Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

This brief introductory chapter sets the stage for a broad discussion of many aspects of virtual worlds, by comparing episodes experienced by two avatar researchers, one in Second Life (SL), and the other in Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Interviewer Wilber attends a medieval dance on an SL island created by Starfleet, an innovative and hard-working group of 500 Star Trek fans, who have created working virtual technology and soaring architecture to make real their fantasies about the human future. Algorithma Teq visits the Mos Eisley Cantina in SWG, where Luke Skywalker originally met Han Solo, and is scrutinized by two Imperial storm troopers, even as she attempts to remain aloof from the Star Wars mythos and simply practice her engineering skills in making droids. It can be useful to distinguish gamelike virtual worlds from non-game worlds, yet as these examples show, they are not distinct categories, and virtual worlds inevitably mix fantasy and reality in complex ways.

William Sims Bainbridge

Chapter 2. New World View

Abstract

This chapter reports the wide range of ideas in a pair of major scientific conference meetings held inside the most popular virtual world, World of Warcraft (WoW), May 9 and May 10, 2008, plus the challenges of organizing these online events. More than a hundred scholars and scientists contributed to each session, the first covering research on World of Warcraft, and the second examining how virtual worlds fit into the larger world of human experience. A third session, held on May 11, was the starting point for the concluding chapter of this volume. This chapter describes how WoW and other virtual worlds can be used as laboratories for studying human behavior, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and the affordances of virtual worlds can be used to support scientific communication (Bainbridge 2007, in press).

William Sims Bainbridge

Chapter 3. Culture and Creativity: World of Warcraft Modding in China and the US

Abstract

Modding - end-user modification of commercial hardware and software - can be traced back at least to 1961 when Spacewar! was developed by a group of MIT students on a DEC PDP-1. Spacewar! evolved into arcade games including Space Wars produced in 1977 by Cinematronics (Sotamaa 2003). In 1992, players altering Wolfenstein 3-D (1992), a first person shooter game made by id Software, overwrote the graphics and sounds by editing the game files. Learning from this experience, id Software released Doom in 1993 with isolated media files and open source code for players to develop custom maps, images, sounds, and other utilities. Players were able to pass on their modifications to others. By 1996, with the release of Quake, end-user modifications had come to be known as “mods,” and modding was an accepted part of the gaming community (Kucklich 2005; Postigo 2008a, b). Since late-2005, we have been studying World of Warcraft (WoW) in which the use of mods is an important aspect of player practice (Nardi and Harris 2006; Nardi et al. 2007). Technically minded players with an interest in extending the game write mods and make them available to players for free download on distribution sites. Most modders work for free, but the distribution sites are commercial enterprises with advertising.

WoW is a transnational game, available in seven languages, providing an opportunity to examine issues of culture with a stable artifact as anchor. We have studied WoW modding in China and the United States, focusing on the largest single national group of players - the Chinese - and our own local player community. At the time of writing, about half (5.5 million) of all WoW players were Chinese while just under a third (2.5 million) were North American (Blizzard Entertainment 2008).

Yong Ming Kow, Bonnie Nardi

Chapter 4. The Diasporic Game Community: Trans-Ludic Cultures and Latitudinal Research Across Multiple Games and Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This chapter develops a methodological concept that is new in this area of research, latitudinal studies that look at phenomena across multiple virtual worlds, as a means to draw generalizable conclusions. For the purposes of illustration, it uses the remarkable case history of a community of players that arose in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, a massively multiplayer online game, and who migrated to other virtual worlds when it closed down, taking their Uru culture with them. Uru refugees entered other online game worlds, and the non-game worlds There.com and Second Life, where they created their own fictive ethnic identities, communities, and cultures. A 5-year research project has studied the emergence of game refugees, trans-ludic diasporas, and the development of trans-ludic identities, while exploring a range of methodological challenges and opportunities. It is becoming increasingly feasible to conduct ethnographic studies with teams of researchers or graduate students that provide comparative analysis across multiple games or worlds.

Celia Pearce, Artemesia

Chapter 5. Science, Technology, and Reality in The Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa

Abstract

All virtual worlds possess implicit theories of the nature of reality and of the central values of human life, but the The Matrix Online (MxO) and Tabula Rasa (TR) are notable for having especially well-developed philosophical motivations. Extensive participant-observation research in both revealed that they postulate hidden realities beneath the world of appearances, shared a concern over whether technology would liberate or enslave humanity, and offered players distinctive programming languages with which they could empower themselves. Avatars in both were protean, in different ways capable of evolving along multiple lines of development, and operating secondary avatars that provide challenging metaphors of the ways humans exploit each other. MxO draws heavily upon European theories of the social construction of reality and false consciousness, whereas TR draws upon the ideology of the spaceflight social movement and went so far as to transport the avatars to the International Space Station orbiting the real world.

William Sims Bainbridge

Chapter 6. Spore: Assessment of the Science in an Evolution-Oriented Game

Abstract

Spore was introduced in late 2008 with a tremendous amount of publicity, including a National Geographic television documentary, asserting it was revolutionary in two ways: First, its makers consistently implied that it realistically depicted the biological and cultural evolution of species from the cellular stage, through the development of intelligence, tribes, civilization, and even space travel. Second, it combined aspects of solo-play avatar-experienced world, multicharacter but solo-player strategy game, and asynchronous Internet sharing of characters that differs from the typical synchronous online environment. Thus, it claimed to be a valid simulation of the real world, and at the same time, it expanded the definition of an online virtual world.

The chief designer, Will Wright, has a long and influential history as an innovator with a unique perspective on what constitutes a virtual world. SimCity, Wright’s urban planning and city-building game dating from 1989, launched the Maxis company that most recently produced Spore. Early Will Wright games sought to establish connections to science and scholarship, notably through bibliographies included in the instruction manuals for the 1993 edition of his original product, SimCity 2000, and the original 2000 version of The Sims (Bremer 1993; Bentley 2000). Wright has called The Sims a “software toy,” rather than a game, and in common with virtual worlds such as Second Life, it does not require gamelike competition. Rather, it is like an interactive doll house, in which an individual user gradually develops a personalized, home-like environment. A multiuser online version of The Sims was launched in 2002 and shut down in 2008, for offering for nearly 6 years a complex virtual world for thousands of inhabitants.

John Bohannon, T. Ryan Gregory, Niles Eldredge, William Sims Bainbridge

Chapter 7. Medulla: A Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Framework for Research, Teaching, and Learning with Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Medulla is an enabling technology designed to support the construction of complex synthetic environments, created by the Federation of American Scientists for learning, teaching, and research inside virtual worlds. It integrates the existing technologies to support the innovative use of digital art, media, documents, and software. In the past, educational technology projects typically reached only small audiences and quickly because they were locked into limited technologies and lacked a viable business model. Medulla is an open source collaborative toolset, independent of any particular virtual world platform, designed for use even by people not familiar with virtual worlds. Initial work has been completed on identifying the functionality needed for collaborative construction and use of virtual worlds for education, evaluating existing software tools capable of providing these services, and linking them together as seamlessly as possible using interoperability standards. Current demonstration projects include reconstructions of the ancient city of Uruk and one designed to teach algebra.

Michelle Roper Fox, Henry Kelly, Sachin Patil

Chapter 8. A Virtual Mars

Abstract

This is a first-person account of the invention and development of a new virtual world called Blue Mars. Although not based on any existing science fiction work or futurist scenario, Blue Mars imagines a technically plausible future in which the planet Mars has been transformed to make it habitable. Employing the high-resolution CryEngine 2 graphics system, Virtual Space Entertainment has developed an early version of Blue Mars in partnership with several educational organizations. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History inspired building a virtual version of its upcoming Hall of Human Origins, and the National Geographic Society suggested a virtual exhibit to coincide with their Terra Cotta Warrior Exhibition. Among the difficult challenges faced by the Blue Mars team was the tragic death of one of its key innovators, and the need for repeated redesign to take advantage of the most advanced available technology. Looking at our world through the eyes of Martian colonists in the year 2150 will open new vistas for education, communication, and a broader understanding of the Earth.

Richard Childers

Chapter 9. Opening the Metaverse

Abstract

Virtual worlds (VWs) have the ability to deliver enhanced visualization and simulation capabilities, and to support contextualized copresence, so they have the potential to serve large numbers of work organizations, educators, trainers, and scholars. To accomplish this, they must evolve into a metaverse that would make it easy for anyone to create and distribute 3D virtual information spaces that are collaborative, persistent, and interoperable, and that provide a shared social context for unifying and integrating resources, multimedia content, along with grid and cloud-based computing services on demand. On the basis of the example of the Web, the new global metamedium supporting the open metaverse must (1) be open and nonproprietary, (2) include a VW browser analogous to today’s open source web browsers for viewing and interacting with VWs, and (3) provide 3D hyperlink capability for traversing VW contexts. The Open Cobalt project seeks to accomplish this revolution by building and deploying a virtual-machine-based technology that functions as a VW browser and construction toolkit, and as an integrated development environment for accessing, creating, and publishing hyperlinked VWs.

Julian Lombardi, Marilyn Lombardi

Chapter 10. A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This chapter outlines a typology of genres of ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds, informed by extensive research the author has completed both in Second Life and in Indonesia. It begins by identifying four confusions about virtual worlds: they are not games, they need not be graphical or even visual, they are not mass media, and they need not be defined in terms of escapist role-playing. A three-part typology of methods for ethnographic research in virtual worlds focuses on the relationship between research design and ethnographic scale. One class of methods for researching virtual worlds with regard to ethnographic scale explores interfaces between virtual worlds and the actual world, whereas a second examines interfaces between two or more virtual worlds. The third class involves studying a single virtual world in its own terms. Recognizing that all three approaches have merit for particular research purposes, ethnography of virtual worlds can be a vibrant field of research, contributing to central debates about human selfhood and sociality.

Tom Boellstorff

Chapter 11. Massively Multiplayer Online Games as Living Laboratories: Opportunities and Pitfalls

Abstract

The digital nature of online games makes them particularly amenable to large-scale, automated data collection and analysis; so researchers have begun to use them as living laboratories to test or refine the existing theories of human behavior. On the basis of several years of intensive data collection in several massively multiplayer online games, this chapter addresses three problems concerning validity and generalizability that must be taken into account. First, each game has a set of laws that steer player behavior, thereby introducing confounding factors that have to be taken into account by the researcher. Second, games attract skewed samples of players, and players may adopt transformed personalities inside the game world, which puts into question the validity of extending findings from observations in the digital realm into the physical one. Third, the lack of a clear boundary defining the “game space,” illustrated by the many websites and forums for popular games, raises the question of whether online games themselves capture the totality of the user’s experience. The problematic mapping between “real-world” behaviors and those in online games presents research opportunities as well as pitfalls that need to be avoided.

Nicolas Ducheneaut

Chapter 12. Examining Player Anger in World of Warcraft

Abstract

This questionnaire study of the sources of anger in World of Warcraft applies classical quantitative measurement scale construction to a new problem, generating a host of questionnaire items that could find use in future studies, and identifying four major categories of events that cause negative effect among players. First, 33 players provided examples of in-game scenarios that had made them angry, and their responses were culled to create a 93-item battery rated by hundreds of player respondents in terms of anger intensity and anger frequency. An iterative process of factor analysis and scale reliability assessment led to a 28-item instrument measuring four anger-provoking factors: Raids/Instances, Griefers, Perceived Time Wasting, and Anti-social Players. These anger-causing scenarios were then illustrated by concrete examples from player and researcher experiences in World of Warcraft. One striking finding is that players become angry at other players’ negative behavior, regardless of whether that behavior was intended to harm.

Jane Barnett, Mark Coulson, Nigel Foreman

Chapter 13. Dude Looks like a Lady: Gender Swapping in an Online Game

Abstract

After reviewing the literature on online identity construction and developing a set of theory-based hypotheses, this chapter employs a novel combination of survey data and game-generated behavioral logs to examine gender swapping in EverQuest II. Gender swapping is defined as a difference between the gender reported by the player in the survey from the gender of the player’s main character in the game. Motivations for play were measured using Yee’s condensed MMO motivations scale, and behavioral logs supplied four main measures of gender-stereotypical in-game behaviors. Contrary to expectations, gender swapping was less common among female players, and swapping was rather rare in general. Homosexual players were more likely to change their online gender than straight players. Performance and socialization motivations for play did not differ significantly between swappers and nonswappers. Men who play female characters were not more likely to engage in stereotypically female acts than men who play male characters; however, women who played male characters did display a degree of hyper-masculine behavior. Some of these findings suggest that there may be less of the identity exploration or challenging of gender norms than some had expected, but the female population of players may be bimodal, composed of stereotypically female and male-leaning subgroups.

Searle Huh, Dmitri Williams

Chapter 14. Virtual Doppelgangers: Psychological Effects of Avatars Who Ignore Their Owners

Abstract

For a decade, the Virtual Human Interaction Lab has been creating doppelgangers, virtual versions of the self, for research purposes. This chapter considers how humans may be affected by confrontation with virtual versions of themselves, on the basis of well-established psychological theories, including social cognitive theory (social learning theory), media richness theory (information richness theory), and self-perception theory. Experiments carried out in the Lab, and informed by these theories, have explored such notable topics as health communication, marketing, and false memories. The findings of one series of studies suggest that doppelgangerscan show the rewards of exercise and proper eating habits, changing people’s health-related behavior as a result. Other studies showed that doppelgangers are powerful marketing agents and can be used in advertisements to create favorable brand impressions among consumers. Other research documented that children have difficulty in distinguishing between an actual memory elicited by a physical world event and a false memory elicited by mental image or doppelganger.

Jeremy N. Bailenson, Kathryn Y. Segovia

Chapter 15. Speaking in Character: Voice Communication in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This chapter summarizes 5 years of research on the implications of introducing voice communication systems to virtual worlds. Voice introduces both benefits and problems for players of fast-paced team games, from better coordination of groups and greater social presence of fellow players on the positive side, to negative features such as channel congestion, transmission of noise, and an unwillingness by some to use voice with strangers online. Similarly, in non-game worlds like Second Life, issues related to identity and impression management play important roles, as voice may build greater trust that is especially important for business users, yet it erodes the anonymity and ability to conceal social attributes like gender that are important for other users. A very different mixture of problems and opportunities exists when users conduct several simultaneous conversations in multiple text and voice channels. Technical difficulties still exist with current systems, including the challenge of debugging and harmonizing all the participants’ voice setups. Different groups use virtual worlds for very different purposes, so a single modality may not suit all.

Greg Wadley, Martin R. Gibbs

Chapter 16. What People Talk About in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This chapter examines what people talk about in virtual worlds, employing protocol analysis. Each of two scenario studies was developed to assess the impact of virtual worlds as a collaborative environment for a specific purpose: one for learning and one for designing. The first designed a place in Active Worlds for a course on Web Site Design, having group learning spaces surrounded by individual student galleries. Student text chat was analyzed through a coding scheme with four major categories: control, technology, learning, and place. The second studied expert architects in a Second Life environment called DesignWorld that combined 3D modeling and sketching tools. Video and audio recordings were coded in terms of four categories of communication content (designing, representation of the model, awareness of each other, and software features), and in terms of synthesis comparing alternative designs versus analysis of how well the proposed solution satisfies the given design task. Both studies found that people talk about their avatars, identity, and location in the virtual world. However, the discussion is chiefly about the task and not about the virtual world, implying that virtual worlds provide a viable environment for learning and designing that does not distract people from their task.

Mary Lou Maher

Chapter 17. Changing the Rules: Social Architectures in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

In the late 1960s, Mischel (1968) sparked a debate in personality psychology by critiquing the reliance on trait-based frameworks of behavior. While the standard approach had been to measure stable dispositions (such as Extraversion), Mischel argued that behavior was largely determined by situational demands (such as being at a party). In the decades that followed, while there have been loud calls within the field to embrace an interactionist approach, research in personality psychology has still largely sidelined situational factors (Endler and Parker 1992) and has continued to focus on standardizing trait measures (Costa and McCrae 1985; Goldberg 1992).

Virtual worlds evoke this person-situation debate not because we are able to create impossible and fantastic scenarios, but because of the degree of control we are able to have over social interactions. Unlike the physical world, all the rules of social interaction in a virtual world have to be explicitly coded. These rules dictate the maximum size of ad hoc groups, the distance your voice can travel, whether other players can hurt you, and the consequences of dying. As Lessig has noted, “Cyberspace does not guarantee its own freedom but instead carries an extraordinary potential for control. … Architecture is a kind of law: it determines what people can and cannot do” (Lessig 1999: 58-59). Indeed, we are not free to do whatever we want to do in virtual worlds, especially massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). There are consequences to dying, and these rules vary from game to game. While we tend to think of altruism and gregariousness as personality traits, virtual worlds allow us to ask how the social architectures of these environments can be engineered to shape individual and community behavior.

Nick Yee

Chapter 18. Game-Based Virtual Worlds as Decentralized Virtual Activity Systems

Abstract

There is widespread interest in the development and use of decentralized systems and virtual world environments as possible new places for engaging in collaborative work activities. Similarly, there is widespread interest in stimulating new technological innovations that enable people to come together through social networking, file/media sharing, and networked multi-player computer game play. A decentralized virtual activity system (DVAS) is a networked computer supported work/play system whose elements and social activities can be both virtual and decentralized (Scacchi et al. 2008b). Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and online virtual worlds such as Second Life are each popular examples of a DVAS. Furthermore, these systems are beginning to be used for research, deve-lopment, and education activities in different science, technology, and engineering domains (Bainbridge 2007, Bohannon et al. 2009; Rieber 2005; Scacchi and Adams 2007; Shaffer 2006), which are also of interest here. This chapter explores two case studies of DVASs developed at the University of California at Irvine that employ game-based virtual worlds to support collaborative work/play activities in different settings. The settings include those that model and simulate practical or imaginative physical worlds in different domains of science, technology, or engineering through alternative virtual worlds where players/workers engage in different kinds of quests or quest-like workflows (Jakobsson 2006).

Walt Scacchi

Chapter 19. When Virtual Worlds Expand

Abstract

The future of a virtual world depends on whether it can grow in subjective size, cultural content, and numbers of human participants. In one form of growth, exemplified by Second Life, the scope of a world increases gradually as new sponsors pay for new territory and inhabitants create content. A very different form of growth is sudden expansion, as when World of Warcraft (WoW) added entire new continents in its Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions (Lummis and Kern 2006, 2008; Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008; Sims et al. 2008). Well-established gamelike worlds have often undergone many expansions. Both the pioneer science fiction game Anarchy Online, which was launched in 2001, and Star Wars Galaxies dating from 2003, have had three, and EVE Online also from 2003 has had nine, although smaller ones. This chapter reports research on WoW’s 2008 Lich King expansion, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, in order to develop theoretical ideas of the implications of expansion for virtual worlds.

William Sims Bainbridge

Chapter 20. Cooperation, Coordination, and Trust in Virtual Teams: Insights from Virtual Games

Abstract

This chapter considers fundamental concepts of effective virtual teams, illustrated by research on Travian, a massively multiplayer online strategy game wherein players seek to build empires. Team inputs are the resources that enable individuals to work interdependently toward a common goal, including individual and collective capabilities, shared knowledge structures, and leadership style. Team processes, notably coordination and cooperation, transform team inputs to desired collective outcomes. Because the members of virtual teams are geographically dispersed, relying on information and communication technology, three theories are especially relevant for understanding how they can function effectively: social presence theory, media richness theory, and media synchronicity theory. Research in settings like Travian can inform our understanding of structures, processes, and performance of virtual teams. Such research could provide valuable insight into the emergence and persistence of trust and cooperation, as well as the impact of different communication media for coordination and information management in virtual organizations.

M. Audrey Korsgaard, Arnold Picot, Rolf T. Wigand, Isabelle M. Welpe, Jakob J. Assmann

Chapter 21. Virtual Worlds for Virtual Organizing

Abstract

The members and resources of a virtual organization are dispersed across time and space, yet they function as a coherent entity through the use of technologies, networks, and alliances. As virtual organizations proliferate and become increasingly important in society, many may exploit the technical architecture s of virtual worlds, which are the confluence of computer-mediated communication, telepresence, and virtual reality originally created for gaming. A brief socio-technical history describes their early origins and the waves of progress followed by stasis that brought us to the current period of renewed enthusiasm. Examination of contemporary examples demonstrates how three genres of virtual worlds have enabled new arenas for virtual organizing: developer-defined closed worlds, user-modifiable quasi-open worlds, and user-generated open worlds. Among expected future trends are an increase in collaboration born virtually rather than imported from existing organizations, a tension between high-fidelity recreations of the physical world and hyper-stylized imaginations of fantasy worlds, and the growth of specialized worlds optimized for particular sectors, companies, or cultures.

Diana Rhoten, Wayne Lutters

Chapter 22. Future Evolution of Virtual Worlds as Communication Environments

Abstract

Extensive experience creating locations and activities inside virtual worlds provides the basis for contemplating their future. Users of virtual worlds are diverse in their goals for these online environments; for example, immersionists want them to be alternative realities disconnected from real life, whereas augmentationists want them to be communication media supporting real-life activities. As the technology improves, the diversity of virtual worlds will increase along with their significance. Many will incorporate more advanced virtual reality, or serve as major media for long-distance collaboration, or become the venues for futurist social movements. Key issues are how people can create their own virtual worlds, travel across worlds, and experience a variety of multimedia immersive environments. This chapter concludes by noting the view among some computer scientists that future technologies will permit uploading human personalities to artificial intelligence avatars, thereby enhancing human beings and rendering the virtual worlds entirely real.

Giulio Prisco

Chapter 23. The Future of Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This book, like the May 2008 conference in World of Warcraft, ends with projections toward what the future might hold for virtual worlds. Every chapter thus far has included speculations about future directions, even while standing on data from the past. This last chapter, like the final session of the conference on which it is based, incorporates comments from dozens of participants into a stream of ideas. We have edited selected comments together with the panel’s contributions. Our intention is to provide a portal from this book into a wider virtual community comprising researchers and residents in virtual worlds. The discussion surveys many recent lines of development, some of which have already been surveyed in scientific and historical literature, or by journalists (Au 2008; Castronova 2007; Guest 2007; Ludlow and Wallace 2007). Yet, many of the topics here have not received such attention. Considered as a set of socio-technical innovations, virtual worlds are not just about technical possibilities; they also inspired the participants to consider the economic bases for investing in those possibilities and the novel cultural, social, and artistic forms virtual worlds might offer.

William Sims Bainbridge, Wayne Lutters, Diana Rhoten, Henry Lowood

Backmatter