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.