17. Changing the Rules: Social Architectures in Virtual Worlds

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.