of the anchors of family, community, and society. People can find themselves projecting through filters they don’t like, or with which they don’t feel comfortable. Virtual worlds allow the filters to be changed experimentally and (as a consequence) experientially. Through playing them you can find the filter closest to clarity: The one for the person you feel yourself truly to be.

Identity exploration is generally seen as a good thing. Sherry Turkle noted that it can be problematical for individuals who discover their ideal self but resist moving toward it; Mark Slouka warns ³¹ that there are further difficulties when an individual wants to change but their identity issues are irreconcilable. He describes a male friend who, while masquerading as female, fell in love with another female character; she reciprocated his feelings without knowing he was male in real life ³². In this example, the virtual person and the real person can be reconciled intellectually and emotionally, but never physically; the female character’s personality can influence the male player’s (and vice versa), but they can never become one in the physical world. They can in the virtual one, therefore the male player is committed to spending as much time as possible there, but this is a relationship that can never be consummated. The fate of Slouka’s friend reminds me of that of Rilian, Prince of Narnia, enchanted so that he was only ever himself for one hour every night while bound in a silver chair ³³.

Slouka is right, too: There can be problems when the virtual world acts as a bridge between different parts of the real world. In general, players treat virtual worlds as if they were separate from the real world; this is an incredibly useful approximation to the truth, but (as I keep pointing out) virtual worlds exist courtesy of reality. Newton’s laws of motion work for everyday situations, but they break down when objects are traveling at close to the speed of light ³⁴; similarly, rules of virtual behavior work for everyday situations, but they break down when they travel close to reality ³⁵.

Every occurrence in a virtual world has a real-world effect: If nothing else, it is presented to the minds of those who observe its occurrence or who observe its effects. In most cases, this effect can be regarded as negligible compared even with the mere noise of existence surrounding the player. However, over time the accretion of these mental effects can be life-changing. People will develop as people, of course, but even in so doing there can be very unpleasant real-life physical effects. It’s quite conceivable, for example, that for the wrong person at the wrong time the permanent death of a character could cause the permanent death of the player ³⁶. Less drastically, falling in love can and does occur regularly in virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds may offer respite from reality, but reality is always, always in charge. You always have to come back. Of course, this could be used as a reason for not leaving it in the first place. Fortunately, my reality at the moment is in describing the psychological research I have discovered that addresses issues of identity exploration, so I’ll spare you my further speculations and return to that.

As with any science where the collection of data is expensive and time-consuming, psychologists have a tendency to talk about other people’s experiments rather than conduct their own. This means that eloquent or forceful essayists can pile interpretation on interpretation until they reach a collective explanation of an idealized state that may not equate with the truth. In looking at identity issues, MOOs, and other TinyMUD derivatives are the standard; much of what psychologists know about virtual worlds comes from MOOs (LambdaMOO in particular), even though they are hardly representative of virtual worlds in general.

Rather than relying on second-hand observations and idealistic interpretations, Elaine Raybourn conducted her own study ³⁷ of MOOs in 1998. She found that several of the tropes that had become current were actually quite wrong.

Raybourn started from the standpoint that players construct identities in virtual worlds. Her aim was to discover how they did it. Through interviews and participant observation, she discovered three themes that reflected the processes at work:

• Developing the programming skills that lead to privilege and status and to being a contributor to the community.

• Using creative communication skills to become more popular.

• Treating newbies to displays of active engagement, indifference, or abuse, so as to present an image of powerfulness.

These are not the kind of touchy-feely counterculture ideals normally described as being embedded in MOOs.

There are two main assumption failures:

• Although social virtual worlds do not have an explicit gain-points-for-doing-things hierarchy in place, that doesn’t mean there is no goal-oriented behavior. It’s not tangible (that is, programmed in), sure, but it exists. Players have, through their interactions, created a goal-oriented pecking-order system themselves.

• Community building is no more democratic than in real life. The earlier consensus among researchers was that more egalitarian communities formed in virtual reality because, freed from their bodies, people could project aspects of themselves which were received more positively, thereby creating stronger and more meaningful relationships. Raybourn discovered that community formation is actually heavily influenced by people’s efforts to gain respect, privileges, and popularity.

However much that players of adventure virtual worlds may welcome any research demonstrating that players of social virtual worlds are not their ideological superiors, the argument about goal-oriented behavior doesn’t actually say much. The “games” that people play in MOOs are the same ones “played” in any other social environment that has a power elite, such as an office, school, or factory (or, indeed, a too-easy adventure world that ceases character development before personal development has taken place; Michael Lawrie’s discussion ³⁸ of how he made MIST work as a game is very enlightening in this regard). It’s politics, and game-type virtual worlds have politics, too.

So people in a MOO may use political success to validate their identity constructions, but it’s the identity constructions that are at the heart of it because they’re the only material (real-world) change that can emerge from playing them (educational MOOs are an honorable exception).

One of the points that Raybourn makes most forcefully is that in virtual worlds “communication is identity”—with disembodiment, it’s all there is by which to judge anyone. This may be basically true in MOOs, but in adventure-style virtual worlds there are other ways to get a message across, too. All actions have a communication component: If I go off and fetch you something you need, I’m communicating an aspect of my personality even if I don’t say a word. Similarly, all communications have an action component: If I want to get through a locked door, then threatening you to give me the key could be considered an action undertaken by me to cause the door to open ³⁹. Actions speak louder than words, the pen is mightier than the sword; they’re different ends of a continuum. Raybourn is right, communication is identity, but communication isn’t only speech.

Raybourn’s paper has its flaws, but it goes some way to debunking the more idealistic views of virtual worlds that were becoming orthodoxy. Perhaps had she invested more than the 50 hours she did as a participant observer, she could have provided some insight into the way her three themes relate to one another among a community of players.

As for disembodiment, I offer the following summary: Actions can be physical or communicative, their effects real or virtual, to various degrees ⁴⁰. The same applies to people.

Although MOOs have a special place in the hearts of social science researchers, some do look at other codebases. Mizuko Ito’s object of study ⁴¹ was the (now defunct) LPMUD Farside. While, in general, toeing the Haraway disembodiment line and therefore saying pretty much the same as everyone else about virtual worlds’ capacity to blur the boundaries of mind and machine (reporting that it happens, rather than how or why it happens or what the consequences are for individuals), Ito also touches on something most other researchers missed by virtue of concentrating on MOOs and MUSEs: PKing (player-killing). Here, she does look at consequences and (because of the contested nature of these) accountability. She identifies several different reasons that players PK:

• Vigilantism, defending the innocent from PKs ⁴².

• In response to extreme provocation.

• They consider it to be part of the game.

• They are thrill-seekers, who enjoy the hunt.

• They are sociopaths.

Ito operates under the not unreasonable implicit assumption that everyone in a virtual world knows what the consensus attitude to PKing is (which, in general, is that the first two reasons are acceptable, as is the third between consenting adults). She notes that there is a qualitative difference between killing PCs and killing NPCs and mobiles, in that people are real.

It’s interesting to consider whether this will change as NPCs get increasingly better artificial intelligence; Haraway’s analogy cuts both ways.

The best article ⁴³ I have found about the reasons people PK was written by Lexley Vaughan, a MUD2 player rather than a psychologist (and a case study in identity exploration herself). In addition to Ito’s list, she adds

• Wannabes. People who think PKs are cool, and hang around in gangs talking up themselves into occasional acts of violence.

• Achievers. The classic player type, testing the viability of PKing as a means of scoring points.

• Explorers. Another classic player type, exploring this aspect of the virtual world just like they would any other.

• Broken achievers. Achievers who have been attacked once too often and snapped. They PK as a form of protest.

• Broken explorers. Like broken achievers, but deadlier. They don’t even care if they lose.

• Provers. These form the main body of PKs, characterized by their identity issues. They are people with low self-esteem, who choose to beat up other players (usually ones completely unable to defend themselves) to prove their self-worth. Unfortunately, more often than not this only reinforces their (and everyone else’s) belief that they’re losers.

• Big whackers. Alpha males strutting their stuff.

Lexley also identifies different types of PK run by administration-level players; she doesn’t, however, address the issues of marauding bandit gangs that plague large-scale virtual worlds where PKing is allowed.

Another player who has eloquently expressed how the identity issues of some people can spoil the fun of others is Arios Truthseeker. His 2000 Essay on D00dism ⁴⁴ describes the phenomenon of the d00d, a class of individuals prevalent in game-oriented virtual worlds (especially graphical ones) characterized by their stylistic spelling, their uniformity of self-perceived coolness ⁴⁵, and their complete disregard for the sensibilities of everyone else. They exploit virtual worlds as places to gain the acceptance and gratification that they lack in the real world, little realizing that their almost total objectification of other players means they are achieving nothing of the sort except perhaps among fellow d00ds. Truthseeker ⁴⁶ offers a number of strategies for dealing with d00ds as a player and, more importantly from the point of view of this book, as a designer.

The only major solution Truthseeker doesn’t appear to consider is that of letting d00ds complete their hero’s journey. Over the years, I’ve encountered several players who, had they been around today, would have qualified as d00ds. Some of them turned into the best wizards (even arch-wizards) I ever had. The d00d of today could be the responsible leader of tomorrow, if someone hasn’t tracked them down in real life and used physical threats to stop their playing ever again.

This almost brings me to the end of my discussion of the psychology of identity with regards to virtual worlds. There’s a lot more out there on the subject, especially in the cyberculture literature, some of which I’ll be coming to shortly from a different angle.

Firstly, as an aside, I confess that I was both surprised and elated when I discovered that psychologists had so quickly latched onto the fact that virtual worlds are catalysts for identity exploration. My only disappointment was that they didn’t realize that this was in part because virtual worlds had been designed as such. The best functional designs are supposed to be those that work while remaining invisible to the user, so I guess virtual world designers should take this as a compliment. On the other hand, it reinforces the common prejudice that we’re unrounded, geeky, emotionally adolescent individuals who couldn’t tell a Renaissance from a Reformation if one came up and bit us. Oh well, such is our lot.

Now the remaining points about identity construction.

For some people, an important component of their identity is their race. This is particularly true of individuals who find themselves in an environment where their own race is not dominant. Although for some people race is a physical notation of (their or others’) difference, this is not always the case: Other people may regard it as a cultural marker (genetic difference correlating with, rather than defining, cultural difference); others ignore race entirely. This latter approach (“color blindness”) is the liberal point of view, but it diminishes people for whom their race is a part of who they are.

This is a point made by Lisa Nakamura, who examined ⁴⁷ issues of race in the context of (you guessed it) LambdaMOO. Nakamura asserts that by not giving players the option of defining their characters’ race, LambdaMOO is in fact defining it for them: All players are assumed to be white ⁴⁸. Unfortunately for her, even if they were able to define their characters’ race, there’s still a strong chance that all players would be assumed to be white, in the same way that female characters in a male-heavy virtual world are assumed by default to be real-life male. LambdaMOO characters are not LambdaMOO players.

Nakamura discovered that race does make an appearance in LambdaMOO, however, through the recreational appropriation of stereotypes. She encountered many Asian-presenting characters in the form of replications of TV, movie, and book characters. She portrays the (presumed white) players behind these characters as identity tourists, staying awhile in another race before moving on somewhere else; naturally, as with all stereotyping, they were only ever going to reinforce their stereotypes this way, rather than actually learning something about the race they were pretending to be.

Nakamura characterizes this racial tourism as “passing,” but I don’t believe it is. The stereotypes chosen are almost universally obvious as being stereotypes: No one is going to believe that someone claiming to be a samurai warrior really is a samurai warrior, therefore the whole point of passing—getting away with pretending to be something you’re not—is undone. Were a non-Asian to pretend to be a Japanese student of English, that would be passing; pretending to be Sulu from Star Trek is no more passing than pretending to be Spock.

Many virtual worlds do have “races,” of course, it’s just that these just don’t correspond to real ones: You can be an elf, a dwarf, a halfling, and so on. In virtual worlds for virtual characters, these are as meaningful as any other race—more so in tangible terms, because whereas with real-world races it would be improper to give members of one race superior characteristics to those of another, for imaginary races it is acceptable (although see Chapter 8, “Coda: Ethical Considerations,” for a discussion of why perhaps it shouldn’t be).

These “races” are actually more like subspecies than races, of course, which blurs the issue even further. If I can be an elf, can I be a Jewish elf ⁴⁹ or a Chinese elf? Can I be an Inuit leprechaun, or are all leprechauns Irish?

To experiment with issues of race in virtual worlds, Beth Kolko has established a virtual world (MOOScape) specifically for this purpose ⁵⁰. Sensing that an important element of real-world identity is missing from virtual identity, her aim is to ask how the global marking of a character’s race affects the social environment of virtual worlds. It’s a reasonable thing to do; after all, if LambdaMOO lets you define your character’s age, why shouldn’t you define its race ⁵¹?

In setting up MOOScape, Kolko had to decide how to put in the racial specifier. She had basically three choices:

• Very intrusively, like gender. Reflect it in every third-person message concerning the player.

• Moderately intrusively, like mood. Reflect it in every reference to the player’s actions—for example, their movement.

• Moderately unintrusively. Reflect it only in the descriptions of players that people get when they look at them.

She eventually decided on the latter; you know what race other characters are, but it doesn’t intervene overtly in interactions between players.

A trickier issue was what races people were allowed. The problem with a closed data set (that is, a list of races from which people should select one) is that not everyone finds a description with which they feel comfortable. On the basis that MOOScape was introducing race into virtual worlds, rather than defining it, Kolko went with an open data set: Despite reservations that races like elves and lizardfolk would make an appearance, players are allowed to describe their race in whatever terms they wished.

The results of the MOOScape experiment should be interesting. Race only makes sense in the real world; by asking about race, MOOScape is asking players to reveal something about themselves, rather than about their characters. If your character is you, there’s not an issue here, of course: In situations where the virtual world is being used as an adjunct to reality—hosting a business meeting, for example—your character is merely an avatar and people will always relate to you rather than to it.

However, in most virtual worlds your character is not you ⁵².

In an absolute sense, race is a purely physical property. It does not transfer to virtual worlds except when referencing a physical entity (that is, the player—something to be avoided in virtual worlds if they are to maintain their immersive integrity). Put bluntly, if you say you want your character to be a certain (real-world) race in a virtual world, you are arguing only for a cosmetic change to your character’s appearance. That cosmetic change may be associated (by you or other players) with certain real-world cultural baggage, but the nature of this baggage is dependent on the real-world culture of the players that participate in or witness it.

For example, let’s suppose that race is a choice. People cross-gender play out of curiosity, so we’ll assume that some will cross-race play, too. Let’s further assume that some non-Asians play as Asians and truly (rather than in the Nakamura sense) try to pass. Would they learn about what it is like to be an Asian that way? No: They would only learn what it is like to be viewed as an Asian character by the players of that particular virtual world. They get insights into mind-sets, but not into genetics.

You can’t learn about the physical aspects of a race by role-playing a member of it; all you can learn about is the culture with which that race is associated (by its representatives, by other cultures, and by you). You might learn about any of these, but they only tell you about states of mind. In Reality, race (like gender) is a badge that people are forced to wear wherever they go. In virtual worlds, like it or not, that badge is removed. You can put it back on your virtual self, but so can anyone. In real life, people who wear the same badge may feel disposed to interact differently with other people depending on the badges they wear, and cultural differences will arise because of this. In virtual worlds, badge-wearing is arbitrary; race is therefore expressed only through the culture of individuals of that race (if that race has a race-specific culture).

Players of virtual worlds for whom their race is an important part of their identity have a dilemma here. To be true to themselves, they want their characters to exhibit the same indelible mark that they use to define themselves; however, in virtual worlds these marks are not indelible. Do these people therefore campaign to bind the cosmetic features of characters to those of their players (knowing it would be unpoliceable)? Or do they discard that part of their identity that is coupled to the nature of their physical body and align with the portable aspects of their culture instead?

Another important component of identity for people in the real world is their sexuality. Unlike the situation for race and gender, people in the real world do not have to wear irremovable badges that proclaim their sexuality (although they may choose to present indicators, overt or otherwise). This means that there’s not much call to implement sexuality as a physical characteristic in a virtual world ⁵³; sexuality-defined subcultures are not tied to physical markers (although in real life obviously they are tied to physical activity), and therefore they transfer reasonably easily to virtual worlds.

Most virtual worlds take no line on sexuality, which (apropos Nakamura’s argument about race) perhaps means they actually do take a line—that is, heterosexuality ⁵⁴ is the norm. Actually, for a fair number of them sexuality really isn’t an issue, because sex itself isn’t; the subject simply wouldn’t arise in a virtual world written for children, for example, and the same is true of many other (particularly gamelike) virtual worlds.

That said, even in gamelike virtual worlds, people do meet and fall in love. Both heterosexuals and homosexuals can operate in this kind of environment; it’s pro-heterosexual, but usually more tolerant than real life (you can play characters of the opposite gender, after all) and therefore not a major barrier for homosexuals who (like it or not) are obliged to operate under these conditions in reality anyway.

The real world has its homosexual subcultures, however, and it’s natural that people may want to bring theirs with them into virtual worlds. There are essentially three ways to do it:

• Set up a virtual world for which this is the dominant culture.

• Join a virtual world that has similar or related subcultures.

• Incorporate the culture in a ghetto within a regular virtual world.

Virtual worlds of the first kind do exist, although they are not in general advertised outside their target player base (probably so as to avoid attracting homophobes ⁵⁵). They are split by gender, because the subcultures for men and women are different. The two most interesting experiments are both aimed at women, Shoujo-Ai MUSH ⁵⁶ and Isle of Lesbos ⁵⁷.

General sex-oriented virtual worlds, which are usually friendly to people whatever their sexual orientations and preferences, have been around since Void. Despite what people may think, players do not spend their whole time in these worlds engaging in imaginative acts of virtual sex. They are as likely to sit around chatting about nothing as players in any other virtual world (although their very nature makes their cliques and communities quite tightly knit). HavenMUSH ⁵⁸ is probably the best-known example of this kind of “responsibly adult” world.

Randal Woodland describes ⁵⁹ the third of these approaches (all of which, incidentally, he calls queer spaces). In examining how four different online systems (the other three are BBS/forum-oriented) cater to homosexual identity, he describes a part of LambdaMOO called Weaveworld. This subworld is ⁶⁰ both accessible and distinct from the rest of the virtual world, using a series of very subtle symbols to indicate to those passers-by attuned to such things as the nature of its contents. The reasons for this tactfulness are so as not to appear in-your-face to other players of LambdaMOO (as both a courtesy to the general population and a defense against potential hate-players), and to impart a sense of sophistication (that is, to tell visitors that it’s not a place built for devotees of narcissistic sex).

In terms of the effect of these different queer spaces on identity, Woodland is reticent. He describes, for example, a case where the creation of a psychologically safe haven for gay men fell through because of freedom of speech objections. He doesn’t say whether in a virtual environment where no one knows who you are, the issues of psychological safety are different from those of real life. Can cultural tropes that have evolved in response to real-life hostility be shed? Are people who follow the same rituals in virtual worlds that they do in the real one passing up on liberation, or merely being pragmatic? What are the implications of a virtual world where every character (if not player) is the same sex?

To speculate further, for many people gender, race, and sexuality are part of their real-life identity. They are not of equal status, however, because of their visibility. Gender is visible in the real world (through physical characteristics) and in the virtual world (through pronouns in textual worlds and avatars in graphical ones). Sexuality is invisible in the real world and invisible in the virtual world; people who want to display it have to use signs, which may be understood by everyone (you walk around with a notice hanging round your neck saying “I am gay”) or only by those in sync with such matters (Weaveworld’s references to paganism, sensuality, ancient Greek warriors, and so on).

Race, however, is visible in the real world but (in the textual case at least) invisible in virtual worlds. Is race only ultimately important because it is visible in the real world (in which case, wouldn’t a virtual world undermine real-life identity?), or is it legitimately important for cultural or biologically imperative reasons too (in which case, will people for whom race is important have to develop their own codified signals for recognizing one another?).

There are many questions here to which it would be interesting to know the answer; unfortunately, the research on virtual worlds concerned with race and/or sexuality is relatively thin on the ground ⁶¹.

This is in stark contrast to our next topic: gender studies.

Gender Studies

I learned through experience as an undergraduate at Essex University that as a male I have been irredeemably socialized to hold oppressive, androcentric views about all things gender and that therefore my opinions on the subject are worth less than nothing. Even seemingly neutral actions on my part are inherently tainted by my early conditioning and testosterone-charged world-view, so can therefore only be regarded as manifestations of my poisoned, male psyche. Consequently, if you don’t want the purity of your beliefs about gender issues adulterated, you should skip this section.

For those of you who know sarcasm when you see it, read on….

The general point here is correct: Anything people say about gender is inevitably moderated by their own experiences. Whatever I write on the subject—even my selection of research paper references—really is influenced by my upbringing and physiology. However, the same applies to every individual on the planet, so I’m not alone in that; furthermore, it isn’t only true for gender studies, but pretty well “anything else,” too.

Much work in gender studies is from a feminist perspective ¹, which makes my position slightly more dubious. There isn’t a lot I can do about this, though. I shall strive to be impartial (although not necessarily unopinionated where virtual worlds are concerned); if I slip up you can blame me, not my gender.

So here we go….

Gender Studies is not Sex Studies; there is a difference between sex, and gender, essentially anthropological. Sex is a biological condition; gender refers to the behaviors associated with the sexes. Sex is uniform across all cultures; gender varies across cultures.

Gender influences people in two main ways: Through their gender identity (that is, their feeling of being male or female) and through their gender roles (that is, what their society establishes as appropriate behavior for females and males). Although there are only two sexes, some societies have more than two genders (usually to account for individuals whose biological sex does not match their gender identity). Gender roles may have a biological origin (the “boys will be boys” argument) or a cultural evolutionary one (tribes whose womenfolk fought and died alongside their menfolk had fewer babies than ones where only the menfolk fought, so the former were eventually outnumbered and defeated by the latter). Alternatively, gender roles may arise as the result of pressures from other cultural activities.

Although this is the classic, anthropological view of gender, it is not one that is universally held among gender theorists. They regard sex as an essentialist concept (that is, something that has intrinsic meaning beyond what perception reveals), whereas their preference is for a more constructivist ² approach (that is, that things only have the meanings that individuals construct for them based on the sensory data). This would suggest that sex/gender were part of the same system, but as Tomasz Mazur describes in an early review ³ of how gender studies theory applies to virtual worlds, this doesn’t work either—it flounders on the concept of identity. Mazur argues that virtual worlds themselves have a similar problem, with “real” being essentialist and “virtual” being constructivist, and identity existing in both and neither at the same time. He adopts a post-modernist ⁴ stance to address these issues.

Problematical though the fundamentals may be at a philosophical level, this is not something that normally concerns students of gender with regard to virtual worlds. Rather, they are primarily interested in two specific aspects of player behavior that introduce new variables into their own equations: cross-gender play and virtual sex. I’ll take these in that order.

If there were a pill that changed your real-life sex for one day only, would you take it? The science isn’t important—a mass of nanotechnology DNA-tampering machines could perhaps do it—but would you take it? Why would you want to? Why wouldn’t you want to? What would the effect be on gender issues in a world where anyone could take such a pill?

In virtual worlds, that pill is already available, without prescription.

The paper that brought the practice of cross-gender play to the attention of nonplayers was Amy Bruckman’s Gender Swapping on the Internet ⁵. This followed up on some of the activity she had noted in her earlier Identity Workshop paper, and includes interviews and other set pieces that have been heavily quoted by later researchers. She observed two behavioral patterns in particular that were to resonate with many people: That female characters are subjected to unwanted sexual advances; that female characters are assumed to be in need of help.

Bruckman indirectly suggests that the two may be related. Offers of help can be viewed as tokens of interest; by accepting the token, the recipient is signifying their acceptance of the other person’s interest; they are then obligated to respond favorably. Although some may see this as buying favor—and it may well be just that in some cases—it isn’t always. Sometimes, it’s just social interaction. Similarly, whether an offer of help is an esteem-damaging, patronizing assumption of vulnerability or the first move in a mating game depends largely on the attitudes of the players involved.

Unusually, Bruckman views gender as just one aspect of identity, on a par with (say) nationality. I share this view, but it’s not one that cuts much ice with those who politicize gender; Bruckman has been criticized for taking this position. I personally find it difficult to see why gender should be preeminent; race and sexuality are perhaps as much a part of a person’s identity as their gender, but these don’t get anywhere near the coverage that gender does. Perhaps it’s more to do with the way that most languages (through pronouns) force gender to be an issue; race and sexuality are not denoted in this way, and therefore have a much lower profile ⁶.

Bruckman characterizes gender as being malleable in virtual worlds. She means in the self, not in the character, but other researchers don’t always realize this and have occasionally questioned it. Bruckman, as (by then) a player of virtual worlds, could understand the difference between real and virtual self from an experiential point of view; researchers who have only an intellectual understanding are more prone to miss the point.

Sherry Turkle also writes about cross-gender play in Life on the Screen (in her Chapter 8); she even interviews some of the same people as Bruckman. She sees cross-gender play as challenging and psychologically complicated; characters that are neither male nor female she finds disturbing, yet evocative. As a result of her studies, she puts forward the hypothesis that gender exploration is a valid part of identity exploration in general; it can lead to the development of a person as an individual, due (at least) to the extension of their emotional range that it stimulates.

The existence of genders other than male and female in some virtual worlds is discussed ⁷ by Brenda Danet. Danet regards gender as a tyranny, and is therefore interested in the opportunities presented by the Internet—where all conventional gender cues are absent—for gender-free existence. She looked at Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and MOOs, and found that in both, individuals can successfully camouflage their identities for very long periods. Cross-gender play in MOOs, though, was much more elaborate than in IRC ⁸.

MOOs typically have more than the usual two genders available to them ⁹, some of which may be considered a third gender, others a non-commitment to gender, and others completely genderless. Examples include:

• Neutral (“Sam puts its cards on the table”)

• Either (“Sam puts his/her cards on the table”)

• Plural (“Sam puts their cards on the table”)

• Spivak ¹⁰ (“Sam puts eir cards on the table”)

• Person (“Sam puts per cards on the table”)

From my point of view, this is interesting because in MUD1 I didn’t want gender to be a tangible property of characters. My own dialect of English—Yorkshire—uses near-plural by default for people whose gender is unknown or unspecified (as you will doubtless have noticed in this book, where I habitually refer to singular but generic players as “they” or “them”). As a student, I was once told off for using the word “themself” in a report, which up until then I hadn’t even considered not to be an English word ¹¹. For me, if I were informed that a new teacher had joined a school, it would be perfectly natural to ask “what’s their name?” rather than “what’s his or her name?” ¹². This approach was not suitable for MUD1, though, because for non-dialect speakers it looked bizarre (although it has since gained much wider acceptance, at least in England) and because sustaining it when gender is known is untenable.

My preferred alternative to implementing gender was to use a pronoun-free denotational approach instead (“Sam puts Sam’s cards on the table”), but I abandoned this on the grounds that it was too intrusive—I wanted to draw people into the virtual world, and the erection of constant billboards that said they were reading text was too much of an interference ¹³. It’s amusing to note that neither of the ways I considered for the linguistic avoidance of gender (near-plural ¹⁴ or denotational) have found any currency in MOOs.

Danet looked at gender choices for two large MOOs: LambdaMOO and (Amy Bruckman’s) MediaMOO ¹⁵. Both have non-binary gender classifications in place, and Danet examined the proportion of players who chose to take advantage of the alternatives to male/female that were available. She found that on LambdaMOO, roughly 50% of the characters were male, 30% were female and 20% were neither; on MediaMOO, 50% were male, 20% were female and 30% were neither.

There may be any number of reasons for this difference. Perhaps the media professionals of MediaMOO have a more progressive attitude to gender, or the balance of players’ real-life genders in the two games is significantly different. Danet’s observation that the real-life identity (and therefore gender) of MediaMOO’s players is known, whereas that of LambdaMOO’s isn’t, muddies the waters still further. Are MediaMOO players more likely to make gender-political statements, knowing that they may be called to account afterward if they don’t? Or is the fact that no one can accuse them of attempting to be deceitful by playing with their gender a liberating factor?

Danet’s paper ends with 11 questions for future research into cross-gender play, all of which have yet to be fully answered.

I should point out at this stage that there are two opposing views concerning whether cross-gender play is a good thing or a bad thing. They can be summarized as

• Cross-gender play is good, because it emancipates the individual.

• Cross-gender play is bad, because it subjugates the group.

At one level, its researchers’ views are inconsequential: Cross-gender play happens, and it will continue to happen no matter what people believe should happen and no matter what ideology they want it to fit. They can’t stop it, police it or exploit it, so incorporating it into their theories is purely an academic exercise. Virtual designers know implicitly, however, that things can be done to promote one side of the argument over the other, thereby encouraging or discouraging the practice. Creating mechanisms for characters’ gender to flip periodically through the use of magic or magiclike effects, for example, would encourage cross-gender play ¹⁶; making graphical avatars physically plain (if not ugly) would discourage it.

So, let’s look at some of the objections in more detail.

One of the hopes that feminists had about cross-gender play was that it would lead to a fluidity of gender. Lori Kendall points out ¹⁷ that in practice it does the opposite: People come to entertain a more rigid understanding of gender identities than they had before. They focus on the “true” identity behind the mask, rather than the one that is presented ¹⁸. Women came to virtual worlds later than men, therefore the cultures they had to join were already in place when they arrived, and thus the likelihood of changing this situation is not going to increase by much even if more women do participate in these virtual worlds—at least, not unless everyone makes a conscious effort.

This argument looks fine on the face of it, but it relies on regarding virtual worlds as extensions of Reality. In an absolute sense, they are part of Reality and therefore can indeed be considered physical extensions of it. They are not, however, extensions of the models of Reality that players have in their heads. Even social MOOs are separate from reality, as many players understand immediately and those that don’t will come to realize in the long-term. The hardware that supports each virtual world, and therefore the implementation of the virtual worlds, is in Reality; however, the virtual worlds themselves only exist in the imaginations of their players. They’re not worlds because they are worlds; they’re worlds because people think they’re worlds. What’s more, players think these worlds are not the real world.

The only things that exist in both the virtual world and the real world are the players’ identities. Kendall is correct in her observation that gender types in virtual worlds can be very stereotypical, tending to crystallize around some falsely perceived “essence” for each gender. Where I believe her to be mistaken is in concluding that these only serve to reinforce existing notions of gender and therefore add to the general woes of women (in particular) when they are acted on in real life. For players who can’t yet separate the real from the virtual, this may be true; for the rest, it isn’t ¹⁹.

Characters and players both move. The formal role that a character takes on may be some stylization of a false perception of Reality, but experience in playing that role will change both the character and the player. The character will change when behavioral expectations meet the reality of other players’ attitudes; the player will change when these expectations meet the player’s own attitudes. There is a fluidity of gender identity, and the stereotype drives it; in other words, where the stereotype exists it’s to show that it’s wrong.

Over time, the relevance of both Kendall’s and my positions may diminish. As players’ experience with virtual worlds grows, it could be that gender moves on and that stereotypes become irrelevant. While newbies still arrive with real-world gender issues to address, however, the likelihood of any such paradigm shift’s occurring is doubtful.

A second objection is raised by Jocelyne Voisin. She points out ²⁰ that in radical feminist theories, separatism sometimes plays a central role: The creation of a woman-only environment is seen the only way to escape patriarchal oppression. In the real world, such safe haven environments do exist—spaces from which men are banned—but they are relatively small in number. A separatist virtual world would be easier for many women to reach, and more conducive than real life to discovering whether the assumed benefits of such an environment (a supportive, egalitarian, nurturing community) would in fact arise and be sustainable over the long term. Gender masquerading, however, rules this out as a possibility: If there’s no way to tell that a female-presenting character has a biologically female player running it, the extent to which these spaces can be considered exclusively feminine is limited.

Voisin is right: Cross-gender play does undermine such feminist virtual utopias (as transsexuals pose problems for real-life “female-only” spaces). Deliberate infiltration of a female space is not likely to happen often, but even so that may be more often than is acceptable. Unfortunately for the radicals, there’s very little that can be done about this; even proof of real-life identity when an account was created doesn’t guarantee that the person later using the account is the one whose identity was proven ²¹. Creating a virtual world with all-female characters doesn’t mean you’ll get all-female players; the only way to guarantee all-female players is to have them under constant real-world surveillance as they play—hardly a situation that could be described as supportive or egalitarian. So although cross-gender play validates feminist conspiracy theorists’ worst fears, it’s unstoppable and unavoidable; taking an uncompromising view of it isn’t going to change a thing.

Countering that view is the suggestion made by Michèle White that perhaps virtual worlds are intrinsically not female-friendly places anyway, at least as they are currently designed. White’s complaint ²² is that the commands used in MOOs to obtain information about other players suggest a surveillant attitude and use voyeuristic terminology (“watch,” “scope,” “glance,” “peep,” “gawk,” “examine,” and so on). The “look” command itself, with the third-person messages it triggers, is worst of all; frequently, new players are distressed when they are continually looked at by other players. The concept of “gaze” is important in feminist theories, because implicit in it is a communication between the gazer and the gazee. MOOs unequivocally empower the gazer: Gazing is active; self-image is passive. In other words, you describe yourself for the benefit of the person who looks, not for the benefit of yourself. This limits the identity constructs that people can create, which is bad for everyone no matter what gender they are playing.

I have some sympathy with White’s position. In my own virtual worlds, players don’t get to describe their characters—I believe that allowing it anchors character development too much. On the other hand, looking at a character is permitted (it concocts a brief description based on their tangible properties), along with large numbers of other commands that have characters as their objects (including “hit”). Although White herself doesn’t argue this, anyone willing to construe such commands as empowering those who issue them at the expense of those against whom they are issued would surmise that virtual worlds (even graphical ones) were less than ideal. Quite how to implement these kinds of commands some other way is non-obvious, too. That said, virtual worlds are still much better than the real one in this respect, because at least the “empowering” actions are open to anyone.

Returning to the issue of how cross-gender play undermines attempts to set up female-only virtual communities, it could be that the problem might be worse in theory than in practice; it depends on the actual incidence of cross-gender play. If far fewer men play as female characters than anecdotal evidence suggests, the effects of their presence might amount to mere background noise. It would therefore be very useful if empirical evidence existed to show how widespread cross-gender playing really is. At a more general level, it would also be very nice to know if the predictions as to why people play across gender are in fact accurate.

I know of two studies that have attempted to answer these questions ²³.

The first study is by Kathryn Wright, who is the resident consulting psychologist at womengamers.com ²⁴. Her perspective is that of female computer game players (among whom she numbers), rather than of gender studies; nevertheless, the results of her study ²⁵ are relevant in this context.

Wright surveyed men who played female characters across a variety of game types, but mainly those of first-person shooters and (gamelike) graphical virtual worlds. 57% of her respondents (all of whom claimed to be male in real life) played as female characters for over half the time. Respondents were asked to describe in their own words why they played as female characters; when Wright analyzed the results, she found they fell into the following categories ²⁶:

• 25% said it added to the role-playing experience (of which 19% cited gender exploration as a motivation).

• 23% did it for the visual stimulation (that is, sexual aesthetics ²⁷).

• 19% did it because the avatars were smaller and harder to see/hit.

• 16% did it to be given gifts.

• 14% did it because female characters had better skills.

• 14% said they preferred the modeling (that is, non-sexual aesthetics).

• 13% did it for variety.

• 11% did it to get a psychological edge over the other players.

• 6% preferred the sounds that female avatars made.

• 6% did it to amuse themselves at the reactions of male players.

• 6% did it from habit: They started, and hadn’t found a reason to stop.

Although role-playing comes out as the top reason, many others are for gameplay purposes, that is, female characters have an edge for whatever reason, and so they are played as a means to an end. Wright anticipated this and asked a series of follow-up questions; read her papers if you want to know what she found (it’s interesting, but not relevant to the current discussion).

As a final question, Wright asked whether cross-gender players thought there was a correlation between men who played as women and men who were homosexual or confused about their gender; this was in response to something that happened when she advertised for respondents to her survey (she was accused of doing the survey in order to meet homosexual EverQuest players). She found that among the respondents themselves

• 60% said there was no correlation.

• 15% said there may be for some people, but not for everyone.

• 12% said there was for them personally, but not for everyone.

• 12% didn’t answer.

Wright notes that no cross-gender players reported a belief that men who play as female characters are homosexual by default.

Wright’s survey was limited, in that she had 64 respondents of which only 33 actually completed her survey (the rest gave their opinions via email). She concluded that lumping together role-playing, fighting and action gamers was inadvisable, because too many answers were dependent on the type of game that the players played. Nevertheless, her results do suggest that some cross-gender players really do perform it for reasons of exploring their identity.

A much more formal and detailed survey ²⁸ was undertaken by Lynne Roberts and Malcolm Parks in 2000. Their methods were very thorough: They selected the largest two social MOOs plus five others chosen at random, and from these selected (also at random) 1,200 candidate characters ²⁹ that had been played during the previous 14 days. A second study included players of role-playing MOOs. The candidates were contacted individually, and around 30% agreed to take part.

Unlike Wright’s survey, which looked only at the cross-gender players themselves, Roberts’s and Parks’s examined the views of all players on the subjects. Their findings make very interesting reading. For example, they discovered that the male/female player breakdown ³⁰ in the MOOs they surveyed approached parity (48.1% female in study 1, 47.0% in study 2); this is a much higher ratio than is common for regular computer games ³¹.

Roberts and Parks discovered that around 60% of the players of social MOOs had never played cross-gender, but that around 20% were engaged in it at some time during the 14 days the survey covered. In role-playing MOOs, 43.3% had never tried it but 40.0% were currently cross-gender playing. Including all the personality and sexuality tests that the studies incorporated, playing in a role-playing MOO was found to be the greatest predictor that an individual selected at random from the respondents was or had tried cross-gender playing. Perhaps surprisingly, real-life gender was not found to be a predictor of cross-gender play: Female players were as likely to play another gender as were male players.

I said “another gender” there, because of course MOOs have multiple genders. 78.7% of cross-gender play was found to be to the opposite gender (that is, male or female) of the real-life player, whereas the remaining cross-gender ³² players opted for something else; this is in line with Danet’s figures from LambdaMOO four years earlier.

As for why they played across genders, the reasons players gave were consistent but the proportions varied between those who were currently doing it and those who had tried it but stopped. Among current cross-gender players, 31.3% said it was part of role-playing or a challenge to their role-playing skills, whereas 13.4% of former cross-gender players did. Conversely, 13.5% of current cross-gender players said they had started cross-gender playing to experiment with gender, whereas 34.3% of former cross-gender players did. Why there should be this reversal clearly merits further investigation.

The surveys produced many other results about who cross-gender plays and why; read the paper itself for the full details. From the point of the discussion here, there are two issues the results raise that are of particular importance.

Firstly, the studies do seem to show that cross-gender play is a widespread activity. Roberts and Parks themselves do not conclude that it is prevalent, pointing out that although many players had played cross-gender in the two-week period the study covered, only 22.6% of those Study 1 respondents who had done so had spent more than 60% of their playing time pursuing the activity. For Study 2, the figures were better: 31.5% of cross-gender players spent more than 70% of their time doing it, of which 20% said they played the whole time during the previous two weeks as a gender other than their real-life one. Roberts and Parks are correct that cross-gender play isn’t prevalent (if “prevalent” means “more than 50%,” which from a strictly statistical point of view it must); their results would seem to indicate that it’s quite a common activity, though, even in purely social (as opposed to role-playing) MOOs. I suspect that the figures for goal-oriented virtual worlds would be higher, since players of these are more formally embarked on an exercise of identity exploration ³³; my only caveat is that some people object to cross-gender play in principle, and these may be more common in such gamelike worlds.

This brings me to the second point of special significance in Roberts’s and Park’s results: Why people don’t play cross-gender. The studies found that many of those players who had never played cross-gender believed that the activity was manipulative, was used to lure people into having virtual sex, and was a way to cause trouble for people who didn’t do it. They were upset and uncomfortable when confronted by someone not playing as their biological sex. Personally, I’m very disappointed by this; the cited activities are ones that cross-gender play should weaken, not strengthen! I can only hope that the people who hold these points of view do so out of ignorance, and that as they come to understand the difference between the real and the virtual (that is, that there is one) they may revise their opinions ³⁴.

As I mentioned earlier, Roberts’s and Parks’s survey showed that cross-gender playing by female players was far more common than is usually supposed; their studies showed that it happened as often as it did for male players. The reasons that women play cross-gender are different, however. A short article ³⁵ by (female) player Natalia, who plays as a male character 90% of the time, explains that she does it mainly to avoid the nuisance of unwanted attention that female characters get (gifts and pickup lines). This treatment of female characters has been noted many times before, however a point that Natalia makes which is often not reported is that it’s only a very small minority of players who make playing as a female character unpleasant—sometimes only one in the whole virtual world. After all, when she plays as a male character and doesn’t hit on female characters, no one comments at all—it isn’t regarded as unusual. This would seem to suggest that intervention by the community management team could eliminate the problem, at least in relatively small virtual worlds.

Daphne Desser undertook a small study ³⁶ of women who mask their gender in virtual worlds, to judge the effectiveness of female rhetorical practices in an environment where gender was not a factor. The theory is that in real life, women use social connections through language, gestures (nodding, smiling, and so on) and linguistic tags that show agreement; this is because they have diminished power in patriarchal real-life societies. In virtual worlds, where no one need know a player’s real-life gender, such defensive insertions should not be necessary; women have the same social and physical presence as men. Previous studies of chat groups had suggested that even when women are gender-masked by pseudonyms, they are still more vulnerable than gender-masked men to harassment. This would mean that somehow people were picking up on the fact that they were “harassable” (if not that they were female); if women did not change their discursive style of interaction even when playing cross-gender, that could perhaps explain it.

Desser analyzed transcripts of gender-masked chat sessions from LinguaMOO ³⁷, and discovered that real-life females do indeed still use social connections much more than real-life males; their behavior in virtual worlds in this respect was not substantially different to their behavior in the real world. Desser sees this as an indictment of the power that real-life expectation wields to cause people to conform to gender roles ³⁸.

She also, however, looked at the behavior of male characters playing as female characters, to see whether their behavior was equally unchanged. Perhaps surprisingly, she found that it wasn’t: The vocabulary of males playing as females alters in a way that the vocabulary of females playing as males doesn’t. This may well be because men have a stronger stereotype to work to than women; on the other hand, it could be that men are more willing to behave differently than women. It would take a much wider study to determine whether men were, in practice, any better at cross-gender play than women, however ³⁹.

The differences between male and female characters has been the subject of speculation for many years. Back in 1994, Lynn Cherny examined ⁴⁰ behavioral differences in JaysHouseMOO, a small virtual world where many of the players knew each other in real life and didn’t switch gender. She discovered that in this context, men and women treat their virtual bodies differently: Women engage in hugs and other cuddlesome contacts with one another, but otherwise don’t interact “physically” much beyond that; men, conversely, have a much wider range of emotes, some of which evoke quite violent imagery. When women use such emotes, it’s almost invariably when in the presence of men who are using them; Cherny suggests they’re adapting to male behavior so as to fit in.

Cherny’s work pointed to differences between male and female behavior in non-anonymous virtual worlds. Whether these differences could be used as “gender fingerprints” to spot cross-gender playing in a virtual world with anonymity is another matter, of course. Spotting cross-gender playing isn’t easy even when you’re looking (which, most of the time, people aren’t).

In Kathryn Wright’s survey, players were asked whether they felt they could tell the real-life gender of characters accurately. She found:

• 50% believed they couldn’t.

• 31% believed they could most of the time.

• 19% believed they could sometimes, but couldn’t at other times, depending on the skills of the person doing it.

As I indicated in Chapter 3, it’s actually not all that hard to pass as someone you are not (irrespective of their gender) if you know what you’re doing. I’ve played characters incognito for years at a time. Two of those that lasted for over 24 months of pretty well daily play were female, and neither was detected. I even had people asking me if I were female in real life when my female alter ego was playing a male character, their having “seen through” her charade. My experiences are not uncommon. Someone who made a real study of it and read all the literature could perhaps keep something like this up indefinitely (although quite why they’d want to do so isn’t clear).

For instance, it’s often observed that no men play unsexy female characters ⁴¹. Whether this is any different from what women do is immaterial—it’s the perception that counts. So, knowing that people commonly believe that men don’t play unsexy females, the crafty male cross-gender player will reduce his chance of being outed by masquerading as an unsexy female. The same applies to all other metrics for detecting differences between the genders, once the diligent role-player has read up on them.

Gender is an important part of the identity of many individuals in the real world. Crossing gender therefore raises important questions: Does it give people a wider appreciation of the opposite sex? Or does it give them a dangerously false impression?

In real life, gender has a biological basis. Male and female exist because that’s how human beings reproduce. Virtual worlds enable people to escape their bodies, and be whatever gender they wish.

Well, that’s the conceit. Unfortunately, although you can take the person out of the body, you can’t take the body out of the person. If the virtual person is told a joke, their real-world body may laugh; if something very upsetting happens, their real-world body may cry; if they get excited, their real-world heart will definitely beat faster and they may get an adrenaline rush. Real-world bodies can react to virtual-world events, because the player’s mind is in both places at once.

This brings us to the second activity of players of virtual worlds that interests gender theorists: virtual sex.

The practice goes by many names, including netsex, cybersex, tinysex, and worse. I’ll be following Sherry Turkle’s line and calling it virtual sex, because that’s its most accurate designation. It occurs only in textual worlds and the text channels of graphical worlds ⁴².

Virtual sex was not common in early, adventure-style virtual worlds, only really taking off with TinyMUD and its immediate descendants ⁴³. Whether this was because the worlds or the players were more social, or because there wasn’t a great deal else to do in them, is a matter for conjecture.

As for what virtual sex is, well in practical terms it’s a series of emoted actions that simulate a sexual encounter. The command

:bats the ball to Jill.

when issued by a player called Jack will create the message Jack bats the ball to Jill.

Jill can then enter the command

:returns with a sliced backhand.

to generate the message

Jill returns with a sliced backhand.

Okay, so I’m showing how you’d use emotes to play virtual tennis here, but virtual sex is the same except that it entails much ritual removal of virtual clothes and inserting virtual objects into virtual containers. If the characters involved are not binary-gendered, they make up their own ways to exchange virtual bodily fluids, usually involving intermingling super-sensitive tentacle organs.

Transcripts of virtual sex taking place are presented in Laurel Gilber’s early investigation ⁴⁴ into the phenomenon. As is usual with logs, these appear dead on the page; it looks like you really had to be there to appreciate the emotion of the moment.

Gilber’s analysis takes a post-modern approach that manages (as is almost inevitable with post-modernism ⁴⁵) to explain absolutely everything without actually telling you any more than you knew anyway. However, she does make some interesting points, most notably that because seduction ⁴⁶ is involved in these encounters they are not pornography. She also points out that in a world where AIDS is a dangerous reality, virtual sex is a much safer prospect.

But why engage in virtual sex? It’s perfectly possible to fall in love with someone remotely without having to enact a romp in the hay. In the days before email, people occasionally fell in love by exchanging correspondence with individuals whom they had never met. Even in virtual worlds, it happens through mere conversation: At one stage in British Legends I was able to trace a chain of 14 people who had fallen in love with someone who professed to love someone else. What does emoting the sex act give that whispering sweet nothings doesn’t?

In her Life on the Screen examination of the issues, Sherry Turkle focuses on the effect of virtual sex on real-life relationships. She asks whether to have virtual sex is to be unfaithful, and whether the violation of trust amounts to infidelity. Again, though, the same could be said about explicit email exchanges; it’s not something that virtual sex delivers which is unavailable by other means, and neither is it of practical use in real life ⁴⁷.

Jennifer Mulcahy examines ⁴⁸ virtual sex as an aspect of virtual romance. When people form relationships, either the relationship is real (in the minds of the participants) or it is simply role-play. In the former context, virtual sex can be used as a means to seek out potential partners for relationships, or to consummate/strengthen an existing relationship; in the latter context, it can be a personal exploration of sexual identity or a way to have some relaxing fun. Clearly, there are problems if one virtual lover thinks they’re in a relationship and the other doesn’t.

Mulcahy also looks at FurryMUCKs, some of which have a very sexually liberal culture ⁴⁹. In these, players take on the role of humanoid animals, reacting as animals to various degrees. Citing a player who genuinely ⁵⁰ believes he’s a porcupine trapped in a human’s body, Mulcahy hypothesizes that players often don’t want to meet their partners in real life because it would collapse the images that they have built in their heads concerning their virtual lovers. In this situation, virtual sex takes place because real sex can’t. She makes the important point that the actuality of physical attraction can stop a virtual relationship—no matter how intense—in its tracks. Players enjoying the experience of a virtual relationship implicitly understand this, and may therefore be apprehensive about meeting their partners in real life.

So, is it that virtual sex is the lust that accompanies virtual love?

Shannon McRae also looks at the use of anthropomorphic characters in her discussion ⁵¹ of virtual sex, in particular the symbolism involved. Players’ choice of what animal to play reflects their attitudes to sex: A wolf, for example, is likely to be very dominant and predatory, whereas a rabbit would be timid and submissive. Virtual sex in this context allows players to explore aspects of their own sexuality; it’s practical role-playing.

The bulk of McRae’s article examines the attraction of virtual sex. She finally pins it down to eroticism, in which regard I think she’s correct. She also tries to ascertain why players find the experience so intense, but is less successful there: She applies three theories, none of which convince her (and none of which convince me, either). Personally, I see it as a consequence of immersion; then again, given my arguments earlier in this book, I would, wouldn’t I? (Virtual sex Zen moment: What is the sound of one hand typing?)

For some people, the attraction of virtual sex is pure hedonism. You can emphasize features of your sexuality without fear, you won’t catch any sexually transmitted diseases, and no one will become pregnant as a result. This view of virtual sex was popularized by Claire Benedikt in an up-beat, influential 1995 article ⁵² on the subject. With virtual sex, you get all the emotional pleasure and none of the dangers of real sex. If people try to mess you around by emoting an event you don’t like, you can quit, ignore them, or emote the inverse of the event just as easily. If someone tears off your shirt, you can snap your fingers and the shirt reappears; your virtual power is equal to that of any abuser. Role-playing is consensual; actions are only validated by the consent of all individuals concerned. If you don’t want to play along, all they can do is to go look for someone else who will.

Benedikt makes her point forcefully and with examples. Virtual sex is (in an implementational sense) intangible; anything that “happens” only happens if your mind accepts it or its consequences as real. Investing words with emotion doesn’t make them true; even if you feel violated, you haven’t been. If someone is harassing you, speak to a wizard and they’ll punish your tormentor. The only real threats are the ones that involve real life, and for those you can call on the real police.

But if you can’t prevent or undo the virtual abuse? If there are no administrators you can call on to stop it while it’s taking place? If it’s witnessed by passers-by who think you’re a willing participant?

Thus, we come to the most famous of all articles about virtual worlds: Julian Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace ⁵³. Oft-reprinted not just because of its subject matter but also for the quality of its writing, its main concern is not the incident of virtual rape to which its title refers; rather it describes the way the community of LambdaMOO, where the event took place, reacted. Nevertheless, the virtual rape itself is a potent totem for gender theorists; a reagent rather than a catalyst.

Warning: If you thought cross-gender play was controversial, you’re almost guaranteed to be offended by some of the discussion that follows.

Virtual sex was quite prevalent on LambdaMOO at the time of the incident Dibbell reports, to the extent that he suggests that it was in their first act of virtual sex that many newbies experienced what would now be termed as immersion. There is a difference, however, between virtual sex in private between consenting players and that conducted in public against the will of at least one of the participants. This is nevertheless precisely what one of the LambdaMOO players did. His character’s name was Mr. Bungle.

Mr. Bungle used a virtual object called a voodoo doll to force other characters to behave in ways that their players had not instructed. He caused his victims to perform a number of debased acts, all to the accompaniment of his maniacal laughter. Because he had an audience in the form of the other players who were in the room when his assault began, his victim’s logging off would have made no difference—enough witnesses could see what was going on. For the same reason, the victim’s gagging of him would have had no effect ⁵⁴. Simply ignoring someone who is controlling your character is not an option, either. Mr. Bungle was only making intangible changes to the virtual world, but was doing so using a device with tangible functionality such that no one could prevent him. It wasn’t until a player called in an experienced old-timer who had some kind of virtual stasis gun at his disposal that the orgy of violence stopped.

Dibbell goes on to describe what happened afterward as the community struggled to come to terms with the events. Most players wanted Mr. Bungle expunged from the database (that is, the character would cease to exist), but unfortunately none of them had the power to do it. The administrators had handed over LambdaMOO to its players some four months earlier, and would only act on social issues when requested by the community as a whole. Unfortunately, the players had not formed a body to represent their views, so before they could get Mr. Bungle removed they had to create one. They disagreed over how to effect this, and in the end the wizards had to implement/impose a voting system themselves.

Many interesting points are raised here. The first is that the violation of a character was referred to almost universally as its “rape.” Although this word can technically be used in a non-sexual context (“the rape of the country”), that’s not how it was meant here: The players—those who experienced it and even those who merely had it described to them second-hand—all saw it as the non-consensual sexual desecration of an individual, for which the word “rape” was entirely appropriate. This is not to say that they felt it was the same as real-life rape, because there was no physical side to what had happened. It was a rape of a mind, but not of a body.

The community debated the possibility of responding to the virtual crime in Reality. The player behind Mr. Bungle was a student at a university with a strong antiharassment policy, and it was conceivable that had its authorities been presented with evidence of his actions (committed while using their computer) they might have removed him from his course. The players determined that a LambdaMOO crime best warranted a LambdaMOO response, but that’s not to say that players of other virtual worlds would necessarily feel the same way if something similar happened there. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, there is good reason to suppose that the crime was more real-world than virtual world.

Also, the proposed punishment amounted to character death at worst and permanent exile at best; in a social virtual world like LambdaMOO, this is about the most drastic thing that can happen to anyone. Heinous though rape is, it is second to murder in seriousness. By ordering the death of the alleged rapist, wouldn’t that mean the punishment was more severe than the crime? And what purpose was the punishment to serve—was it a warning to others, a step toward rehabilitation or merely an act of revenge?

As a developer, I can only shake my head that this situation ever arose. Non-admin players have a prevailing attitude that anything the virtual world lets them do, they’re allowed to do. The only exceptions they will countenance are those that involve freeform input (for example, speech) that the programmers can’t reasonably be expected to prevent. Over time, they come to appreciate other rules of behavior that exist, too, but the default is that if the world lets you do it, it’s allowed. If it weren’t allowed, the programmers would just stop it, right?

Consequently, it came as no surprise to me at all to learn that a virtual world in which players could control other players’ characters would, lo and behold, lead to a situation where one player did exactly that. Why would they do it? In the Mr. Bungle case, Dibbell suggests it was because the perpetrator was a sociopath: He looked on the virtual world as a laboratory for experimenting with other people’s emotions, a viewpoint that is only perhaps excusable when held by total newbies.

A Rape in Cyberspace succeeded in drawing the attention of researchers and journalists to virtual worlds (Dibbell himself is a journalist), its ultimately positive spin doing much to help people take virtual worlds seriously. Virtual sex was not presented as a sordid activity undertaken by emotionally crippled adolescent males; players were depicted as responsible individuals genuinely shocked by the actions of a madman. The critical differences between the real and the virtual were thrown into relief.

Players are real, characters are virtual. Immersed players are their characters—they’re personae—and therefore any assault on a persona is an assault on the player. The assault can only be emotional or intellectual, because those are the only aspects of the real that can be affected by the virtual. A player who doesn’t understand the difference between a character and a persona (for example, someone who thinks “it’s just a game”) may assault other characters—and therefore players—without fully realizing the consequences. A player who does know the difference can perform an assault without censure if the context of the virtual world reasonably permits it (for example, it’s clear from the genre ⁵⁵ that characters can be raped). A player who knows the difference and isn’t in a virtual world with a culture that allows such assaults, yet who still goes ahead and does it without provocation anyway, is indeed a sociopath ⁵⁶.

As to whether these assaults violate real-world law, that’s a matter for the lawyers. In a real world where people can be successfully sued for inflicting emotional distress by failing to deliver on a promise to meet Jesus Christ in the flesh ⁵⁷, who knows what a gullible player might come to believe? Personally, I feel that anyone who enters a virtual world takes a certain emotional risk in doing so, and that they’ve no more right to sue than has a member of the crowd at a golf match who is hit by a stray ball. By the same token, though, any golfer who deliberately or irresponsibly hit a ball at someone knowing it would cause them physical damage could expect to be sued; anyone in a virtual world who deliberately or irresponsibly causes real-life emotional distress beyond that which a reasonable individual could expect to endure in the context of that world deserves all they get.

For those who think that freedom of speech rules would act as a defense, consider a different incident of virtual rape reported by Elizabeth Reid in her 1994 Cultural Formations thesis. This occasion did not involve emote commands: Rather, the “rapist” depicted the violations he ⁵⁸ was committing through use of the “shout” command. The effect on the other players was actually worse than in Dibbell’s example, because of the nature of the virtual world in which it took place. JennyMUSH ⁵⁹ was set up to help the victims of real-life sexual assault or abuse overcome their trauma, and developed into a strong, supportive community where people could talk through their problems openly with others who had suffered similar violations. Consequently, when the rogue player waited until there were no administrators playing before changing gender to male, name to Daddy, and then screaming graphical and violent messages of virtual assault, it was calculated to cause maximum psychological damage. If someone had used a public address system at a psychiatric hospital to manifest the worst fears of everyone attending a recovery group, they could expect to be punished; the same should be said when people choose to conduct similar real-life violence through actions undertaken in virtual worlds. New prospective players of JennyMUSH now have to be recommended by two other players and give their real-life contact details to the system administrator before they are admitted. They remain anonymous from the other players, but can be called to account if they violate trust.

Simply the best discussion I have read about virtual rape is by Richard MacKinnon ⁶⁰. He takes the view that the concept of “rape” is a social construct that varies from culture to culture; in plain English, what members of a society understand by “rape” defines what rape is in that society. The LambdaMOO players who witnessed Mr. Bungle’s actions or heard them described almost universally viewed it as rape, therefore in that community it was rape.

Virtual communities differ importantly from real-life ones, however, in that their members don’t have bodies. The wholesale importing of real-life concepts of rape into virtual worlds is therefore a bad idea: Instead, players should reconstruct the notion of rape within the context of the virtual world. Furthermore, because there are theories of rape, this can be done in a guided fashion—learning from real life, rather than repeating its mistakes.

MacKinnon describes the main prevailing theories that explain the causes of rape in real life. These are:

• Feminist. Rape is the result of deep-seated social traditions dominated almost totally by men.

• Social learning. Aggressive sexual behavior is acquired through repeated exposure to it.

• Evolutionary. Rape is a manifestation of the different reproductive priorities of the sexes.

Whichever of these is used in the context of virtual worlds, it must be broad; virtual worlds involve no body, therefore any definition of rape that requires one is inapplicable. In this regard, some of the wider feminist viewpoints are most appropriate, defining rape to be any “damage to the self” inflicted by physical, emotional, psychological, or material means. This being the case, rape (of the mind) is indeed possible in virtual worlds. The question is, therefore, how to prevent it?

In considering his solution, MacKinnon notes that Mr. Bungle’s actions were automatically accepted as events in the real world by the observing players. Had Mr. Bungle used his voodoo doll to make his victim appear to burst into flames, the players would not have accepted this as a possibility and would have mocked him for it. Putting this in terms I have used elsewhere in this book, the players would have thought spontaneous human combustion to be “unrealistic;” why, therefore, did they not look on the virtual rape this way? MacKinnon’s answer is that they were using a definition for rape taken from the real world that didn’t fit; it would have been better were they to create a new definition appropriate to their virtual world. Claire Benedikt’s seemingly blasé suggestion of deflecting the attacker’s weapon by deferring to the consensual nature of the virtual world’s reality is actually the solution. Rather than accepting rape to be an assault on the mind even when there is no body, players should merely point out the obvious: You can’t sexually assault someone when neither you nor they have a body. The act of attempting to do so is ridiculous, and therefore so is anyone making such an attempt.

MacKinnon accepts that during any period where new definitions of rape are coming into acceptance there will be problems, but the eventual reconstruction of the concept for virtual worlds will be far more helpful in the long term. I’m not convinced that it’s this simple: Immersion means that character and player are, in a sense, one persona, so an assault on such a character is an assault on a player. Unless they consented to it, it really could be damage to their self that amounts to rape under this broad definition ⁶¹. To respond as MacKinnon suggests would mean unimmersing, but this could be problematical for some players if they didn’t realize what was happening in time.

MacKinnon makes another interesting point concerning Mr. Bungle’s punishment. He is of the opinion that punishing a character is no punishment at all unless the player has a stake in that character. Mr. Bungle’s player didn’t care about the Mr. Bungle character, therefore any sanctions imposed on him were worthless. As Mr. Bungle’s player deliberately hurt his victim’s player ⁶², the offense was in real life, not in LambdaMOO. Perhaps it would have been better if the LambdaMOO denizens had asked for the offending player to suffer the consequences of his actions in real life? I subscribe to this same view, while also noting that deleting Mr. Bungle might nevertheless have served some small purpose in serving as a deterrent for other players contemplating similar rapes.

I also ought to state that personally I don’t feel that the violations delivered by Mr. Bungle amounted to rape. They were certainly cruel and certainly unpleasant, but to label this incident as an example of perhaps the second-worst ⁶³ crime a person can commit in Reality tends, in my opinion, to trivialize the latter rather than raise the former’s significance.

I mention all this for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the brief of this chapter to report on what researchers in other fields think about virtual worlds, and this is one of the areas in which there is particularly constructive activity. Secondly, it raises a general point concerning the responsibility of virtual world designers for what goes on in their worlds. Consider the “rape” command in a text-based virtual world.

Yes, you heard me.

Look, someone in your virtual world—probably a newbie, but it could be a more experienced player—is going to try the command “rape.” They can “kill Xyzzy” and get away with it, murder is a greater crime than rape, and so it should be okay to try “rape Xyzzy,” shouldn’t it? Or maybe they’re doing it in an educational virtual world because, hey, their watching friends in the real world will think they’re big. However they reason, someone is eventually going to do it. You, as the virtual world’s designer, have to decide how to respond.

Here are some typical solutions:

• Do nothing. The response to the command “rape” is the same as would be generated by any other non-command. This is the solution most designers take. They do so either because they didn’t consider rape to be an issue, or they did but it was too hard so they ducked it, or they have some rationale along the lines of “I won’t dignify it with a response.” None of these are acceptable. It is important, it shouldn’t be avoided, and you are giving it a response (specifically, that you don’t mind having in your world people who think rape is okay).

• Issue a response telling the player off. This has the advantage of showing that you don’t approve of this kind of behavior, but the disadvantage of being toothless. The would-be rapist can simply laugh it off.

• Issue a warning, and also alert the customer service staff. A 20-minute lecture by an unamused admin undertaken in a disconnected sin bin room is enough to persuade most of the “I just wanted to see what would happen” brigade that no, actually, you didn’t. This works, but administrators don’t like doing it, especially if they end up being hated for “not being able to take a joke” as a result. It also runs the risk that people will try it simply to gain attention.

• Give the warning tangible force. Don’t just say you think that this is inappropriate for your virtual world, but (temporarily) damage any character that tries it. Now they know you’re serious.

• Give the command tangible meaning. They want to assault another character, okay, so invoke whatever combat routines the virtual world uses. Couple it with one of the preceding responses (it works particularly well with an automatic hit point loss). Hey, if you attack someone while your pants are round your ankles, you’re bound to be at a disadvantage….

• Mete out instant PD on any character that issues the command. If the player wants it back, they can come cap in hand to the administrators and beg. Only after a suitable display of contrition will their character be resurrected. This zero-tolerance approach makes its point, but can be overkill. Furthermore, experienced players will persuade naïve newbies to try the command, then laugh their socks off at the result. The newly dead newbie, however, will suffer all the usual effects of PD and may be hurt as a result. Their punishment is beyond their crime.

• Do any of the above, and warn the intended victim. They can then take action to avoid the odious individual concerned in future. This sounds a good idea, but in practice it isn’t; it can be highly disturbing if, during the course of normal play, you suddenly receive a message telling you that your character has just successfully resisted an attempted rape by some other character. There is a strong possibility that a player would eventually exploit such a rape command solely to hurt their victim—even if it meant they’d eventually lose their own character as a result.

I’ve had numerous debates ⁶⁴ on this subject over the years concerning MUD2’s approach to the command, and have tried various different solutions. The one I have settled on is “tangible meaning,” without informing the intended victim that the attack came from a “rape” command. This means that the perpetrator suffers the consequences of their action, but they’re the only person who does. On the whole, people prefer not to see the word “rape” coming from their virtual world, even if this is at the expense of not being informed when someone tries it ⁶⁵.

Returning at last from the fringes of Gender Studies back to the mainstream, how can attitudes to virtual sex (and virtual rape) best be summed up? As with cross-gender play, there are basically two points of view:

• The radical view is that virtual sex victimizes women. There is a continuum of harassment, with virtual rape at the end-point.

• The liberal view is that virtual sex liberates women. Sex can be as frequent and different as you want, and is often better than in real life.

Neither of these is satisfactory, as Nicola Döring points out in her excellent critique ⁶⁶. Victimization sees women as always having the status of objects, and does not admit the possibility that virtual sexual experiences can exist and be enjoyed; liberalization idealizes women’s choice and control, and does not admit the possibility that there may be a power imbalance between the genders. Döring proposes a third, empowerment model that addresses the concerns of the other two. Central to this is the notion that sexual empowerment is an individual learning process, as well as a process of political emancipation. Women should question their needs, and explore them critically; in other words, through their actions in the virtual world, they should develop a better understanding of themselves.

Yes, that does sound strangely familiar. Isn’t it nice when all these theories come together?

Back in Chapter 4,“World Design,” I referred to J. C. Herz’s 1994 zeitgeist-capturing book, Surfing on the Internet. Her experiences with virtual worlds cover several chapters, as she moves from newbie to seasoned veteran ⁶⁷. When she begins, she has experience of IRC but not much idea of what’s possible in a virtual world. She starts with a look at the education-oriented MicroMUSE ⁶⁸, then moves on to the more socially oriented LambdaMOO. There, she meets a character called Thorin who gives her a tour of the place.

Herz leaves LambdaMOO and explores many other virtual worlds over the coming weeks, playing several quite extensively. Finally, she returns to LambdaMOO no longer a newbie, and seeks out the friendly Thorin. At first he doesn’t recall her, having showed around many guests in his time, but when she jogs his memory he remembers. He then furthers her education by demonstrating how to create her own virtual space within LambdaMOO. Then he hits on her.

As a guest, Herz was an “it.” Now she is experienced and has created her own character, she’s a “her.” When Thorin helped her as a guest, he didn’t know she was female (although he suspected it). Now she’s confirmed her real-life gender and accepted his further help, he thinks she’s obligated to him.

Well yes, maybe she is, but she’s not obligated that much. When she turns down his advances, Thorin’s mood changes drastically. He subjects her to a torrent of power-trip emotes, describing the mean things his character is doing to hers and how her character is reacting. Herz subverts this in exactly the manner described by Benedikt, undoing his every virtual act with an emote that returns to the status quo, all the while pointing out his foolishness with smiles and laughter. She ends with the comment, “Ooh. MUD harassment. Think I’ll have to see a shrink about this. Not.”

Now that’s the attitude.

Lexicography

After so many pages of dense theorizing concerning nigh-inaccessible ideological positions using elitist vocabulary, I thought I’d go on to something a little less stressful next: lexicography—the compilation of dictionaries.

Lexicography is one small part of lexicology (the study of the structure and history of a particular language), which itself falls under the scientific umbrella of linguistics. We’ve already met sociolinguistics in the context of anthropology; other major subfields include phonetics, syntax, semantics, and translation, none of which touch on virtual worlds very much (which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t). Three other subfields of linguistics do have something to say about virtual worlds, however: cognitive science and computational linguistics (which I file with artificial intelligence), and language acquisition (which comes under education). This leaves lexicography, with a dash of lexicology as a context.

Virtual worlds are great for learning foreign languages. They’re great for learning your mother tongue, come to that. They’re also great for the development of new terms. This is why lexicographers are interested in them.

There are two opposing stances on the purpose of dictionaries. One, the prescriptive view, is that dictionaries tell you what words actually mean, as opposed to what certain individuals might think they mean. By ensuring that everyone uses the same words in the same way, clarity is maintained and the subtle interrelationships between words are upheld. The contrary, descriptive view, is that dictionaries are for recording words as they are used, its not being the business of the lexicographer to make judgments about the “correctness” of usage.

As an example, a prescriptive dictionary will tell you that the word “enormity” means “extreme wickedness” (as in “when the enormity of his murderous deeds sank in”), whereas a descriptive dictionary will add that it means “huge scale” (as in “when the enormity of her tennis victory sank in”). Initially, as they struggled to formalize spellings and dialect terms, dictionaries were prescriptive. There were even “dictionary wars,” in which rival lexicographers vied to have their version accepted as definitive—sometimes for very political reasons ¹.

Nowadays, though, dictionaries are mainly descriptive. They do give the “correct” meaning of a word, but report it as “archaic” if it is; upstart new meanings come in as “informal.” Pedants may lament the passing of prescriptive dictionaries, but languages do change. The word “enormous” meant “extremely wicked” back in the 1500s.

So, how do modern dictionaries define virtual worlds? Basically, they don’t. This is not surprising for two reasons:

• Players disagree over what virtual worlds are called (which is why I began this book by defining the terms I’d be using).

• Virtual worlds are an online phenomenon that lexicographers don’t necessarily know exists.

There are many hundreds of dictionaries around, of course, and some undoubtedly do have references to virtual world terms if not virtual worlds themselves. I’m certain that the mighty Oxford English Dictionary ² does, because one of their lexicographers phoned me to ask me where the acronym “MUD” first appeared in print ³. In general, though, definitions have been limited to specialist lexicographies. The first time I saw “MUD” was in a 1991 dictionary of personal computing ⁴, which referred only to MUD1 and not MUDs in general; it did, however, have a definition of MUG as an abbreviation for “multiuser game” (although apart from directing the reader to the definition for MUD, that was the sum of it).

Doubtless this situation will change as lexicographers latch on to the fact that virtual worlds are played by more people than read their dictionaries, and are therefore worthy of consideration. If they do, they may be tempted not only to define concepts such as “virtual world,” “avatar,” and “permanent death,” but also to look at the words that players use in everyday communication.

This is where, finally, it gets interesting.

Players of virtual worlds often develop new words (or, as with “avatar,” new meanings for old words) to label things that they find important. The same applies for any subculture, of course; indeed, one of the signifiers of a subculture is the development of its own jargon. Knowledge of jargon terms can be used to erect barriers between a subculture and its mainstream culture; if someone doesn’t know what a term means, or misapplies it, that flags them as an outsider. Academics, for example, will frequently drop the names of other academics in conversation to sum up viewpoints or ideals in a single word; this isn’t deliberately to be exclusive, but if you don’t know the work to which they’re referring then it can have that effect. For example, if I were talking to someone I believed was an expert on identity issues in virtual worlds, I might in the course of the conversation refer to Sherry Turkle’s work expecting them to know what I meant; if they replied “Sherry who?,” I’d maybe wonder if they were indeed the expert they professed to be.

The use of jargon terms can define membership of a community. This can go two ways:

• The community excludes people who don’t use its jargon.

• The community includes people who learn its jargon.

For virtual worlds, we want the second of these: Newbies arrive, they don’t understand many of the terms, but in being taught them by members of the community they feel they are being accepted into the community (which is true—they are). It’s therefore in the interests of virtual world developers to ensure that there is a certain amount of jargon in their worlds, to help act as community glue.

For example, newbies to worlds like EverQuest will hear people referring to “mobs.” In the real world, the word “mob” means a large, unruly crowd; in virtual worlds, a “mob” is a computer-controlled monster. When players learn what a “mob” is, it draws them one step further into the community.

Some virtual world jargon comes from related subcultures. “Rooms” get their name because that’s what people called them in adventure games such as Zork. A good many words hail from the general computer hacker subculture, the jargon of which is maintained as the Jargon File ⁵ (published in book form as The New Hacker’s Dictionary ⁶). This work not only defines many commonly used words and phrases, but it is packed with interesting background notes and information; in places, it almost amounts to an historical record, rather than a mere noting of usage.

There are two comparatively large ⁷ dictionaries of terms that are used by players of virtual worlds. One of these, the Encyclopedia of MUDs Dictionary ⁸, covers textual virtual worlds in general; the other, the MUDspeke Dictionary ⁹, collates only those terms that have found favor in MUD2. There is some overlap between these, partly because of their common heritage and partly because of external factors. Some terms are more exportable than others, and are therefore more inclusive or exclusive.

Looking at the various terms that have found favor in virtual worlds, they can be classified along their lines of general utility as follows:

• Those exported into mainstream culture. “Wtf” (what the f**k?) has appeared in mainstream U.K. newspapers and magazines, as has “bot” (an intelligent conversational agent). Both began in virtual worlds.

• Those exported into a wider subculture. IRC users use “afk” (“away from keyboard”), “brb” (“be right back”) and “bbl” (“be back later”) because players of virtual worlds did (not that many IRC users know this).

• Those exported into other virtual worlds. “Rehi” (“hello again”), “mobile,” and “rl” (“real life”) are endemic across virtual worlds, but began in MUD1.

• Those not exportable to other virtual worlds. MUD2 players know who “the twins” are, but players of other virtual worlds wouldn’t because they don’t contain the objects to which the term refers.

• Those not exportable to the same virtual world at a different time in its history. Terms that mention characters by name are particularly prone to lose resonance over time. Others, however, inexplicably cling on. MUD2 players will say they “fetched” when their modem chokes on them, solely because a long-deceased specialist piece of client software that one incarnation of the world used would display the unhelpful message “fetch error” when this happened.

• Those that look exported but were probably reinvented independently. Mobile phone users don’t key in “b4” (“before”) or “thx” (“thanks”) because virtual world players did; they do it because it takes less time (which is precisely why virtual world players did it).

• Those that were exported but were reinventions in virtual worlds. People today use the word “newbie” because MUD1 players invented it, however unbeknown to those players they were merely reinventing a word that had been used in select British fee-paying schools for years.

As I noted in Chapter 3, from a game designer’s point of view a certain amount of jargon is a good thing. Too much can act as a barrier to newbies, of course, but too little can weaken a community’s hold on its members. Although I don’t recommend the out-and-out inventing of terms for the players to use, there’s no harm in ensuring that any idiosyncratic vocabulary that has arisen to fill a need during development of the game is passed on. Players use words like “shard” and “zone” because that’s what the designers and programmers called them. Members of the live team can, by frequently using a term (especially one invented by the players), make that term “official”—thereby greatly increasing its acceptability. Understanding any new term adds to a player’s stake in a virtual world. Jargon is your friend: Treat it well.

In her analysis ¹⁰ of the use of jargon in virtual worlds, Diane Shortt suggests that as more and more people play these worlds, specialist terms will seep more and more into the mainstream—just as hippie terms from the 1960s are now part of everyday speech. She sees this as an inevitable consequence of the increasing popularity of virtual worlds, but notes that players do express regret that “their” language is becoming less “theirs.”

Whether this seepage is a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure. On the face of it, it looks like it should be bad because jargon makes for community. However, if there are so many people playing these virtual worlds that their terminology has become mainstream, why worry?

A final note: As the “fetch” example illustrated, words can preserve history. For some virtual worlds, this may indeed be the only way that their history is preserved. Historians have yet to show any interest in virtual worlds at all—there’s no History section in this chapter—and yet some of these worlds have the potential to last almost indefinitely ¹¹. When culture is only maintained by word–of mouth, the words in those mouths are important. Dictionaries can be the gatekeepers of history; would your virtual world benefit from one?

Economics

Virtual worlds (the more persistent ones, anyway) have economies. Economists study economies. Virtual-world economies are therefore legitimate objects of study for economists.

This doesn’t mean that many economists do study virtual worlds, however. Those who are involved in the area are more often than not players of virtual worlds who happen to be economists in real life, rather than economists coming to virtual worlds from the outside. That said, academic economists are becoming increasingly aware of virtual worlds, and we can expect more of them to become interested in the topic as time goes on.

I said “the topic” there, but there are actually three main areas of importance:

• Using virtual worlds to simulate a real-world economy for experimental purposes.

• Figuring out how the in-world economies of virtual worlds work (or fail to work).

• Examining the interaction between virtual-world economies and the real-world economy.

The first of these is not perhaps as widespread as might be expected. I have only one paper in my collection that addresses it, by Thomas Grimm and Johann Mitlöhner ¹. Their approach was to take a regular textual world and add commands specific to performing monetary transactions. The first of these, “deal,” proposed a contract between two individuals (the buyer and the seller), concerning one object. Negotiation could then follow, using an “offer” command to change the terms of the proposed contract (price, quantity, delivery date, and so on), plus “accept” and “withdraw” commands to terminate the deal one way or the other. The system (that is, the virtual world engine) would then either execute or delete the contract, as appropriate. None of the contract commands accrued any cost in themselves (it was a lawyer-free environment).

Grimm and Mitlöhner’s purpose was to create artificial agents that exhibited different “lifelike” behaviors, and see just how well these worked in practice in an environment shared with each other and with real people. They were using a virtual world to simulate theories that are hard to test in the real one. Economic modeling by computer is not a new idea, of course; virtual worlds offer the additional presence of humans, which makes the model they present more plausible ².

The problem is, virtual world economies don’t seem to work the same way as the real one. When they’re constructed to work like the real world works, they don’t. Money quickly becomes either worthless or (less often) impossible to acquire; yet trade still happens. This is fascinating stuff, made all the more interesting because although it’s not too hard to see why the design for a particular virtual-world economy might fail, it’s much harder to come up with a design for one that wouldn’t.

It should be noted that there are several different types of economy available in virtual worlds. Some, such as TinyMUD’s tokens, are little more than permissions to interact with the virtual world: They limit the amount of building that can be done, but there’s not a lot else for which they can be used. The designers of the early graphical world Habitat characterized this as a “socialist economy” ³, based as it was on the equitable distribution of limited real-world computer resources. Their own solution (which was, almost inevitably, inflationary) involved having in-world money that could be spent on in-world goods; again, though, it was still basically one-on-one between character and database—a point well made in a 1995 talk ⁴ to economists by Julian Dibbell. Economies only really get going when players trade between each other, so as to obtain things on which they place different values. This brings us to the second topic of interest to economists: the internal economics of virtual worlds.

The first report on the economics of an individual world remains the archetype: Zachary Booth Simpson’s The In-game Economics of Ultima Online ⁵. This seminal work describes the similarities and differences between Ultima Online’s economy and real-world economies, the thought that went into its design, and the places where the expectation did not match the eventuality.

There were five reasons that the designers of UO wanted their world to have an economy, universal across all large-scale virtual worlds:

• To ration power, so that not everyone can have every piece of desirable kit.

• To support specialization (and therefore diversity), so that players concentrate on finding their own individual niche because of the limits on what they can own.

• To encourage interaction, for trade and work.

• To provide goals.

• To support economic role-playing, for people who like to be artisans, merchants, and so on.

These were the aims. Simpson identified the following areas where the designers had to make unconventional ⁶ decisions because of UO’s virtual nature:

• Balancing fun and realism. The real world’s way of doing it may not be fun.

• What to do with characters when players log off.

• How to handle muling by players with more than one character.

• Hoarding of objects by players creates database load and must be discouraged.

• Newbies need to be given help so they can advance quickly, but this must not be exploitable by experienced players through their mules.

• What to do when bugs allow people to cheat.

The original solution to all these criteria was a closed economy where resources, money, raw materials, goods, and character inventory were all interlinked through player and system actions to create a single economic flow. Within a year of launch, it had switched to faucet/drain. Why was this?

Simpson argues that it was a failure of the original design to consider microeconomic aspects of the world, concentrating as it did on the macro economy. There was severe over-production of goods, because players created many items solely so that their creation skills would rise. This led to a fall in prices that players were not willing to accept. If a player makes a ton of identical shirts and takes them to some NPC vend or that already has a ton of these shirts and has been unable to sell them, the player should expect that the vendor refuses to buy any more; unfortunately, the player instead regards it as a bug—the virtual world encouraged them to create clothes, so it ought to obey its obligations and buy them.

A second problem was that the NPC shopkeeper economy didn’t work. NPC shopkeepers set their prices using a hugely complicated formula based on many different factors. The problem was, players wanted to sell things to NPC vendors but didn’t want to buy anything from them. This meant that vendors operating to a positive cash flow paradigm would cease buying when they ran out of money. Those objects they sold that players could not get elsewhere were subject to a pricing scheme that groups of players could combine to exploit once they figured it out (which of course they did—buying low in one place then teleporting to where they could sell high, for example).

A third problem was hoarding. In a closed economy where the number of resources is constant, new resources are only added to the system when old resources are expended. For example, if a sword breaks, then the metal it is made up of is returned to the resource pool and a miner somewhere will dig up some ore that replaces it. This keeps down inflation (which is its intention), but unfortunately it means that whenever people hold on to objects, rather than using them, there is a resource shortage. Scarcity then encourages players to hold onto the resource even more (because who knows when they may next find some?). The solution of increasing the pool didn’t work—people kept on hoarding and resources kept on drying up. Only by switching to a faucet (constant input of resources, irrespective of use) did that problem go away, but at the expense of server load (because people still hoarded objects they couldn’t or wouldn’t sell). The faucet needed sufficient drains to match it, but these weren’t present. Had these been there at the start, people would have accepted them; because they weren’t, though, players regarded attempts to impose new drains (for example, taxes) as taking things away from them, which was deeply unpopular.

The final reason that the UO economy failed was because of counterfeiting. Loopholes existed that enabled players to clone money, and because of this, they could create as much as they liked until the programmers could fix the bug. This took much longer to tackle than it should have.

Simpson finishes his report with some suggestions as to how future virtual worlds might be able to address these issues, while noting that actually the failure of UO’s economy was not as bad as it would have been for a real-world economy—players still had fun. I won’t list all his conclusions here, because there are too many of them; besides, if you’re at all interested in any of this, you would do better to read the original report. I’ll list his most important recommendations, however, for comparison with what other people propose:

• Create enforceable contracts. If people agree to pay for work, or to perform work for pay, then neither should be able to rip off the other without serious consequences.

• Create auctions. These define price very efficiently, and are fun social events.

• Allow player-controlled vendors to buy as well as sell.

• Deepen production paths. If there are transitional steps to producing goods, newbies can have an apprenticelike intermediate role to play in production instead of creating finished goods themselves.

• Make characters purchase skill improvements, rather than improve them through use.

As a result of Simpson’s paper, later large-scale virtual worlds have invariably gone for an open model rather than a closed one. However, that isn’t to say that a closed one can never work. Although in Chapter 4 I suggested that no one has yet created a successful closed model economy for virtual worlds, that’s actually only true for the big, graphical worlds. In smaller-scale worlds, with fewer player management issues, a closed economy can be implemented and run successfully. Geoff Wong describes ⁷ how by adhering to a strict monetarist Loans Standard policy, the designers of Shattered World ⁸ have created an economy in which prices have remained relatively stable since the early 1990s. The key to this is ensuring that all manufacturers, shops, and banks in the world are owned by PCs, rather than by NPCs. Players specify the prices for absolutely everything—nothing is set by the system itself except the amount of money that the individual banks can loan.

The success of the Scattered World economic system is evidenced by its stable prices. It does have periods of boom and bust (related to changes in the size of the player base), but has never suffered the kind of collapse that befell UO. Its main problem is that to keep the money supply under control, newbies can’t be given a grubstake when they enter—they have either to persuade a banker to loan them the money or perform menial tasks for other players who don’t want to do the tasks themselves. Only when a newbie has demonstrated that they’re likely to become a regular player will bankers deign to lend them any money. This is fine for a small-scale virtual world, but it’s easy to see how one with thousands of newbies couldn’t expect to keep them for long.

There are other problems, too. In a comparison ⁹ of open and closed virtual-world economies, Dan Hastings notes the following difficulties:

• There is a huge amount of work involved in tracking the creation and destruction of economically significant items. Pretty well everything must be audited so as to ensure that the overall money supply remains under control. This can lead to very serious overheads in implementation ¹⁰.

• Virtual worlds where not all characters are PCs must simulate the behavior of their implied NPCs. The virtual world must somehow attempt to model the fact that PCs are “really” only a small fraction of the total population, even though they drive its economy. This is very hard to get right for a closed economy.

• Closed economies remove some of the designer’s freedom. If you create a city with a “poor” area, under a closed economy it’s very difficult to prevent this from becoming a “rich” area if players decide to make it such. This means any premade quests or whatever that assume it’s a poor area will become out of date. Deliberate, artistic placement of economic entities is also hard to sustain.

It may be possible to combine the best of open and closed systems by maintaining a fixed pool of total wealth and using taxation as a mechanism for managing it. This is the approach that has been taken by Star Wars Galaxies, for which excellent documents ¹¹ exist describing the virtual world’s economy itself and the rationale behind its creation. It features a central bank, to control and monitor the cash flow into and out of the virtual economy, ensuring that the amount provided by the faucet is the same as that recovered by taxation. The plan is to keep taxation ¹² constant and vary the incoming wealth (amortized across all distribution mechanisms) to match it; this avoids the tax-level changes that players so hate. There is some leeway in the system, in that calculations are performed weekly rather than continually; these calculations also account for net increases in the number of players joining the virtual world since they were last run. The hope is that this economy will:

• Discourage hoarding, because objects decay.

• Increase immediate spending, because money devalues quicker than goods.

• Create equal opportunities, because newbies don’t have to play catch-up with players who have been around for months.

In general, as long as a taxation system is imposed from the beginning, the players will accept it; they would not feel that anything was being taken from them as a punishment for their collective success. Personally, I believe that this is probably the right way to go in the long term, but of course it greatly depends on its actual implementation; it may have unforeseen consequences on gameplay. Nevertheless, having taxation as a weapon right from the start should make solving most of the unexpected problems that do arise a great deal easier.

Part of the issue with virtual-world economies is that they touch on so many aspects of design. Certain things have to be in place for the economy to function, and some of these are directly at odds with what would otherwise be preferred for gameplay reasons. For example, if there’s a severe recession in the real world, then there’s not a lot you can do about it; in a virtual world, you instead can go play some other world where there isn’t a recession. Periodic recessions may be required to cool down overheated economies, but they’re no fun for the players caught up in them.

This is particularly problematical for players who enjoy the economic side of virtual life. Primarily, this means gatherers and crafters rather than traders (although it will mean traders too in any world where people can’t teleport about at will, buying stuff at source). In a celebrated attack on the hack-and-slay disposition of many virtual world designers, Sie Ming wrote an article ¹³—I Want to Bake Bread ¹⁴—pointing out some of the things that gatherers/crafters liked to do that weren’t being addressed by existing virtual worlds. This was followed up a few months later by a second article ¹⁵—I Want to Forge Swords—describing mechanisms by which designers might tackle these issues. It’s essentially an argument for an integrated economy, whereby there is a symbiotic relationship between those who create objects and those who consume them (that is, supply and demand). Although some of the suggestions are too specialized for many virtual worlds ¹⁶, most are eminently sensible and should not be difficult to incorporate to some degree in any reasonably open-ended new design. That the sentiments the articles express have not become widespread is due mainly to three main factors: A lack of understanding by well-meaning designers who want to be nice to crafters, but somehow just can’t get “it’s all about combat” ideas out of their heads—designers who subscribe to the overall sentiments, but lack the time and budget to do them justice; designers who perfectly understand the issues, but are creating a virtual world that really isn’t about crafting.

Crafting is an area where virtual-world economic activity doesn’t match the real-world version it hopes to model. Real-world economies can grow through extension of manufacturing, improved production methods, and better distribution. In virtual worlds, all these have to be programmed in and are therefore inviolate. In the real world, I can figure out a new way to make toothbrushes that takes less time or creates better toothbrushes; in a virtual world, I can only do this if the designers have anticipated me.

So far, I’ve described how those players of virtual worlds who have an interest in the subject have undertaken economics research concerning virtual worlds. There are, however, economists who come to virtual worlds as economists rather than as players. Their starting point is almost invariably the economic set-up of the real world, in which light they look at the economies of virtual worlds.

This isn’t a bad way to go about things, as long as you realize that there are differences between real-world and virtual-world economies. Although virtual worlds strive for realism when this helps immersion, nevertheless there are situations where the virtual cannot work the same as the real. Given that economies touch on so many aspects of virtual worlds, it would be surprising if they weren’t affected by some of these.

In an underrated introduction ¹⁷ to the topic, John Beezer sets about assessing the differences between real-world and virtual-world economies. He lists the conditions that must be satisfied in order to create a virtual economy recognizably close enough to a real (mercantile) economy that it could be studied as such. The conditions are categorized under three headings:

• Technical. To do with the hardware and software.

• Natural. Facts of real life, which are so fundamental to real-world economies that they must be transferred to virtual worlds.

• Cultural. Related to the way that people interact within the virtual world.

Of these, the most interesting ones are the natural ones. Beezer makes some very uncomfortable points here. For example, a major economic motivator in real life is fear of dying. Indeed, an “economic good” can be legitimately defined as “any product or service that prolongs or protects life”—it’s that fundamental.

Death must be permanent, and also sufficiently unpleasant that players will take it seriously ¹⁸. Characters must be able to kill one another, so that those characters with economic power can be prevented from abusing it (by armed insurrection). Virtual worlds without permanent death are therefore not going to work like the real world, right from the start.

Similarly, a lot of real-world economic activity is concerned with the provision of food and shelter. People need to eat a range of foods, too, not just a certain number of calories worth. Virtual worlds where the necessities aren’t necessary will also not work like the real world.

Thirdly, the way the real world’s economy works is moderated by transaction costs. Resources are not spread out evenly: Some crops grow better in one place than they do elsewhere; some minerals occur in one type of rock but not another; some animals prefer a particular climate. The further away you are from where something is produced, the more it costs to get it. Teleporting should therefore require effort, and teleporting lots of things should be proportionately harder than teleporting just a few of them. Virtual worlds with instant teleportation in them also aren’t going to have an economy like the real world’s.

Beezer’s points are all attainable: You could create a virtual world economy as he describes, and it would indeed work like the real one ¹⁹. The thing is, most virtual worlds do not adhere to these principles, and therefore their economies are not going to make sense if designed along real-world lines. The reason they don’t adhere to the principles is because if they did then their players would migrate to some other virtual world where “life” was easier—ironically, this is basically an economic argument.

The problem thus becomes one of creating a virtual world economy that looks to the players like a real economy but that behind the scenes is not. To this end, some of the ways in which virtual worlds differ from the real one can be used to their advantage. In the real world, for example, central banks aim to keep the money supply in equilibrium with the supply of goods; they do this by tweaking interest rates and by printing banknotes. The virtual world There.com, on the other hand, plans on doing something that the real world can’t—increasing the number of goods created so as to be in equilibrium with the money supply ²⁰. A second weapon they have is to maintain an exchange rate between their internal currency and the real-world dollar, so that the value of the newbie grubstake (and potentially other fixed-amount items) can be kept reasonably constant even if there is rampant inflation. It should be interesting to see how all this pans out.

There.com is a commercial virtual world that explicitly acknowledges the fact that its internal economy is linked to that of the real world. This has been something that has been evident for some time, ever since Ultima Online characters and equipment started being offered for sale on eBay ²¹. Some virtual worlds encourage it as part of their business model; others condone it; most condemn it. Basically, though, it’s going to happen with any large-scale commercial virtual world. It’s just a case of whether this is a black-market, gray-market or white-market economy ²².

And so we come to perhaps the second most famous ²³ of all writings about virtual worlds: Edward Castronova’s Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier ²⁴. From its somewhat dry title, you might guess that the paper itself hasn’t been read by millions of people. Its conclusions, however, made national newspapers across the globe.

Castronova looks at Norrath (the name of EverQuest’s world) as if it were a real country. He does it absolutely straight, discarding objections that it’s “just a game”: If it’s important to people, it’s important to study it. Choosing Norrath on the grounds that it was the biggest virtual world in terms of subscriptions and revenues ²⁵, he spent four months playing and collecting data. This was supplemented by a survey that attracted 3,619 respondents over a two-day period; the results of this survey (weighted so as to account for the activities of less involved players who didn’t hear about it) form the basis of Castronova’s analysis.

Although this study is all very absorbing, particularly the sections concerning the different markets for commerce within Norrath, it’s what Castronova further did with his data that hit the headlines. He noted that there was considerable trade between Norrath and the real world, and decided to collect further information concerning currency auctions so as to estimate its volume. He found that in May 2001 one Norrathian platinum piece sold for $0.0133 (that is, about one and a third cents), although by September it had dropped somewhat to $0.0098. He then looked at auctions of characters, to see if they were over- or under-valued according to this exchange rate. He found that a $1,000 character typically had more than $1,000 of wealth (in terms of platinum piece prices), so they were undervalued. It then occurred to him to figure out how much a character was typically worth per level, and use data from his user survey about the rate at which characters gain levels to calculate how much wealth Norrath generates as a whole.

He discovered that each level of a character is worth about $13 at auction. Across the whole of Norrath, players were adding around $15,000 of levels per hour. This leads to a gross national product (GNP) of about $135,000,000. Dividing this by the number of players to get the per capita GNP gives a figure of $2,266—roughly the same as that of Russia, and the 77 th richest in the world. This is what attracted the attention of journalists. Virtual worlds may be inhabited by people you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry (not that she’d ever meet one), but ye gods! They comprise the 77 th richest country in the world! Maybe there’s something important going on here that merits significant attention?

As pleased as I am whenever virtual worlds are being taken seriously, I nevertheless feel slightly uneasy here. GNP per capita is used as an indicator for the social and economic well-being of a country; it’s more to do with standards of living than absolute wealth. Although it is indeed frequently used to measure the relative wealth of countries, it’s very sensitive to population figures; low-population countries that are faring well will rate better than high-population counties that aren’t, even though the higher-population countries have as countries far more wealth than the lower-population ones. Norrath may equate with Russia in GNP per capita, but I don’t see Norrath financing a space program.

Castronova followed up his findings with a second paper ²⁶ six months later that considered whether virtual economies might grow to the extent that they have an impact on real economies. From a virtual world designer’s point of view, this is the more interesting paper, mainly because of the many philosophical points it raises. I personally believe that most of these can be addressed by an understanding that virtual world developers rule by divine right, but I appreciate how this may not be to many players’ liking.

Castronova ends this second paper with a list of areas where virtual-world economies don’t fit the standard models of real-world economies:

• In the real world, governments shouldn’t fix prices. In virtual worlds, developers can create and destroy goods effortlessly, therefore they don’t care about excess supply or demand. Some price-fixing could work in them.

• People in the real world would rather not work. People in virtual worlds would rather not not work—they get bored with nothing to do.

• In the real world, economic growth is good. In virtual worlds, increases in per capita wealth make it easier to accomplish tasks and therefore lower the challenge that they present. This means the world is less interesting, so growth can be bad.

• Real-world economics treats populations as fixed and assumes that their tastes and (initial) abilities are fixed. In virtual worlds, people can choose (through player class selection) to exhibit a subset of their abilities. They also can choose (in the context of the world) to be more than one person, and when to be alive.

Virtual world developers who employ real-world economists to design their virtual economies would do well to ensure these individuals have read On Virtual Economies first.

Castronova’s work suggests that people can make a living from virtual worlds. This is borne out by the facts, too: In an April 2001 discussion ²⁷ among Ultima Online eBay sellers, it transpired that some of them were taking in nearly $20,000 a month. On the whole, it was much less than this, of course: High sellers are often resellers, who (to use a real estate analogy) invest hard cash in acquiring run-down “properties” that they then spend considerable time and effort “refurbishing” to sell at a profit.

As it happens, many big deals in UO involve what would be called real estate if it weren’t actually virtual estate. People buy and sell houses the whole time. For an article ²⁸ he was writing, Julian Dibbell tracked the sale of a three-story tower from seller to middle-man to buyer—just one such transaction of the thousands that are undertaken daily in the real world for imaginary items.

When you can sell the virtual, how real does that make it?

Well, it makes it real enough for real companies to want a presence in virtual worlds. After all, when you’ve run out of real-world territories to reach, where else can you go? The Sims Online started the trend by integrating McDonald’s kiosks into their virtual world; although intended mainly as a marketing ploy (it certainly garnered a lot of publicity), this also had the interesting effect of making the virtual seem more real (and, perhaps in time, the real seem more virtual). It may be that the most important thing that economists have brought to virtual worlds is the realization that they are part of Reality.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, of course. If you bring the real into the virtual, you can’t pick and choose what you get. Virtual McDonald’s means virtual anti-McDonald’s protesters ²⁹.

This links rather nicely (although, as will immediately become apparent, not exactly convincingly) to our next topic: politics.

Politics

When players of virtual worlds refer to “politics,” they’re really talking about systems of government. Politics will be involved in any process by which people gain office, whether that office is head of a country or head of the local chapter of Hell’s Angels. It can happen in any virtual world where players have the ability to gain power through the support of others. On the whole, though, players use the term in the context of offices that grant tangible, law-making powers to their holder, enforced by the virtual world itself. There are other forms of politics that are important for virtual worlds, especially so-called “issue” politics such as feminism; these, I cover where the particular issue is discussed. Thus, with one exception that I’ll give at the end, this section examines the research that people have undertaken concerning the government of and in virtual worlds.

As with economics, most of the work done with politics in virtual worlds has come from players and designers who happen to have a background in that area. The best explanation ¹ as to how and why political systems as a gameplay mechanic make good sense in virtual worlds is by Matthew Mihaly, who has experience of just such a system in his virtual world Achaea (plus a degree in Political Science from Cornell University). He characterizes political situations in general as lying along a spectrum from static to dynamic. Static systems, such as monarchies, have no competition for power at the top but may have some lower down. Dynamic systems, such as democracies, have competition for even the very highest offices. Clearly, dynamic is more fun, but it does need a static element or it becomes incapable of doing its job. If governments changed daily, they wouldn’t get a lot done.

For designers of virtual worlds, implementing a formal political system is good for four ² reasons:

• It provides a non-violent way for players to gain a sense of achievement and involvement in the world.

• It creates a class of opinion leaders. When the live team wants to make a major change, it only has to win over the opinion leaders, not the whole player base. Opinion leaders take much of the flak that would otherwise be directed at the live team.

• It provides an incentive for experienced players to help newbies.

• It can provide another dimension to gameplay, as there are many interesting social dynamics that arise in situations where characters have formal control over aspects of other characters’ lives. This also increases the possibility that “storyline” content can emerge from player actions.

As for why players would want a political system, that’s not so clear. Many of the reasons that people care about who governs them in real life don’t apply in virtual worlds. They don’t, for example, react the same way to despots: In the real world, citizens may fear for their lives, but in virtual worlds they simply leave if someone is taking the fun out of playing. Matt narrows down the reasons that players might genuinely want a system of in-world government to the following (none of which are particularly strong):

• Comradeship. Players connect with other players in their community, and care what happens to them. Comradeship is good for a virtual world, but its presence isn’t dependent on the existence of an in-world government.

• Public services. Players get access to facilities they wouldn’t get access to if there wasn’t a government. This is only the case because it is forced by the virtual world design, of course, so it’s really an artificial reason.

• Glory by association. Your faction does well, so you feel good about it.

This all assumes, of course, that some players will actually want to be leaders. Matt concludes that there are four basic motivators involved (yet another set of bullet points—sorry folks!):

• The desire for power (over other players)

• The desire for glory (that is, recognition by your peers)

• The challenge

• The desire to help

Checkpoint: Let’s see how the player types I described in Chapter 3 fit into this. Power is clearly the domain of politicians and glory is that of griefers. The other player types are more general: Challenge is a motivator for both opportunists and planners (that is, achievers); the desire to help is present in both networkers and friends (that is, socializers). Because of what politicking involves, I’d guess that more opportunists than planners would be interested in the challenge aspect, as it’s quite a long-term activity. I also suspect that fewer friends than networkers will want to get involved, as the former tend to interact mainly with the people they know, rather than the population in general. This means that potential leaders would be in the front, top-left corner of the 3D player interest graph shown in Figure 3.4.

Okay, back to Matt’s analysis….

The critical thing about creating a system of offices is that they must have meaning. Power doesn’t itself imply meaning: There should be perceived benefits for letting people have the powers in the first place. This is best done through the provision of public services, but there are other ways that can work well, too. Comradeship comes from the collective fear of, and responses to, threats to the organization concerned; glory by association follows from this (assuming that the organization does occasionally triumph).

As for the type of government, Matt advocates a republic or democracy with a hierarchy of offices (rather than standalone “mayor” posts or whatever). Democracy is best, if only because players who live in real-world democracies won’t accept anything else ³; hierarchies are desirable so that people can get a taste of power without having to challenge influential players for the top job, and because it’s another ladder to climb. The nature of the hierarchy doesn’t have to be the same as in real life governments, because there is no need to build in “checks and balances”—real-live governments can abolish elections, but virtual ones can’t if the programming enforces them. This means that the system of government can be designed to address directly the reasons for having it, making it more fun for the players.

The hardest part of government design is deciding what powers the player holders of offices have. With too little, the offices are little more than sinecures; with too much, life for governed players can become unbearable to the extent that they leave for some other virtual world ⁴. There’s also the problem of law enforcement: Should the government only make laws that the virtual world itself can enforce (for example, to ban stealing it throws a switch that stops the “steal” command from working) or can it add other laws (“spying,” “treason”) that would need police and a judicial system to enforce? Even then, what could the punishments be? Imprisonment in a virtual world isn’t quite as big a deal as in the real one. What alternative justice systems are there ⁵?

Matthew Mihaly aside, most of the other articles about politics in virtual worlds concern how particular virtual worlds implement the concept. This is one field where large-scale graphical worlds are breaking new ground, because their textual predecessors didn’t often have the kind of player numbers that made such a system viable. There are exceptions, of course: Achaea itself, and (as mentioned in the Mr. Bungle case) LambdaMOO.

The fact that LambdaMOO had politics might suggest that there would be dozens of academic papers describing the goings-on. That there isn’t is something of a surprise; A Rape in Cyberspace pretty much says all that has been said. There is a good paper ⁶ about the legal system that emerged from LambdaMOO, but nothing ⁷ about its politics.

Freed from any legacy of the past, designers have come up with some very interesting approaches to politics. Nexon’s Dark Ages ⁸, for example, uses a notion of “political clout,” Clout is a tangible measure of political ability attached to a character and granted by the formal support of other characters; it must be spent to attain office and to execute the political control that comes with it. Roy Wilson, Jr. gives a good explanation ⁹ of how this works, at the same time illustrating the refreshing absence of serious grief play that it engenders. The theory that underpins it is described in a rather more difficult article ¹⁰ by Dark Ages’s designer Dave Kennerly, which is hard to follow without knowing what the virtual world is all about beforehand.

Another virtual world planned to have a strong political element is Star Wars Galaxies. Here, drawing on ideas from Lineage, politics is regarded as a profession; it has a skill tree associated with it, and characters must have the right skill before they can take political office. SWG’s design incorporates a very flexible “player associations” system that allows players to form large groups to focus on some aspect of the virtual world; politics is one such aspect. There is some concern ¹¹ as to how griefer-resistant this all is, however, especially as some of the powers that players can obtain could make virtual life quite unpleasant for other players.

Atriarch follows the general trend by allowing players to build their own cities, install their own governments for those cities, set taxes and laws, instigate trade routes, and so on. Shadowbane, on the other hand, goes for a purely guild-based system, allowing guilds to swear fealty to other guilds like Asheron’s Call players do to other individuals. Guilds can build cities, choose which government type to have (monarchy, oligarchy, republic, democracy), and set tax rates for shops.

So, the ideas are there, if it’s not yet clear what kind of consensus solution will emerge. It’s important to note that with the exception of LambdaMOO, all the examples I’ve described so far have concerned in-context government of virtual worlds. Overall control of virtual worlds does not, in general, use the same systems. You may be able to elect a town mayor, but that mayor can’t change patch release dates, subscription rates, or the extinctness of a virtual volcano. That said, not all virtual worlds are run by individual megalomaniacs, and some do involve players in real-world policy decisions (A Tale in the Desert, for example).

I’ve found two reasonably good studies that (as part of wider investigations into the subject) look at how virtual worlds are governed. Both were written by groups of students in 1998/99.

The report ¹² from Stanford University compares the approaches of virtual worlds, chat systems, email mailing lists, and newsgroups. Different types of government are described, along with their strengths and weaknesses concerning the online services under discussion. Virtual worlds ¹³ are usually feudal by nature, with a monarch having overlord powers over an oligarchy that has powers over the rest of the player base. Some virtual worlds are anarchies, which allow only for ostracism and flaming to influence deviant behavior. LambdaMOO was highly unusual in that not only was it a democracy, but it was a direct-participation democracy rather than a representative democracy.

The joint report ¹⁴ from MIT and Harvard Law School mentions the same monarchy-like hierarchical power structure that is typical of most virtual world administrations, but notes that there is a form of democracy at work because players can choose which world to play. If they don’t like what the government is doing, they are at liberty to leave and find somewhere more appealing. In other words, they can vote with their feet. This makes virtual world developers accountable in a way that real-life autocrats are not. The report also looks at LambdaMOO, and concludes that the ultimate failure of its democracy was evidence that this is not a viable form of government for virtual communities. The LambdaMOO developers had power but didn’t want the responsibility that went with it, so they passed power to the players. Unfortunately, the one power they couldn’t pass—control of the physical hardware—overrode all the other powers. Attempting to separate social from technical issues does not work when the social is rooted in the technical.

The control of virtual worlds only involves player politics if it involves players. So far, the experiments in that direction have had mixed results ¹⁵, and the paradigm is for a developer hegemony to rule. It’s conceivable that players could set up co-operatives to develop and run virtual worlds on democratic or shared-ownership principles, but it’s not going to happen until the cost of creating and operating commercial virtual worlds has dropped substantially.

Something that is rarely mentioned is the possibility of using virtual worlds to make political statements about the real world. The reason, of course, is that designers are wary of making overtly political points for fear of putting off prospective players. Nevertheless, as we shall see in Chapter 7, “Toward a Critical Aesthetic,” it’s quite possible to use virtual worlds to make artistic statements; politics drives some people’s art.

Another point that is not made very often ¹⁶ is that if virtual worlds are places with populations and governments and a currency with a real-world exchange rate, at what point should they be considered to be countries in their own right? EverQuest’s population is bigger than that of Iceland, Qatar, Luxembourg, Equatorial Guinea, and so on. If Malta can send a representative to the United Nations and accept ambassadors from other countries, why can’t Norrath?

And now we reach the final piece I’d like to mention about politics in virtual worlds. This one really is about politics—genuine, polemical, oh-my-gawd-get-me-out-of-here ideological theory applied to virtual worlds.

Brace yourself….

Using a Marxism versus capitalism line of reasoning, Annalee Newitz argues ¹⁷ that the freedom to be a different person online is only illusory. The Marxist perspective is that people work to get beyond their material needs, thereby acquiring an intellectual freedom; work is therefore the fundamental that gives life meaning. In a capitalist system, this is not the case: You sell your labor to other people and must therefore behave as they require. This means adopting a work persona different from your real self (smiling at customers when you’re not happy, working on despite being tired, and so on).

Newitz’s argument is that people in capitalist societies are so used to believing that different social environments require them to manifest different personalities that they create one automatically when they enter a virtual world. This virtual personality has no direct link to the material world, and therefore it is surplus, worn only for pleasure.

Surplus is capitalism’s promise, and people are seduced by it. Individuals in a capitalist society don’t consider that they work to survive; instead, they feel that they work so as to produce a surplus of free time. They believe that free time liberates them from their material needs, whereas really it strips their lives of meaning (because meaning comes from labor). From this perspective, adding an extra, unnecessary self merely increases the number of partial selves that an individual has but that can never (except by adopting the Marxist approach) be reconciled. People would be better off if they stayed with the real instead of flirting with the virtual.

In other words, your virtual self is meaningless because you can’t do what makes your life meaningful in virtual worlds.

This is a very powerful point, whether or not you accept the Marxist reasoning by which it was derived. Personally, I don’t know enough about the ideology to be able to comment on it ¹⁸; I do know about virtual worlds, though, and (as I’ve argued in this book) I believe strongly that they bring multiple selves together rather than keep them apart. You may not be able to change your work self, but you can blend your virtual self and your real self together into one. Thus, although it may from a Marxist standpoint be possible to level all manner of charges against virtual worlds, I don’t think that the installation of contradictory identities is one that necessarily holds.

Autobiography

Virtual worlds have such an effect on people that often they want to write about their experiences. Although most of this takes the form of what might be called “fan fiction,” a little is more personal. Some players keep logs, some keep diaries; some write essays, some write poetry. A very small few write full-blown autobiographies that cover the period of their life that they spent in (and out) of virtual worlds. As the ethnography of an individual, these are remarkable resources; as a recounting of their author’s own, private hero’s journey, they’re invaluable.

I am aware of only two ¹ such autobiographies: those of Julian Dibbell and Indra Sinha.

My Tiny Life ² concerns the three intense months that Julian Dibbell spent in LamdbaMOO. It begins with a retelling of A Rape in Cyberspace, then launches into Dibbell’s experiences as a player in this post-Mr. Bungle world. Although the book chronicles these goings-on very well, actually it isn’t really about them at all: Instead, what it charts is how by playing LambdaMOO, Dibbell overcame the insecurities he was experiencing about his love for his then girlfriend (now wife). The virtual world gave him an outlook on the real world that he didn’t have previously, enabling him to look at himself in new ways. From this, he developed a stronger sense of self-worth, through which he was able to overcome any lingering doubts about commitment that he still had. Dibbell doesn’t say this directly in his book, but it is hinted at throughout; it’s clear he feels genuine gratitude to LambdaMOO for what it taught him. Basically, LambdaMOO was where he finally grew up.

The picture of LambdaMOO itself that emerges is vaguely disturbing, like some ghastly reality TV experiment gone hideously awry. All you can do in LambdaMOO is create objects and talk to people. There are some elements of gameplay within individual creations, but these do not connect with one another cohesively. All activity therefore revolves around creating (for which a strict quota system exists) or talking and emoting. This doesn’t leave great scope for people to have fun: They’re pretty well limited to acquiring quota (which acts not so much as a currency as Dark Ages-like clout) or performing acts of virtual sex—both of which involve tiresome interpersonal politics. Some of what Dibbell describes should give designers pause for thought, in particular the schmoo wars (where players rose up against the “power elite” that they felt governed LambdaMOO); most of it seems incredibly shallow and petty, however. This, of course, is part of Dibbell’s point.

The book has some nice stylistic touches that help blur the lines between the real and the virtual; in particular, events that occur in real life are written like transcripts of a LambdaMOO session whereas events in LambdaMOO appear in conventional narrative form. Its main strength, however, is its content: It is the perfect riposte to anyone who tells players of virtual worlds that they should “get a life!” For this, we should all be grateful.

The second autobiographical work I’m going to mention is a much harder read, not least because it consists of over a hundred very small, choppy chapters. The Cybergypsies ³ is Indra Sinha’s account of his time in Shades and Void ⁴ (which he switched to once British Telecom closed down Shades).

Yes, Shades and Void—his experiences predate Julian Dibbell’s by several years.

Again, what the book purports to be about isn’t what it’s actually about. Its subtext is the author’s relationship with the love of his life (his wife, whom he greatly neglected while playing in virtual worlds). This time, though, the view expressed seems somewhat harsher: Ultimately, Sinha stopped playing because he realized that events he thought important in the virtual world were trifling and inconsequential when compared with events of the real world ⁵.

The book consists of three main threads—a device to highlight the way that the real and the virtual are interwoven. The first of these threads concerns virtual worlds; the second concerns Reality; the third concerns computer viruses. This last one does not sit at all well with the other two: Although Shades and Reality overlap (Sinha met Shades players in real life), the viruses thread could be unpicked without affecting the integrity of the whole work one jot. Its presence serves mainly to propose an analogy: Playing virtual worlds introduces an addiction into the lives of players that can be as disruptive for them as the arrival of a virus is on a personal computer. This works if the payload that is delivered by playing virtual worlds is not considered benign, but (as someone who believes that in general it is benign) I’m not convinced by it myself.

From the preceding it may appear that Sinha is contemptuous of virtual worlds, but this is not the case. His fondness for Void, if not Shades, is apparent and sincere. Rather his attitude seems to be that virtual worlds are places you visit to find out what your problems are and where you can grow as you address these problems, but that once this is done you will inevitably come back to Reality. I wouldn’t disagree with this, except to note that you can be “master of the two worlds’; later return is possible.

Sinha does, however, have one particularly serious concern about virtual worlds that he expresses as “what we imagine, we make.” In Void, one of his friends described an incident where she and others ate another character at a feast; she further explained that far “worse” things often happened. It was okay, though, because the virtual world was imaginary, and anything done in the imagination is “safe.” Sinha’s reaction was that no, it is not safe: People use the same emotional faculties in the real world that they use in virtual worlds, and by tolerating a sickening virtual action they are also modifying what they would tolerate in Reality; they are becoming desensitized. If imaginary cruelty is considered to be acceptable, real cruelty inevitably becomes more acceptable than it was previously.

Although this is a powerful observation ⁶, it is quite selective. I agree that such things do indeed occur in virtual worlds, but would counter that in the majority of cases the virtual world is set up such that positive changes in attitude greatly outweigh negative ones. Designers bear the primary responsibility of ensuring that this should be so, although the players themselves are also culpable: The cannibalistic feast in Void was enacted entirely through emotes, not some bizarre “eat person” command. Any virtual world set up (deliberately or otherwise) to change players’ attitudes in ways that society finds unacceptable is for society to deal with. As far as I know, there are no such virtual worlds in existence; that’s not to say that this will always be the case, however.

In Sinha’s book, his father-in-law gets interested in Scientology. The way that this eminently sensible man is gradually drawn in as he strives to gain different “levels” of awareness is contrasted with the way that players of virtual worlds find themselves on leveling treadmills that they somehow can’t leave. It’s an amusing analogy: virtual world designers as theocrats.

It also provides a handy link to the next topic….

Theology

Theology? Why would a theologist…?

Then it hits you: As the real is to the virtual, so the spiritual is to the real. Theologists should be more interested in virtual worlds than perhaps anyone else except the designers of such worlds themselves.

I have two points to make before I begin this discussion.

Firstly, I’m an atheist. I’m going to be talking about religions here, and try as I might to be objective it’s inevitable that my views are going to show through in places. If this is likely to offend you, please skip the remainder of this section.

Secondly, I’m an atheist. I regard ethics and morality as important issues, but I don’t associate them with particular religious doctrines. Therefore, some of the things I’ll be talking about might not seem to be theology-related at all. If this apparent belittling of faith is likely to offend you, you too should skip the remainder of this section.

Okay, so let’s get started….

A July 1999 poll ¹ in The Mud Journal asked “What kind of Mud would you like more of?” Of the 362 people who responded 10.3% indicated that they would like to see more religious-themed virtual worlds. This was lower than any of the other genres (horror 24.2%, futuristic 21.8%, old western 19.8%, sci-fi 13.3%, real world events 10.6%) but nevertheless 10.3% is not insignificant.

Even so, many players and designers would be surprised to learn that there are virtual worlds in existence right now that were built as places of worship for real-life religions. I don’t just mean technopaganism, either, although this was among the first to be studied ²; there are virtual worlds created as places for people to participate in mainstream religious services, too. The E-church ³, for example, was set up by a group of Christians in the charismatic tradition, and has met with some success at reproducing some of the essential features of a conventional church service ⁴, if not the experience.

Technopagans attempt to create a virtual space that can be sanctified as a place in which spirit is manifested. The E-church’s congregation, on the other hand, tries to replicate the real in the virtual; it only partially succeeds, because the technology gets in the way of some aspects of the service. Nevertheless, the E-church is adapting to account for these, and also to exploit some of the advantages that virtuality brings.

Whether these experiments will lead to more or less real-world religious activity in virtual worlds depends on the specific religions involved, of course. It would take something of a debate before conventional Christian churches allowed baptism or weddings in virtual worlds, for example; the Roman Catholic Eucharist presents particularly thorny problems.

In an examination ⁵ of religions and cyberspace (including virtual worlds), Lorne L. Dawson noted the following additional traps awaiting anyone intending to move any religion from the real to the virtual—or, indeed, to create a new religion for virtual spaces only:

• The propagation of misinformation and misunderstandings

• Loss of control over religious materials

• Loss of group identity among practitioners of religions

• Negative effects of the interface

• Blurring the frames of reality

For the most part, virtual worlds are not regarded by their inhabitants as places where religion is important. Morality is important, but the basis of this—religious or otherwise—is rarely mentioned. Not only would it often be non-immersive to bring real-world religion into a virtual world, but (along with discussions about politics) it offers a good opportunity to fall out with your friends. That said, many virtual worlds do have a formal or informal system of etiquette in place for the bulk of their players, along with a stronger system of ethics for their administrators. Some of the latter go back years: The MUSH favorite Amberyl’s Wizard Ethics ⁶ has remained unchanged since 1994, and MUD2’s Good Wiz Guide ⁷ d ates back to MUD1.

In an early analysis ⁸ of the problem of determining an ethical system for virtual worlds, Chuck Haeberle poses the question: Should the moral values and ethics which we consider to be valid in real life be applied to the virtual world, or should we look at the virtual world as existing with a separate set of ethics? Ethical standards exist wherever humans exist, so virtual worlds—even anarchic ones—must have them.

Haeberle notes that a virtual world operates over a potentially unending period, and that its players define how it is played by how they play it. They must always abide by the rules of the virtual world in which they play, but if they don’t like those rules they can play elsewhere. For this reason, some real-world values must be carried over—they’re part of the value judgment.

Virtual worlds are an extension of real life; the interaction between players gives rise to a real-life morality that makes virtual worlds more than the mere games they would otherwise be. In other words, it’s because we’re real that virtual worlds must be treated in moral terms as if they were equally real.

That said, there are big differences between virtual worlds and Reality. An ethical system that has evolved for real life may need to be adapted if it is to hold in virtual worlds, too. This is the position of Michael Cranford, who identifies ⁹ the desire to be more greatly immersed as the great allure of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds offer the prospect of existence without limits; yet without limits, whence comes meaning? If everything is possible, if risk and consequence are not factors, why would anybody treat other people in a dignified or sensitive manner? Haeberle is right in that people should bring real-world morality into virtual worlds, but that doesn’t mean they do. Furthermore, if other people treat you badly in this virtual world, there’s no guarantee they won’t follow you to whichever other virtual world you go to instead. Cranford is ultimately pessimistic, seeing the ethical systems of virtual worlds as potentially eroding those of Reality. Because virtual worlds have fewer constraints than Reality, some degree of retrogressive behavior is inevitable.

Cranford’s argument is basically anthropological. It’s interesting, therefore, to see what bona fide students of anthropology have to say on the subject of religion in virtual worlds. Many anthropologists take the view that a culture without religion is no culture at all; however, they have quite inclusive views as to what “religion” may be. Any system of beliefs in supernatural forces—with accompanying symbols and rituals—that serve to help people make sense of the world is a religion; deities are not a necessary component. From this perspective, do virtual worlds have anything in them that would qualify as “religion”? If so, it strengthens their claim to separate culture status; if not, it weakens it.

There is an argument ¹⁰ that although virtual world cultures don’t usually have an explicit religion, nevertheless they do have so many components that are analogous to what religions have that they could be treated as if they did have religions ¹¹. For example, logging in is an acceptance of the “truth” of virtual worlds, signifying a belief in the non-real—a very ritualistic process.

That there is, for certain people, a religious aspect to virtual worlds is the conclusion of Jen Clodius in her discussion ¹² of religion in DragonMUD. She noted that there were many traditional religious symbols in DragonMUD, but that these were present entirely for their evocative effects; if DragonMUD did indeed have a religious aspect, it would need to have symbols of its own. It did have some ceremony (particularly concerning the raising of players to the rank of wizard, that is, junior administrator). Could it be argued that this was basically a religious act at root?

Starting with a very well-known anthropological definition ¹³ of religion from Clifford Geertz, she invited members of the DragonMUD community to debate the suggestion that there was a religious aspect to that virtual world. Twenty-five participated in the resulting discussion. Taking a check-list approach to each element of Geertz’s definition in turn, the players decided:

• DragonMUD has symbols. Some objects have a permanent place in the virtual world and have real-life significance to players, therefore they act as symbols.

• These symbols can act to establish long-lasting moods and motivations. Furthermore, they do so in themselves; however, these motivations are primarily social. On the whole, the consensus was that the virtual world’s symbols did satisfy this clause of Geertz’s criteria, but not everyone agreed.

• There are conceptions of a general order of existence in DragonMUD, assuming the context is DragonMUD itself and not the real world.

• DragonMUD’s symbols clothe the conceptions of order with an aura of factuality because of their permanence and their meaning to the players.

• DragonMUD has a unique realism. It’s less clear whether the clothing of conceptions of an order of existence in factuality caused this, though.

Clodius concludes that for some players there is a religious aspect to DragonMUD, but she is hesitant to go beyond that due to what she perceives as her own possible cynicism concerning their motivations. Personally, I believe her cynicism to be more than justified.

The DragonMUD players involved in the discussion criticized Geertz’s definition for its omission of any reference to a sense of “awe” or of the “sacred.” I think perhaps they missed the point: These are implicit in Geertz’s definition, which the players did not realize in their haste to show that DragonMUD did indeed have a religious aspect to it. If more of them had understood what Geertz was actually saying with his definition, they might have been less quick to assert that it applied to their virtual world. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t apply, of course—some players expressed that they did have a sense of awe concerning DragonMUD—but rather that the debate was incomplete ¹⁴.

So far, I’ve described what religion has to say about virtual worlds, but not what virtual worlds have to say about religion. This is no different to what I’ve done in discussing other disciplines, of course: Virtual world designers may be interested in what geographers have to say about virtual worlds, but they’re not concerned with the problems that virtual worlds give geographers—that’s for geographers to worry about. In the case of religion, however, the creator/created analogy is too strong: The questions that virtual world designers pose for theologians are questions that PCs and NPCs pose for designers.

In her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace ¹⁵, Margaret Wertheim argues that what cyberspace offers (in both its virtual-world present and its cyberpunk promise) is akin to the world-view of medieval Christians. Back then, people had the notion that they were simultaneously embedded in both a physical world and a spiritual world. Wertheim charts this view through various scientific and mathematical spaces until she arrives at cyberspace, which has a physical/virtual split that mirrors the physical/ spiritual split of the medieval age.

This book is a great starting place if you want to look into the spiritual and the virtual more fully. It’s not specific to virtual worlds, but they are mentioned, and what she says certainly applies to them. Her contention is that human beings have always had “other worlds,” whether Aboriginal Dreamtime or Greek Olympus, and that Western cultures in particular have always associated immateriality with spirituality ¹⁶. Virtual worlds’ offer of death that isn’t death is precisely what is promised by many religions. The level system of virtual worlds is like Dante’s description of the nine circles of Hell, the nine cornices of Purgatory and the nine spheres of Heaven: Players advance in experience and understanding until their ultimate ascendance to wizardhood. Cyberspace is being claimed as a realm for the self; this book explores how it could be a realm for the soul.

Although the analogy between virtual and spiritual spaces is easy to draw, the consequences of it are not. Wertheim identifies the morality and ethics present in virtual spaces as much harder to explain than is the case for spiritual spaces. Although she takes some tentative steps, she never really comes close to answering her question. The moral underpinnings of virtual worlds cannot be explained in a self-contained fashion by the same appeal to the word of some deity that is available for spiritual worlds.

Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control ¹⁷ makes a very interesting point about the recursive nature of creation. In a wide-ranging eclectic mix of cyberholism, Kelly invests a few pages talking about virtual worlds. At first, this is the usual stuff about MUDs, MOOs, and quotes from Turkle. Then, however, he makes his killer observation.

The ultimate “god game” would be a vast world, set into motion with a few well-chosen rules and populated by PCs and autonomous, AI-driven NPCs. Time would pass, relationships and interrelationships would form and tangle. All entities—PCs and NPCs—would alter their world, physically and socially, until it evolved into something quite different from how it started. At that point, the god who created it descends into it.

Kelly’s is not a religious book, let alone a Christian one, but he uses a Christian analogy to pursue his argument. He describes the Biblical story of the Creation in terms of a designer creating a world. At the end, the designer (that is, God) creates a simulacrum of himself that he instantiates as Adam. He makes Adam just like he himself is, with free will and creativity. He turns Adam loose in the world.

Mankind is now repeating the exercise; we are creating our own worlds. Is this the final act that completes God’s genesis—makes us truly the copies of him that we were always intended to be—or is it a foolish audacity?

Put another way, is it a sacrament or a blasphemy? If you accept God as the creator of the universe, it must be one or the other—there’s no partial solution. By creating a virtual world, either you are completing God’s plan that humanity be in his image (sacrament, but does this mean God’s work is now done?), or you are mocking him through your arrogance and false pride (blasphemy, but does this mean humanity can never consider itself truly to be in God’s image?).

Either way, just like God’s creation of mankind, any free-willed virtual creatures the designer creates will not be under the designer’s control: The creator has to pass control to the created. The designer—whether you or God—must “let go to win” ¹⁸.

A third book, TechGnosis ¹⁹ by Erik Davis, reverses the argument: By creating virtual worlds, we become the gods that we weren’t before. Like Wertheim, Davis takes the point of view that the technical merely hides the same mystical that humanity has always sought (although his approach is less anthropological and more evangelical). Virtual worlds are just one example of where this happens—the scope of the book is much wider. Nevertheless, in the few pages that he dedicates to the virtual worlds, Davis raises a number of interesting points.

Firstly, he notes that virtual worlds of all kinds use magic as a metaphor to explain the kinds of things that you can do in them that you can’t do in Reality. They present a mystical fiction to account for the technological fact.

Secondly, he observes that permanent death crystallizes a philosophical question concerning immersion. Do we identify with our online selves because they are as liberated as we want to be, or because they are as constrained as we really are ²⁰?

Finally, he makes a connection with Hinduism. The word avatar, used in (mainly graphical) virtual worlds to denote the virtual object under the player’s control, has Hindu roots. It came to virtual worlds through Habitat, although it was also used in the (single-player) Ultima series (of which many virtual world designers were aware) so it didn’t need any explaining to them ²¹. In Hindu belief, avatars have two identities: As separate from the gods; as indivisible from the gods. Virtual world avatars have the same duality of separation (two worlds) and identity (same person), but they apply the concept in reverse: People become gods; gods don’t become people. Davis remains undecided as to whether this is an ascent or a descent of the spirit.

The similarity between virtual world existence and Hindu mysticism has been noted many times ²². A remarkable 1992 paper ²³ by Thyagi NagaSiva goes one step further, and proposes the use of virtual worlds as a foundation metaphor for a new, Western mysticism.

NagaSiva takes the view that virtual worlds are places where different aspects of the individual can exist—different selves, in other words. The existent of different selves is not restricted to virtual worlds, however—Reality has many situations where individuals can be regarded as having a self different to that present in other situations. NagaSiva suggests that it is insightful to regard these different selves as existing in their own, private “virtual world.” Whether this virtual world is an actual virtual world running on an actual computer or a metaphorical virtual world is immaterial; the two may be considered as equally “real.” What we normally mean by Reality is therefore simply an agglomeration of multiple virtual worlds; true Reality would be the superset of all virtual worlds ²⁴, a subject/object unity akin to the Buddhist Nirvana or Christian Heaven. Individual virtual worlds are merely the worlds inhabited by particular instantiations of the self. People can find NagaSiva’s notion of Reality in any of their virtual worlds, although they will not usually perceive it in normal states of consciousness. You find Reality by unifying with the divine, thereby both transcending and subsuming the virtual world experience.

NagaSiva’s paper seems a good place to end this discussion of theology and virtual worlds, but I shall nevertheless carry on (not least because ending here would imply I was for NagaSiva’s proposal, which I’m not ²⁵). Instead, I’m going to take a brief look at the design of in-context religions (or, strictly speaking, deities) for virtual worlds. There isn’t a lot of work in this area; the main paper, Dan Hastings’s Designing God ²⁶, is very short. It does, however, cover most of the basics ²⁷:

• Are gods necessary?

• If so, do the gods exist in the virtual world or are they merely fictional?

• Who are the gods?

• What do they want?

• Where did they come from?

• Why are they here?

There’s great scope for designer creativity in this area; pantheons in particular offer fine opportunities for combining philosophical and artistic points with gameplay elements. Do the gods represent: emotional concepts (love, hate, trust); aspects of life (time, fate, chance); aspects of nature (air, sea, forest); natural forces (fire, storms, earthquakes); aspects of balance (law, chaos, good, evil)? Or do they represent something else entirely?

There are some interesting consequences of having gods ²⁸ in virtual worlds, all of which need to be determined by the designer. What, for example, is the effect of worshiping a god (or of not doing so)? What are the myths, and do they conflict? How did these give rise to the symbols and rituals of faith that turn it into a religion? How much of the religion should be programmed in as laws of nature (which wouldn’t be tangibly different to laws of the land?) and how much should be left to enforcement by players or NPCs?

A very interesting mechanism for implementing religion is described in an article by Paul Schwanz ²⁹. His idea is to codify morality as tangible properties along four dimensions: health, wealth, power, and information. Players choose their characters to be givers or takers along each dimension, and the degree to which they are so. When players undertake an action, any reward they gain is split along those dimensions. Thus, for example, a character who kills a king would gain points if they were an assassin (rating high for taking health and power) but the king’s physician would lose points (because they are life-giving and loyal, that is, power-giving). Conversely, an assassin who healed a king would lose points, whereas a healer would gain them. By this ruse, players get to decide on the morality of their characters and can role-play them appropriately.

As a system of morality, which could be used to give value to any virtual religion, this is an excellent approach. For identity exploration, though, it presents a barrier. This, perhaps, is the great irony of all virtual-world religious experience: It changes the player, but it can’t itself change in response. For such adaptability, people must rely on either themselves or on other people. Whether these other people are real, virtual, or imaginary depends entirely on the religion.