虚拟社会文化融合

William Sims Bainbridge
Virtual
Sociocultural
Convergence
Virtual Sociocultural Convergence
Virtual Sociocultural
Convergence
Arlington, VA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-33019-8 ISBN 978-3-319-33020-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940513
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

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or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: The avatar based on Jacob Moreno, inventor of psychodrama, explored many
psychology locations in Second Life, and here is taking that expedition one step further, by role-playing
a monk in a cathedral, giving a sermon based on the book before him, which represents this book.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction: Virtual Sociocultural Convergence ................................ 1

Looking Backward .................................................................................... 2
Psychodrama ............................................................................................. 5
A Secondary Life ...................................................................................... 7
Convergence of the Past with the Future.............................................. 12
Gameworld as Civilization ........................................................................ 18
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 22
References ................................................................................................. 22
2 Technological Determinism in Construction of an Online Society ..... 25
Social Change ........................................................................................... 26
The Virtual Lake Tahoe ............................................................................. 28
Joining the Pawnee Tribe .......................................................................... 33
Technological Indeterminism ............................................................... 37
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 41
References ................................................................................................. 42
3 Convergence in Online Urban Environments....................................... 45
A School of Thought ................................................................................. 45
Areas of Paragon City ............................................................................... 47
An Urban Matrix ....................................................................................... 52
A Network of Cities .................................................................................. 57
A Pseudo-Rome ........................................................................................ 60
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 64
References ................................................................................................. 66
4 Social Organizations in Online Virtual Worlds .................................... 69
Compensation and Collectivity ................................................................. 69
Endless Teamwork .................................................................................... 73
Arguably the Largest World ...................................................................... 77
Ancient Virtual Egypt ............................................................................... 80
Multiple Guild Functions .......................................................................... 84
v
vi Contents
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 88
References ................................................................................................. 90
5 Autonomy Within Rigid Rule-Based Systems ...................................... 93
A Towering Intellect ................................................................................. 93
Escaping a Scripted Role .......................................................................... 97
God Mode Fallout ..................................................................................... 103
A Quartet of Avatars.................................................................................. 109
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 112
References ................................................................................................. 114
6 Modeling Social Stratification in Online Games .................................. 117
Ludic Structures ........................................................................................ 117
Dynamic Structures................................................................................... 119
Rifts in Strata ............................................................................................ 121
Fishing for Honor...................................................................................... 123
Bandit Capitalism...................................................................................... 127
Iron and Gold ............................................................................................ 133
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 136
References ................................................................................................. 138
7 Linguistic Convergence and Divergence in Middle Earth .................. 141
Historical Dialectology ............................................................................. 141
The Value of a Treasure............................................................................. 144
Proper Names ............................................................................................ 147
Tavern Chatting ......................................................................................... 149
Tolkien auf Deutsch .................................................................................. 153
Translating Tasks....................................................................................... 156
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 160
References ................................................................................................. 161
8 Functional Equivalence Across Virtual Cultures ................................. 165
Cultural Extinction .................................................................................... 166
The Polish Argonaut.................................................................................. 168
Culturally Relative Avatars ....................................................................... 172
Ritual Orcish Initiation ............................................................................. 177
Miscellaneous Observations ..................................................................... 180
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 182
References ................................................................................................. 184
9 Individual Incentives for Investment in Gameworlds.......................... 187
Homansian Sociology ............................................................................... 187
A Vast Mythos ........................................................................................... 190
The Costs of Stumbling ............................................................................ 193
A Disciple of the Land .............................................................................. 197
Cultural Relativism ................................................................................... 199
A World Reborn ........................................................................................ 202
Contents vii
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 205

References ................................................................................................. 207
10 Divergence in the Fall of a Virtual Civilization .................................... 211
Nightmare Intellectuals ............................................................................. 211
War and Peace ........................................................................................... 214
Non-player Factions .................................................................................. 218
Player Factions .......................................................................................... 220
The Environmental Vista ........................................................................... 224
A Skillful Economy .................................................................................. 226
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 231
References ................................................................................................. 234
11 Alienation and Assimilation in a Warcraft World................................ 237
Two Intertwined Viewpoints ..................................................................... 237
Joining the Alliance................................................................................... 241
Joining the Horde ...................................................................................... 245
Nothing in Moderation.............................................................................. 248
Refusal to Pander ...................................................................................... 251
Engineering Satire..................................................................................... 252
Conclusion ................................................................................................ 256
References ................................................................................................. 258
Chapter 1
Introduction: Virtual Sociocultural
Convergence
A remarkable sociocultural convergence has occurred over the past two decades, as
multiplayer online games became virtual worlds through the unification of com-
puter science, social science, and the humanities. The emergence of online media
provides not only new methods for collecting social science data, but also contexts
for developing theory and conducting education in the arts as well as technology.
Notably, role-playing games and virtual worlds naturally demonstrate many classi-
cal concepts, in ways that encourage innovative thinking. This book reports the
methodologies and results of a diversity of research projects, each of which explores
the implications of a pre-existing school of thought in a novel computer-based envi-
ronment selected not merely to harmonize with its intellectual premises, but to
stimulate new perspectives. Precisely because the technology is radically new, it can
have the most creative impact upon ideas that are old. That is to say, the book uses
computer-generated virtual worlds of the present time to explore the convergence of
the past with the future.
While each chapter focuses on particular social science issues through particular
examples, there is an overarching conceptual framework, developed over the past 15
years in a series of conferences that culminated in the 2016 Handbook of Science
and Technology Convergence [1]. This was an outgrowth ultimately of the National
Nanotechnology Initiative in the United States, yet quickly acquired greater scope
both internationally and across fields of human endeavor. The first book-length con-
ference report, Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, was pub-
lished in 2001 [2]. Nanoscience has direct connections with both microbiology and
microelectronics, which suggested that a natural affinity exists among nanotechnol-
ogy, biotechnology and information technology. Cognitive science is also con-
nected, most obviously with biology and computer science, but also providing an
understanding of the human mind that facilitates science and engineering in general,
because both are human mental activities.
A series of book-length reports emerged from four NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-
Cogno) conferences: Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance
(2003), The Coevolution of Human Potential and Converging Technologies (2004),
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 1

W.S. Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_1
2 1 Introduction: Virtual Sociocultural Convergence
Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies in Society

(2006), and Progress in Convergence: Technologies for Human Wellbeing (2006)
[3]. In parallel with the conferences, three two-volume reference works approached
convergence from different directions: Encyclopedia of Human-Computer
Interaction (2004), Nanotechnology: Societal Implications (2006), and Leadership
in Science and Technology (2012) [4]. Then a series of international conferences led
to a wider conception: Convergence of Knowledge, Technology and Society (2013)
[5]. Finally a capstone was added to this intellectual arch in the form of the 2016
Handbook, which included many chapters about the coming transformation of soci-
ety, culture, and the arts.
All those publications were collective efforts, some with scores of authors, while
Virtual Sociocultural Convergence is an individual effort. However, it draws upon
the thinking of several deceased social and psychological theorists and the practical
accomplishments of the people who created the virtual worlds. Every human indi-
vidual exists in the context of a particular culture, and every culture is both the
product and producer of a particular technological complex. Therefore, exploring
virtual worlds by means of avatars is not at all unnatural, even though the cultures
and technologies may be somewhat different from those experienced in everyday
life. At times, the data reflect the behavior of other human beings inside the mas-
sively multi-player online gameworlds, but the primary culture of each world was
created by programmers, artists, and game designers, so we are not using these
environments to collect data simply about online player behavior, but about the
creations in which that behavior takes place. The world-creators learned their craft
within an evolving socio-cultural subculture, shaped in great measure by what game
players seemed to enjoy, but also by current computer programming practices, the
physical hardware of the computer systems, and the experience of exploring earlier
gameworlds.
Looking Backward
Prior to about a third of a century ago, many social scientists proposed bold theo-
ries, each of which seemed to have some utility in explaining the social world, yet
none of which were conclusively proven or disproven after the methodological
innovations of subsequent years. Some theories dropped out of fashion, and it is
hard to know whether that occurred because it was difficult to base empirical
research on them, or that they simply failed to harmonize with the political and
aesthetic values of the new generations attracted to careers in the social sciences.
This book will highlight the work of a range of these past social theorists, nota-
bly Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), Edward Jarvis (1803–1884), William James
(1842–1910), Robert Michels (1876–1936), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936),
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), Pitirim
A. Sorokin (1889–1968), Jacob Moreno (1889–1974), George C. Homans (1910–
1989), Angus McIntosh (1914–2005), Ernest Edward Kovacs (1919–1962), Daniel
Looking Backward 3
Bell (1919–2011), and Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006). In addition to these

individuals, broader schools of thought will provide the basis for many of the chap-
ters, including the Chicago School of urban sociology, the New Paradigm theories
of cult formation and recruitment, and Game Theory of social stratification. With
these past perspectives as starting points, each chapter after this introduction will
conclude by suggesting how its themes link to the modern Science and Technology
Convergence Movement.
The primary methodology will be to send avatars representing particular theo-
rists or schools of thought into online gameworlds that harmonize with, or chal-
lenge, their fundamental ideas. As the theorists differed, so do the fundamental
conceptions of online games, often along the convergence-divergence dimension.
For example, World of Warcraft asserts that conflict between ethnic groups is an
inescapable feature of human society, while Lord of the Rings Online seeks ethnic
harmony, and Vanguard had great difficulty deciding what inter-group relations
should be. While Xsyon and Fallen Earth agreed that the days of Western Civilization
are numbered, they differed in whether the post-apocalyptic future would encourage
human freedom or ideological fanaticism. Solo player games like Fallout 3 and
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt acknowledge that humans are by nature social beings, by
including hundreds of computer-simulated people. Traditional social phenomena
such as cities, voluntary organizations, and social stratification manifested in differ-
ent ways across many other massively multiplayer online games, notably: City of
Heroes, The Matrix Online, Age of Conan, Guild Wars 2, EverQuest, A Tale in the
Desert, Elder Scrolls Online, Rift, ArcheAge, and Final Fantasy XIV.
A key theme of this book is the need to broaden the intellectual basis of social
science, in three ways. First, we shall revive some credible perspectives from the
past, that vary in their degree of current recognition, including some that are obscure
yet powerful. Some of the ideas are politically incorrect, but which of them fall into
this stimulating category only the reader can decide. Second, we shall cultivate
hypotheses illustrated by the partly fictional and partly real cultures of the game-
worlds. Third, principles from the convergence between other fields of science will
enter through the medium of information technology. Yes, each game was created
by a small team of designers, but the best of them always draw upon profound cul-
tural sources that often were outside the boundaries of academic fashion, and upon
the responses of millions of players to previous games. Massively multiplayer
online games require Internet, advanced graphics and many other computational
techniques developed only recently, but also depend upon many ancient traditions
of legend and literature. At the same time, design principles from the field of human-
computer interaction introduce cognitive science, and the game industry is interna-
tional in scope, thus based in globalization.
The series of NBIC conferences used the term convergence for the integration of
different fields of science and engineering, because participants believed the dispa-
rate fields would converge on a set of shared theoretical concepts and research
methodologies. But the alternate term consilience also has some currency. As noted
in the Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence by Ullica Segerstrale, a
sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, consilience was popularized
within science studies by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson [6]. In 1971, Wilson had pub-
lished The Insect Societies, understanding ant colonies in biological terms more
than sociological ones, then in 1975 published a seminally convergent textbook,
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [7]. His 1979 Pulitzer-prize winning book On
Human Nature applied evolutionary theory to human behavior, and in 1981 with
Charles Lumsden he considered culture from a sociobiological perspective in
Genes, Mind, and Culture [8]. As Segerstrale explains in her Handbook chapter,
Wilson sought to transcend even the division between the sciences and the humani-
ties in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge [9].
Several chapters of the Handbook explicitly connect the arts and humanities to
science and engineering. Andy Miah contributed an insightful essay titled
“Convergence with the Arts,” and his own professional title tells the story equally
well, because he chairs Science Communication and Future Media in the School of
Environment and Life Sciences of the University of Salford in the United Kingdom.
He explains how artists have played active roles in adopting and adapting new tech-
nologies, in the context of globalization, which is itself a form of convergence.
Sociologist of urban culture Terry Nichols Clark documents how active communi-
ties of artists can energize the economies and social lives of cites around the world
[10]. Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin contributed a chapter highly relevant
to sophisticated computer role-playing games, “The Future of Interactive and
Personalized Narrative.” They are professors of Computational Media in a school of
engineering, and their academic websites document that they are highly convergent.
The research areas of Mateas are “Computational media and the intersection of
artificial intelligence, art and design” [11]. Those of Wardrip-Fruin are “New mod-
els of storytelling in games, how games express ideas through play, how games can
help broaden understanding of the power of computation” [12].
Many other chapters will be cited throughout this book, but one deserves special
mention here, “Convergence-Divergence Process” by Mihail C. Roco, the historic
leader of government nanotechnology initiatives and co-editor of the Handbook
[13]. His model of large-scale innovation has four steps, the first two representing
convergence, and the last two representing divergence: (1) The creation phase in
which separate fields that are potential partners discover and invent somewhat sepa-
rately in parallel. (2) The integration phase in which the fields share their develop-
ments with each other. (3) The innovation phase in which the elements contributed
by different fields combine in new ways. (4) The spin-off phase in which numerous
and diverse new tools, forms of expertise, technological applications, and economic
businesses result. At any given time, several of these processes may be progressing,
at different rates, with greater or lesser scope, and at different phases.
Roco significantly cites a contribution to the original convergence book by Newt
Gingrich that introduced the traditional model of innovation in a new field, that
grows slowly at first, then more rapidly, then slowly again as it approaches a steady-
state horizontal asymptote, what is often called the sigmoid curve (S-shaped) or
logistic function [14]. But as with the convergence-divergence model, Gingrich
argued that completion of one cycle can prepare a basis for the next, thus generating
potentially endless progress in the form of a ladder of logistic functions. It is worth
Psychodrama 5
noting that Gingrich himself is convergent, representing that rare species, a politi-
cian who is also an intellectual, who was Republican leader in the House of
Representatives prior to involvement with the Convergence Movement, and more
recently has been a mass media commentator on social and political issues. This
illustrates a phenomenon to be encountered often in these pages, the convergence of
political conservative thinking with social science that has in recent decades become
almost exclusively politically liberal.
This chapter will introduce the methodological approach by entering three very
different computerized environments: (1) Second Life, the most prominent non-
game virtual world; (2) Fallout 3, generally recognized as among the best solo-
player computer games, and (3) Gods and Heroes, a massively multiplayer online
(MMO) role-playing game that has become as extinct as the ancient world it repre-
sented. Each of the first two was explored from the perspective of an avatar based
on a different prominent social scientist who was also a psychiatrist, while the third
was explored by a pair of avatars belonging to a school of thought, in this case the
actual citizenry of ancient Rome. Thus the goal of this chapter is to share a sense of
the diversity of environments and perspectives that are available for this innovative
research methodology.
Psychodrama
While largely forgotten by academics today, Jacob L. Moreno (1889–1974) was a

pioneer at the intersection of psychology and sociology, who founded a scientific
journal still published by the American Sociological Association, which he named
Sociometry but now is called Social Psychology Quarterly [15]. Wikipedia calls him
a “leading psychiatrist and psychosociologist, thinker and educator, the founder of
psychodrama, and the foremost pioneer of group psychotherapy. During his life-
time, he was recognized as one of the leading social scientists” [16].
Our goal in playing Moreno is more to gain perspective on role-playing, rather
than to immortalize this particular man. Therefore we shall not delve deeply into his
psyche, and leave to others the task of mapping his philosophy [17]. However, it is
worth noting that throughout his life he was undecided whether his career was sci-
entific or spiritual, psychiatric or religious. In early adulthood, his first attempt to
found a social movement was The Religion of Encounter [18]. A history of group
therapy that features Moreno’s work and was published in his journal says that
group therapy historically evolved out of religious practices [19]. Late in his life,
Moreno seemed rather mystical, arguing at times that we create our lives in partner-
ship with God, and speaking sometimes on behalf of God. Yet, as David Bakan has
suggested, Psychoanalysis can be viewed as a religion [20]. At the peak of his psy-
chodramatic career, Moreno himself wrote, “In our time the social and mental sci-
ences aim at a similar accomplishment as religion once attained” [21].
Born more than three decades after Sigmund Freud, Moreno was nonetheless a
rival to him, and very much opposed many of Freud’s theories. It is possible that this
hostility was responsible in significant degree for the obscurity into which Moreno
fell after death, but it is well known that swarms of rivals competed over the psycho-
analytic legacy, even as it lost status within both medical psychiatry and academic
psychology [22]. An unproven theory, yet one worth considering, is that
Psychoanalysis originally emerged out of role-playing by Freud’s clients, who were
willing to simulate his theories, thereby providing him with apparent evidence for
their truth. Freud’s earliest work was done in collaboration with Josef Breuer, and
focused exclusively on patients diagnosed hysteric [23]. Such people are histrionic,
expressing feelings in a theatrical manner, even at times dramatically repressing
them.
Moreno’s psychodrama may have exploited a theatricality in some of his clients,
but it also may have helped many explore the implications of not only their inner
feelings but also their social relationships. A longstanding issue in the field of psy-
chotherapy has been the extent to which the session between therapist and client
should be guided by a specific theory about the nature of the client’s problems,
versus offering a supportive environment for the client’s own self-discovery.
Many people who have heard about psychodrama, and know that its innovator
was also a pioneer of group therapy, imagined it always worked like this. Some
weeks into frequent meetings of a therapy group, each member should have learned
a good deal about the others, and about their families. Perhaps on a particular day,
George recalls a traumatic childhood moment involving his father arguing with his
mother, while he and his older brother watched in horror. After George describes the
incident, the therapist guiding the group asks George to play the role of his father,
while the group acts out the episode, with other members playing George’s mother,
brother, and even George himself but in a passive mode. After the scene, the group
would discuss it, and perhaps repeat the scene differently on the basis of any insights
they gained. All members of the group, prominently George but not he alone, would
experience some emotional catharsis and gain intellectual insights about family
conflicts. George might gain empathy toward his father, as an antidote to the anger
he has felt since that day in childhood, but exactly what George gains depends upon
the precise nature of the psychological problems he suffers, rather than being
imposed on him by the theory of the psychotherapist.
As reasonable as this description of psychodrama is, in the historical context of
Moreno’s work it is rather simplistic. Yes, catharsis and insight are prime goals, and
many scenes like this were indeed played out in group therapy of the period [24].
But psychodrama had many versions, and was intended to serve many purposes, of
which personal psychotherapy was only one [25]. Moreno had the ambition to build
a worldwide social movement, based on psychodrama, in which the audience was
recruited to become players on the stage, then matured into directors who would
establish their own branches of the movement. While Moreno did not live to see the
World Wide Web and online role-playing games, he was an ambitious man who
wrote as early as 1944 about the possible application of psychodrama to motion
pictures and even television [26].
YouTube offers a film dating from about 1948, that begins with Moreno demon-
strating psychodrama to a young man, with an audience but not in a group therapy
A Secondary Life 7
context. The scene is a small, round theater stage Moreno had built at his center in
New York, with a curtain at the rear through which Moreno appears. He invites
someone from the audience to come up on stage, and the young man volunteers.
Rather than asking the man to recall a traumatic childhood experience, Moreno
explains that the method can help us deal with the present and future, as well as the
past, and asks the man what he hopes for his own future. The man says he wants to
become a professor, so Moreno encourages him to imagine it is now the future, he
has become a professor, and should begin a lecture. Moreno interrupts rather aggres-
sively to explain the complex set of roles, goals, production techniques, and condi-
tions in a variety of psychodrama circumstances, at one point proclaiming, “This is
a world which is absolutely real!” [27].
A Secondary Life
We shall now revive Moreno inside a virtual world. One logs into Second Life on a
standard personal computer, and I have done so on both desktops and laptops,
Windows machines and Macintoshes. When the software opens, the user sees a
somewhat realistic scene, looking like a place in the material world. A high-realism
cartoon of a person stands in the center, looking away from the user; this is the
user’s avatar. Around the edges of the screen are various pull-down or pop-out
menus of choices, for example one that allows the user to move the viewpoint, even
looking the avatar in the face. The arrow keys on the keyboard make the avatar walk
forward or back, left or right. As the avatar moves, so does the viewpoint, and per-
spectives on the surroundings change in a realistic manner.
Because Second Life is a virtual world, avatars representing different users may
meet, walk around each other, sit on a nearby bench together, gesture at each other,
and speak. Their communication may take place through voice, most easily if both
users are wearing headphones so that echoes do not create annoying feedback.
There is also a local text chat, and a variety of other long-distance and enduring
means of communication. Google Translate is integrated into the text chat, so that
people who do not know a common language can communicate with each other.
Indeed, Second Life has a global audience, and serves as a medium for international
convergence.
Essentially all of the complex features of the environment were created by users,
employing reasonably effective tools built into the very complex user interface of
the software. Objects like furniture and houses are built from many simpler objects
called prims – short for primitives – which can be connected together so they move
as a unit. Their surfaces can display either standard textures, or image files the user
uploads from his or her local computer. Objects may contain computer programs
written by their creator in the Second Life Scripting Language, which can move an
object, produce sounds or text, give the user another object, or open a web browser
to a specified site. Users can also program gestures, which are more than mere
movements but can put an avatar through very complex sequences of actions, emit-
ting sounds and text as well.
The real Jacob Moreno never liked to admit he was lost, so his avatar immedi-
ately sought a context within which to begin his second life. A pull-down menu
called World gave him a Search tool, with a keyword field in which he typed “sci-
ence,” selecting also the “Places” option. In a moment he saw information about
many science-related locations in Second Life, including one called the National
Space Society. The Apollo missions to the Moon had ended 2 years before his death,
and he had found them inspirational if rather remote from his own field, and he
wondered how far the space program had progressed since he had been away. So he
clicked the Teleport command for this place. The image on my computer screen
dissolved, and then a new one formed, piece by piece as graphics data files were
downloaded from the Internet server in California.
Near the entrance of the National Space Society headquarters, he found a full-
scale model of the Apollo 11 lunar lander, in the near corner of a large exhibition
space dominated by robot landers and rovers. Well he could wonder whether outer
space is the right environment for a fragile human like himself, rather than for com-
puter controlled artificial intelligences. His thought then drifted to the issue of
whether a computer-created virtual world was an appropriate environment for
humans, given that Second Life like the Moon failed to offer oxygen to breathe.
Feeling rather vulnerable, he was happy to see that the National Space Society
offered free Apollo spacesuits, so quickly he donned one. Wearing this cumbersome
white garment, his face was totally obscured, so he felt comfortably anonymous, as
if he did not need to decide who he was going to be. But now that he knew how to
search for virtual places and travel to them, he could begin his work.
He searched the system for places with the keyword “psychology,” finding there
were not many, and some of that small set of hits were really duplicates of each
other. In particular, the University of Derby posted several links to their cluster of
four sims – short for simulations – so he teleported there. Derby had a huge virtual
area, most of it a rather flat grassy landscape, supporting several large clusters of
buildings, surrounded by an ocean. What first caught his attention was a billboard
saying “University of Derby – Shakespeare Today.” Behind it was a full-scale model
of the Globe theater in which that great bard’s dramas were first performed. Figure
1.1 shows Moreno dancing in his Apollo space suit, overcome by excitement.
Despite the lack of an audience, Moreno could not resist the urge to enter the
Globe theater, jump up on the stage, and perform, but unaccustomed to jumping in
Second Life, he flew much higher and landed in a balcony overlooking the stage.
Although not about to play the role of Juliet, asking “wherefore art thou, Romeo,”
this seemed a good vantage point for some psychodrama practice, so he tried out
several inspirational quotations:
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. (Julius
Caesar, Act III, Scene II)
The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. (Hamlet, Act II, Scene
II)
A Secondary Life 9
Fig. 1.1 Jacob Moreno at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in Second Life
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and
then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth-
ing. (Macbeth, Act V, Scene V)
Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre presents more
woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in. (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII)
As in a theatre the eyes of men after a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage are idly bent on him
that enters next, thinking his prattle to be tedious (King Richard the Second, Act V,
Scene II)
As an unperfect actor on the stage, who with his fear is put beside his part (Sonnet 23)
Like a dull actor now I have forgot my part and I am out, even to a full disgrace. (Coriolanus,
Act V, Scene III)
Moreno meditated. Yes, we may relive the tragedies of Julius Caesar and King
Richard, through role-playing, but we also must play our own personal roles,
whether in a tragedy or comedy, which requires more than the usual thespian com-
petence. Was Shakespeare a better psychologist than Freud? On this thought,
Moreno escaped the Globe theater for the larger globe outside. His incompetent
jump into the balcony had taught him he could fly in Second Life, so he zoomed
northward into the sim called Games at DerbyUni.
Several buildings and smaller objects seemed to have been set up for use in psy-
chological experiments or college classes, including a circle of thatched huts, and
structures that looked like modern office buildings. Checking the information about
the land under them, Moreno discovered it had been “claimed” way back on March
30, 2009, fully 5 years earlier. Yet many signs here and there referred to the area as
“under development.” Perhaps the initial phase of use by the Psychology depart-
ment at Derby University had concluded long ago, but a new phase might begin
soon.
It seemed that almost everything was “owned” by Milton Broome, so Moreno
used the search tool of the user interface to find the information profile of the avatar
by this name, learning that he had been born in Second Life on April 5, 2007, and
reading this personal biography:
The avatar of Dr Simon Bignell. Psychologist at The Centre for Psychological Research,
University of Derby, Derbyshire, England, UK. Researching & lecturing in Autism,
Asperger’s, ADHD and education in SL. I don’t offer Psychological services, receive or
donate money in SL. I try to respect the rights of all people, equally those with neurodiver-
sity and disability. “And man created God in his own image.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
The profile also listed the 20 formally organized groups of avatars to which the
avatar Broome belonged. Most obviously, he was a member of University of Derby:
“A group for Students and Staff of the University of Derby, UK. This group is used
to make announcements about University activities and events in Second Life.”
Rather more interesting for Moreno was Psychological Research: “This popular
(500+) open group is used as Second Life’s primary group for those interested in
Psychology, both in and out of Second Life. Choose from many Psychology ‘Active
Titles’ refreshed each week. Join to receive frequent updates about Second Life
activities.” Moreno immediately did join, finding that with him added the popula-
tion of the group was fully 527 avatars.
Deciding it was time to become more systematic in his research, Moreno began
assembling Table 1.1, summarizing data about the most significant psychology sims
he would visit, discovered by entering “psychology” into the search engine for
places. For each place, he discovered the owner, looked up that avatar’s profile, then
scanned through the list of groups to which the avatar belonged. The wide range,
from 0 groups to 27, suggested that some avatars merely served a limited function,
such as being the official owner for some land, and were not the medium through
which a person interacted actively with many other people. Other avatars, in con-
trast, were highly social, belonging to some professional groups, some special-
interest groups, and others that by their descriptions seemed purely social.
He visited the virtual campuses of six conventional educational institutions, then
three more unusual groups. Fearless Nation served the community of people suffer-
ing from post-traumatic stress disorder. Emasculata Academy served people who
were moving from male to female gender identity, at least virtually, and indeed a
biologically male person he met there was operating a little girl avatar. At the HMS
Center for Complexity, Moreno met a young lady named Helen, who was not the
avatar of a person, but what gamers call a non-player character or NPC. She wel-
comed him to the island, suggested he explore it, and gave him a link to the organi-
zation’s website, which explained:
Human Mosaic Systems (HMS) teaches and enables an understanding of complex human
systems through the design of immersive 3D virtual environments with an eye towards
the psychology of the avatar, group dynamics, and the virtual space. In addition, we are
a Solution Provider in Second Life.
We help clients navigate Living Human Systems and their complex dynamics through
design and facilitation. We focus on the 4 core aspects of Complex Human Systems:
Group Dynamics, Building Relationships, Identity, and Storytelling [28].
Moreno toured the beautiful and complex HMS island by riding in a hot air bal-
loon provided for that purpose. Offices and meeting rooms were located in a
A Secondary Life 11
Table 1.1 Prominent psychology groups in Second Life

Virtual place Description and purpose Avatar Birth date Groups
Derby The Island is run by Psychology Milton April 5, 20
University – at University of Derby, Broome 2007
Psychology UK. AND This is the project site
AND for the PREVIEW-Psych
PREVIEW- (Problem Based Learning in
Psych Project Virtual Interactive Worlds for
Psychology) and PREVIEW-
Sustain (Problem Based
Learning in Virtual Interactive
Worlds for the Education of
Sustainable Development).
Virtual 6 The Second Life presence for Tinkle Firelyte January 12, 1
West – the Cyberpsychology course in 2010
University of the Department of Psychology
Bath, at the University of Bath.
Department of
Psychology
Psychology An introductory survey of the Mike Atkinson April 17, 18
1000 by Mike methods and findings of modern 2008
Atkinson at scientific psychology.
University
Western Ontario
Athabasca Athabasca University Campus Gunnar February 14, 4
University including our new ARC building Korobase 2007
and Psychology Lab!
ODU SL The Old Dominion University Arlanders Rae February 28, 20
Research Psychology department virtual 2009
Facility classroom and research facility,
home of the Technology iN
Training Laboratory (TNTLab).
University of Programs in Educational esprmc Fall November 7, 7
Alabama Psychology, Counselor 2007
College of Education, Educational
Education Research, School Psychology,
Curriculum and Instruction,
Special Education, Higher
Education, and Administration.
Fearless Nation A 501c3 Nonprofit based in the Acorn2Oak October 4, 0
PTSD Support U.S. http://www.fearless-nation. Director 2009
org
PTSD, SL, secondlife, suicide,
trauma, depression, psychology,
art, veteran, war, law, military,
police, crime, yoga, medicine,
DSM, T2, telehealth.
(continued)
Table 1.1 (continued)

Virtual place Description and purpose Avatar Birth date Groups
Emasculata EA prepares “new women” to Patti Compton March 12, 24
Academy take their place in society 2008
through a full curriculum of
cooperative feminization
classes, psychological and
medical treatments. to establish
a fully realized feminine
identity, in a traditional feminine
environment.
HMS Center for Focuses on the complexity and Bev McCarter September 27
Complexity psychology of the avatar and 3D 16, 2008
virtual spaces design.
Keywords: complex systems,
psychology, avatar, training,
workshops, conference space,
human systems, virtual world
administrator, SL information,
billiards, bar.
Conference Center, but much of the island seemed like a tourist resort, with facili-
ties for swimming, boating and even flight training. Visitors could dance or do Tai
Chi exercises, through the use of pose balls, a Second Life technology for control-
ling the movements of an avatar. Moreno decided to accept the invitation to medi-
tate at the center of a green hedge labyrinth, where his avatar sat, waved arms slowly
in the air, and was described as “meditating.” He took this opportunity to contem-
plate the identity he had taken over during this episode of psychodrama, and how he
could use membership lists of any groups he joined to develop sociograms.
Moreno was not only the inventor of psychodrama and one of the founders of
group psychotherapy, but also the key pioneer of social network research [29]. Thus
he would have been able to tabulate the group memberships of all groups he himself
joined, thereby charting the social connections between groups, such as those in
Table 1.1. Our second social scientist who was also a psychiatrist, Edward Jarvis,
contributed significantly to demography and social geography.
Convergence of the Past with the Future
When an academic researcher plans an individual role-playing project, it is legiti-

mate to approach the topic through personal connections. I studied the work of
Edward Jarvis (1803–1884) when I was living in the Boston area, where he had
lived, and found his unpublished 1873 autobiography in the Harvard College
Library. I explored Fallout 3 when I lived in the Washington DC area, exactly the
territory depicted in this solo-player game. Indeed, the company that created Fallout
3 originated nearby in Bethesda, Maryland, and was named appropriately enough,
A Secondary Life 13
Bethesda Softworks. Jarvis was president of the American Statistical Association

for 30 years beginning in 1852, while Fallout 3 is set in the year 2277, long after the
destruction of his nation.
Commercially very successful and very positively reviewed, Fallout 3 is one of
the intellectually most interesting solo-player games for a social scientist. Both in
its design and in its depiction of fictional characters, it explores ideology under
extreme circumstances. This is how the instruction manual described the
background:
Imagine if, after World War II, the timeline had split. Our world forked into one branch, the
Fallout universe the other. In that other branch, technology progressed at a much more
impressive rate, while American society remained locked in the cultural norms of the
1950’s. It was an idyllic “world of tomorrow,” filled with servant robots, beehive hairdos,
and fusion-powered cars. And then in the year 2077, at the climax of a long running war
with China, it all went to hell in a globe-shattering nuclear war… Fallout 3 takes place two
hundred years later, in the year 2277, in post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. and its environs.
The “Capital Wasteland,” as it has come to be known, is a nightmare landscape of roving
Raider gangs, freakish Super Mutants, rotting Feral Ghouls, and malfunctioning military
robots [30].
Notice that the concept involves cultural stasis combined with rapid technologi-
cal change, with the implication that American society had lost the ability to adapt
to new conditions, and might have been able to avoid nuclear war if only the culture
had evolved in the right direction. It may not be immediately obvious, however, how
a psychiatrist from four centuries earlier would be the appropriate avatar through
which to explore the radioactive ruins. There are three reasons.
First, Edward Jarvis was one of the earliest social scientists I personally admire,
and every avatar choice must serve the goals of the user. He is best known for his
methodological rigor, first demonstrated in his critiques of the error-prone 1840
census of the United States, which were a milestone in the development of rigorous
enumeration [31]. He was a consultant for the census of 1850, wrote the mortality
volume for the 1860 census, and was a consultant again for the 1870 census [32].
Much of his research represented the convergence of medicine and demography, for
example his comparative statistical analysis of infant mortality [33]. One essay
combined quantitative analysis of the increase of human longevity with historical
analysis of the economic, sanitary, and technological factors responsible for it [34].
Another charted the demographic growth of sectors of the American population
from 1790 to 1870 [35]. He wrote a gem of an article on immigration, so well
crafted both in theoretical argument and data analysis that I am sure a sociology
journal would accept it if it were submitted today [36]. Indeed, among his scientific
virtues was his natural tendency to merge empirical analysis with theoretical dis-
covery, rather than separating theory from data as was so common in sociology
early in the twentieth century. He was a leader of the American Social Science
Association, a brave but premature attempt to unify many fields. Emulating these
convergent virtues would be a fine approach with which to explore an intellectually
deep virtual world.
Second, Jarvis discovered and developed many theoretical ideas, some of which
sadly social science needed to rediscover decades later because both the fragmenta-
tion into multiple separate social sciences and the influence of European political
ideologies had practically erased memory of all the best early American social sci-
entists once the nation’s universities had established departments in fields like soci-
ology and psychology. Of all his theoretical accomplishments, only Jarvis’s Law
seems still to be influential, and limited to social geographers. On the basis of care-
ful analysis of data on rates of mental illness, Jarvis found that the rates were high-
est near the large mental asylums that had recently been built [37]. He noted that
hospitalization of members of families who lived far from the nearest asylum might
be impractical, because travel difficulties would prevent family members from visit-
ing, but his main explanation was more profound. Near one of the new asylums,
communication patterns would promote public awareness, preparing more of the
friends and relatives of a potential patient to advise hospitalization. This blending of
social geography with psychiatry could well fit a world in which the degree of
insanity varies across the war-blasted landscape, measured partly through the meta-
phor of varying levels of post-war radioactivity.
Third, and this is the most telling of the three reasons, Jarvis subscribed to the
theory that the advance of civilization had the unfortunate and unintended conse-
quence of increasing the rates of mental illness. This idea was not unique with him,
and he quoted both British psychiatrist James C. Prichard and French psychiatrist
Jean Esquirol as advocating this theory, even as he took upon himself the main task
of testing it empirically. He noted that superficially, the data seemed to be in sup-
port: “There are certainly more lunatics in public and private establishments; they
attract more of popular sympathy; they receive more of the care and protection of
the government; more and more hospitals are built; and the numbers of the insane
seem to increase in a still more rapid ratio” [38]. After analyzing better data in
sophisticated ways, in 1852 he concluded:
Insanity is then a part of the price which we pay for civilization. The causes of the one
increase with the developments and results of the other. This is not necessarily the case, but
it is now. The increase of knowledge, the improvements in the arts, the multiplication of
comforts, the amelioration of manners, the growth of refinement, and the elevation of mor-
als, do not of themselves disturb men’s cerebral organs and create mental disorder. But with
them come more opportunities and rewards for great and excessive mental action, more
uncertain and hazardous employments, and consequently more disappointments, more
means and provocations for sensual indulgence, and more dangers of accidents and injuries,
more groundless hopes, and more painful struggle to obtain that which is beyond reach, or
to effect that which is impossible [39].
A modern sociologist who reads this paragraph is likely to think of a book Emile
Durkheim published 45 years later on suicide, attributing high rates to anomie and
egoism, and note how similar this conceptualization is to anomie: “groundless
hopes” [40]. In later publications, Jarvis tended to emphasize that the increasing
complexity of society, and the mental demands of formal education, could simply
over-stress the brain, a theory we might well heed today, given the recent doubts
about the value of widespread higher education. Since Jarvis, the theory that insanity
A Secondary Life 15
rates are increasing has been debated, fluctuated in the extent to which it is sup-
ported by data, and has received various explanations. But the relevance to Fallout
3 should be obvious. The game assumes that American society fell into the ultimate
insanity of nuclear war, and the insanity rate for the few survivors may be one hun-
dred percent.
Jarvis carried out his most extensive empirical research project in the 1850s, a
census of insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts [41]. He created a 15-item mailed
questionnaire, printed in the form of a census schedule. To achieve the highest pos-
sible response rate, he personally visited all the counties and 65 of the towns of
Massachusetts, and eventually he obtained data from every single community. Of
the state’s 1,319 doctors, fully 99.6 % responded, and Jarvis was able to obtain
information about the patients of the four holdouts from other doctors in the same
towns. This research is widely regarded as the best work of psychiatric epidemiol-
ogy in nineteenth-century America. The most striking finding was that rates of men-
tal illness were highest in the lowest social class. Unfortunately, several sociologists
who studied social class and mental illness a century later failed to read the excel-
lent book in which Jarvis reported his findings [42]. A hundred and sixty years later
than that, it makes perfect sense for Jarvis to carry out a similar survey of the insane
in a different area, Washington.
The geography of Fallout 3 is not precisely identical to that of Washington, DC,
and of course if the timelines diverged around 1950, the locations of subway sta-
tions and styles of architecture at the time of the 2077 disaster could be somewhat
different. Yet it is possible to identify the approximate locations of all the places
Jarvis visited in Fallout 3. His home base was a fortified village named Megaton,
just south of Springvale, Virginia, not far from Reston or McLean. Its population,
counting Jarvis once he had earned a house there, was 43. Each of the homes and
businesses was constructed of crude materials, and raised up on a series of girders,
connected with bent and irregular walkways. The external shell that protected
everything from raiders and mutated beasts was cobbled together from sheets of
metal, many taken from ruined airplanes. A Fallout wiki provides the history:
The site of Megaton began as a gigantic crater left by a plane wreck that was carrying an
atomic bomb. Shortly after the crash, several wasteland survivors… huddled down in the
crater, since it provided shelter from the dust storms. Once things began to settle down,
some people left and began to wander the wasteland. These people then returned later on to
trade with the remaining settlers. As a result, Megaton became a full-on trading center…
Megaton’s construction was aided significantly by the Children of Atom, who had just
began to worship the undetonated atomic bomb in the town center. The settlers were forced
to leave the bomb unmoved in exchange for their much needed help [43].
Figure 1.2 shows the bomb at the center of Megaton, with Jarvis brandishing a
baseball bat for self defense in the foreground. The man standing near the bomb is
Confessor Cromwell, pastor of the only church in Megaton, dedicated to worship of
the bomb. In the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the psychiatrist col-
leagues of Edward Jarvis believed that one common cause of insanity was religious
excitement, so naturally Cromwell was one of the first people my virtual Jarvis
interviewed, to determine his sanity or lack thereof [44].
Fig. 1.2 Edward Jarvis near a nuclear bomb in Fallout 3
Practically all role-playing computer games allow the user’s avatar to have a
conversation with a non-player character (NPC) like Cromwell. Given the limita-
tions of today’s artificial intelligence, these are not free-form discussions, but struc-
tured around pre-written text. In Fallout 3, the user often has two or more options
concerning what to say, each of which triggers a different response from the
NPC. Here is part of the Cromwell interview:
Confessor Cromwell: I am Confessor Cromwell, prophet of Atom and father of the undying
Glow. Please, child, come to the Church any time. Any time at all!
Edward Jarvis: Tell me about the Church of Atom.
Confessor Cromwell: The Church of the Children of Atom is based on the idea that each
single atomic mass in all creation contains within it an entire universe. When that atomic
mass is split, a single universe divides and becomes two – thus signifying the single
greatest act of Atom’s creation. Occasionally, a divine event occurs and trillions upon
trillions of new universes are created. The last such event took place here, 200 years ago.
Where most of the lost children of Atom see that event as simple war and devastation,
we see creation and unification in Atom’s Glow.
Edward Jarvis: Why do you worship the bomb?
Confessor Cromwell: Those who were called to Atom during the Great Division were very
fortunate. They were permitted to aid in the process of Atom’s creation. We seek the
same, both in symbol and in fact and the “bomb”, as you call it, represents Atom’s
capacity for creation.
Despite his crazy ideas, Cromwell is calm and does not seem to suffer from hal-
lucinations. The resident of Megaton whom Jarvis came to know best, and with
whom he spoke many times, was also calm, yet crazy in her own way. Her name was
Moira Brown, who could always be found during business hours inside Craterside
Supply, where Jarvis could sell items he had looted from defeated enemies or scav-
enged from the wasteland, and buy ammunition for his guns. Moira was always
cheery, even when talking about horrible deaths, and seemed to be constantly in
A Secondary Life 17
denial. She imagined herself to be a scientist, only slightly bothered by the fact that
her previous assistant was eaten by a creature she was studying. Now she is writing
a book titled Wasteland Survival Guide and wants Jarvis to do the dangerous work
while she limits herself to the intellectual writing task. Each mission provides the
player with experience managing the dangerous environment, and gives Moira
material for what would be a survivalist instruction manual.
The first of three chapters requires Jarvis to complete three quests: (1) find food
at a ruined supermarket, (2) explore a minefield across the river and just west of
Bethesda, and (3) become sick with radiation poisoning. Whenever Jarvis swam in
the river, he would get a goodly dose of radiation, but it was hard to calibrate the
exposure. Then he discovered that if he stood right beside the nose of the atom
bomb at Megaton, he would receive one rad per second. The second chapter also
assigned three quests: (1) test a repellant against giant mole rats in a DC sewer sys-
tem, (2) place a scientific monitoring device inside a nest of giant mutated horse-
shoe crabs called mirelurks, and (3) sustain physical injuries depriving him of more
than half his health. As he hobbled back to Megaton after placing the device among
the mirelurks, he saw his health was just a bit higher than fifty percent, so he care-
fully jumped off one of the walkways inside Megaton to gain just the right amount
of additional damage.
The third chapter of Moira’s book gave Jarvis an assignment that brought my
pilot research using him to a logical conclusion: visiting the Arlington Public
Library. In fact, I hold a borrower’s card and have used that real-world library for
years. It was a long trek south from Megaton, skirting hordes of raiders and mon-
sters. The building in Fallout 3 did not look at all like the real Arlington Library,
which is modern in style, but vaguely resembled a small version of the Library of
Congress, which has Greek columns in traditional federal government style. As it
happens, Arlington plans to replace the current 40-year-old structure of the central
library, which has become obsolete. Building a library in the Fallout universe a
century before the nuclear war, a more traditional architectural style would have
been followed. When he entered the library, Jarvis encountered an ominous figure:
Scribe Yearling: You’re awfully brave to be walking around down here by yourself. Are you
scavenging the ruins?
Edward Jarvis: I’m searching for records from the library.
Scribe Yearling: It seems that we have similar goals in mind. It’s rare to meet someone who
has proper priorities. I am Senior Scribe Yearling, Order of the Word. I have a proposal
for you if you are interested.
Edward Jarvis: I’m interested in this. Tell me more.
Scribe Yearling: Good. My task here is to collect the written works of those who came
before in order to supplement the Brotherhood Archives at the Citadel. Although most
of the pre-war books have been destroyed, there are a few that have survived. But find-
ing a book in these ruins is… difficult. I could have a million Initiates to comb the ruins,
and I’d still never come close to recovering every book that remains undamaged.
Edward Jarvis: And you want me to help you gather books, right?
Scribe Yearling: Precisely. The collected knowledge of a lost age is worth far more than any
weapon. So, return here with any books that you find in good condition… Books repre-
sent the collected knowledge of the world before. Everything from a child’s story book
to a detailed technical guide has value.
At this point, I had operated the Jarvis avatar inside Fallout 3 for 13 hours,
advancing somewhat more slowly than an ordinary player would have done in order
to collect data carefully. I took 602 screenshot photographs, and copied the text for
the Cromwell and Yearling interviews from them. Most MMOs and many solo-
player games calibrate the player’s progress in terms of experience levels, and I had
reached only level 4 out of a maximum 20. Some of the main avatars described in
later chapters were run for hundreds of hours, and in both Lord of the Rings Online
and World of Warcraft, one of my many avatars achieved the maximum of level 100.
Running Jarvis only briefly in Fallout 3 was sufficient for an initial example.
Gameworld as Civilization
This book will primarily concern massively multiplayer online role-playing games,
so the concluding example for this introductory chapter needs to present one. Gods
and Heroes was a very interesting, high quality MMO that sadly failed in the mar-
ketplace, so it can illustrate the harsh economic realities of the genre, as well as the
standard design features. MMOs are very expensive to create, the dominant ones
costing tens of millions of dollars to support a team of artists, story-tellers, and
computer programmers, as well as personnel to provide support to its customers,
and a management team facing daunting challenges. Unfortunately, Gods and
Heroes lacked sufficient funding, and potential customers may not have been suffi-
ciently interested in being ancient Romans, for this game to succeed. The rather
brief Wikipedia page explains that it sought the convergence of history and mythol-
ogy, scholarship and economics:
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (abbreviated as G&H or GnH) was the title of an MMORPG
made by Heatwave Interactive. The game was set in the world of Ancient Rome, and com-
bines historical elements and enemies (Etruscans, Faliscans, etc.) with mythological ones
(Cyclopes, Gorgons, etc.). Players could select era-appropriate classes from Soldiers,
Gladiators, Mystics and Priests, each of which could be aligned with an Olympian god
(such as Jupiter or Mars).
Originally developed by Perpetual Entertainment, the game was put on indefinite hold
in October, 2007. In February, 2010, Heatwave Interactive announced it had acquired rights
to the game and planned to continue its development. The game was released in June, 2011
with a retail purchase and subscription. In early 2012 the game switched to free play with a
$10 purchase of the game. The game and its forums entered maintenance in September
2012 and never fully returned, although some existing players were still able to log in to
game servers at some points after that. Steam has since removed the game from its shop
[45].
Although G&H was released on June 21, 2011, I actually began my exploration
of it over 7 months earlier on November 8, 2010. It is not uncommon for MMOs to
give early access to a few volunteers prior to the game’s completion, asking those
players to serve as beta testers. Employees of Heatwave Interactive could watch
what happens from the perspective of their Internet server, noting programming
bugs or other problems that might arise, correcting them before public release of the
Gameworld as Civilization 19
game. One example was occasional crashing of the game, for reasons the players
might not perceive, if interactions between multiple players exposed weaknesses in
the database structure, of if certain actions by a player triggered a freeze caused by
a specific programming error. The players themselves could provide comments,
through one of a number of communication channels, which in G&H prominently
consisted of brief questionnaires that popped up on the screen.
Role-playing MMOs invariably begin with a series of screens in which the player
selects a type of character, assigns a name to it, and usually adjusts details of the
character’s appearance. I decided that any avatars I created in G&H would represent
not social scientists but archetypal ancient Romans, and my exploration would be
especially focused on the extent to which the game offered a realistic image of
ancient Rome. Therefore, I named my first avatar Andivius, after the protagonist of
Edward Lucas White’s historical novel, Andivius Hedulio [46].
MMO designers hope that players will experience their virtual world several
times through the perspectives of different avatars having different names and abili-
ties, and the avatar’s class defines the abilities. The G&H designers intended for it
to offer choices among six different classes: Gladiator, Mystic, Priest, Soldier,
Nomad, and Scout, but only the first four of these were initially available. The inter-
face explained their styles:
Gladiator: Trained to fight for fame and fortune, the Gladiator knows well the roar of the
crowd and strives always for the sweet taste of victory.
Mystic: With mastery over all the elements, the Mystic has the power to destroy enemies
with the many spells at his command.
Priest: This hero of the divine wields the power to heal and protect his friends or curse
enemies in the name of the gods of Olympus.
Soldier: The Soldier represents the pinnacle of Roman military might – loyal, courageous
and above all, well disciplined.
The avatar could be male or female, and I selected male because that was the
gender of Andivius Hedulio. An appearance customization screen allowed me to
select skin tone, hair color, and some alternatives of hair and face. For each of the
four classes, one must select which of two deities to worship, a decision that affects
some of the powers the avatar develops over time. I decided that Andivius should be
a soldier in service of Minerva, rather than of Mars.
The action of an MMO usually starts in a tutorial area, where the player learns
how to control the avatar, in the context of an environment and missions that also
provide a backstory introducing key concepts about the fictional goals to be
achieved. In this case, Andivius had been a prisoner of pirates whose ship sank, and
who was able to swim out of the wreck to a beach called Shores of Fate on Telchinos
Island. The first mission was simply for Andivius to make his way inland and report
for duty to Commander Galucus. Since this was a beta test, the interface then dis-
played a small questionnaire window:
Fig. 1.3 Realistic and mythical characters in Gods and Heroes
Congratulations! You have completed quest A Hero Rises: Far from Home. To help us
make the game better please provide feedback about this quest.
Fun [ ] Not Fun [ ] Sort of Fun [ ] Average [ ] Fun [ ] Very Fun
Difficulty [ ] Very Easy [ ] Easy [ ] Average [ ] Hard [ ] Very Hard
Length [ ] Too Short [ ] Short [ ] Average [ ] Long [ ] Too Long
Reward [ ] Valueless [ ] Negligible [ ] Average [ ] Good [ ] Very Good
Story [ ] Farfetched [ ] Unlikely [ ] Average [ ] Good [ ] Very Good
I have experienced beta tests of several other games, and they differ greatly in
how they obtain player feedback. In recent years, many games have expanded the
notion of beta test to include open betas that really are marketing strategies to pre-
pare many players to be interested in a new MMO, but this was a closed beta really
intended to help the designers complete their work. Not all regions of the virtual
geography were available, and not all quests within the available regions had been
completed. Andivius completed his life at level 25 on December 18, 2010, during
which I took 2,222 screenshots, including Fig. 1.3 which dates from November 29,
2010, when he had reached level 21.
Gameworld as Civilization 21
Andivius is the armored figure in the center of the picture, standing in front of an
outdoors altar. The three other characters holding shields are the members of his
team, and the three taller figures are giant Satyrs. None of these six other figures
represent other players. The three Satyrs are friendly non-player characters who
stayed near the shrine and interacted with player avatars in regard to various quests.
The three members of the team are what I call secondary avatars, operated by the
player and providing back-up for the main avatar. MMOs vary with respect to
whether they have secondary avatars, and if so whether they might be limited only
to certain classes, such as a hunter in World of Warcraft having a hunting animal
called a pet. The term alt is used in role-playing lingo to refer to alternative avatars,
operated at different times by a player but within the same game. Secondary avatars
operate simultaneously with the main avatar, and were a major feature of G&H.
The Gods and Heroes geography included a very nice if of necessity simplified
simulation of ancient Rome itself, as well as the port city of Ostia, and Aricia, a
town in the nearby Alban Hills. Around them extended much virtual territory with
some other settlements and somewhat diverse geography, inhabited by mythical
beings as well as by realistic ancient Italians. Over time, as the avatar completed
missions, it was possible to recruit more and more team members, from whom the
player could select some to accompany the main avatar on missions. In the beta test
version of G&H, extra team members, as well as some non-player characters, could
be found at a small camp the main avatar could visit.
When G&H launched in the following June, it was more fully developed but not
entirely complete. This time, there were multiple versions operating in parallel on
different Internet servers, to accommodate a larger number of players, and I created
new characters on servers named Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. One was a male gladi-
ator named Hedulio, representing a reboot of Andivius but in a different class, and
another was Adastra, a female priest. I did not take either of these above level 2, but
used them as the vantage point for taking censuses of the other avatars currently
online. The social panel of the interface, used to recruit other players to multi-player
teams, allowed one to search by level, class, and deity, thereby facilitating repeated
analysis of the virtual demographics of the game. Later chapters will present analy-
sis of similar data from other MMOs.
The second main avatar was Aspera, a female mystic. I took her all the way up to
the maximum level 30, over the period June 29 to July 24, 2011. G&H had replaced
the modest camp with an impressive estate belonging to the main avatar, which
included a river and lake containing fish, wild areas with animals, and a villa, tem-
ple, library, barracks, and guard tower. In the backstory, the estate had been dam-
aged during war, and some of the quests Aspera completed in the wider world
provided help in rebuilding the temple in which she worshipped Trevia. G&H’s
interface explained that this “goddess of sorcery and queen of the underworld,
brings life where there should be none and death to those who have offended her.”
I explored many of the religious and mythological qualities of Gods and Heroes
in my earlier book, eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming [47]. Here,
my purpose was to begin exploration of MMOs with one that had clear connections
to the real world, and that illustrated the range of features that MMOs might have.
In the concluding chapter, we will discover that World of Warcraft introduced the
equivalent of the G&H estate in an expansion that took place fully three and a half
years after I finished research on G&H. I cannot claim G&H was unusually innova-
tive, but its designers did their best. Few other MMOs relate to real history, or to the
supernatural beliefs of real societies. Despite an occasional glitch, I found the game
play interesting, diverse, and complex. I wish Trevia would resurrect Gods and
Heroes, so that thousands of other people could experience what a fine virtual world
it was!
Conclusion
The three gameworlds we just explored illustrate important dimensions of variation

across virtual worlds, notably the variable relationships between the individual user
and the populations of real and fictional people who inhabit these environments.
Fallout 3 will be available essentially permanently, for anyone who wishes to expe-
rience it, but Gods and Heroes no longer exists. Online games require some organi-
zation to operate software and databases from an Internet server, at considerable
cost, and as yet no equivalent of the public library is ready to take over this respon-
sibility when commercial profitably has been exhausted. Thus, it is no longer pos-
sible to explore City of Heroes or The Matrix Online, two high-quality virtual worlds
covered in Chap. 3, and only sympathy prevents me from predicting which other
marvelous gameworlds will cease to exist next. Thus, this book is not only a dem-
onstration study of how theory-related social science can be performed, in the
dynamic context of convergence of the sciences and humanities, but also a record of
some of the most fascinating early examples of virtual worlds. The second chapter
seeks to understand the conceptual and technological basis of computer-generated
virtual worlds, through exploration of one that has survived and is fascinating,
despite not having gained a significant status in the marketplace.
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Chapter 2
Technological Determinism in Construction
of an Online Society
Psychodrama focuses on individual human personalities, and how relationships

between individuals link them together into networks, but many other perspectives
emphasize the social environment on a very large scale, some even arguing that
individuals do not matter. One of those macro-sociological theories is especially
relevant here, not merely to provide contrast but because it illuminates the nature of
the computational systems in which avatars exist. Traditionally called technological
determinism, it argues that the engine of history is not the decisive action of indi-
vidual leaders, but the gradual accretion of human knowledge and its practical
applications. Today, this perspective suggests that the ongoing convergence of mul-
tiple sciences and fields of engineering into an integrated system will have radical
consequences for human society [1]. Traditional historians wrote narratives about
kings and emperors, but in the twentieth century, many analysts shifted the focus to
technological innovations. Leslie White, for example, argued that the Dark Ages
were in fact bright with invention, perhaps liberated rather than inhibited by the fall
of the restrictive Roman Empire [2]. S. C. Gilfillan, an expert on the history of naval
technologies, asserted: “There is no indication that any individual’s genius has been
necessary to any invention that has had any importance. To the historian and social
scientist the progress of invention appears impersonal” [3]. To impersonate some-
one holding this viewpoint, I selected the most prominent sociologist who held this
view, William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), and a virtual world named Xsyon that simu-
lates the re-emergence of technology after the collapse of civilization. The conclu-
sion of this chapter links Ogburn and Xsyon to the dominant ideology of science
fiction in its historic Golden Age.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_2
26 2 Technological Determinism in Construction of an Online Society
Social Change
There is nothing especially modern about the idea that technological innovations are
a major source of social change. For example, it was evident to Adam Smith even
back in 1776, that investment in technological innovation could reduce the amount
of human labor required to produce goods, thus adding to the effective wealth of the
society even as it reduced prices [4]. Already by 1813, Robert Owen was analyzing
the impact of the industrial revolution, arguing that the innovation of the printing
press and widespread schooling could provide new perspectives to guide the cre-
ation of better forms of society [5].
However, many of the leading social theorists of the nineteenth century did not
assume that technology was the primary driving force of progress, although assign-
ing it a major role. Herbert Spencer believed that social and technical evolution
followed the same laws as biological evolution, but with the difference that the
desire of human beings to improve the conditions of their lives gave technological
evolution a teleological quality that natural selection in biology lacked. Spencer
argued that on balance each cause in our universe has more than one effect, so all
forms of long-term evolution would lead to increasing complexity. For humans that
meant an increasing division of labor that harnessed technology in ever more com-
plex ways and on larger and larger scales. He specifically noted that the develop-
ment of transportation over roads allowed economic differentiation of geographically
dispersed communities, as they could specialize as components in an increasingly
differentiated society [6]. Thus, Spencer’s theory illustrated the convergence-
divergence dynamic, and later social theories like Emile Durkheim and Talcott
Parsons optimistically believed that technology merely supported progress for a
civilization whose institutions functioned through a combination of integration and
differentiation [7].
In his 1922 book, Social Change, William F. Ogburn did more than merely sum-
marize the ideas of previous writers, but sought to assemble them into an intellec-
tual system, add new concepts, and offer a range of compelling examples [8]. His
central model of social change introduced four concepts that interacted with each
other as elements within a dynamic system: (1) Invention, (2) Accumulation, (3)
Diffusion, and (4) Adjustment. Each technological innovation has its own impact,
whether small or large, but as inventions accumulate so does their force impelling
society to change. More than that, inventions combine to produce new inventions, in
what today we might call a chain reaction or the convergence-divergence process.
An invention made in one industry at one location, diffuses both topically and topo-
graphically, thereby amplifying both invention and accumulation. Finally, society
must adjust, and the results of that adjustment feed back into the three prior
processes.
Clearly, the development of the factory system, that was the primary adjustment
to the industrial revolution, transformed the nature of labor and the social systems
managing it for a large segment of the population. But among Ogburn’s favorite
examples was the way that mass production absorbed many kinds of manufacture
Social Change 27
that used to take place within the home, thereby insidiously reducing the economic
value of women even as it appeared to offer them convenience. Improved health
conditions, also caused by technological innovations, reduced infant mortality,
thereby also reducing the significance of traditional women’s work raising numer-
ous children many of whom used to die young. The result was what Ogburn named
cultural lag: An unfortunate delay in the adjustment process that would enable soci-
ety to make best use of the innovations. Beneficial technical progress had the harm-
ful secondary effect of reducing the status of women in society, which could be
cured only by abandoning the traditional assumptions about the roles that women
were expected to play. Ogburn described himself as a Feminist, compelled by his
analysis to support social change.
There can be no doubt that Ogburn began his career deeply interested in a range
of radical ideas, many of them imported from Europe. In 1919 he had contributed
an article to The American Economic Review that cited a work by Friedrich Engels,
collaborator of Karl Marx, that currently can be read online at www.marxists.org
[9]. However Ogburn’s essay more prominently cites the psychoanalytic literature,
notably both Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. Arguably, Marxism is a form of tech-
nological determinism, as it places great emphasis on the organization of work and
the impact of the Industrial Revolution. However, Ogburn’s main point seems to be
that individuals lack insight into their own subconscious motivations and symbol-
isms, thus are severely inhibited from intentionally controlling events and subservi-
ent to large-scale phenomena such as technological development [10].
In an enthusiastic 1929 catalog of recent innovations, Ogburn noted that some
consequences might seem surprising: “The utilization of steam has affected the
divorce rate, and the invention and wide use of the tin can and glass preserving-jar
have had an effect on the movement for woman suffrage” [11]. In 1936 he noted
more abstractly the complex chains of causation that technological innovation can
unleash: “A very common pattern is for the technological change to effect first an
economic organization which, second, causes a change in some social institution,
such as the family or government, and which finally causes a change in the social
philosophy of a people” [12]. In 1937, Ogburn wrote, “Government in the United
States will probably tend toward a greater centralization because of the airplane, the
bus, the truck, the Diesel engine, the radio, the telephone, and the various uses to
which the wire and the wireless may be placed” [13]. He went on to predict that
technological development would erode local governments of all kinds, in favor of
ever larger central governmental organizations. If technology is so powerful, how
can morality control it? He was not convinced this was possible:
The society of the future then will be one of greater and greater change. And as the environ-
ment changes the habits of man change. Under these conditions morality, as it is generally
conceived, will have no place. For the general notion of morality is the following of a set of
rules or commandments. Such commandments can be laid down with great specificity in a
stationary society where experience leads to guidance in minute detail. But in a society
undergoing great change there is little guidance to be gained from the past. The situations
that arise are new, and ethical conduct is a matter of intelligence and forecast; and the fixity
and detail of right and wrong give way before social expediency [14].
The abstract of an article Ogburn published in 1946 soon after the destruction of
Hiroshima by an atom bomb expressed not only his radical belief that society would
be radically changed, but the hope that sociology would be as well:
The influence of the discovery of atomic energy on sociology lies in the field of social
change and the social effects of invention. The atomic bomb will cause changes in interna-
tional organization, in cities, and in many institutions. To attain a lasting world government
controlling the use of the bomb and to break up large cities into smaller ones are stupendous
efforts in collective action and call for a huge amount of sociological research. The use of
atomic energy in machines will usher in the atomic age and more; the scientific revolution
and its industrial uses may have even more extensive effects upon society than the industrial
revolution, ushered in by steam. The crisis of atomic energy raises the problem of changed
methods of sociology to meet the future [15].
His suggestion that large cities should be divided into small ones was a defensive
reaction to the possibility that even a small number of nuclear weapons could
destroy civilization if it were concentrated into a few major urban centers. Setting
that dismal analysis aside, today with Internet and the potential for replacement of
mass production by distributed production again as was the case centuries ago
in local workshops integrated into their communities, we can go further and suggest
that humanity might be better off without cities. In the decades since he wrote, a
degree of economic unity has transformed the world to some degree, but outside
Western Europe political unification has not really been attempted. Today we are
less optimistic than Ogburn was about the benefits of nuclear power, although he
may still be proven right. His main prediction about the transformation of sociology
was that societies would need to engage in very serious social planning, on the basis
of rigorous research, a shift that remains politically controversial.
Yet one reason for including Ogburn and other early social scientists in this book
is a sense that for all their pretentions about methodological progress, the social sci-
ences have become timid in recent decades, and could learn a good deal from earlier
masters, even when their views are politically incorrect. For enactment of his theo-
ries I chose an MMO with some affinity to Fallout 3, named Xsyon. It places the
avatar on the shores of Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border, after the fall of
civilization, requiring the player to rebuild from scratch the technology required for
survival.
The Virtual Lake Tahoe
In many ways, Xsyon is an unusual gameworld, so one of the lessons it teaches is

that impersonation research can often be carried out most effectively in a frankly
unpopular, almost unknown virtual environment, learning from game designers
who have not yet achieved commercial success, and whose attempts to innovate
have not garnered praise. Probably a choice like this should not be taken until the
user has gained experience in two or three diverse but popular gameworlds. But a
key insight is that marketplace popularity is not the ultimate measure of artistic
The Virtual Lake Tahoe 29
success. Any student of literature already knows this, and the swarms of people with
music players plugged into their ears while commuting on the subway are probably
not listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass.
Xsyon is an example of a rather common pattern in MMOs, however, because
many of them were originally developed by tiny teams of talented but underfunded
enthusiasts, often unable to complete their difficult job, and often being forced to
hand their product over to a big company even if they are successful. As Wikipedia
reports, Xsyon was created by an independent company, Notorious Games, which
unlike even moderately prominent competitors was not the subject of its own
Wikipedia article [16]. The game’s own wiki has a page giving brief bios of the
development team, beginning with this remarkable personal statement by their
leader:
Jordi Grau Davis (that’s me) studied for many years, earning Bachelor degrees in
Archaeology and Architecture from the University of California Berkeley and a Master’s
degree in Architecture from Harvard University, only to leave it all behind for video games
in 1994. I founded two game graphics companies, Vector Graphics and Future Primitive and
have been in the game industry for 17 years. Through these companies I fulfilled contracts
with Sony, Sega, Mindscape, Microprose, Virgin Interactive, Raven Soft, Hewlett Packard,
Worlds Inc. and many other clients culminating with a publishing deal with Electronic Arts
with only a four person team. As Future Primitive was disbanded, I continued working as
both an artist and a programmer for several small independent projects for companies
including Autodesk and Hurricane Electric, the latest being an online world Roma Victor
which was released to the public in July of 2006. I founded Notorious Games LLC in 2007
with the intention of creating a unique virtual game world, the game I’ve been wanting to
play since I first sat at a computer, Xsyon [17].
At one point, I had planned to study Roma Victor but procrastinated unfortu-
nately until it had been shut down. I would have compared it with that different
game also set in ancient Rome, Gods and Heroes, which we explored in the first
chapter. Two other admirable historical games, A Tale in the Desert and Pirates of
the Burning Sea, have survived for many years, but are rather unpopular. One might
conclude that today’s game players are ignorant Philistines, but even without com-
ing to that harsh judgment it does seem strange that people with the intellect to
appreciate an innovative art form seem incapable of simultaneously appreciating
sophisticated expressions of more traditional culture. Interestingly, many of the
other members of the Xsyon team were residents of Novosibirsk, Russia. Arguably
the most innovative successful MMO, EVE Online, was developed by a team in
Reykjavík, Iceland, and perhaps they will pardon the observation that smart, ambi-
tious people may actually be more free to innovate if they live outside the dominant
power centers of civilization.
We can reasonably speculate that Xsyon is intended to be pronounced Zion,
which is the name of the last redoubt of human civilization in the Matrix movies, in
addition to having many traditional religious and utopian connotations. The Xsyon
wiki describes the situation in five words: “Modern technology has consumed itself”
[18]. The avatars prowl the resultant rubbish heaps, while feeling some affinity to
the Native American cultures that had preceded industrialism. Yet the gameplay
requires the user to gather material resources, create tools, produce more and more
products necessary for life, and gain technical skills. Thus, Xsyon is the rebirth of
technological civilization, potentially recapitulating William F. Ogburn’s theory of
technological determinism. In so doing, it places in the foreground of the experience
a set of activities that a very large fraction of more popular MMOs place in the
background. Thus it is an excellent virtual world in which to learn about resource
gathering and crafting.
When Ogburn entered Xsyon on April 30, 2014, civilization had already fallen,
and when he looked around him he did not see even one other human being. He was
in a deserted city on Founder’s Isle at the north end of Lake Tahoe, but when he
compared online maps he conjectured that this was an artificial island, built just
south of King’s Beach. However, other parts of the coastline seemed to differ
between the physical and virtual worlds, so an alternate hypothesis was that the fall
of civilization had been so violent as to transform geological details. At first he was
afraid to leave town, because he carried only a small axe with which to defend him-
self, but then he remembered that the name of this world was Peace.
At the time Ogburn visited, there were actually three versions of Xsyon, and their
differences illustrate a common range in virtual worlds. There was a test server,
where the game designers tried out new features of the game before they were fully
debugged and adjusted to function well. A few players created avatars here in order
to be helpful, just like college students volunteering to be test subjects in their pro-
fessors’ research experiments, to enjoy interesting and sometimes unique experi-
ences, and to feel they were real pioneers. The original public version of Xsyon,
called War, emphasized combat between players, a standard category in MMOs
called PvP for “player-versus-player.” A few games are entirely PvP, some have PvP
areas within complex worlds, and others set aside distinct PvP worlds so that com-
bat between players takes place everywhere on one Internet server, and nowhere on
another. These differences are encoded into the software as a simple rule, that may
however have complex contingencies: Can one player attack another? In many
MMOs, one player may challenge another to a duel even outside PvP areas, but the
fight will not take place unless the other player agrees, and the duel will end with
the surrender, but not the death, of the loser. Under a full PvP rule, one player may
attack another, even from ambush, can kill the other player’s avatar, and perhaps
even loot the corpse of the valuables it is carrying.
The Peace version of Xsyon was a very recent addition, launching only on March
17, 2014. Initially it was a duplicate of the War version including whatever its play-
ers had already built, except that on its server PvP attacks were not permitted by the
rules built into the software. The alternative to PvP is PvE, for “player-versus-
environment.” Danger was diminished but not absent, because there were many
wild animals in Xsyon, more big and aggressive ones in hinterlands far from the
lake, and at first Ogburn did not know what he would face when he left the ghost-
town city. He did explore it, and he found none of the virtual services found in the
towns of other MMOs, operated by non-player characters functioning as merchants,
healers, and mission-givers. He would need to set his own goals and discover how
to accomplish them.
The Virtual Lake Tahoe 31
A causeway connected Founder’s Isle to the mainland, and soon Ogburn had
accomplished two things. First, he saw that as in other MMOs, a text chat allowed
players to communicate with each other, and by reading it he could learn from them.
XCameronX exclaimed, “i caught a fish… omg 2 fish in a row.” We know this was
an excited exclamation because in the gamer lingo “omg” means “Oh, my God!”
Ogburn deduced that catching fish was a worthwhile activity, that attempts often
failed because two successes in a row were surprising, and at some point he would
need to try it. This was his first example of diffusion of technology, communication
of technically significant information from one person to another.
Second, he figured out how to hold his axe, walked up to a small tree, and tried
chopping at it. In a way, this involved diffusion as well, because he had not made the
axe himself, and any technological artifact contains information. The result was a
large log, which he found he could carry on his back, but after lugging it around for
a while, he dropped it, because he did not seem to have the skill or tool required to
make anything useful out of it. This is a minor example of that fundamental princi-
ple of technological determinism, that many technical activities are not possible
until the general level of knowledge and tools have advanced to a level sufficient for
them. The ancients could build ladders out of tree branches, but no ladder could
reach the Moon. Advanced multi-stage chemical-fuel rockets are required for that
accomplishment.
Xsyon could be described as an MMO in development, rather than having an
entirely completed design, and indeed it was launched as Xsyon: Prelude with the
hope that sufficient players would subscribe to fund its full completion. Only on
May 2, 2014, was an extensive tutorial added, in the form of panels arranged like
pages in a reference book, that appeared in a small window in the user interface
[19]. The main section for beginning players explained how to make some service-
able but low-quality armor out of grass, and Ogburn immediately took advantage of
this new diffusion of innovation.
Crafting, which is the general term for making things in MMOs, takes place
simultaneously in two environments: in the game’s user interface and in the virtual
world itself. To craft with grass, I needed to open three interface windows, by click-
ing three icons in the lower right corner of the computer screen: Resources, Packs,
and Basketry. Then Ogburn walked onto a grassy area. An icon of a bundle of grass
appeared in the resources window, so I clicked it with my computer’s mouse.
Ogburn knelt down and moved his hands to gather grass, as a tiny bar graph indi-
cated his progress. When he finished this action, the icon of a bundle of grass
appeared in the Packs window. The Basketry window was complex, with a list of
things the avatar had the skill to make at the top, and places for icons of tools and
materials near the bottom. When “grass thread” is selected from the “schemes” or
recipes menu, the lower part of the Basketry window indicates that no tools are
required, and the only resource required was a bundle of grass. Clicking the icon in
the Packs window for a bundle of grass, set it up for work in the Basketry window,
and clicking a “craft” button set Ogburn working. The result, a moment later, was
an icon of a spool of thread containing 30 units, which appeared in Ogburn’s small
backpack.
Thus, in its simplest form, crafting involves the investment of time in transform-
ing X units of one resource into Y units of another, in this case 1 grass bundle into
30 units of grass thread, thus an expression of an algorithm. The tutorial then had
Ogburn practice transforming 10 units of thread into 1 unit of string, and 4 units of
string into 1 unit of twine. Exploring the list of schemes told him that 4 units of
twine could produce either 1 unit of grass braided rope or 1 unit of grass twisted
rope. None of these crafting activities required tools, other than presumably
Ogburn’s fingers. Economists and computer scientists often refer to such ruled-
based methods for transforming input into output as a production system. Typically,
computer programmers write code for such systems as a set of if-then statements,
often nested in the equivalent of a decision tree with alternative branches, such as
whether the grass rope would be braided or twisted. When computer scientists of
yore argued simplistically that such rule-based systems were the one right way to
accomplish “artificial intelligence,” they implicitly acknowledged that this was one
of the ways human beings traditionally thought, as illustrated by the way Xsyon
simulates production of technology from naturally occurring raw materials.
The tutorial then told Ogburn to move from a grassy area to a rocky surface,
which happened to be granite, and use the same procedures as for grass gathering to
obtain 3 rocks, then to go among some trees and do the same to get one bundle of
branches. Moving inside a complex environment has the effect of changing the con-
ditions on which the if-then rules operate. If you are on grass, you can harvest grass;
if on granite, then rock; if under trees, then branches. A crucial feature of most
modern computer games is that the decision tree of if-then rules is set in the context
of time. Procedures cannot be completed instantaneously. For example, Ogburn
took time walking from one location to another, and I had to wait when he gathered
a resource.
I then closed the Basketry window, opened the Toolcraft window, and selected
the scheme to make a mallet. This required 1 rock, 1 branch, and 1 unit of grass
twine. This was the rare example of making a tool without needing a tool to do so,
and thus it represents the very earliest stage in human history. The next assignment
was making the very simple weaving tool called a lasher, placing the mallet icon in
the tool section of the Toolcraft window, and 1 rock in the resources section. Here,
a tool was needed to make a tool. Using the mallet again, to shape another rock,
made a weaver. This illustrates how a difference in design can manufacture two dif-
ferent things from the same materials by means of the same tools.
Returning to the Basketry crafting window, the lasher and weaver were used to
produce grass fabric. These same tools then used both grass fabric and grass thread
to make a new outfit for Ogburn to wear, consisting of shirt, pants and moccasins.
While providing more protection than the rags he had entered this world with, in
time he would need to gain the skills, tools, and resources to make far better outfits,
using Tailoring and Leathercrafting windows of schemes.
Soon, Ogburn was feeling very tired. From time to time, he paused, bent over,
and failed to respond to my instructions. Indeed, Xsyon avatars need to rest occa-
sionally, if they are very active. But they also need to eat and drink. Water was
abundant, in many streams and in Lake Tahoe itself, so Ogburn could bend down in
Joining the Pawnee Tribe 33
shallow water and gulp it down. Food was more difficult. He believed that some
bushes held edible berries, but he never found any. He encountered a mule deer, but
with his bare hands he could not kill it to get the meat. Fishing was his only alterna-
tive, but that required a fishing pole, made from a branch and some string, which
could be made from grass but later in his skill acquisition he could make better
string from cloth. The tools required were a craft knife, which had been provided to
him at his entry into Xsyon, and an awl, which he would need to make from a piece
of granite, a piece of the much rarer flint rock, and some grass twine, using his
hammer.
He was quite famished when he was ready to fish, and most times he cast the line
into the water, he failed to catch anything. But he did, just barely, build up a supply
of fish in the small backpack he had been provided. For the remainder of his research
in Xsyon, he would carry fish with him, and often run to the nearest stream for a
drink of water. This illustrates that many aspects of human survival can be modelled
as production systems, and life must be maintained at some considerable cost, while
technology is progressing.
Ogburn completed the brief crafting tutorial, noticed that some other chapters
involved cooperation between players, and recognized that he would need to coop-
erate in some way with more advanced players, not merely to learn information
through technology diffusion, but also to use products they had manufactured when
he needed something he could not make himself. For example, if his fishing rod
broke, he could make another one, but if his craft knife broke, he would be in a
pickle. To make one, he discovered he would need a different rare rock, obsidian,
and also a pair of pliers, which he did not have. To make pliers, he would need a
small metal plate, perhaps scavenged from a garbage heap somewhere, and a chisel,
which thankfully, he could make from any rock with his hammer. Very complex
production systems can fail if even just one of the conditions of an if-then cannot be
met, and this is one way of understanding the need humans have to cooperate with
each other.
Joining the Pawnee Tribe
Thankfully, at that moment, he saw a message in Xsyon’s text chat from LaughingOak
who had been offering what appeared to be good advice to other players: “If you are
new, or a returning player and would like to join an active and growing tribe, please
consider The Pawnee in zone 896. We offer a huge area to work in, freedom to ter-
raform and build as you like, and are f2p player friendly. For info Whisper/w
Laughingoak or Tupux.” Terraform refers to preparing land prior to building struc-
tures on it using the Architecture skill and materials largely prepared using the
Masonry skill. F2p refers to “free-to-play,” experiencing the early levels of activity
in Xsyon without yet paying a subscription, and indeed at that point I had not yet
subscribed, something I did very quickly once I confirmed that Xsyon was worthy
of extensive investigation. Whisper is a common gamer term for instant message
private text chat with one other player, and users may switch this on by entering “/w
[name of other player],” while “/t” switches the text chat where the user is writing
to the tribe, if the player belongs to one.
Deciding he had no choice but to take a chance, he followed Laughing Oak’s
somewhat scary instructions to swim south toward the middle of the lake, then turn
west and keep going until he reached the western shore. This turned out to be the
right decision, and over the following days LaughingOak and his tribe proved to be
marvelous mentors, offering even more help than Ogburn was prepared to accept.
Days later, I found the May 6, 2011, web posting in which LaughingOak had
announced the formation of the Pawnee tribe, which began with a self-description:
“First off, I am 54 years old, in the IT field for the last 30+ years. I have been an avid
gamer for a very long time, long before MMO’s. I have been a guild master/leader
in many online games, mostly PVE style games, and have always played an archer
type character” [20]. Later in private conversations Ogburn learned that in the “real”
world LaughingOak was both a father and a grandfather, possessing a generous but
firm paternal character.
The announcement did not explain why the name Pawnee had been chosen, but
of course the word originally described a Native American people who lived in the
area of Oklahoma. The formal groups of players in Xsyon are called “tribes,” com-
monly called guilds in other MMOs, evoking images of Native American cultures.
Each Xsyon tribe has a totem pole, a cultural artifact associated with the Northwest
Coast Native Americans, rather than with either Lake Tahoe or Oklahoma. At best,
the tribe metaphor refers to a traditional form of social organization followed every-
where in the world at one time, admittedly with variations that have been exhaus-
tively studied by cultural anthropologists.
Ogburn was not the only newcomer at Pawnee when he first arrived, and
LaughingOak assigned each of them a kind of entrance exam, manufacturing 200
granite bricks, which required harvesting more granite than a player could carry in
one trip to the tribe’s storage bins, and using a hammer and chisel on it. Because the
buildings at Pawnee headquarters were constructed on the original Xsyon server
before it was renamed War, and had a different history only since Peace launched on
March 17, 2014, it was a very complex facility. For much of the time Ogburn was
doing his research, LaughingOak and his closest associates were constructing a new
set of apartments, for the new players they hoped would join, producing an amaz-
ingly complex and huge set of architectural structures, protected by walls and lock-
able gates. However, the assignment to make bricks was more a test of the character
of the applicant for membership, than strictly speaking a contribution to the building
project.
Each newcomer was promised a storage cart as a reward for delivering the 200
bricks, but apparently Ogburn proved himself through his serious attitude, and
LaughingOak delivered a cart to him before he completed that assignment. Much of
computer hardware consists of memory, and much of human civilization consists of
storage. Not merely a home’s attic, basement, bedroom closets, and kitchen cabinets
are storage, but really all of the house that is not in use at the moment. We buy things
in a store, yet originally this word referred to a place for storage. Garages and
parking places, pockets and toolkits, our world overflows with containers, and the
same is true for most virtual worlds.
By the time LaughingOak gave Ogburn the storage cart, Ogburn had already
learned how to make storage baskets. There are two ways for an avatar to “learn”
things in Xsyon, although Ogburn primarily experienced one of them. Performing
any action, from fishing to weaving grass thread into string to swimming, gradually
builds up an associated skill number. At various unexpected points, this number
reaches the level that unlocks a skill, and the avatar is “inspired” to know it. Thus,
at the beginning Ogburn could not weave baskets, but as his Basketry skill rose, he
learned how to weave first one and then a second kind of basket. Originally given a
backpack with very little storage space, as soon as he made his first basket, he dis-
carded the backpack and began carrying the more capacious basket on his back.
Inside the Pawnee encampment were many tribe-owned baskets, and a few con-
tained schemes in a form like a page of instructions, which an avatar could learn by
consuming, and that the Pawnee leadership had collected from the environment.
This was the second way to learn, and constituted two steps of technological diffu-
sion: (1) scavenging a scheme from a rubbish heap was a communication from the
past to the present, (2) receiving a scheme from another player was communication
in present time.
There are limits to how much weight an avatar can carry, and 50 granite stones
alone would completely use up that ability. The cart was apparently not limited in
the weight it could carry, but had only 5 storage spaces, compared to 50 for a basket.
The secret to a cart’s great utility was the fact it could hold a basket in each of its
five spaces, thus really having a capacity of 250 spaces. A single hammer would use
up one of those spaces, but commodities like granite bricks could be stacked, put-
ting 100 in a single space of a basket on the cart. In addition, now that he was a
member of the Pawnee, Ogburn could leave baskets filled with resources in areas
reserved for storage, setting the permission rules for each, for example allowing
other members of the tribe to use the resources, or not, as he chose. The land around
the buildings belonged to the Pawnee, and the more members a tribe had, the larger
the land area it could dominate. The cart could be moved, and some players took
theirs some distance if they were harvesting resources in great quantity. Eventually,
Ogburn placed his cart in Pawnee territory on the bank of a river, so he could alter-
nately fish and make tools, having also chosen a spot where mining granite occa-
sionally produced a valuable pyrite or obsidian stone. Thus storage can be
conceptualized either as memory, or as effective use of space. Figure 2.1 shows
Ogburn moving his storage cart, with a storage basket on his back.
Given his technological determinist theories, Ogburn set himself three primary
tasks, which he hoped to complete during sociological field research of limited
duration: (1) making a superior suit of clothing and armor to replace his original
grass outfit, (2) making samples of all the different tools his Toolcraft skills could
create, and (3) exploring to some extent many of the other technological aspects of
Xsyon life. He would not attempt to build a house, craft weapons, or hunt animals,
but limit himself to the goals which would best address issues relevant to his theo-
ries. Fabric for clothing could be obtained through scavenging on dump heaps,
Fig. 2.1 Ogburn with his storage cart and basket in Xsyon
which was also the way to obtain leather that could also be made into clothing.
Some clothing required metal components, such as buckles, and some tools required
metal parts as well. This meant he would need to develop his Scavenging skills, and
luckily there were several large trash dumps near the Pawnee land.
While Ogburn walked across trash, I watched the Resources window. From place
to place and time to time, it would display from zero to four icons, telling which
kind of resource could be gathered just like bundles of grass: fabric, leather, metal,
and plastic. Just four units of one resource could be gathered before something must
be done with it. Grass was simple, because it could immediately be made into
thread, but the scavenging resources first needed to be sorted. This placed a random
selection of materials into the basket Ogburn used as his inventory, rather like being
dealt a hand of cards in a card game. Repeatedly sorting fabric trash might build up
stacks consisting of many of the same thing, but there were several fabric types and
colors, each of which required its own stack. Some units of fabric were intact, while
others were torn scraps, and scissors could turn intact pieces into scraps. Scraps
could be made into thread, which lost their color and thus could combine into a
smaller number of stacks, differing only by material, such as cotton, wool, or span-
dex. Working with fabric required the Tailoring skill, and doing so increased that
particular skill.
As Ogburn gained Tailoring skill, he also learned schemes for making more and
more kinds of clothing. Eventually he decided to make a green outfit, of the type
called Truckee, consisting of fully 13 different articles that needed to be tailored,
each with a specific scheme and set of materials. He gathered vast amounts of fab-
ric, saved all the intact green pieces, regardless of type of fabric, turned some of the
rest into thread and twine that would be useful for crafting things, and turned the
remainder into rope to increase his skill, discarding most of that rope because it was
of no use to him, but also delivering much rope to LaughingOak to be used in the
tribe’s construction projects. A complete outfit required pants and a shirt, which
apparently did not exist in the Truckee version, so he used Leathercrafting to make
some from leather scraps also gathered at a trash heap. Making his new suit of
clothes was relatively easy, if time consuming, but the same could not be said for
making all the tools.
Technological Indeterminism
It is easy to imagine a technological innovation that cannot actually be achieved, but

difficult to know whether it was fundamentally impossible, or could be accom-
plished at a higher level of general technological development. When Ogburn set
out to build tools, he had to assume that Xsyon actually provided the means to do so,
in each and every case. However, we cannot make that assumption about the real
world - that all things desired are in fact possible - so Ogburn may have been over-
optimistic. Each skill begins at level 5 and can be increased by hard work up to 100.
By the time Ogburn had reached level 40 in Toolcraft, he had made 39 different
tools, and believed there were only two other general types, both of them saws, one
for use on wood, and the other, on bone. Both required use of a hammer and a craft
knife, with two easily acquired resources, tree branches and grass twine. But each
also required scavenging an old saw blade from a trash heap, and he had not yet
found one.
The online forums related to Xsyon contained many debates about saw blades.
What level of skill in scavenging did one need to reach before they could be
obtained? Were they found only in certain locations, such as dangerous territory far
from the lake where fierce bears and even reanimated corpses called revenants
lurked? Some online forum posters complained that beginners cannot find saw
blades, but this seemed to be intentional on the part of Xsyon’s designers, because
that motivates them to develop friendships with more advanced players. Saws are
needed for Woodworking, and Woodworking is required to make the materials
required to make a cart using the Wainwright skill. And, as Ogburn had already
learned, a storage cart is probably the most valuable single tool.
On the assumption that saw blades could be scavenged through the Resources
window in the same way as other metal objects, and that they could be obtained only
after reaching some level of scavenging skill, Ogburn scavenged aggressively, and
began exploring beyond the safe areas near the lake, on the assumption that danger-
ous trash heaps might be more productive. He found a high danger trash heap that
intuition told him would be excellent, but three sinister revenants could dimly be
seen in some dark shadows. He tried scavenging at the greatest possible distance
from them, but one of these non-player characters saw him, chased him, and “killed”
him. As in most MMOs, death is not permanent, and Ogburn returned to life at the
totem pole of the Pawnee tribe. He immediately saw that four pieces of his precious
Trukee armor had been lost, and later LaughingOak retrieved them from the
dangerous trash heap. MMOs inflict various penalties on defeated avatars, and this
was the most obvious penalty in Xsyon.
Not until about a week later did Ogburn realize his mistake. LaughingOak and
one of his senior associates were conversing in the tribal text chat about how low-
level players had been damaging the nearby landscape, because gathering resources
would exhaust them and leave the ground brown and barren. Ogburn commented
that scavenging always did this, then deduced from the conversation that he was
mistaken. Checking the frankly not entirely clear tutorial, he discovered that the
Resources window was not the only way to scavenge, and the other would give a
somewhat different range of materials. Using this other method, he quickly found
two of the old saw blades he needed to complete his tool collection.
Learning about the second method of scavenging was information diffusion of a
somewhat subtle kind, and it also illustrates an issue about progress in science and
technology that was hotly debated only after the real-life Ogburn’s death in 1959. In
1957, Thomas Kuhn had published The Copernican Revolution about the birth of
modern astronomy, then in 1962 generalized from his historical findings in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions [21]. A key concept was paradigm, a relatively
coherent set of theories and methods that a science could practice. Copernicus and
his colleagues had given astronomy a new paradigm, and once one has consolidated,
subsequent paradigm shifts can be difficult. Their chief problem could be described
in Ogburn’s theory as cultural lag. New data may disagree with the old paradigm,
but an established scientific community may be slow to adjust. Worst comes to
worst, a science may rigidify such than an old paradigm prevents new scientific
discoveries and thus closes off any new technological innovations that would be
based on them.
This model can be applied to the admittedly minor paradigm shift that Ogburn
experienced in Xsyon, only rather late in his personal history discovering that there
was a second way to scavenge resources. But cultural lag may not merely represent
mental rigidity, but also economic limitations. He did not plan to stay in Xsyon for-
ever, but to learn as much as he could quickly. Discovery has costs, and at any given
point in time, each individual and each civilization has only a limited amount of
time and other resources it can invest. As a practical matter, he decided to be content
with his collection of tools, which were low-level ones, and not invest the consider-
able scavenging time required to collect the materials needed to duplicate that col-
lection at higher levels of quality, which is what the Toolcraft skill line offered.
Instead, he decided to invest his remaining time increasing his Tailoring skill to the
maximum 100 level, and explore the factors that would be required to produce a
collection of one particular piece of armor, for which he selected that capital choice,
helmets.
Xsyon’s user interface offers a few statistics, notably how many times the player
has used a crafting ability to reach the given skill level from the initial start of 5.
There are many quirks in the system, but here a few of the numbers will be instruc-
tive. He had reached a Toolcraft maximum skill of 50.1, on the basis of 961 uses. A
few of these were not actually making a tool, but investing points he had gained
using any of the skills to increase this particular one. But certainly he had
Table 2.1 Ogburn’s collection of twenty helmets in Xsyon

Helmet name Skill Tools Ingredients
Tailoring
Novice’s Cloth 10 Shears, needle 1 fabric, 1 thread
Apprentice’s Cloth 20 Shears, needle 1 fabric, 1 thread
Craftsman’s Cloth 40 Shears, needle 1 fabric, 1 thread
Artisan’s Cloth 60 Shears, needle, chalk 2 fabric, 1 thread
Adept’s Cloth 70 Shears, needle, awl 1 fabric, 1 thread, 2 medium
plastic sheets
Mentor’s Cloth 80 Shears, needle, chalk, 2 fabric, 1 thread, 2 medium
tape measure plastic sheets
Master’s Cloth 90 Shears, needle, chalk, 1 fabric, 1 thread, 2 medium
tape measure, hammer metal sheets, 2 rivets
Grandmaster’s Cloth 99 Shears, needle, chalk, 2 fabric, 1 thread, 2 medium
tape measure, hammer metal sheets, 2 rivets
Truckee 25 Shears, needle 2 fabric, 1 thread
Bransford 25 Shears, needle 2 fabric, 1 thread, 6 rivets
Ringmaster Top Hat 25 Shears, awl 1 fabric, 1 thread, 1 small
metal sheet
Cimarron 30 Shears, awl 2 fabric, 2 string, 2 cloth scraps
Marcette 35 Shears, needle 2 fabric, 1 thread, 15 feathers
Parkhurst 55 Shears, needle 2 fabric, 1 thread, 1 decoration
Leathercrafting
Novice’s Leather 10 Craft knife, needle 1 leather, 1 thread
Apprentice’s Leather 20 Craft knife, needle 1 leather, 1 thread
Cedarrat 5 Craft knife, punch 2 fur, 2 rivets, 10 feathers
Oakley 10 Craft knife, needle 2 leather, 2 thread
Sawtak 15 Craft knife, needle 2 leather, 2 thread, 8 feathers
Basketry
Daogwa Gatherer’s 20 Lasher, weaver 3 grass thatch, 2 grass thread
manufactured a very large number of tools, for example, producing dozens of chis-
els that were immediately discarded, because this was the easiest way to increase
skill. Many of his tools broke during use and needed to be replaced. Tailoring was a
more efficient choice to reach 100 because the process of turning scraps of cloth
into rope went through several steps, each of which earned a little skill, and the user
interface could be set to do this in batches rather than requiring a mouse click for
each act of production. But, still, his total number of uses of Tailoring indicated how
difficult it was to reach 100 skill level, fully 12,120. Table 2.1 shows information
about the 20 helmets that constituted Ogburn’s final collection.
The table begins with examples of cloth helmets that could be crafted from levels
10–99. One might guess there were two others, at levels 30 and 50, but in fact these
eight were the entire set. At high levels, not only is increased skill required but also
additional tools and materials. These eight are followed by six miscellaneous hel-
mets, and Ogburn actually had schemes for nine more, which however would have
Fig. 2.2 The user interface of Xsyon while crafting a leather helmet
required very high quality materials which he believed could be obtained only in
dangerous areas far from the lake.
The Leathercraft skill line could also produce helmets, so he made the five avail-
able to him at a much lower level of skill, plus one helmet using the Basketry skill,
to complete his collection of twenty. Figure 2.2 shows the complexity of the user
interface, as Ogburn crafts a novice’s leather helm while standing in a huge trash
dump, using a piece of leather, some thread, a knife and a sewing needle. The con-
tents of the storage basket on his back are shown at the left; the action selection
icons are in the window at the upper right corner, and the leathercrafting window
just to the left of it.
When his work was done, I checked Ogburn’s skill levels in those areas where he
had actually done significant work. Foraging, which is the term for grass gathering
and has a second method as Scavenging does, had reached 25.3. Fishing was at
35.7. Resources, which chiefly means rock mining, had reached 45.3, and
Scavenging was at 61.2. Among the crafting skills he had practiced, Leathercraft
had reached 20.0, just high enough to permit making the Apprentice’s Leather Helm
and thus confirm that there was a sequence in this craft comparable to the one in
Tailoring. Basketry had reached 31.4, and Toolcraft had dropped from his maximum
50.1 to 49.0, because skills decline over time. All these numbers were far less than
the 100 achieved in Tailoring, but still respectable. Therefore, Ogburn judged it was
time to leave Lake Tahoe. Before he left, he donated his collections to the Pawnee
tribe, in modest thanks for all the technology diffusion it had so kindly given him,
and return to his job as chair of the Sociology Department at the University of
Chicago.
Conclusion 41
Conclusion
When Ogburn crafted a helmet in Xsyon, a software production system operated on

numbers already stored in memory registers, on both the user’s computer and the
game’s server. The same thing happened when he fished. That is to say that similar
programming accomplishes different results largely because of how the data are
displayed to the user. Thus, crafting is a good example with which to understand the
operation of gamelike virtual worlds, but the same can be said for a range of activi-
ties in the world outside computers. Technological determinism applies to virtual
worlds consisting of electrons, and to material worlds consisting of molecules, to at
least a significant degree. Arguably the largest machines built by humans are cities;
the decisive step in early human history was the invention of cities, and they will be
the topic of the following chapter [22]. Perhaps the invention of Internet in our own
lifetimes is the second equally important discontinuity, unless one is partial to ear-
lier technological saltations such as the Industrial Revolution or the Atomic Age.
Online role-playing games represent a discontinuity in artistic culture, that can
be compared with the emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre early
in the twentieth century. Writing in Handbook of Science and Technology
Convergence, Anita Street, Nora Savage, and Angela Page documented how science
fiction provides visions of possible developments that often inspire the accomplish-
ments of real scientists and engineers, even as the fiction relies upon real technical
developments for it own inspiration [23]. An example of how computational analy-
sis of popular culture can contribute to an understanding of this dynamic is my early
research on science fiction (SF), a project that employed a computational technique
called factor analysis with survey data on preferences for particular authors to map
the intellectual structure of this literary genre [24].
Four primary dimensions of stylistic and ideological variation emerged from the
research, the first three of which constitute competing views of the future. Hard-
science SF was written by authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov,
emphasizes new developments in technology and the physical sciences, and is opti-
mistic about the benefits of technical innovation. New-Wave SF writers like Harlan
Ellison and Brian Aldiss experimented with new literary styles, speculated about
future developments in the social sciences, and were pessimistic about humanity’s
capacity to create a better world. The fantasy cluster of writers, including Robert
E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, found more hope in magic than in science and pos-
tulated that human courage can defy supernaturally-ordained fate. The fourth
dimension in the factor analysis was time, appropriately enough, anchored by
respondents’ preferences for classic writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and
expressed in the SF lament that “the future ain’t what it used to be” [25]. The hard-
science style was dominant in the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, often
dated around 1938–1953 and centered on a subculture of SF magazines, while the
new-wave style was a reaction against it dating mainly from the turbulent 1960s.
But the classic works of writers like Verne and Wells really fit hard-science as well,
merely outdated by real-world technical advances.
With its heavy reliance upon algorithms that govern assembly of tools and con-
struction of buildings, Xsyon harmonizes most closely with the hard-science variety
of SF, even as it may draw some pessimism from new-wave. In that sense all of the
games described in this book have a basis in hard-science, even those that superfi-
cially are magical fantasies, because all depend upon algorithms. Well designed
computer games always possess some kind of literary backstory, an explanation of
the events that produced the given world. In the case of Xsyon, it was another high-
tech world war, something the real William F. Ogburn had greatly feared and that
was also the backstory for Fallout 3. A war that results in the disintegration of civi-
lization is the ultimate divergence, so all the action in Xsyon represented conver-
gence, notably the union of people to form tribes, and the assembly of materials to
form ever more complex technologies.
If a massive convergence actually takes place in the real world, uniting science,
technology, and society, the future will be far more than was formerly imagined.
The new computing and communication technologies have the potential to improve
the social sciences, integrating across previously separate disciplines and greatly
expanding our capacity to collect and analyze social trends [26]. But at the same
time, the scientific and engineering disciplines that are developing these technolo-
gies represent an external threat to traditional social science that may partially sup-
plant it over the coming decades. For example, cybernetics offers entirely new
theoretical paradigms for analyzing social phenomena, such as conceptualizing
organizations as information-processing systems or modeling social interaction by
artificial intelligence [27]. The collection and organization of data about “the infor-
mation society” may come to be dominated by information scientists or computer
scientists, rather than sociologists and anthropologists [28].
References
1. Roco, M. C., Bainbridge, W. S., Tonn, B., & Whitesides, G. (Eds.). (2013). Convergence of
knowledge, technology and society. Dordrecht: Springer.
2. White, L. A. (1959). The evolution of culture: The development of civilization to the fall of
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3. Gilfillan, S. C. (1963). The sociology of invention (p. 10). Cambridge: MIT Press.
4. Smith, A. (1812). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (p. 133).
London: Cadell and Davies.
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7. Durkheim, E. (1964 [1893]). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press; Parsons,
T. (1964). Evolutionary universals in society. American Sociological Review 29, 339–357.
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Huebsch.
9. Engels, F. Peasant war in Germany, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-
war-germany/. Accessed 11 Nov 2014.
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American Economic Review, 9(1 Supplement), 291–305.
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11. Ogburn, W. F. (1929). Inventions and discoveries. The American Journal of Sociology, 34(6),
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296–297.
15. Ogburn, W. F. (1946). Sociology and the atom. The American Journal of Sociology, 51(4),
267–275.
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19. www.xsyon.com/entry.php/90-Patch-Notes-05-02-2014. Accessed 24 May 2014.
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Kaufmann.
Chapter 3
Convergence in Online Urban Environments
Cities can be conceptualized as massive multi-component machines, vast aggrega-

tions of people, or socio-technical systems that result from the convergence of many
more specialized subsystems. A very large faction of online gameworlds contain
computer simulations of cities, not merely streets and buildings, but also govern-
ments, police, and criminal gangs. The variety of these virtual urban environments
is immense, and many instances are extremely complex. To gain some perspective,
we shall explore four rather different examples. City of Heroes depicted one, vast,
conflict-ridden city with surrounding suburbs, set in an alternate history in which
the Nazis invaded America during the Second World War, and the wounds continue
to bleed. The Matrix Online allowed players to experience the city from the 1999
movie, The Matrix, in which a huge metropolis was in reality a computer simulation
experiencing escalating chaos. Guild Wars 2 contains five culturally distinct cities,
whose ethnic groups had concluded peace after earlier conflict, connected with a
sixth city that experiences dynamic events, with most of the conflict exiled to the
countryside. Age of Conan offers a fantasy gameworld set in the human past, with
one huge city dominated by one ethnic group among four that players may belong
to, with a distinctive architectural style and culture, but also permitting players to
build their own cities. We shall consider these four very different gameworlds from
the perspective of a classical framework for understanding urban social dynamics
that itself was the convergence of different scientific movements.
A School of Thought
Beginning roughly a century ago, one real-world city dominated urban social sci-
ence: Chicago. Based in the sociology department of the University of Chicago,
many researchers considered by later generations as geniuses studied the growth,
diversity, and social problems of their city’s rapidly expanding urban population, in
ways especially relevant to our understanding of the fictional cities found in many

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_3
46 3 Convergence in Online Urban Environments
MMOs [1]. Many of the most influential studies dating from the 1920s and 1930s
sought to map, explain, and understand the consequences of the differentiation of
neighborhoods, for example why some were rife with crime and mental illness,
while others were not. A standard design feature of MMOs is the patchwork nature
of virtual geography, that divides a virtual world into deserts and forests, and a vir-
tual city into slums and business districts. Thus, concepts from the Chicago School
of Sociology may be applied to MMOs, without necessarily assuming that the
designers were in any way influenced by reading the particular urban sociologists
cited here.
The leaders, notably Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, wanted their sociology to
be a real science, so one of their strategies was to draw general ideas from other,
better established fields. One source for this intellectual convergence was biological
ecology, for example in the growth of a forest that spreads over a period of years
into an open space, gradually altering the populations of animal wildlife as well as
the distribution of other plant species. Applied to the growth of a city, this ecological
thinking explained the development of concentric zones. A small town is estab-
lished at the beginning, and morphs into a business district as housing is built around
it. With economic and demographic growth, the prosperous classes build new and
better residences in a ring around the existing dwellings that degenerate into some-
thing like a slum. This process continues until a map of neighborhoods of different
types resembles an archery target, with the central business district in the bull’s-eye,
and an upper middle class commuter zone in the outer ring. If a degree of stability
is achieved, then neighborhoods become moral regions, possessing distinctive
norms and patterns of behavior [2].
Stability itself becomes a variable, and some neighborhoods, usually the poorest,
were afflicted by social disorganization, rife with crime and vice, a pathological
form of divergence. Within each ring of a concentric zone, immigration patterns
may produce further specialization of neighborhoods, as illustrated by William
Foote Whyte’s study, Street Corner Society, which explored the Italian North End
of Boston [3]. In Chicago itself, the most influential study of a distinctive neighbor-
hood was The Hobo by Nels Anderson, examining “Hobohemia,” a district domi-
nated by migrant workers, many of whom had fallen into desperate unemployment
[4]. The studies by Whyte and Anderson were observational, comparable to cultural
anthropology, in Whyte’s case actually living among the Italian immigrants and
sharing aspects of their lives, but many other studies were statistical, thus foreshad-
owing modern computational databases, employing quantitative analysis of official
rates for crime and mental illness. Robert E. L. Faris and H. Warren Dunham found
that schizophrenia rates for Chicago neighborhoods correlated with social disorga-
nization, but depression rates did not [5]. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay found
that rates of juvenile delinquency correlated with social disorganization [6]. Frederic
Thrasher offered a theoretical explanation: When large-scale social order breaks
down, people naturally band together to create small-scale social order, for example
in gangs [7]. Thrasher’s theory illustrates one way in which divergence can be the
basis for convergence.
Areas of Paragon City 47
An almost universal design feature of MMOs is placement of the equivalent of

businesses in clusters represent by town and cities: vendor and quest giver NPCs,
banks, transportation hubs, and crafting facilities. But in the case of very large vir-
tual cities, neighborhood differentiation also provides a variety of adventures, by
type and experience level. A more general principle that also applies to wide open
spaces is predictable variation: players want variety but not total chaos. Thus many
virtual cities possess slum areas populated by small gangs of thugs, and in some
cases even industrial areas or neighborhoods defined by ethic cultures. This chapter
will explore dimensions of variation in virtual cities, and some of the analytical
concepts are derived from the work of the Chicago School.
Areas of Paragon City
As explained by its rather long Wikipedia article, City of Heroes existed from April
27, 2004 until November 30, 2012 [8]. On October 31, 2005, a separate but similar
game, City of Villains launched, and the two were combined on July 16, 2008. This
unusual history unintentionally mirrored the real history of New York City, because
Brooklyn and Manhattan originally were separate cities, merging only on January
1, 1898. In addition to the major merger, CoH had fully 23 updates that added areas
and changed content over its lifetime.
I began my exploration of City of Heroes on June 4, 2012, running one avatar for
about 25 hours, then a second one for 262 intense field research hours from
September 27 to November 30. While Paragon does not exactly reflect the concen-
tric zone theory developed for Chicago, there were distinct types of neighborhoods.
One way to understand Paragon is in terms of two major categories of city districts,
distinguished as relatively intact urban areas versus more disorganized areas where
the physical structure of the city had often been ruined by one or another disaster. A
dozen of the more intact areas are described in Table 3.1. With the exception of
Faultline and Peregrine Island, these zones are connected by a monorail transit sys-
tem, and the elite Midnighter Club had teleport connections to three zones served by
the monorail.
Atlas Park is the area where heroes began their careers, assigned relatively easy
missions for avatars having experience levels 1 through 6. A colossal heroic statue
of Atlas depicts him supporting the entire Earth on his shoulders, but the story
behind his heroism is not the classical one: “Atlas was one of the first heroes to
respond to the Nazi sneak attack against Paragon City on December 7th, 1941.
Almost single-handedly, Atlas kept the German attackers from gaining a foothold
past Independence Port. It cost him his life, but he held his ground until the Freedom
Phalanx arrived” [9]. Thus, Paragon City represents an alternate version of history,
exaggerating real events in order to mythologize the deeds of the heroes. Figure 3.1
shows the City Hall, with the statue of Atlas in the background on the right.
In their travels, avatars could collect two kinds of souvenirs, exploration badges
proving they had reached widely dispersed locations, and history badges that told
Table 3.1 Intact areas of Paragon in City of Heroes

Badges collected
Zone Levels Features Explore History
Atlas Park 1–6 Starting zone, governmental center with 8 7
City Hall, colossal heroic statue of Atlas
Kings Row 5–10 Factories and working class residential, 8 5
suffered in the Great Depression of the
1930s
Skyway City 10–19 Failed experiment in urban design based on 8 4
elevated highways, a transportation hub
Steel Canyon 10–19 Financial center of the city, jewelry stores, 8 4
main campus of Paragon University
Faultline 15–25 Largely ruined district, where Overbrook 8 4
Dam was destroyed by artificial earthquakes
Talos Island 20–27 Site of real estate boom in the 1980s for 8 5
high-tech and financial companies
Independence Port 20–30 Main point of commerce for the Eastern 8 4
USA, invasion point during Second World
War
Croatoa 25–34 Resort town surrounded by wilderness, 8 4
branch campus of Paragon University
Brickstown 30–38 Has maximum security Zigursky Prison, 8 2
called “The Ziggurat,” for super-powered
villains
Founders’ Falls 31–39 Venice-like elite district, branch campus of 8 2
Paragon University
Peregrine Island 40–50 Home of the Portal Corporation that 8 1
develops gateways to other realities
Midnighter Club 1–50 Private library, museum and connection hub 1 13
to the three university campuses.
fragments of Paragon’s story. The history badges were especially interesting, nota-
bly the Authority Badge, whose quest arc began at the foot of the colossal heroic
statue of Talos in the Talos Island district, where Talos and the Chimera monster
were believed by some to be still locked in combat under the sea. His contribution
had been equal to that of the Nazi-killer:
He called himself Talos, though the newspapers preferred the more descriptive “Terrific
Titan”. Standing well over 300 feet tall, Talos was the epitome of titanic heroism as he
battled to defend Paragon City. Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, he steadfastly rose to the
challenge of combating giant monstrosities. He became the city’s newest marvel and cham-
pion. Yet deep mystery surrounded his true identity. Even more astonishing was his ability
to vanish after battle. A profoundly enigmatic hero, journalists, historians and scholars had
only his cryptic utterances for clues to his origin: “For thousands of years, I have been a
protector of humanity.” The only certainty about Talos was his almost mystical connection
to a young boy named Michael McVey. Whenever the youngster was imperiled, Talos
would appear to save the day [10].
Fig. 3.1 The government center of City of Heroes in Atlas Park
To earn the Authority Badge, one had to visit four more locations in other parts
of the city, two in Independence Port and one each in more disorganized districts,
Echo: Dark Astoria and Terra Volta. At each location, a plaque told part of the story
of how the first organization of superheroes gained formal recognition:
Behind the left heal of the status of Talos: When the Freedom Phalanx became the legally
recognized Super Group in 1953, a grand celebration was held at this site. Among the
attendees was Vambrace, who said, “I am humbled by the faith you have placed in myself
and the Freedom Phalanx. Again and again, the people of this city remind me why it is a
place worth fighting for.”
Valor Bridge in Independence Port: When the Freedom Phalanx became the first legally
recognized Super Group in 1953, Statesman held a conference at Valor Bridge. He said,
“The valiant hero Atlas died defending the city on this very bridge. I do not know how to
thank you for your faith in the Freedom Phalanx, except to say that I, too, am ready to die
in your defense.”
Beside the water in Independence Port: In 1953, the Freedom Phalanx prevented a ship
bearing copious amounts of explosives from docking at this harbor. When the captain was
interrogated, it became clear that he was on a mission of sabotage. Public sentiment for the
Freedom Phalanx swelled, and Mayor Kyle Legretsky proposed that the Citizens Crime
Fighting Act be expanded. He proposed that groups such as the Freedom Phalanx be offi-
cially sanctioned fighting forces.
Via time travel to a long lost point in Dark Astoria: When the Freedom Phalanx became
an officially recognized Super Group in 1953, the hero Vambrace made a pledge. “Dark
Astoria will be restored to its natural state,” he said. “The Freedom Phalanx is committed to
saving every part of Paragon City, even those that may seem lost.”
Near the ruined nuclear reactor in Terra Volta: In 1953, citizens poured into the streets
in support of the Freedom Phalanx becoming a legally recognized Super Group. The work-
ers of Terra Volta were particularly adamant in their support, having witnessed many vil-
lainous activities over the past few decades. Each night, when the factory whistles blew, a
shout would go up across the zone, echoing in the evening air: “Freedom Phalanx! Freedom
Phalanx!”
Social scientists and literature professors tend to ignore gameworlds, and yet
they have become a major repository of folk wisdom and cultural debate, about
issues that deserve much more attention that scholars generally accord them. Was
Talos an actual demigod from ancient Greece? Or was he the figment of a modern
boy’s imagination? To what extent do influential people - call them heroes - need
formal authority from government agencies, versus popular support, versus simply
their own determination to do what must be done? More generally, must heroes
work in teams versus solo? Framing these questions in a different way, does immor-
tality through incorporation in the community require authentication by the govern-
ment, symbolized by erection of a statue, or can heroes operate in full independence
from political power structures?
City government was nonexistent in most of the zones described in Table 3.2.
Ouroboros, the two echo zones, and Cimerora did not even exist in the present, but
stood outside of time. For security reasons, hazard zones had been isolated from
Paragon, and could be entered only by heroes who have reached a sufficient security
level. Trial zones were similar and contained very dangerous enemies. Co-op zones
could be entered by either heroes or villains, without necessarily battling each other.
It was impossible to get one of the exploration badges in the Rikti War Zone, because
it was inside the Rikti spaceship and could be collected only after a successful group
raid, but during the last week of the game’s existence, such raids did not happen.
However, my avatar was able to obtain all the other badges for the districts listed in
both tables, and a zero in the table indicates that no history badge existed in the area.
Throughout Paragon City, gangs roam the streets, logically the result of social
disorganization as explained by the Chicago School. Yet typically the disorganiza-
tion was caused by conflict between well-organized groups, thus reflecting a com-
peting theory that the cause of chaos was lack of society-wide agreement on
principles of governance, caused by the violent equivalent of immigration. For
example, the Steel Canyon zone, like Wall Street, was the primary financial district,
so it should have been the center of organization. Yet two rival Fascist groups com-
peted throughout this district, standing on street corners to harangue the crowd and
attack any passing heroes, but also involved in complex secret struggles against
each other. The Fifth Column, a term coined in 1936 by a right-wing leader in the
Spanish civil war, was supposedly established in that year by three Fascists,
Requiem, Vandal and Nosferatu, and gave Nazi-style names to its squadrons: Nacht,
Nebel, Raserei and Ubermenschen. The Council arose immediately after the Second
World War and like the Nationalists in Spain who had Nazi allies, benefitted from
having extraterrestrial allies, assisting them in their attempt to conquer Paragon.
The 2012 destruction of Paragon City was not accomplished by its street gangs,
or Fascists, or the Rikti, but by NCSoft, the company that had purchased this MMO
years before and found it no longer profitable to continue. If it were possible to
restore the very best MMOs, perhaps in some kind of publically accessible
government-operated digital library, there is no doubt that City of Heroes would be
among them. Yet restoring it to life would not end the chaos, because conflict is one
of the most attractive features of popular MMOs. Perhaps people prefer fighting
Table 3.2 Socially disorganized areas of Paragon in City of Heroes

Badges collected
Zone Levels Features Explore History
Echo: Galaxy 1–6 City: Residential and business district as it 8 5
City was before meteor strikes destroyed it
Sewer Network 3–10 Trial: Elaborate maze of tunnels, inhabited 8 0
by dangerous gangs from the city, sewage
The Hollows 5–15 Hazard: A wealthy residential district, 8 4
destroyed when explosions collapsed hidden
caverns
Perez Park 7–14 Hazard: With forest and a lake, now a hotbed 8 5
of chaos, infested by deviant groups
Boomtown 10–19 Hazard: Originally called Baumton, now 8 5
wrecked, the site of the final battle in the
Rikti war
Ouroboros 14–50 A gold-colored base, floating in the air, with 1 0
access to locations as they were in the past
Striga Island 20–29 Hazard: Long operated by smugglers and 8 4
The 5th Column and The Council rival
fascist groups
Terra Volta 20–29 Trial: Rusting industrial district dominated 8 4
by a decrepit nuclear power reactor
First Ward 20–30 Co-op: Center of a utopian city, skyscrapers 8 0
and residential, ruined by high-tech
ecoterrorist attack
Echo: Dark 21–29 Hazard: Commercial center with cemetery in 8 4
Astoria which a god was buried, in the past
Night Ward 30–39 Co-op: Occult variant of First Ward, invaded 8 0
by spirits of the dead from Netherworld
Crey’s Folly 31–39 Hazard: Once a heavily polluted industrial 8 2
area, now completely ruined by the Rikti war
Eden 33–39 Trial: Formerly the peaceful Woodvale 8 2
suburb, turned into a wilderness by
ecoterrorists
Cimerora 35–50 Co-op trial: Back in time, a seaside Roman 1 0
town under siege by a competing faction
Rikti War Zone 35–50 Co-op trial: Formerly called White Plains, 13 1
site where Rikti spaceship crashed
Abandoned 36–40 Trial: Deeper and more dangerous than the 8 1
Sewer ordinary city sewer system
Shadow Shard 40–47 Hazard: Alien universe of rocks floating in 24 0
air: Firebase Zulu, Cascade Archipelago, The
Chantry
each other in the physically safe environments of computer games, when their
aggressive instincts were designed for combat in the real world they inhabit.
An Urban Matrix
The virtual universe is an infinite hall of mirrors. If we look forward, we see what is
behind us. If we look back, we see only vague possibilities. At best, reality is a
matrix of relationships, like those programmed into computer code, suggesting the
correlations between ephemeral variables. Consider The City, an amalgam of
Sydney and Chicago, frozen in the year 1999, even two centuries later. This is the
setting of three popular movies, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003),
and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), plus a virtual gameworld, The Matrix Online
(MxO) that existed from March 22, 2005 until July 31, 2009, when it was erased
[11].
Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s very French, post-modern, post-existentialist
book, Simulacra and Simulation [12], The Matrix postulated that a computer hacker
named Neo lived in an illusion, a computer simulation that fooled most residents
into believing it was real. He was recruited to a rebel group called Zion, by selecting
a redpill rather than a bluepill, thereby becoming aware that reality was a lie and
gaining the label Redpill. A Zion leader believed that Neo was the Chosen One to
lead them to freedom, through a surrealistic struggle against the Machines that
imprisoned humanity in this database that pretended to be a city. The gameworld
duplicated this city, including some locales shown in the films, simulating many
roads and buildings in fully 52 distinct neighborhoods. Table 3.3 lists the neighbor-
hoods in the first two of four sections of the city experienced by any player’s avatar,
Richland and Westview, along with some standard information, based on my thor-
ough exploration of the entire city, a printed guidebook, and various online sources.
The entire city suffers from social disorganization, most extreme in these poor
neighborhoods where, as Frederick Thrasher would have expected, gangs have
formed amidst the chaos. The mission contacts are leading non-player characters
who give the player missions to perform, what are called quest-givers. As in real
cities, there are often local landmarks, a few of which are large, abstract works of
art called monuments. They provide some symbolic meaning for a neighborhood
that has one, but they may be computer-generated propaganda designed to deceive
human beings.
The original movie released in the year 1999, depicting a city that also seemed to
be in 1999, but actually was closer to 2199 but ambiguous as to real date, since there
was nothing real about it. Not only was there a 200-year discrepancy in the date
assigned to “today,” but repeatedly in the past the simulation had crashed and
rebooted in a precarious cycle where a programming bug could cause reality to rip
asunder. The Westview slum was especially degenerate, as the game guide explained,
reflecting “the slow decay in the code comprising the area… and it is unlikely that
An Urban Matrix 53
Table 3.3 The poorest neighborhoods of the city in The Matrix Online
Neighborhoods Gangs Mission contacts Landmarks
Richland (the slums)
Achan Bells Yttri None
Apollyon Five points Raini Majesty Monument
Camon Slashers Silver Park
Dannah Silver Bullets Digger Park
Eshean Death Merchants Ruth Park
Kedemoth Furies Argon Park
Lemone Silver Bullets None None
Magog Blackwoods Thalia Mjolnir Monument
Mannsdale Eighty Eights Anti-M None
Mara Blackwoods Sister Margaret Hypercube, Congregational
Church
Midian Park Bricks Beryl Azimuth Twin Monument
Moriah Crossbones Bag Lady, Molly B Azimuth Monument
Tabor Park Demon Army Chessman Park
Uriah Choppers Mercury Wharf
Zia Furies None None
Westview (Barrens)
Bathary Row Bathary Boys Cerulean Wharf
Gracy Heights Crushers Mockingbird None
Guinness Lake King’s Men Indigo Two parks
Lucero Point Sparks Mandarin Park
Manssen Park Disciples Greene Church of the Disciples
Rogers Way Amber Group Amber Ascension Monument
Sobra Shores Legion Violet First Unified Church
Southard Guillotines Rose None
Stamos Crow Bars Grisaille Hypersphere Monument, park
anyone will be successful in stemming the tide of entropy anytime soon” [13]. Thus,
computational chaos functioned similarly to social disorganization.
One of Westview’s neighborhoods illustrates the fabricated nature of history, as
explained in an official Matrix online database: “Rogers Way is supposedly named
for a soldier from the neighborhood who died heroically in combat in World War
One. Naturally this is a lie, but beneath it is a grain of truth. The real Rogers was a
Zion operative who died holding the line against the Machines in this neighborhood,
granting the previous Chosen One the time he needed to reach the core of the system
in that iteration’s final hour” [14].
Near the center of Rogers Way is a dismal park, lacking decent grass and with
leafless trees, dominated by a fascinating but supremely ugly structure called the
Ascension Monument. Figure 3.2 shows my avatar, standing on a rooftop overlook-
ing the monument. The in-game atlas described it thus: “Rising up like stairs to the
sky, the monument’s apex features a door, which is the subject of many a tall tale.
Fig. 3.2 The Ascension Monument in The Matrix Online
Every kid in the neighborhood has a friend who has a friend who saw a person
emerge from the door, bathed in white light from beyond. Others say they have
opened the normally unbudgeable door, to be confronted by the strangest things, but
nobody really believes these sorts of local legends.” The bottom of the monument is
defaced by posters and graffiti, yet another sign of how people use the past for their
own purposes, and thus perhaps misuse it.
An excellent amateur 2007 essay about the culture and mechanics of Matrix
Online by someone using the moniker Bedman describes Rogers Way thus: “The
site of a collapsed highway, this neighborhood sits in the middle of Westview. It also
has the dubious distinction of being the only neighborhood with a highway built
over the ruins of a demolished building” [15]. Given that the highways in MegaCity
are composed of information, the idea of a collapsed highway suggests a fracture of
knowledge, or fragmentation of a database. A highway built over a ruin is the
description of every city in the Old World, constructed on the physical as well as
cultural remains of a fallen civilization. In The Matrix Online, the elevated high-
ways were a relatively safe way to travel through some otherwise dangerous neigh-
borhood, and I can recall with pain the difficulty of leaping from one section of the
collapsed road in Rogers Way, trying often without success to avoid the hostile gang
members who crowded around it.
An Urban Matrix 55
Table 3.4 The most prosperous neighborhoods of the city in The Matrix Online
Neighborhoods Gangs Mission contacts Landmarks
International district
Akasaka Brothers of Destiny Operetta Taishan Sculpture
Furihata Silver Dragons Grace Taibai Sculpture
Ikebukuro Phoenix Sunshine Kobayashi Boardwalk
Jurong Destitutes Lotus None
Kaede Sisters of Fate Rickshaw Wutai Sculpture
Kowloon Chang Wings Mr. Po Park
Murasaki Black Tigers Synn Dawei Sculpture
Sai Kung Gold Blood The Seamstress None
Shinjuku Jade Moons Dame White Sanbai Sculpture
Shirakaba Great Wall Security Yuusake Akayama None
Ueno Shurikens Mr. Bishop None
Downtown
Baldwin Heights Assassins The Coroner Network Media
Center Park Chisels The Sculptress Ushape Sculpture, park
Chelsea Bookwyrm Hypatia None
Creston Heights Neighbourhood Watchers The Landlord Ouroboros
Edgewater Wharf Rats The Bartender Mercer Canal
Hampton Green Suits Nicky G Pendhurst-Amaranth
Historic District Pit Vipers Madame T City Courthouse, park
Industrial Square Corporate Security The Network None
Stratford Campus Shades Mr. Black None
Lamar Dog Pound Sammy “Lilac” None
Wien
Maribeau Daggers Tick Tock None
Morrell Warriors The Jeweler Jukubaitus
Park East White Security The Newsie Kalt Corporation
Pillsen Shades The Chef None
South Vauxton Runners Weaver None
Union Hall Hellions The Auditor Interlock Sculpture
Vauxton Sleeper Pepper Wright Research
The two cleaner, more prosperous sections of the city, the International District
and the Downtown business and elite housing area listed in Table 3.4, face disorga-
nization as well, but are under greater control by the machines. Two of the elite
mission contacts, Dame White and Mr. Black, are a married couple, and the tensions
within their family constitute one of the social ruptures reverberating throughout the
city. All the mission contacts in Westview are their children, and a guidebook for
The Matrix Online explains: “The two parents each covet the other’s power, but
never admit it. They work against each other covertly through their children. The
siblings compete for the attention and favor of both parents, as well as playing their
parents off against one another” [16]. This family, however, is not human, because
each member is an artificial intelligence that has achieved a degree of autonomy

within the larger program that is this virtual city. Indeed, most of the quest-givers
and enemies the player’s avatar interact with are Exiles, the term used for subunits
of the larger program that have become somewhat disconnected from the others.
The disconnection is complete now, and The City is no longer accessible through
Internet. Yet one of my avatars in the non-game virtual world Second Life found
fragments of it 15 months after the climactic day when The Matrix Online went
offline. By taking a redpill, he joined a group called The Matrix Online in SL, and
became a Redpill like Neo before him. He teleported to the Sub Lupina district of
Babylon City, arriving inside a welcome building. A computer interface called the
Simulacron gave him a message, saying, “Redpill, this is Babylon, belonging to the
Light Universe. Something here may feel familiar, and this is not for chance.
Sometimes things run parallel to another without knowing from each other. This
place is different, but you may feel home very quickly as you are open minded, as
Redpill normally should be. As long you wander through these streets, remember,
that every ending can mean a new beginning.”
Passing vending machines selling weapons and voluptuous female disguises, he
encountered a map of Babylon City, with an area named Wachowski Square, named
after the brothers who created The Matrix, and another called Westview. Stepping
onto the street, he immediately discovered a green-lit public telephone booth, look-
ing like the hardlines in The Matrix Online used for teleporting. He also saw a sign
giving instructions beginning, “The Simulacron: wichtigste Ueberlebensregeln: 1.
Kopf unten halten…” (German for: “most important survival rules: 1. Keep the head
down.) He was in an immense, detailed combat sim built by enthusiasts to represent
a part of a city very much like that in The Matrix Online, where players could stage
battles.
Checking his map system he discovered he was in the German section of Second
Life, not far west of the city of Munich, and seeing areas named Goethe, Schiller,
Beethoven, and Bach. He walked past street signs giving the names of neighbor-
hoods in Westview, including Bathary Row and Rogers Way. In the Plaza, he found
a tall, red monument composed of interlocked squares, identical to the Hypercube
at Mara Central in The Matrix Online. Figure 3.3 depicts this meta-hypercube in its
apparently normal urban setting.
At Wachowski Square, Interviewer Wilber found a duplicate of the Hypersphere
Monument from the Stamos neighborhood of Westview, a sphere framed inside the
edges of a cube. Inside one of the offices, he discovered tiny models of these two
monuments, sitting on tables rather than the ground. Just outside, a wall poster
advertised a machinima video on YouTube created in Babylon City by Laurina
Hawks, titled in German “Eine Inkongruenz der Wirklichkeit” [17]. Pasting this into
Google Translate gives this English: “A mismatch of reality,” which pasted back in
gives: “Ein Ungleichgewicht der Wirklichkeit,” which pasted back in gives: “An
imbalance of reality.” But the machinima’s formal English title is “An Incongruent
Truth.”
The fundamental post-modern theory of writers like Jean Baudrillard reflects the
Marxist concept of false consciousness [18]. It also draws upon pessimistic
A Network of Cities 57
Fig. 3.3 The Hypercube Monument in the Second Life imitation of The Matrix Online
Existentialism, which can trace its intellectual lineage back to Georg Büchner and
Friedrich Nietzsche [19]. Sigmund Freud asserted that people are unaware of their
own subconscious desires, and that civilization imposes painful inhibitions on the
natural impulses of human beings [20]. Thus, The Matrix seems actually to support
the belief that society must be based upon a single, unquestioned system of shared
belief, something the Chicago School of Sociology did not fully accept. An ideol-
ogy is the operating system for a culture, supporting all the specialized software -
such as individual human personalities - that runs within it. When this ideology
breaks down, disorganization proliferates, potentially spiraling all the way down
into total disorder and death.
A Network of Cities
City of Heroes and The Matrix Online primarily consisted of one metropolis each.
More common in popular MMOs, several roughly equal cities exist, typically popu-
lated primarily by one ethnic group or political faction each, and often in competi-
tion with each other. We shall consider that pattern closely in the concluding chapter,
about World of Warcraft. Guild Wars 2 (GW2) has aspects of both patterns, because
its roughly equal cities are inhabited by different races yet are allied with each other
and connected through a transportation system. For the research reported here, I ran
two avatars in GW2, June 7 through August 10, 2013. One reached the top 80 expe-
rience level and explored the entire virtual environment, and the other limited him-
self to exploration of the cities and reached level 34. Chapter 5 of this book will
report a second phase of the research, which ended with five avatars reaching level
80, one for each of the five playable races.
Guild Wars 2 possessed six main cities, five of which were the home areas for the
five races. As was true for City of Heroes, there are multiple ways of marking explo-
ration progress. Waypoints are teleportation hubs like the hardlines in The Matrix
Online. Upon hiking to each of the 64 waypoints in these cities, an avatar would
earn some experience points plus the right to teleport back to that location by pay-
ment of a small fee. They also contained 123 points of interest, from which avatars
earned only experience, and some were hard to find. The cities held 38 vistas, which
were flags on high points from which there was an excellent view of the land below,
some requiring discovery of hidden routes or jumping skills. Indeed, despite the fact
the route was obvious, I could never complete one at the north end of the Norn home
city. Reaching it required jumping along a series of ice ledges, and on each of doz-
ens of attempts my avatar fell. This was the only one of the urban waypoints, points
of interest, and vistas he failed to achieve.
The five races are more like five very different humanoid species, each with its
own history and culture: Human, Norn, Sylvari, Charr and Asura. Given that Tyria,
the world they share, is rich in magic, the differences between culture, race, and
species are not rigid barriers. For example, the Sylvari seem to be magical human-
flower hybrids. As in a number of other high quality MMOs, notably World of
Warcraft, each race begins with a different personal story and starter location, not
far from the associated city. Some races warred against others in the past, but at
present they are mostly at peace.
Divinity’s Reach, home to the Humans, looks for all the world like a Renaissance
European city in architectural style, and the costumes of its residents. It is in the
form of a giant wheel with a royal upper city, and “six high roads, each dedicated to
a god, divide the lower city into districts,” as the in-game description explains.
These gods are: Balthazar (Fire and War), Dwayna (Life and Air), Grenth (Death
and Ice), Lyssa (Beauty and Illusions), Melandru, (Nature and Earth) and Kormir
(Truth and Knowledge). But long ago, the gods abandoned humanity, and Humans
lost most of the territory they had been given by those deities. The official wiki says,
“Humans have lost their homeland, their security, and their former glory. Even their
gods have withdrawn. And yet, the human spirit remains unshaken” [21]. They had
ruled the Ascalon nation from a city named Rin, until the Charr seized most of their
territory.
The main Charr city, the Black Citadel, consists of harsh industrial facilities,
almost steampunk in style, “dominated by the huge metal-shod sphere at its center.”
As their wiki page explains, “The charr are a race of large, savage, feline creatures
that occupy much of eastern Tyria. They have renounced all gods as false and instead
view all of life, from magic to combat, with a hard, cynical eye. Their culture has
developed into a military state where they are raised as warriors from birth” [22].
A Network of Cities 59
Their military government is organized in four divisions, called High Legions: Ash,
Blood, Flame and Iron. Now at peace with the other races, their natural ferocity is
restrained by their technological competence.
Hoelbrak, home of the Norn race, was built in Nordic icebound Dark Ages style
with lodges for four totemic animals: Raven, Wolf, Bear and Snow Leopard. A
printed guide describes Norns as tolerant and a bit laid-back, yet says: “Norn are
built in proportions similar to humans, but they stand larger and stronger. These
9-foot-tall people can withstand great hardship and cold temperatures. As a culture,
the Norn prize skill, personal achievement, and prowess in hunting and battle suc-
cess is the greatest measure of worth” [23].
The Grove is a multi-level garden around the Mother Tree, who “gives love and
wise guidance to her sprouts,” the Sylvari, according to its in-game description. I
have described this nature-oriented culture at some length in a chapter of another
book, but a key feature is that one’s avatar is not necessarily just one blade of grass
in a uniform lawn [24]. Indeed, many of the Sylvari strive to achieve individual
identity, and thus are ambivalent about being dominated, even by Nature. This is an
interesting alternative to a widespread feeling that environmentalists in our own
world are somehow collectivists, given that the political left favors preservation of
nature as well as greater social equality. Not infrequently, gameworlds combine
ideas into a fictional culture that may be very compatible, despite not being con-
nected in today’s culture.
Rata Sum, home to the Asura, is an immense, levitating cube based on magical
technologies. In several ways, the Asura are the opposite of the Charr. Both are very
different from Humans and Norn, and the two pairs of races might be conceptual-
ized as two orthogonal dimensions of variation. While the Charr look fierce, the
Asura look cute. While the Charr prize physical technologies, the Asura practice
magic. Superficially, the Asura look like cartoon mice or rabbits, and indeed their
ancestors lived under the ground. They are somewhat flippant when interacting with
other races, considering themselves to be vastly more intelligent.
The sixth city, Lion’s Arch, does not belong to one race, but to them all. Originally
a hangout for pirates, it became a hub for trade between the other races, and has easy
transportation connections with each of the other five. It performs a special function
in GW2 as the location for short-duration special activities, whether holiday festi-
vals or major conflict-oriented temporary quest arcs [25].
GW2’s cities and races illustrate a quality of many of the intellectually best
MMOs, namely their design around an array of conceptual structures. Each of the
races has a philosophy or personality. They can be compared with each other in
terms of a structure of concepts. Charr is to Asura as fierce is to cute. Human is to
Norn as hot is to cold. Each city has its own conceptual structure, and both Divinity’s
Reach and Hoelbrak are laid out physically in terms of the two culture’s religious
concepts. The five racial cities connect as in a pentagram with Lion’s Arch at the
center. Structural theories abound in cultural anthropology (Structural Anthropology),
sociology (Structural Functionalism), and social psychology (Personality
Dimensions) [26]. While we could analyze cultural structures in gameworlds in
terms of classic theories from twentieth-century social science, we might better
consider which of them could be the basis of new structural theories to guide con-
vergence in the twenty-first century.
A Pseudo-Rome
Among the most complex cities within a geographically diverse gameworld is

Tarantia in Age of Conan (AoC), a game that also gives player guilds the opportu-
nity to construct their own cities. AoC is based on the Conan mythos from movies,
comic books, and numerous works of literature. Originated by Robert E. Howard in
the 1930s, after Howard’s suicide a number of other authors continued this popular
series [27]. Much of the credit for Conan’s immortality goes to historian and science
fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp who edited and completed some of Howard’s
manuscripts, and AoC mentions him as well as two other continuation authors, Lin
Carter and John Maddox Roberts. Conan is a Cimmerian barbarian, living in a lost
period of history between the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of Classical Civilization,
who begins Howard’s novel Hour of the Dragon after he has seized the throne of the
more civilized Aquilonia, which has its capital at Tarantia. It is worth noting that
Aquilonia might mean the land of the eagle, symbol of Ancient Rome’s glory, and
Tarantia’s architecture is very Roman. At one point in a subsequent war against the
Nemedians, the populace imagines that Conan has been killed and Valerius, an heir
of the king Conan slaughtered, seeks the throne, producing this chaotic scene:
He stared at the familiar towers and streets of Tarantia, where a mob seethed and screamed,
and at the same time he was somehow able to see the banners of Nemedia moving inexora-
bly westward through the smoke and flame of a pillaged land. In the great square of Tarantia
the frantic throng milled and yammered, screaming that the king was dead, that the barons
were girding themselves to divide the land between them, and that the rule of a king, even
of Valerius, was better than anarchy [28].
The version of Tarantia in AoC fits into this story line, and does reflect themes
from several of the Conan stories. The MMO’s wiki describes it thus:
Called the “most princely city of the world’s West” by chroniclers far and wide, Tarantia is
a sprawling city of wonders and the capital of Aquilonia. Its skyline is dotted with towers
of blue and gold, and many of its buildings are clean and dazzling to behold. Created in
layers, like rumpled cloth against the cliffs of the Khorotas River, Tarantia has several dis-
tinctive areas separated by walls and tiers both physical and societal [29].
Old Tarantia, south of the river, is a peaceful hub of commerce and travel, with
connections to the three main geographic regions: Aquilonia, Cimmeria, and Stygia.
Beneath its shining streets, the sewer system is infested by beasts and human ene-
mies. The northern sections of Tarantia, chiefly the Noble District, are accessible
across a bridge. There can be found complex battlegrounds of several kinds. On the
east, Aquilonian troops are holed up in Black Dragon Barracks, under attack from
Nemedians, some of whom have also infiltrated the center of the district. Indeed, to
reach the place where Conan himself broods, one must go through a corpse-strewn
area held by his enemies.
A Pseudo-Rome 61
The northwest corner of the Noble District consists of a tangle of safe streets
connecting five aristocratic villas, each of which is filled with enemies. The level of
the enemies adjusts to match that of the player’s avatar, and players can return daily
to earn experience and valuable loot, repeating minor missions after completing the
original one. For example, Lady Verde is being held captive by vandals in her villa,
so the first mission is to rescue her. Subsequent missions retrieve her property from
the bodies of vandals after killing them. The most complex story takes place in the
Villa of Paetus, first two infiltrations to get evidence he is conspiring with the
Nemedians to assassinate Conan, then entering to kill him and perhaps also a
Nemedian ambassador.
Tarantia Commons, on the north shore of the river on the west side, is a poor
district, including a shanty town, a ghoul-infested cemetery, and a leper colony,
designed for avatars at the high end of the experience scale, about 75–80. Just south
of the Noble District, it provides a social class contrast, and has descended into
extreme social disorganization. As Thrasher would have predicted, one result was
the emergence of gangs. Two, the Crows that occupy rooftops and the Rats that
occupy the docks, are factions that encourage the player to affiliate with one and
attack the other. Visiting the lepers can infect the avatar, who must bring moss and
seaweed to a priest of the Aquilonian god, Mitra, in order to be cured.
Avatars and many non-player characters in Age of Conan belong to four so-
called “races.” Originally there were three, each with a different urban center.
Aquilonians were based on Graeco-Roman civilization, with Tarantia as their capi-
tal. Stygians were reminiscent of popular stereotypes of ancient Egyptians and
Babylonians, using the small city named Khemi as their transportation and trading
hub. Cimmerians, like Conan himself, expressed Celtic and Norse traditions, using
Conarch Village as their hub. Note that these three peoples might not be described
as belonging to different “races” in our real world, but to different ethnic groups or
nations.
Age of Conan launched in 2008, and in 2010 a fourth race, named Khitan after
an actual ancient nomadic Asian people, was added. Their culture seemed to be an
amalgam of Chinese and Korean styles, and their addition may have been a strategy
to attract players in those nations to this MMO. Yet the controversial term race,
might apply in this case. The AoC wiki describes them thus: “The Khitan people…
have merged into a homogeneous race: slender, of medium height, with parchment-
yellow skin, slanted eyes, sharp features, high foreheads, and oval faces. Some
regional variation exists (Southerners, for example, tend to be shorter and thicker
about the waist), but the distinctions are almost invisible to Westerners” [30].
Other chapters of this book, especially the concluding one about World of
Warcraft, will consider the common practice of MMOs to offer avatars who belong
to different races, but the topic deserves at least brief consideration here. As in the
case of Guild Wars 2, MMOs that have multiple cities often assign them to different
ethnic groups of avatars. Robert E. Howard’s fiction often exploited tensions and lack
of mutual understanding between real or imaginary ethnic groups, and in the real
ancient world conflict between tribes was common. Age of Conan does not require
avatars belonging to one race to fight against those belonging to another, but the story
line concerns a world in which inter-ethnic war is constantly threatened. The Conan
stories, and this MMO, exploit exoticism, the aesthetic enjoyment of alien cultures,
quite apart from the potential of cultural differences to justify combat.
The most obvious aesthetic value of ethnicity for AoC can be seen by a tourist who
visits both Tarantia and Khemi. The architecture of Tarantia is entirely classical, a
walled city in light-gray stone, with columns on several buildings, and inhabitants
dressed like ancient Romans. Khemi, apart from being much smaller, is sandy in
color. Figure 3.4 shows the temple of the snake god, Set, in this pseudo-Egyptian
zone. Exotic religion is an extremely common feature of MMOs, and thus temples are
also common, and ethnic diversity harmonizes conceptually with religious diversity.
In many multi-city MMOs, player avatars begin life near their own ethnic groups’
urban hub, but that was not the case for Age of Conan. Rather, most avatars are
washed up on a shore near the city of Tortage, and must go through about the first
20 levels of experience before being released into the wider environment. Some
avatars are created at an advanced experience level under special circumstances by
experienced players, and clever players who begin an avatar in the conventional
manner can find a quicker escape from Tortage about level 17. Aficionados of
Howard’s fiction speculate that Tortage is a fictionalized version of Tortuga in the
Caribbean. The AoC wiki describes it thus:
The City of Tortage, central hub of its namesake island, stands tall above the jungles and
beaches which surround it. Controlled by the Red Hand under the vicious rule of Strom, the
city is unwelcoming to those unwilling to submit. A melting pot of lords, merchants, pirates,
criminals and slaves alike, the City of Tortage hums with political intrigue surrounding a
potential upsurgence by a separatist group. Should it overwhelm the weary visitor, the
Thirsty Dog Inn should be the first point of call for both ale and tale [31].
Fig. 3.4 A priest and a mounted necromancer at the Temple of Set in Khemi, Age of Conan
A Pseudo-Rome 63
Across the pseudo-ancient world called Hyboria, many smaller towns and vil-
lages exist, but for members of a successful player guild their own city is the most
important. Player cities are separate instances, accessible by members but unseen
by outsiders, and the example I explored was in the rural Poitain region of Aquilonia,
with a direct return link to Tarantia, but requiring a hike to reach. It belonged to a
frankly rather static guild named the Red Pirates, that had invested great effort
building the city before falling inactive. In the summer of 2014 it claimed 357 mem-
bers, but often none were online during the hours I explored, and seldom more than
one. The guild chat was totally inactive, and my occasional attempt to communicate
with other members, after my initial interaction with an officer who invited me to
join, were failures. Yet guild membership was valuable even in the absence of social
interaction, because of the guild city.
The city of the Red Pirates was physically rather large, having a tall outer wall,
and an inner wall protecting a keep, the standard term for the fortified core of a large
castle in Medieval Europe. Between the keep and the outer wall, members of the Red
Pirates had constructed four kinds of workshop: armorsmith, weaponsmith, alche-
mist, and architect. There was also a thieves guild and a trade post, and all these
facilities had been developed to the second of three levels. In the case of the work-
shops, their level set the maximum skill level a member could achieve in the related
profession, which was higher than if the avatar did not belong to a guild. Figure 3.5
shows my highest level of several AoC avatars, a level 80 necromancer, surrounded
by the corpses of her undead secondary-avatar minions whom she has just returned
to their well-deserved deaths. She stands on one of the towers of the outer wall of the
Red Pirates city, and the wall in the background belongs to the keep.
Fig. 3.5 The private city of the Red Pirates guild in Age of Conan
MMOs differ greatly in what private areas, if any, they offer players. The city of
the Red Pirates was identified on its guild management window as Instance 912, and
instance is the standard MMO term for areas or sections of the database that exist in
multiple versions. In the following chapter, we will see that players of EverQuest
can have personal houses, in instances called neighborhoods, and that guilds and
players in A Tale in the Desert also own structures but out in the open world such
that strangers can visit them. The fact that the city of the Red Pirates in AoC was an
instance meant that players who were not members could not visit or even see it.
The four races in Age of Conan battle each other in special zones, but are at peace
throughout much of their world, except in the cases of one Internet server that
emphasizes PvP. However, there are many fictional factions, as the game manual
explains: “You can join, work or betray factions in an ever-changing political cli-
mate. Depending on which factions you choose to align with, other factions may
come hostile or friendly. Different factions also provide quests and new lines of
gameplay. Completing quests with specific factions will allow you to rise within the
ranks of the faction” [32]. Thus any urban conflict is the result of large-scale con-
flict, rather than Chicago-School social disorganization.
Conclusion
The fictional cities in MMOs vary in their degree of organization, versus disorgani-
zation, and in their degree of cultural convergence. Because the action in nearly
every MMO is rooted in conflict, disorganization on some scale must be prevalent.
In both City of Heroes and The Matrix Online, conflict inside the city is widespread,
and street gangs are one of the more visible manifestations. In Age of Conan and
Guild Wars 2, most urban environments are peaceful, and conflict is exiled to the
countryside or as in Age of Conan to specific districts of Tarantia and the sewers
beneath it. The latter two, which are fantasy games, illustrate a very common fea-
ture of this very popular genre: assigning players’ avatars to ethnic groups that may,
under some circumstances, go to war with each other. Across any number of MMOs,
we will see evidence of the principles the Chicago School taught, especially urban
areas suffering social disorganization. But the fact that the Chicago School came to
dominate within academic sociology does not prove that all truths are contained
within it, and indeed many MMOs are based on the premise that the citizens of a
city ideally should belong to a single, unified culture, even as cities like nations may
differ in their fundamental systems of meaning.
If we conceptualize a city in terms of technological convergence, then it is a huge
machine, assembled from multiple components that serve distinctive functions. For
example, in Lion’s Arch, the convergence city for the five geographically separated
ethnic cities in Guild Wars 2, one section perhaps fifty meters in subjective width
contains the eight varied machines required for avatars to manufacture products like
potions and swords, each requiring expertise in one of eight crafting professions. A
short distance away is the auction house where players buy and sell materials used
Conclusion 65
in crafting, as well as the products of their work. Not far in another direction is the
equivalent of Grand Central Station, offering quick transport to any of the other cit-
ies, that also possess manufacturing and financial districts. In reality, Lion’s Arch is
a connected set of routines in the game’s software, connected to several sections of
the database, in other words a very complex information system that supports the
social system of cooperation between players.
Thinking of Lion’s Arch in terms of the series of science and technology conver-
gence conferences is not only logical but raises a very challenging question: Can
human convergence lead to a future time in which warfare is unthinkable and all
human interaction is productive? The original NBIC formulation assumed so, as the
very first paragraph of the first report suggests:
In the early decades of the 21st century, concentrated efforts can unify science based on the
unity of nature, thereby advancing the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology,
information technology, and new technologies based in cognitive science. With proper
attention to ethical issues and societal needs, converging technologies could achieve a tre-
mendous improvement in human abilities, societal outcomes, the nation’s productivity, and
the quality of life. This is a broad, cross-cutting, emerging and timely opportunity of inter-
est to individuals, society and humanity in the long term. [33]
This vision connects directly to the convergent thinking of the century-old

Chicago School of urban sociology, not merely through similarity and the inspira-
tion gained from reading old publications, but via direct human linkage. The author
who contributed the Handbook chapter most relevant to the arts in an urban context,
Terry Nichols Clark, is himself a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago
[34]. In a long career that always focused on the global context while studying
urban society and cultural movements in specific locations, he has documented how
artistic communities concentrated in local bohemian neighborhoods can energize
economic progress for their cities and create a buzz that radiates far and wide:
Young persons the world over are transforming their political and social experiences by
creating new artistic experiences - like dancing in a public square, building floats, or record-
ing songs and videos. They participate in and mobilize others in concerts as well as in
parades or political demonstrations, with political and economic consequences. Some
adults also find new inspiration in distinctive arts and cultural experiences - like a new band,
star singer, or inspiring film. Video games, smartphones, and the Internet trumpet themes
globally.
These experiences are new for political and economic policy makers, and for analysts.
The activities often break with past categories and build new combinations. They create
passion and ambition, rage and revenge. That is the point. The new buzz has deeper and
broader impact precisely since it works in new and powerful ways, creating and engaging
vast new audiences [35].
This chapter illustrates in a rather comprehensive manner how traditions from

the past can converge with the latest buzz, to create a fresh perspective on the future.
The Wikipedia page for the Chicago School says it “has focused on human behavior
as determined by social structures and physical environmental factors, rather than
genetic and personal characteristics. Biologists and anthropologists have accepted
the theory of evolution as demonstrating that animals adapt to their environments.
As applied to humans who are considered responsible for their own destinies,
members of the School believed that the natural environment which the community
inhabits is a major factor in shaping human behavior, and that the city functions as
a microcosm: ‘In these great cities, where all the passions, all the energies of man-
kind are released, we are in a position to investigate the process of civilization, as it
were, under a microscope.’” The quotation at the end came from a 1928 publication
by Robert Park, most prominent leader of the School, and this excerpt expresses
sociology’s convergence with other fields. As rather more than a mere metaphor, it
can be said that Wikipedia itself is among the world’s most significant cities, admit-
tedly virtual rather than physical, a place where people work together and share
important aspects of their lives [36].
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Chapter 4
Social Organizations in Online Virtual Worlds
While several chapters of this book view a virtual world from the intellectual stand-
point of a prominent individual social scientist, others view the gameworld from the
perspective of a multi-person school of thought, and there is no reason this could not
be the school to which the researcher belongs. The perspective of this chapter is
exactly of that type, considering data about player groups in several virtual worlds
in the light of sociological research on recruitment to those fantasy-heavy volunteer
groups in the real world called religious cults. Of course, there are fundamental dif-
ferences between religious cults and MMO guilds, but there are similarities as well,
notably in the recruitment processes, and the fact that like radical religious groups
the MMOs confer compensatory social status upon members, whose status in the
real world may be lower than they wished. The conclusion will then consider paral-
lels with contemporary online scientific collaborations, which may seem anti-
religious and far too serious to be called games, yet have similarities with cults and
MMOs. The heavy use of supernatural symbolism in many computer games sug-
gests they may be a model of a future convergence between religion and science.
Compensation and Collectivity
The background from which I began my extensive research in virtual worlds was the
experience of having studied two radical religious movements ethnographically,
The Process Church of the Final Judgement and The Family, Children of God, the
first using participant observation, and the second through a combination of obser-
vational and questionnaire survey methods [1]. Although they differed in ideology
and many other features, both were communal, avoided ordinary economic employ-
ment to the extent that was practical, and rejected traditional marriage practices.
Both also were millenarian, postulating that the current secular world was nearing
its end, and both explored that world widely rather than being nailed to any particu-
lar geographic location. One issue they raised concerned how possible it still is for

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_4
70 4 Social Organizations in Online Virtual Worlds
communes to be economically, socially, and culturally independent from the sur-

rounding society, which may have been somewhat more feasible in the nineteenth
century when many rural communes were largely self-sufficient [2].
The Process originated in London in the early 1960s, as an amalgam of two
neighboring religious traditions, the science fiction groups centered on Scientology,
and the ritual magic tradition including the Church of Satan. In early years, it
focused on pseudo-Psychoanalytic therapy sessions using an electronic device
derived from the Scientology e-meter and similar to a “lie detector,” through which
individual members could discover their personal psychological characteristics by
reliving previous incarnations. From this beginning emerged a combined theology-
personality theory in which each person was identified with one or the other of two
opposed deities in two pairs: Jehovah or Lucifer, and Christ or Satan. The group was
exceedingly theatrical in its many rituals, and explicitly defined life as a game, thus
being comparable to a culturally radical MMO. I studied the group through repeated
visits to its chapters in Boston, Toronto, Chicago, and New York City, playing the
role of a member.
The Family was closer to traditional Protestant sectarian traditions, originating in
California in the early 1970s, and recruiting many individuals who could be
described as refugees from the counter-culture of the late 1960s. After becoming
well-established, it consisted of several thousand members living in often small
local communes, communicating first through paper newsletters and then over
Internet. It was fully global, having Asian branches, as well as many in Europe, and
the Americas. While I visited communes in the United States, Canada and France,
the main research method was administering a long questionnaire through the mails
to 1025 members. Based on the standard American sociological instrument, the
General Social Survey, it permitted comparison of members with the general public,
finding a complex mix of similarities and differences.
In terms of nominal membership, the population of The Process was just a few
hundred, comparable to several of the MMO guilds that will be described below,
although the core group of about a hundred Processeans lived their entire lives
within their radical culture, rather than only playing a game a few hours each week.
The Family was much larger in total population, but the size of its typical local
branch was more like a small raiding party or questing team in an MMO. As with
many of the most successful MMO guilds, members of both groups tended to join
through development of social bonds with people who were already members, to go
through a period of exploring how deeply involved they wanted to be, and settled
down into an enduring relationship that was closer or more distant depending on the
interests of the particular person. Those who did not live within one of the com-
munes would participate occasionally for special activities, not unlike members of
an MMO guild who schedule being online to run a dungeon instance with their
fellows.
My research in both radical communities was informed by the developments in
the sociology of religious cults, especially by a theoretical model that my frequent
co-author, Rodney Stark, had co-authored with John Lofland years before. While
both were graduate students in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley,
Compensation and Collectivity 71
the pair encountered a tiny group created by a missionary for the Unification Church,
a Korean religious movement that was just beginning to evangelize America.
Lofland and Stark published an influential article based on their observational and
interview research in American Sociological Review in 1965, titled “Becoming a
World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective” [3]. Lofland did his
doctoral dissertation research on the group, publishing it in 1966 as a book titled:
Doomsday Cult [4]. Stark’s dissertation was on an equally controversial topic, pub-
lished as the book Police Riots [5].
In their joint article, and in Lofland’s book, a theoretical model explained recruit-
ment to radical movements, drawing together elements of their professors’ theories,
including the strain theory of social movements outlined in Neil Smelser’s 1962
book, Theory of Collective Behavior [6]. Society can be conceptualized as a collec-
tive solution to the problems of human life, but within which some individuals or
categories of people are unable to achieve their goals by following the standard
procedures enshrined in the culture. This perspective is at least in part a develop-
ment of Robert K. Merton’s anomie theory, that stated people turn to deviant behav-
ior when following society’s norms does not enable them to achieve the goals in life
that their culture extols [7]. The Lofland-Stark theoretical model is a series of seven
steps that a person makes, perhaps in this order, to become what they called a
deployable agent, a dedicated member of the group who could be effective in con-
verting new members:
For conversion it is necessary that a person:
1. experience enduring, acutely felt tensions;
2. within a religious problem-solving perspective;
3. which leads to defining himself as a religious seeker;
4. encountering the cult at a turning point in his life;
5. wherein an affective bond to adherents is formed (or pre-exists);
6. where extra-cult attachments are low or neutralized;
7. and where, to become a “deployable agent,” exposure to intensive interaction is
accomplished.
The first step requires that the person experiences some dissatisfaction in life,
and social movements often recruit from subgroups in the population who face sim-
ilar problems that have resisted solution. Yet, perhaps all people experience endur-
ing tensions! The point is, if the tensions are only moderate, or short in duration, the
people will not be motivated to seek a deviant solution. It is also worth noting that
human communities differ in the degree that innovative religious groups are dis-
couraged, such that joining one would be extremely deviant. In later research, Stark
and I documented that west-coast areas like Berkeley, California, were more toler-
ant of cults, and thus less tension would be required to impel a person to join one
[8].
The second step implies that the ambient culture categorizes some problem-
solving perspectives as non-religious, and the original essay identified two, psychi-
atric and political. Indeed, The Process combined religious and psychiatric ideas,
and one can imagine other categories that Lofland and Stark did not mention. I
propose a fourth, which is exceedingly popular: imaginary achievement through
arts and games. In my book eGods, I suggested that massively multiplayer online
role-playing games contained a tremendous amount of quasi-religious material, and
religions often postulate virtual worlds, with names like Hades, Heaven, and
Paradise [9]. The most popular religions are based on legends, and legends are the
stuff of MMOs, many identified with that quasi-sacred term, quests.
Different people adopt different hobbies, each of which is like a job but not cred-
ited with serious status by society. Instead of becoming religious seekers, when real
life fails to satisfy their psychological needs, MMO players become computer gam-
ers. In a sense the third point in the Lofland-Stark model follows from the word
enduring in the first point. If people’s tensions were immediately resolved, they
would not seek. Each MMO quest is a small segment of a lifetime of seeking. The
goals are virtual, which may mean imaginary, although to a degree the social status
accorded by membership in a religious cult or gamer guild is real, because other
people offer respect.
Turning point, the fourth point in the model, really just summarizes other points
in the context of a clear conversion experience at which the person’s life changes
course swiftly. Meeting an evangelist, or more gradually developing social bonds
with members, adds a new force drawing a person in, while having reduced bonds
with non-members subtracts a force that might pull the person out. Building stron-
ger social bonds, and adopting the culture of the cult, requires social interaction
with members.
The process of joining a guild in an MMO can vary, but bears some similarities
with the Lofland-Stark model. A group of people who are already friends, may cre-
ate a guild just for their own use, but may later recruit strangers they come to know
and to trust while playing. Guilds often advertise aggressively inside the game, but
experienced players will “shop around,” acting like seekers, assessing how the guild
presents itself, and then deciding after brief membership whether to stay or not.
Very commonly, recruits to a cult today have belonged to at least one other before,
and some people are perpetual seekers, never fully committing themselves.
Similarly, MMO players differ in terms of their propensity to become committed
members. The game software typically gives great power to the leaders of a guild,
so they can easily eject members who misbehave, fail to contribute, or more com-
monly become inactive in the game altogether.
Many theories designed to apply to real-world phenomena can be applied to
social behavior in virtual worlds, for at least three motivations: (1) as illustrations of
fundamental theoretical concepts that can have educational benefits, (2) to develop
theories further by applying them in novel contexts, and (3) even under some cir-
cumstances to test the theories. The following sections of this chapter will not pre-
tend to complete definitive tests, and the theories will chiefly lurk in the background,
to facilitate discussion of a wide range of social phenomena and the methodologies
that permit collection of data relevant to them in MMOs.
MMOs differ in the social structures encouraged by their lore and software, so
the following sections are organized in terms of four varied games: EverQuest,
World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert, and Elder Scrolls Online. In each case, at
least one avatar explored the virtual world extensively for at least a hundred hours,
Endless Teamwork 73
28 avatars and nearly 3000 hours in the case of World of Warcraft. They will be
anonymous in this chapter, because the focus is on groups they joined. Here the
emphasis is on a school of thought, represented in the real world by Lofland, Stark,
myself, our students, and our teachers.
Endless Teamwork
The original EverQuest launched in 1999, is still in operation 17 years later, and was
joined by EverQuest II in 2004. Both are extremely complex virtual worlds, based
on a shared fantasy mythos created from scratch for these games, but incorporating
a number of traditional European elements. Having studied EverQuest II earlier, I
explored EverQuest in the autumn of 2013, and here will report observations of a
guild named Have Heart which I joined that may be typical of energetic but benevo-
lent organizations populated by adults.
In his rather impressive study of the early years of EverQuest, Robert B. Marks
reports that several kinds of guilds emerged from player cooperation and competi-
tion, within the context of the technical features of this MMO:
Casual guilds are essentially groups of friendly people who share common interests and are
mainly interested in being friends…
Raiding guilds are more focused, organized around defeating hordes of monsters and com-
pleting quests…
An entire sub-class of guilds exist around player-killing. Many of these consider themselves
role-playing guilds, albeit role-playing evil characters who are brigands and
murderers…
Countering the player-killer guilds are the anti-player-killer guilds… These are guilds of
player killers who target only other player-killers…
Somewhere between the raiding guilds and the player-killer guilds lie the role-playing
guilds… These are focused on character-to-character interaction instead of player-to-
player. Essentially, each player is acting out a part, rather than being themselves [10].
As was true for Xsyon, player-killing guilds in MMOs are largely confined to
broad player-versus-player servers, of which as of September 2014 EverQuest had
only one, named Zek. On it, outside special protected zones and above the lowest
experience levels, one player may attack another, even from ambush. When my
research began in 2013, the sign-up system suggested Vox, a server that came into
existence only the year before, and that made good sense because many of its play-
ers would be at lower levels of experience, while some had reached high levels, thus
providing greater diversity than on one of the older servers. It was a normal server,
that did not emphasize PvP.
Have Heart combined casual and raiding features, with some light role-playing.
Like many guilds, it created a modest web page at GuildPortal.com, where it offered
this self-description: “We are a guild of many different styles of players, from the
casual to the hardcore. We’re here to experience everything the game has to offer
together. Everything we’ve missed and all of the newer content alike. If you’d like
to join in the fun, please contact an Officer in-game for an invite!” [11] When last
visited, the web page posted pictures of successful team missions in March and
April 2014, a few months after my direct observation of the group concluded. These
were raids requiring at least a half dozen players, all of whom had reached at least
level 70 of 100 levels of experience. A series of posts proclaimed progress through
the game’s complex sets of raids:
It is my great pleasure to announce that Have Heart has beaten all encounters in Asylum of
Anguish, except for Overlord Mata Muram!!!
OMM is dead and the Asylum of Anguish has been cleared for a Have Heart first!! We are
quickly progressing through the raid tiers; Vishimtar the Fallen is all that’s left in the
Dragons of Norrath and the Depths of Darkhollow raids have already began!! More
news coming very soon!!!
Vishimtar the Fallen DEAD to Have Heart for a guild first!! The Dragons of Norrath expan-
sion has been cleared, and we’re already halfway through Depths of Darkhollow!! Only
Sendaii the Hive Queen stands in our way of entering the Demi-Plane of Blood. The
Prophecy of Ro expansion has also began, with Daosheen’s Chamber unlocked for
most, as well as Sullon Zek’s Tower of Razorthorn. Stay tuned for more!
Definitely the most difficult of the 5 Bloods Raids, Sendaii has been defeated and Have
Heart has accessed the cursed Demi-Plane of Blood!! Sullon Zek’s Tower of Razorthorn
starts this week as well. Also, the Asylum of Anguish has been fully cleared for a second
time!!
Many active members of Have Heart were not at a high enough experience level
to join these raids, but there were many other ways in which members socialized
and helped each other. Like many other active guilds, it had a Guild Hall, like a
virtual castle with some useful facilities, and a neighborhood where even mid-level
avatars could rent land and build houses and gardens. Using a text chat channel
limited to members, guildies could exchange information, and offer congratulations
when automatic messages were sent to announce a player had achieved one or
another standard accomplishment. Figure 4.1 shows my avatar standing on his lawn,
within the neighborhood reserved for members of the Have Heart guild.
On October 1, 2013, Have Heart had 159 members. By October 22, membership
had grown to 210 and by November 12 had reached 264. The count is of avatars, not
players. Often an MMO player has one advanced avatar, called a main, and one or
more lower-level avatars with different characteristics, called alts. Some of the
membership growth represented new alts of existing members, as for example when
a group created characters based on the Lord of the Rings stories with intentionally
misspelled names: Fodo (Frodo), Gandulph (Gandalf), Gimlie (Gimli), and Legalos
(Legolas). But other new members were genuine recruits, and many of them com-
mented in the guild chat that they had played EverQuest years ago and were now
returning.
In addition to growth there was some churn in the membership, as when near the
beginning of November about eight high-level members left to form their own guild,
what would be called a schism for a religious group. There were many ways a mem-
ber could contribute to the guild, and among them was donating “tribute” through
which the guild could purchase guild-wide benefits. Table 4.1 lists all the members
recorded as having ever made such contributions at three points over a 6-week
period, thus documenting some of the dynamics around the leadership of a success-
ful and thus largely stable EverQuest guild.
Endless Teamwork 75
Fig. 4.1 An avatar in EverQuest, with his house and part of a sculpture collection
The avatars are listed in order of decreasing amount donated before the first point
in time when they were donators. Thus, Asperity had been a member throughout
this period, but became a donator only late. A “-” rather than a number in a cell of
the table indicates that the avatar was not a member of Have Heart at that point in
time, thus graphically representing the pattern of recruitment and defection among
rather committed members. The dashes in cells in the right-hand column reflect the
defections to form the new spin-off guild. All these data were available through the
user interface, to anyone who was a member of the guild, requiring a researcher
merely to record the data at appropriate points in time, then assemble the data for
analysis.
In addition to the pair who had established Have Heart, Torrential and Lenani,
the guild had 19 officers, but the guild’s database indicates that 5 were alts of
Torrential and 6 were alts of Lenani. Asperity was one of Torrential’s alts, so he had
donated under two names. Among the other officers, Falled was a donator. Cudly,
Dystalla and Spoliator are alts of Noxia, and Clavo is an alt of Maleficence. All of
them are listed in the table of donators. Alts generally belong to different classes, so
that they provide a different experience for the player, and can take a different role
in group missions. But members were not required to list their alts in the database,
so we are not sure how many real people are represented by the 39 rows of the table,
or the 264 total membership on November 12. It is worth noting that the table
includes representatives of fully 14 of the 16 classes of character in EverQuest. The
game’s wiki separates them into five gross categories:
Table 4.1 Donators of money to the have heart guild in EverQuest, October-November 2013
Experience level Guild tribute donations
Name Class Oct 1 Oct 22 Nov 12 Oct 1 Oct 22 Nov 12
Thuggan Warrior 65 66 66 8951 10,372 17,301
Datboizraw Necromancer 66 70 70 7916 7983 7983
Darbous Bard 56 64 70 2738 3799 15,525
Maleficence Necromancer 63 66 66 2657 5692 5692
Malkarith Magician 61 64 – 2612 3362 –
Volric Bard 66 – – 1910 – –
Xylith Monk 84 84 – 1600 1600 –
Dalians Druid 56 64 70 1283 1493 1750
Marca Magician 65 67 67 1261 3270 3270
Qorsad Shadow Knight 60 60 60 1128 1128 1128
Falled Enchanter 68 71 71 1118 1522 1522
Darbs Wizard 56 64 70 756 869 3445
Torrential Warrior 75 75 76 424 663 740
Clavo Rogue 46 50 50 315 773 773
Noxia Necromancer 31 33 33 113 113 113
Highlar Monk 52 52 53 55 55 55
Spoliator Berzerker 29 31 31 21 21 21
Gernest Bard 18 36 50 10 560 2560
Starrfall Cleric 67 71 – 0 2402 –
Xylithicias Necromancer – 64 – – 1932 –
Lenani Shadow Knight 75 76 77 0 1823 2091
Darrque Rogue 26 60 – 0 1389 –
Lonestar Wizard – 75 76 – 794 794
Xatrras Shadow Knight – 14 62 – 352 8045
Eluden Wizard 14 44 55 0 180 1489
Sunniedaze Magician 55 73 – 0 155 –
Spiritualist Shaman 67 71 – 0 107 –
Mariseth Cleric 55 55 61 0 100 100
Jinomorm Beastlord 40 60 65 0 4 4
Asperity Cleric 52 54 60 0 0 513
Brair Necromancer – – 29 – – 400
Sitcher Warrior – – 70 – – 390
Bethea Enchanter – 60 61 – 0 346
Mahonri Druid – 29 56 – 0 325
Drakkinrogue Rogue – – 45 – – 200
Dystalla Magician – – 50 – – 134
Eyeliik Necromancer – – 50 – – 77
Cudly Beastlord – – 50 – – 18
Brog Paladin – – 19 – – 10
Arguably the Largest World 77
Tanks can sustain much damage and taunt enemies to focus attacks on them: warrior, pala-
din, shadow knight.
Damage dealers are less sturdy than tanks but can do damage from a distance: beastlord,
berserker, monk, ranger, rogue.
Casters wear light armor and cast magical spells: magician, necromancer, wizard.
Utility classes increase their group’s ability to resist damage and regenerate their powers:
bard, enchanter.
Healers can restore health to wounded teammates, even in some circumstances resurrecting
them: cleric, druid, shaman [12].
Diversity of classes facilitates the division of labor in a guild, which renders
members more valuable to each other, and can also motivate players to create more
than one character. Complexity encourages players to stay in a game longer, some-
times for years rather than merely months, a theme that will be considered in the
following section.
Arguably the Largest World
When World of Warcraft (WoW) launched in 2004, it could be said to have been
influenced by EverQuest, but it was an outgrowth of a non-MMO strategy game,
Warcraft, that launched a decade earlier, and drew upon fantasy gaming traditions
that went back at least to the 1970s when the table-top game, Dungeons and Dragons
became popular. In the original Warcraft game, a culturally primitive tribe called
Orcs invaded a sophisticated Human civilization, and over the following years other
ethnic groups entered the story. In 2004, World of Warcraft placed Humans at the
head of the Alliance faction, which also included Night Elves, Dwarves, and
Gnomes. The Orcs led the Horde faction, with Trolls, Tauren, and Undead. In 2007,
two other races were added, the Draenei to the Alliance, and the Blood Elves to the
Horde. Another pair entered in 2010, the Worgen in the Alliance, and the Goblins in
the Horde. Then in 2012 the Pandaran were added, but with the option for a player
to join either faction at the end of an extensive tutorial. Although a few guilds are
mono-racial, most guilds combine characters from all the races belonging to a fac-
tion, but guilds cannot reach across the Alliance and Horde.
When I began research in WoW, I naturally had many of my characters join
guilds, and created a couple myself. Most significant was Science on the Earthen
Ring server, a Horde guild I created to host a scientific conference, encouraged by
John Bohannon of the journal Science. The conference lasted for 3 days in May
2008, and as many as 120 avatars of professors, students, and researchers were pres-
ent in each of the three plenary sessions. This is believed to have been the first really
large scientific conference held inside a gameworld. The proceedings were pub-
lished as a conventional academic book [13].
Many very popular MMOs have multiple Internet servers, like Zek and Vox in
EverQuest mentioned above, and World of Warcraft had literally hundreds, many
serving North America and others Europe. Thus for the conference, we needed to
select one server, as a practical matter one where I already had high-level characters
who could handle logistics. Most participants then needed to create an avatar on that
server, which might mean paying for a new World of Warcraft account, even a sec-
ond account if the server one already had was not in North America. I already had
characters on several servers, and quickly realized that the Earthen Ring server was
ideal for the conference. One of my highest-level characters was already there, and
I paid the game a fee to move a second one there as well.
Earthen Ring was a hospitable environment, being a player-versus-environment
roleplaying server, but more than that it was the home of a really remarkable guild,
Alea Iacta Est, a name taken from what Julius Caesar famously said when he
marched his army into Italy, “The die is cast.” The AIE guild features prominently
in my book about World of Warcraft, including analysis of a census I carried out of
1096 avatar members [14]. Leaders of AIE were very helpful in supporting the con-
ference, for example, providing some of the virtual resources required to give each
participant a souvenir pack, including a bag for toting things, a T-shirt carrying the
emblem of the Science guild, and some virtual money. Looking back now more than
7 years, it is obvious that AIE is among the most successful completely virtual orga-
nizations, both because it has good leadership, and because it effectively used other
forms of online communication, including podcast “radio programs,” to grow to
many thousands of members.
By October 2014, AIE had established branches in ten MMOs: World of Warcraft,
Star Wars: The Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, The Elder Scrolls Online,
EVE Online, Guild Wars 2, Star Trek Online, Rift, The Secret World, and Final
Fantasy XIV. This list includes most of the interesting successful MMOs, and as it
happens I have studied all ten, but sought AIE’s help only in WoW. After the confer-
ence was held in Earthen Ring, WoW limited the size of guilds, so AIE formed a
group of co-guilds, each having a name beginning with Alea Iacta Est and adding
another Latin term. Table 4.2 lists the AIE co-guilds along with population data as
of April 2013.
The 6727 members are not individual human beings but avatars, although clearly
this is a large organization, between the size of The Process and The Family, even
before considering the nine other MMOs in which members are active. The main
avatar I used to start the Science guild and organize the conference was a Blood Elf
Priest, and when I re-entered World of Warcraft in 2013 for additional research, I
created a Pandaran monk, whose experiences will be reported in the last chapter of
this book. Because they were new races at two different points in time, Table 4.2
shows the percent of members who were Blood Elves or Pandarans, in each AIE
co-guild. Notice that Pondera, the one with the highest percent Pandaran, also has
the lowest mean experience level, indicating that it is newer than the others. The
table also reports the gender distribution in the co-guilds, as percentage of the ava-
tars (not players) who are male, and plausibly the differences are merely random.
In April 2013, I also conducted censuses of two other guilds on the Earthen Ring
server, Last Breath and Science. All these censuses were done on the official web-
site for the WoW community, us.battle.net, and unlike the EverQuest census did not
require the census-taker to be a member of the guild. When I created the Pandaran
character, I was quite aware that the Science guild still existed despite my absence,
Arguably the Largest World 79
Table 4.2 Census of the AIE co-guilds on the earthen ring server
Blood
Elf Pandaran Male Mean
Guild Name meaning Members (%) (%) (%) level
Audacia Bravery. 725 26.6 13.2 69.4 75.9
Comitas Humor, ease of manner, 581 25.1 13.4 66.6 75.5
openness, and friendliness.
Dignitas Pride, a sense of self-worth. 586 27.0 9.7 66.7 76.1
Fidelis Loyalty and devotion. 640 31.9 11.4 65.5 76.0
Fortuna Fate, luck both good and 550 26.5 12.4 69.3 76.6
bad--but focusing on
positive outcomes of the
RNG.
Gravitas Responsibility, earnestness. 573 29.5 10.8 63.7 76.3
A sense of the importance of
the matter at hand.
Invictus Unconquerable, undefeated. 595 30.3 12.4 63.2 76.7
Libertas Freedom. Our ethic of “Play 651 25.8 15.2 67.7 74.4
and let Play.”
Pondera Balance. 730 27.0 26.0 63.0 69.8
Salus Concern for public health 564 23.4 12.4 66.0 75.4
and welfare.
Verendus Regarded with awe or 532 30.5 9.2 68.2 75.5
reverence.
Alea Iacta The die has been cast. 6727
Est (total)
because I had checked it on the official website over the years, and decided not to
intervene in its activities, therefore joining a different guild that was already well
established, Last Breath. Then, just as that research phase was ending, I had the
Pandaran leave Last Breath, and join Science. There had been many changes over
the 5 years, and many of the most active Science members did not even know that it
had been created for the conference, but a number of the original members still
belonged even after that significant span of time. Table 4.3 tabulates membership by
race and class, also looking at gender which is widely known to vary across classes.
In the context of this book, the main point of an analysis like Table 4.3 is to dem-
onstrate that indeed much quantitative data about avatars can readily be collected
from virtual worlds, plausibly revealing aspects of human interaction in online
social media. We would not expect the percent male to be identical across the three
guilds on each row of the table, yet somewhat consistent patterns do appear. Blood
Elves tend to be female, and female avatars of this race tend to look like “cute
blonds.” Orcs tend to be male even more than all other races, and they are monstrous
brutes. There also are gender variations across classes, notably more females among
the priests who are healers who support other players during battle, rather than
attacking the enemy as warriors do. As in the case of EverQuest, a complex division
of labor gives players a variety of roles to play within their guild.
Table 4.3 Censuses of three World of Warcraft guilds

Last Breath guild Science guild Alea Iacta Est guilds
Type of character Avatars Male (%) Avatars Male (%) Avatars Male (%)
Total 589 65.7 344 54.7 6727 66.2
Race
Blood Elf 202 45.0 106 36.8 1855 44.3
Goblin 51 64.7 40 57.5 659 67.8
Orc 78 88.5 27 74.1 809 85.0
Pandaran 58 67.2 22 54.5 916 62.2
Tauren 85 84.7 64 67.2 1100 83.0
Troll 47 66.0 37 51.4 683 71.6
Undead 68 76.5 48 66.7 705 74.0
Class
Death Knight 69 79.7 28 57.1 567 73.2
Druid 44 68.2 32 68.7 647 74.7
Hunter 66 57.6 51 51.0 831 66.1
Mage 44 45.5 34 47.1 652 55.5
Monk 61 72.1 21 66.7 651 67.9
Paladin 54 63.0 33 54.5 693 65.7
Priest 53 52.8 42 52.4 598 48.3
Rogue 38 63.2 22 40.9 398 62.8
Shaman 45 80.0 29 51.7 605 70.9
Warlock 57 63.2 29 51.7 593 63.9
Warrior 58 72.4 23 65.2 492 80.9
Ancient Virtual Egypt
As its Wikipedia article explains, Tale is very different from most other MMOs: “A
Tale in the Desert is a social MMORPG which does not include combat. Instead, a
variety of social activities provide for the basis of most interaction in the game. The
game’s main focuses are building, community, research and personal or group chal-
lenges called ‘Tests’” [15]. Over a period of perhaps 2 years, players cooperate to
build Ancient Egypt, constructing homes, pens for sheep and camels, shared guild
halls and manufacturing facilities, and puzzles for each other to solve. Then, the
process starts over from the very beginning in a new telling of the tale, which often
adds new features lacking in the old. I explored Tale extensively from July 20, 2009
to March 8, 2010 during the Fourth Telling, then carried out a census of guilds from
September 22, 2013 until October 13, 2013, during the Sixth Telling. In research to
be reported elsewhere, most recently I studied the transition from the Sixth Telling
to the Seventh Telling, throughout 2015.
As they are building their private and shared infrastructure in Tale, avatars do not
automatically gain experience points as they do by killing enemies in EverQuest
and World of Warcraft, but they do gather economic resources from the environment
and barter some of them in return for training in skills from schools teaching one or
Ancient Virtual Egypt 81
Fig. 4.2 A wedding in A Tale in the Desert
another of seven disciplines: (1) Architecture, (2) Art and Music, (3) Harmony, (4)
Human Body, (5) Leadership, (6) Thought, and (7) Worship. In eGods I described
some of the religious rituals in Tale’s Worship discipline, which the game’s wiki
says involves “demonstrating reverence and fidelity to the gods. In Egypt religion is
a communal activity, and the Tests of Worship emphasize and reward group team-
work. Worship is also associated with agriculture” [16]. Religion is not limited to
the Worship discipline, however, for example being central to the marriage cere-
mony which is part of the social Harmony discipline [17]. Figure 4.2 shows one of
these marriage rituals, the couple standing close to a shrine, and other participants
dancing.
Founding a guild in Tale requires learning how to construct a rather spectacular
ancient Egyptian building called a Guild Hall, and doing so with a large number of
bricks and boards that themselves much be created from raw materials. The
membership size of a guild is limited by the numbers of boards and bricks invested,
but an avatar may belong to multiple guilds. My 2013 avatar visited all likely guild
locations across the vast virtual territory of Tale, finding a total of 163 guild halls.
At each one, I was able to access and copy the roster of members, recording a total
of 3829 memberships by 1141 different avatars. Of the 163, just 23 had at least 50
members, and Table 4.4 gives their names, populations, and information about the
avatars who founded them.
Table 4.4 Data on the largest guilds in A Tale in the Desert

Founder
Last
Guild Members Name Gender Level Guilds Acro on Spouse
Guild 196 Farmer Male 48 23 443 0 Kuupid
HHOFW of 125 Sissue Female 38 10 209 30 Keeper
EGYPT
Wretched 117 Tig Male 15 4 20 224 Philadelphia
HIVE of scum
and villainy
Festivals 100 Solaris Male 58 19 155 32*
The Point 93 Arahgon Male 43 9 707 4 Nitocris
zFree 91 Drakkett Male 10 5 34 561* Deedee
Safari Club 81 Shemei Female 61 24 895 0 Obol
Palm Valley 79 Obol Male 61 10 1450 0 Shemei
Seven Lakes 78 Augir Male 40 9 1251 1 Astia
Research
Mentors of 74 Daniels Male 36 16 195 13 Diania
Egypt
CARPE 72 Kuupid Female 61 45 1813 2 Farmer
DIEM
Lower Egypt 72 Iy-Nefer Female 39 4 444 106* Cornchips
Advanced
Research
Network
River Plains 69 Khama Male 22 5 111 528* Mbizi
Public Works
Humble 68 Jaylenaey- Female 62 19 754 1 Thunderstorm
Priests barre
Devotional
Groups
The Goods 67 Darwishi Male 27 11 167 38 Nourbese
A Toil in the 67 Ranno Female 58 29 755 3 Khelben
Desert
Seven Lakes 60 Karedas Male 35 2 137 529* Majami
Pyramid
Construction
Pyromaniacs 60 Avanya Female 57 26 286 1 Hounddog
LPB Mobs 52 Lil Female 16 4 224 525* Loki
Southern 50 Cate Female 59 26 807 1
Cross
Sinai Central 50 Waerloga Male 48 13 551 45* Macrodamia
*The player has quit subscribing to the game
Each guild’s foundation date was given at its guild hall, so it was easy to deter-
mine how long each of the 23 large guilds had existed on a benchmark date of
October 9, 2013. The oldest, Seven Lakes Research, had been founded 617 days
Ancient Virtual Egypt 83
earlier, about as soon as one could be after the start of the Sixth Telling. Several
others had been founded immediately afterward, and only one was less than a year
old, Festivals, which had been founded 342 days before this census benchmark. It
appears that each of the six tellings of Tale to that point had recruited many of its
players at or near the beginning, and they had set up a collection of guilds that
would remain the most prominent, as active players moved to high levels of experi-
ence, and the influx of newcomers declined.
Advancement in each of Tale’s seven disciplines requires completing a series of
quest-like projects, such as the Test of Marriage, which is the second step in the
Discipline of Harmony. Many of the disciplinary advancement steps require coop-
eration of two or more players, so one main function of guilds is to provide a com-
munity willing to participate. The abbreviated name of the most populous guild,
HHOF, stands for “Helping Hands of Friends.” I had belonged to that guild back
during the fourth telling of Tale, and gratefully received much help from its leader,
Kuupid, facts that document some continuity of guilds across tellings, although they
must be created afresh each time. Membership in a guild also gives players access
to facilities and resources needed to complete other advancement steps, such as
ovens in which to bake bricks, storage spaces, and raw materials often freely shared
among members.
It is possible inside Tale to access a good deal of information about any avatar,
and the table gives data for each of the founders, to illustrate key variables. An ava-
tar’s level is simply the number of experience steps. Each discipline begins with one
called principles, followed by ideally seven called tests, although only six were
actually available for about half of the disciplines during the period of this research.
Perhaps confusingly, each test can be completed in either or both of two ways, either
as a pure test in which one must perform better than other players doing it at about
the same time and gaining special status, or as a principle that gains one experience
level in a less competitive and therefore less socially impressive manner. An avatar
begins at level 1, so passing all the tests could reach 53, but additional points were
available, such as becoming an oracle, so the hypothetical level cap is 70. The num-
ber of guilds each of the 21 founders belonged to could be read from their individual
record. One founder, Tig was only level 15 and belonged to only 4 guilds, one being
Wretched HIVE of Scum and Villainy, the guild he founded. This group expressed
interest in the Star Wars mythos, which has little connection to Ancient Egypt, and
involvement in it was at best nominal for most of the 117 members.
The Acro statistic refers to the Test of the Acrobat in the Discipline of the Body.
Avatars learn acrobatic moves, then teach them to the avatars of other players. The
statistic records how many times the avatar has taught an acrobatic move by demon-
strating it to another. Thus, it is a good measure of the player’s commitment to social
relationships, and of the hours the player has spent in Tale. The Last On statistic
says how many days it has been since the avatar had logged into Tale, a direct mea-
sure of involvement. On September 30, 2014, the status of the least active avatars
was checked again, and three had been offline for more than 2 years: Drakket,
Karedas, and Khama.
All except Solaris and Cate were married to another avatar, and there were two
married couples in the list, Farmer with Kuupid, and Shemei with Obol. Marriage is
very serious in Tale, allowing two players to share their wealth. On September 30,
2014, Solaris had been offline 388 days. The spouses of players who appeared to
have become inactive generally had not been online in Tale recently as of October
9, 2013: Deedee (598 days), Cornchips (150), Mbizi (315), Majami (529), Loki
(525), Macrodamia (57). This does not necessarily mean that other members of their
guild were not active, and the group itself may still have been viable despite the
departure of the founder.
In 2014, A Tale in the Desert was transferred to a new owner, was free-to-play for
many months, then launched in improved form for the Seventh Telling on September
10, 2015, reaching a population of about 800 avatars after 2 weeks. If World of
Warcraft is by many measures the largest MMO, like Xsyon, A Tale in the Desert is
one of the smallest in terms of players, although covering a vast virtual geography.
Yes, some of the most interesting religious cults, like The Process, were small, so
small-population MMOs also deserve study. The tendency of some social sciences,
notably political science and sociology, to be concerned with large-scale social
forces does not mean we cannot learn from small phenomena as well, a truth which
cultural anthropologists and social psychologists well know.
Multiple Guild Functions
Launching in April 2014, Elder Scrolls Online is among the most recent MMOs
studied for this book, only ArcheAge in Chap. 6 being newer. However, it continued
a very successful series of solo-player games, notably The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
from 2011 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from 2006. The extremely profes-
sional team that created these games, Bethesda Game Studios, also created Fallout
3 in 2008 which was explored in Chap. 1 and will be revisited in Chap. 5. An obvi-
ous question debated in the gamer community both before and after the launch of
Elder Scrolls Online was whether Bethesda had the right experience to produce an
online social virtual world, although their ability to create interesting narratives and
technically superb software was unquestioned.
A more general question widely debated in the gamer community at about the
same time was the tendency of new MMOs to be themeparks requiring the player to
follow strict instructions performing missions, versus sandboxes offering players
the opportunity to live freely in the virtual world and create their own stories. The
dominance of themeparks in the industry seemed to satisfy the needs of players who
really wanted to play rigid solo games, with the social aspect of MMOs only provid-
ing background, or those who preferred team combat in raids and instances that
were comparable to violent team sports like American football that have strict rule-
books. Crosscutting these cultural debates was technological progress that allowed
games to blend separated “dungeon” instances for subsets of players with the wider
Multiple Guild Functions 85
virtual world in a relatively smooth manner, something that was fundamental to the
design of Elder Scrolls Online.
Many of the missions in Elder Scrolls Online take the player into instances where
other players also are doing the same set of missions, without already being mem-
bers of a team, where they can cooperate spontaneously. For example, often if player
A sees that player B is fighting an enemy, player A will give it a couple of shots for
fun, helping player B implicitly. The presence of several solo players in the same
location can reduce the number of enemies at the given moment, making it easier
for everybody to reach many kinds of mission goals. These up-to-date design fea-
tures made gameplay rather exciting and unpredictable, but may have mitigated
against the formation of long-lasting social groups.
The Bethesda team undoubtedly analyzed many existing MMOs as they were
deciding how to migrate from solo-player games to fully online multi-player games.
In EverQuest and World of Warcraft, a character could belong to only one guild. But
the types of guilds in EverQuest listed by Marks is not a complete typology of all
possible types. EverQuest had a very cumbersome system through which players
could buy and sell virtual goods, while World of Warcraft being more recent had a
very efficient system. Yet an alternative possibility would be to have the economy
work through guilds, rather than through an open system including all players. The
excellent trading system in Lord of the Rings Online allows a player to advertise a
sale to everyone, but the player can set a sale so that only members of the same guild
can purchase the item.
A common pattern for interesting solo games is for a player to zoom through it
in a short period of time, then move on to a different solo game, and some MMO
players have the same exploration instinct, leaving a game upon reaching the experi-
ence level cap, and beginning another, just like chronic religious seekers who jump
from cult to cult. But MMO companies want to hold players for months or years,
earning payments either through a subscription fee or sales of virtual goods and
services. One solution that many MMOs have followed is to offer many group activ-
ities at high experience levels, some of which players will enjoy repeating many
times just as sports teams follow the same ruleset every time they play. This long-
lasting high-level team play requires players to develop social bonds with each other
and establish formal groups.
Given that Elder Scrolls Online had features that worked against group forma-
tion, Bethesda decided that a player should not be limited to only one guild, but
could belong to as many as five. Economic exchange was limited to fellow guild
members, so some guilds existed purely as trading organizations, others might
emphasize role-play, and others could specialize in raiding. The text chat is designed
so that there was a separate channel for each of one’s guilds, facilitating rapid team
formation for raids, and other kinds of fluid cooperation. Guild membership is at the
level of player, not avatar, so players who have multiple avatars can quickly switch
to whichever avatar might be most appropriate for a particular team activity. An
interesting complexity is that there are three competing factions of characters, and a
player may have avatars in all.
Earlier MMOs, notably Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer which I explored,
were designed to encourage but not require PvP combat, by locating the PvP in
special areas of the virtual world that became progressively more important as the
player ascended the experience ladder. Elder Scrolls Online devoted to PvP the
central region of its virtual continent, Cyrodil. ESO’s Wikipedia article explains:
Most of the continent of Tamriel is available in the game, although much of it is locked off
for expansion content. Players have the opportunity to join any of the three factions warring
over the throne of the Emperor of Tamriel: the First Aldmeri Dominion (represented by an
eagle), composed of the Altmer (High Elf), Bosmer (Wood Elf), and Khajiit races; the
Daggerfall Covenant (represented by a lion), composed of the Bretons, Redguard, and
Orsimer (Orcs); and the Ebonheart Pact (represented by a dragon), composed of the Nord,
Dunmer (Dark Elf), and Argonian races. Players may also unlock an additional race, Imperial,
which may be a part of any of the three factions. Pre-ordered copies of the game include the
“Explorers’ Pack,” which allows all races to be played in each of the factions [18].
A given avatar can join battles in Cyrodil only in the faction it belongs to, which
suggests that a player who enjoys PvP would want to belong to at least one guild
connected to the faction of an effective PvP avatar. However, the player might want
to belong to a trading guild that spanned all factions, and outside Cyrodil players of
all three factions can meet peacefully. I ran one avatar through the main solo quest
line of the Ebonheart faction, and watching player videos posted in YouTube
revealed that the three solo quest arcs are very similar, thus not interesting to repeat
for each faction. I joined many guilds temporarily in July and early August, and
report statistics for ten of them in Table 4.5. The level system at that time had a soft
cap at 50, after which one could ascend “veteran” levels doing some of the missions
that properly belonged to a different faction. Thus, the leaders of four of the guilds
had reached veteran status, beginning with V1. The guild interface allows one to see
how recently a player had been online, and a low percentage who had been online
Table 4.5 Census of ten guilds in Elder Scrolls Online

Leader Veterans On in Ebonheart
Guild Members level Officers (%) week (%) (%)
The Perfect Mistakes 148 V12 4 11.5 56.8 83.8
Gods of Warfare 154 35 4 12.3 19.5 81.2
The Sapphire Legion 108 10 2 11.1 9.3 70.4
Acolytes of Apocrypha 106 V12 4 31.1 70.8 83.0
Emporium Auction 479 V1 4 41.8 88.3 80.8
House
The Mortal Gods 20 33 2 10.0 40.0 80.0
East West Trading 344 44 2 11.6 84.6 27.9
Company
Roleplayers Unlimited 125 V10 1 32.8 98.4 80.0
Thrift 85 33 10 5.9 94.1 87.1
Daggerfall Dark 274 16 0 5.8 100.0 90.5
Assassins
Multiple Guild Functions 87
during the past week indicates a possibly moribund guild whose members have
abandoned the game. Given that my avatar was in Ebonheart, nine of the ten guilds
were predominantly of that faction, but none were exclusively so, since I did not
explore Cyrodil.
The Sapphire Legion is a frozen guild, because as a practical matter the leader-
ship structure cannot change. The guildmaster had not been online in fully 3 months,
nor had the two officers. All three of them quit ESO at very low experience levels,
one of the officers reaching 12, but the other only 5. The guild’s message of the day,
posted on its home page in the guild interface and apparently not changed since its
formation, is: “This is gonna be the best day of my life!” Its background information
says, “48 members in one day… GET SOME!! Don’t forget you can recruit and add
friends!” Apparently three enthusiastic players founded the Legion, recruited like
mad for a very brief period, and quit.
The guildmaster set the rules so that the officers could promote members, but not
demote or remove them, and ordinary members can only recruit newcomers but not
promote them to regular member status, nor remove anyone. All those of member
rank and above can fully use the guild bank and store, while new recruits can only
buy in the store, but not sell, and can neither deposit to nor withdraw from the bank.
In fact, when checked on August 2, the bank did indeed contain 125 different kinds
of item, but the store appeared to be empty. That means that members were using
the bank to share things with each other, so the guild was not dead, but merely
frozen.
Acolytes of Apocrypha and Gods of Warfare were using their stores, but posting
very few items, while East West Trading Company (EWTC) operated the equivalent
of a supermarket, filled with a vast array of items for sale. On August 2, this mes-
sage appeared in the text chat: “Trade guild here looking for new members, please
let me know if you’d be interested!” I joined this guild, whose named turned out to
be Thrift, and immediately checked its store, finding a decent selection of different
offerings, some being individual items like a weapon or piece of armor, and others
being stacks of many units of the same raw material for use in making virtual things,
or consumable that was either a particular food, drink or magical potion. Table 4.6
shows the store inventories of Thrift and two other guilds as of August 2, 2014.
As its name clearly indicates, Emporium Auction House (EAH) was a trading
guild, and given its large membership one with huge trading activity. A sense of
what trade guilds handle can be gained from an inventory of the East West Trading
Company (EWTC) store. A total of 2441 items or stacks of a resource were for sale.
Of this total, 345 were weapons, 58 of them one-handed and 287 of them two-
handed. A one-handed sword or mace would allow an avatar to carry a shield, and
42 of these were for sale. Three kinds of armor were available, light (139 items),
medium (224), and heavy (154). In addition, apparel included 135 accessories,
which were about equal numbers of rings and necklaces. While much equipment in
MMOs can be manufactured by avatars, as we saw in Chap. 2, much is also looted
from defeated enemies or gathered from the natural environment, often of no use to
the avatar who obtained it, but valuable for sale to others, in this case avatars who
belong to the same trading guild.
Table 4.6 Store inventories of three trading guilds in Elder Scrolls Online
Type of Item or stack of Units or stacks for sale Percent of total

resource Thrift EWTC EAH Thrift (%) EWTC (%) EAH (%)
Combat items
One-handed weapons 9 24 58 3.1 2.4 2.4
Two-handed weapons 41 104 287 13.9 10.5 11.8
Light armor 29 58 139 9.8 5.9 5.7
Medium armor 23 84 224 7.8 8.5 9.2
Heavy armor 15 63 154 5.1 6.4 6.3
Shields 6 43 42 2.0 4.3 1.7
Accessories 11 135 350 3.7 13.6 14.3
Glyphs 1 14 47 0.3 1.4 1.9
Consumables
Soul gems 1 6 11 0.3 0.6 0.5
Food 0 21 52 0.0 2.1 2.1
Drink 6 22 54 2.0 2.2 2.2
Potions 29 43 50 9.8 4.3 2.0
Bait 1 1 2 0.3 0.1 0.1
Tools 0 0 3 0.0 0.0 0.1
For 3 crafts
Motif books 7 57 66 2.4 5.8 2.7
Style materials 0 36 124 0.0 3.6 5.1
Armor traits 7 5 15 2.4 0.5 0.6
Weapon traits 8 13 4 2.7 1.3 0.2
Craft-specific
Blacksmith 21 28 121 7.1 2.8 5.0
Clothier 28 50 166 9.5 5.1 6.8
Woodworker 10 34 91 3.4 3.4 3.7
Alchemist 10 24 9 3.4 2.4 0.4
Enchanter 0 24 45 0.0 2.4 1.8
Provisioner 32 101 327 10.8 10.2 13.4
295 990 2441 100.0 100.0 100.0
Conclusion
This survey of types of guilds across four MMOs documents the scope and dynam-
ics of relatively successful virtual organizations of somewhat different kinds. The
exclusive guilds in EverQuest and World of Warcraft are more like religious cults,
because members must be totally committed. In contrast, A Tale in the Desert and
Elder Scrolls Online permitted multiple guild membership, which facilitates the
emergence of specialized organizations such as trading guilds, that follow a very
different logic. To be sure, all kinds confer subjective social status on members, and
facilitate economic exchange, but exclusive guilds inhibit membership for purely
Conclusion 89
economic reasons. Both EverQuest and World of Warcraft incorporate impersonal

economic institutions, often described as auction houses, that have no connection to
guild membership. A Tale in the Desert and Elder Scrolls Online in contrast bind
economic exchange to intimate interpersonal relationships. Thus social scientists
who contemplate studying social groups in virtual worlds need to assess which kind
of group would be most suitable for the particular research project, and which vir-
tual world provides the best examples.
Social science research on the formation, functioning, and life-cycle of MMO
guilds may provide insights applicable to a wide variety of online communities,
including many central to the Convergence Movement. For example, the Handbook
of Science and Technology Convergence includes chapters on communication
media, virtual meetings, curation of shared information resources, and the transition
of the computer industry from hardware manufacture to provision of online services
[19]. Two other chapters consider how information technology facilitates cognition
at a level beyond the individual human being, through “minds” that embed social
groups inside the Internet cloud [20]. A tremendously significant development that
happens to be comparable in many ways to MMOs is the Internet-based Citizen
Science movement, in which amateur scientists accept quests from professional sci-
entists, often to obtain information from locations in the real world, or to use game-
like software systems to classify galaxies or experiment with protein folding [21].
In 1995, Bruce Tonn, one of the co-editors of the 2013 conference report, co-
authored an essay on “non-spatial government,” the idea of replacing many tradi-
tional governmental structures by new ones focused not on geographic voting
districts but on performing specific functions for all of humanity, organized and
operated online as MMO guilds are [22].There is another connection to the
Convergence Movement, but one rather more controversial, through religion. In his
Handbook chapter, “Technology and Religion,” Robert Geraci wrote:
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen an acceleration in the historical
process whereby technology, once viewed as instrumental in religion (as it was in business,
art, and other areas), appears to have become the fulfillment of religious aspirations. That
is, technology once served as a signpost for, or necessary precondition of, religious salva-
tion, but in the Western world, technological progress and religious salvation have now
converged - they have become one and the same thing [23].
Geraci intends his analysis to extend very broadly to many manifestations of tech-
nology, but among his specific examples is the Transhumanist Movement, which
has direct linkages to the Convergence Movement. Wikipedia defines it thus:
“Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intel-
lectual movement with the goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition
by eventually developing and making widely available technologies to greatly
enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities” [24]. The bible
of this transcendental movement is The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More
and Natasha Vita-More, disciples of Fereidoun M. Esfandiary who renamed himself
“FM-2030” to symbolize futurism with a goal of achieving perfection by the year
2030, just as “Max More” is a new name expressing high ambitions [25]. FM-2030
is currently in cryonic suspension, a technological response to his death that pre-

serves his brain frozen for possible resurrection with future technology. The Reader
includes essays by Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt, actual leaders in high-tech
information and biotechnology industries, who have both published books relevant
to the conquest of mortality through advanced computer technologies, titled The
Age of Spiritual Machines and Virtually Human [26]. Among the ideas widely dis-
cussed among Transhumanists is uploading, transferring the contents of the mind of
a person into an information technology system through which at least an emulation
of the person could live indefinitely, interacting with others via an avatar or robot
[27].
The idea of achieving at least partial immortality by means of technology may
seem radical, yet is has gained some currency even among experts on avatars and
virtual worlds who are not Transhumanists, notably Jim Blascovich and Jeremy
Bailenson in their aptly titled book, Infinite Reality [28]. Among the authors whose
essays were published in The Transhumanist Reader, six also contributed to one or
more of the Converging Technologies books: Nick Bostrom, James Hughes, Andy
Miah, Anders Sandberg, Wrye Sententia, and myself. Their views cover a wide
range of possibilities, including Nick Bostrom’s serious speculation that we may
already be virtual beings inside a computer simulation, like that fictionalized in The
Matrix movies and the several computer games based on them [29]. The point of
mentioning this connection between Transhumanism and the Convergence
Movement is not to suggest that either of them is a religious cult, but to note that in
the post-modern era, old definitions of societal institutions are dissolving, and
guilds in MMOs can be understood from transcendental as well as mundane
perspectives.
References
1. Bainbridge, W. S. (1978). Satan’s power: A deviant psychotherapy cult. Berkeley: University

of California Press; The endtime family: Children of god. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
2. Bainbridge, W. S. (1997). American religious communes. In The sociology of religious move-
ments (pp. 119–148). New York: Routledge.
3. Lofland, J., & Stark, R. (1965). Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant
perspective. American Sociological Review, 30, 862–875.
4. Lofland, J. (1966). Doomsday Cult. Englewood cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
5. Stark, R. (1972). Police riots: Collective violence and law enforcement. Belmont: Wadsworth.
6. Smelser, N. J. (1962). Theory of collective behavior. New York: Free Press.
7. Merton, R. K. (1968 [1938]). Social structure and anomie. In Social theory and social struc-
ture (pp. 185–214). New York: Free Press.
8. Star, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1985). The future of religion. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
9. Bainbridge, W. S. (2013). eGods: Faith versus fantasy in computer gaming. New York: Oxford
University Press.
10. Marks, R. B. (2003). EverQuest companion: The inside lore of a gameworld (pp. 102–104).
New York: McGraw-Hill.
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2014.
12. everquest.wikia.com/wiki/Classes. Accessed 27 Sept 2014.
13. Bainbridge, W. S. (Ed.). (2010). Online worlds: Convergence of the real and the virtual.
London: Springer.
14. Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The warcraft civilization (p. 152). Cambridge: MIT Press.
15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_in_the_desert. Accessed 29 Nov 2013.
16. www.atitd.org/wiki/tale6/Discipline. Accessed 29 Nov 2013.
17. www.atitd.org/wiki/tale6/Test_of_Marriage. Accessed 8 Nov 2014.
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Online. Accessed 5 Oct 2014.
19. Amant, R. St., & Horton, T. E. (2016). Communication media. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C.
Roco (Eds.). Handbook of science and technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer;
Scacchi, W. (2016). Virtual meetings. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of
science and technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer; Lesk, M. (2016). The conver-
gence of curation. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and tech-
nology convergence. Switzerland: Springer; Spohrer, J. C. (2016). Services science and
societal convergence. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and
technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer.
20. Olds, J. (2016). Cognitive technology. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook
of science and technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer; Oliva, A. (2016). Cognitive
society. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology con-
vergence. Switzerland: Springer.
21. Bainbridge, W. S. (2016). Citizen science. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.), Handbook
of science and technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer.
22. Tonn, B. & Feldman, D. (1995). Non-spatial government. Futures 27, 11–36; M. C. Roco,
W. S. Bainbridge, B. Tonn, & G. Whitesides (Eds.). (2013) Convergence of knowledge, tech-
nology and society. Dordrecht: Springer.
23. Geraci, R. (2016). Technology and religion. In W. S. Bainbridge, & M. C. Roco (Eds.),
Handbook of science and technology convergence. Switzerland: Springer.
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Blackwell; FM-2030. (1989). Are you a transhuman? New York: Warner.
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gence. New York: Viking; Rothblatt, M. Virtually human. New York: St. Martin’s.
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New York: William Morrow.
29. Bostrom, N. (2003). Are you living in a computer simulation? Philosophical Quarterly,
53(211), 243–255.
Chapter 5
Autonomy Within Rigid Rule-Based Systems
Like life itself, virtual realities are systems of contradictions. Most obviously, they
offer freedom from some of the limitations of the physical world, while imposing
other rules upon the players, that can be escaped only with great difficulty. This
chapter will explore possibilities to enhance freedom in a highly popular but con-
straining solo-player computer game, Witcher 3, that imposes an identity, social
bonds, and a rigid story-based quest arc upon the player. Then it will return to
Fallout 3 in which Chap. 1 explored madness, exploring now that debatable form of
criminality called cheating. In harmony with the principles of the convergence-
divergence cycle, this research concludes by exploring the opportunities for division
of labor in the massively multiplayer online game, Guild Wars 2, with one avatar
manufacturing products inside the hub of the network of cities described in Chap. 3,
while three others explore the wide world around it in search of virtual natural
resources. In Chap. 4 we applied a theoretical framework in which religious cults
converged with gamer guilds, and here we look more deeply into that synthesis by
considering the ideas about free will of William James (1842–1910) who was the
most prominent American psychologist a century ago, who based his philosophical
theories of pragmatism on a heritage of belonging to a radical religious movement.
A Towering Intellect
High over the campus of Harvard University looms William James Hall, home of
the university’s departments in psychology and sociology, proclaiming the glories
of rigorous sciences of human behavior [1]. A formalistic icon of abstract technol-
ogy, this colorless tower was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the
original World Trade Center in New York City. It was the last home of the Social
Relations Department, a convergence of psychology, sociology, social psychology
and cultural anthropology, before these components began to diverge again in 1970
[2]. Across the street stands the modest but attractive Swedenborg Chapel, which

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_5
94 5 Autonomy Within Rigid Rule-Based Systems
few visitors to campus realize was also connected to the man after whom the vastly
taller building was named. A sermon on the Chapel’s website offers a perfect quote
with which to begin a discussion of free will:
In the book Varieties of Religious Experience, William James explains what makes up a
“saintly” or “good” life. One of the aspects is a compulsion to act without remuneration—
when one can say, “Heaven or hell is of no regard, for this I must do.” That is a regenerate,
or holy, state. But James also states that we cannot achieve this without struggle—a claim
that makes sense given his Swedenborgian upbringing. To truly change, we must face temp-
tation. We need to realize the good and act according to it. We can only act according to the
good if we are given the choice of the good action over the wrong action [3].
Thus, William James was a convergence of religion and science, who conceptual-
ized free will as a moral imperative, but placed it at the center of his theories of
academic psychology. Philosopher Richard Gale has said that William James had “a
divided self,” struggling to find a compromise between his innate mysticism and the
practical world that surrounded him [4]. As sociologist Rodney Stark and I noted in
our book The Future of Religion, the founder of the religious upbringing James
experienced, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1774), converged modern spiritualism
with traditional Christianity: “Swedenborg claimed to be able to communicate with
the spirits of many famous historical figures and to travel in the spirit world via
‘astral projection’” [5]. Thus Swedenborg taught a radical free will ideology, that
asserted that through spiritual effort a person could escape the ordinary constraints
of the physical universe.
In a sense, an ultimately religious conception is built into the legal system of
modern secular societies, as illustrated by the problematic insanity defense in trials
of a murderer. First of all, an insane person may be incompetent to participate
actively in a legal defense, and more generally competence can be considered to be
those mental skills required to act upon freely-made decisions. Second, it is difficult
to punish people for their evil deeds if they did not understand the difference
between right and wrong. But a third issue that may be raised by an insanity defense
is whether the perpetrator had the free will to decide not to commit the crime. To the
extent that social science offers deterministic theories of deviant behavior, whether
couched as insanity or the effect of surrounding social conditions, then nobody
really has free will and nobody deserves punishment [6].
Yes, we may want to imprison people who constitute a danger to society, but if
they were not free to resist deviant behavior, perhaps their incarceration should be
as pleasant as life experienced by people outside what we would call an asylum
rather than a prison. They do not deserve to suffer, and we should provide them with
alternative ways to experience happy lives, perhaps by playing online games while
they sit in their locked cells. A case can be made that punishing perpetrators serves
a social function by warning other members of society that they will be brought to
account if they commit crimes. But if that is the justification for punishment, then
we should hang murderers in public as was done centuries ago, in the most gory
manner possible, rather then executing them in sterile privacy.
William James sought ways to escape painful dilemmas such as these, through
playing the central role in developing a perspective called American Pragmatism, a
A Towering Intellect 95
school of thought appropriate for a pioneering, innovating, competing society that

considered optimism to be the primary moral obligation. For example, James
argued, even if we doubt the existence of God, we should respect the beliefs of any-
one who agrees with the consensus of society on this difficult issue [7]. More gener-
ally, a belief is true to the extent that it is useful, thus defining truth in pragmatic
rather than objective terms. Of course, there may be an infinite regress hidden in his
logic: how do we know the truth of a belief about the pragmatic utility of another
belief? It is said that William James was naturally a depressive who became a phi-
losopher in order to cure his own psychopathology, and who decided his first act of
free will would be to believe in free will [8]. Or, religion required him to believe in
free will, in order to accept moral responsibility for his actions or inaction [9].
The chief statement of his perspective was presented in a series of public lec-
tures, 1906–1907, preserved in book form as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some
Old Ways of Thinking. In what at first seems an early statement of personality the-
ory, a tradition within psychology that often identifies distinct types of character, he
contrasted two kinds of “temper:” [10]
The Tender-Minded The Tough-minded

Rationalistic Empiricist
Intellectualistic Sensationalistic
Idealistic Materialistic
Optimistic Pessimistic
Religious Irreligious
Free-willist Fatalistic
Monistic Pluralistic
Dogmatical Skeptical
There is much to debate about this typology. For example, when James calls the
Tender Minded “rationalistic” he means that such people adhere to principles,
whereas the Tough Minded are empiricist and follow the facts. A philosopher with
a different personality might have said that following principles is tough-minded,
and tender-minded people would be guided by their sensations about the facts of the
world they dwell within. Later in the list, James associates religion with free will,
yet religions may differ in the extent to which they believe that God-ordained fate
determines our actions, so this connection may reflect a Swedenborgian perspective,
possibly adapted to the more conventional mainstream Protestant denominations so
influential during his lifetime.
Yet, given his divided self, James did not consider himself resolutely tender-
minded, but sought a convergence of these two apparently contradictory perspec-
tives, suggesting that his audience had the same desire:
What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual
abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite
human lives.
You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and will-
ingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but
also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the reli-
gious or of the romantic types [11].
I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of
demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiri-
cisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts [12].
Thus, pragmatism would be tender-minded when that was advantageous, and tough-
minded when circumstances demanded. Or, choosing whether at any given moment
to be tender-minded or tough-minded would be an act of free will.
There are so many possible criticisms of pragmatism, and so many other schools
of thought, that to provide contrast we must be judicious in selecting an alternative
for comparison, but the best contrast is provided by the least judicious philosopher,
Friedrich Nietzsche. Sometimes Nietzsche is described as the first “existentialist,” a
literary and technical term that might mean “avant-garde poet,” “post-modernist,” or
simply “pessimist” [13]. Some of his works consider the concept of free will ironi-
cally as a form of religious slavery, though which society can blame deviant indi-
viduals for violating its norms [14]. James treasured traditional religion, although
his personal religious background was non-traditional, but Nietzsche rejected the
conventional religions of his day through mysterious, transcendental symbolism.
Rather than contrasting the tender-minded with the tough-minded, his first book
contrasted the cool individualism of followers of Apollo with the hot collectivism of
followers of Dionysus [15]. Yet, like James, Nietzsche struggled to find accommo-
dation between opposites, saying this about Nihilists, even as he himself was often
accused of Nihilism:
Whoever is incapable of laying his will into things, lacking will and strength, at least lays
some meaning into them, i.e., the faith that there is a will in them already.
It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without mean-
ing in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one
organizes a small portion of it oneself. [16]
Perhaps fittingly, Nietzsche lost his capacity for free will, ending his last years in a
form of insanity that may have had syphilis as its meaningless cause, and the words
just quoted may not be entirely his. The book from which they came, bearing the
grandiose title The Will to Power, was originally cobbled together by his sister from
fragments he had written, who late in her life was attracted to Nazism thus dragging
the corpse of her long-dead brother into that disreputable camp [17]. James may
indeed have had the freedom to cure his own psychopathology, and his pragmatic
approach may be useful for many other people. Yet Nietzsche’s principle that we
may gain freedom by becoming alienated has some validity as well [18].
We shall have William James uppermost in our minds as we seek freedom in
three rule-based virtual worlds, yet Nietzsche’s point about relishing freedom within
limits is really not very far from what James wrote. Both consider free will to be
central to the human drama, but limited in scope, and their chief disagreement con-
cerns the extent to which the concept of free will should be used as an instrument of
morality. Thus we can now begin to consider how important it can be to follow
orders, versus defecting from the moral order imposed by a rigidly programmed
computer environment. Recognizing that we cannot easily resolve debates when the
Escaping a Scripted Role 97
debaters are speaking different languages, and each word is drenched in multiple
meanings, we can explore some of the issues empirically through exploring three
computer games that both require and permit role-playing and goal achievement.
Escaping a Scripted Role
In order to see a wide range of autonomy issues in computer games that stimulate
reality, it was necessary to start with an example of high quality that imposes strict
controls on the player, while technically permitting increased autonomy at some
cost. The ideal example was Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a highly acclaimed and popular
2015 game with great psychological and cultural depth. The player is like an actor
assigned a highly scripted role, with limited options on how to play it. The game’s
Wikipedia page explains, “Played in a third-person perspective, players control pro-
tagonist Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher who sets out on a long journey through the large
land of Northern Kingdoms. Players do battle against the world’s many dangers
using swords and magic, while interacting with non-player characters and complet-
ing side quests and main missions all to progress through the story [19]. The refer-
ence to third-person perspective means that the player sees the hero named Geralt
from a moderate distance, rather than having first-person perspective, seeing through
the eyes of the character. The player cannot write a new story in place of the main
missions, although the side quests are optional.
Wikipedia also offers a page for the main character in the story that provides
some context: “Geralt lives in an ambiguous moral universe, yet manages to main-
tain his own coherent code of ethics. At once cynical and noble, Geralt has been
compared to Raymond Chandler’s signature character Philip Marlowe. The fantasy
world in which these adventures take place owes much to Polish history and Slavic
mythology” [20]. The game is based on fantasy fiction written by Polish writer
Andrzej Sapkowski, and was produced by a Polish video game developer named
CD Projekt RED, so if one wanted to understand Geralt well, one would want to
read the books and learn something about Polish culture, as well as playing the two
previous games in the series The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. But
if the goal is to explore possibilities for autonomy, and thus to avoid as much as
possible being forced into the role of Geralt, then one would precisely not want to
learn more about him.
A Witcher is an altered human being, more durable than normal and capable of
gaining magical powers. A key aspect of Geralt’s personality is his emotional con-
nection to two Witcher women, a sorceress named Yennefer with whom he has an
erotic bond, and a student sorceress named Cirilla who is like a daughter to them.
Witchers are sterile, so Geralt and Yennefer cannot produce biological children, but
can choose a younger Witcher to be a spiritual offspring. The goal of early missions
is finding Yennefer, and the main story arc involves finding and protecting Cirilla.
But if our goal is autonomy, we must resist any emotional connections to Yennefer
and Cirilla, thus rejecting as many of the missions of the main story as we can.
Simply put, the goal is to explore the world of Witcher 3 as widely as possible,
without becoming Geralt. It is not possible to assign a new name to the main char-
acter, so it cannot really become an avatar of either William James or the player,
except in our imagination.
As befits the first example in a series, Witcher 3 will also let us see some very
common features of modern computer-based role-playing games. This is a solo-
player game, and only later will we consider massively multiplayer online game
Guild Wars 2, but many of the mechanics and the techniques of role-playing are the
same. Popular games like these are very complex, so it is necessary for them to
begin with tutorials that also have the function of introducing the story. There are
really two tutorial stages in Witcher 3. First, some very direct and brief training
takes place at a Witcher school, in the cult’s Kaer Morhen stronghold, having Geralt
interact with Cirilla, as the player learns how to operate the basic features of the
computer interface. Second, a much larger and more advanced tutorial area is a
region called White Orchard, where the player can explore, perform optional side
missions, and do incidental things like killing wild dogs for experience and their
meat, or gathering flowers that can be used to create potions through alchemy.
A Witcher wiki says, “White Orchard is a prosperous village famous for its fruit
orchards, whose boughs burst out white blossoms come spring” [21]. As Geralt
enters this main tutorial area, he receives a virtual lecture, suggesting that he can
explore more of its continent plus an archipelago: “Life on the Continent and in the
Skellige Isles is nasty, brutish and short. War lays waste to the land, and those it
spares live in fear of the countless monsters lurking outside every town and village.”
However, Witchers tend not to feel the emotion of fear, not because they are coura-
geous but because they have become disillusioned with life. Indeed, that mention of
monsters offers the opportunity to gain wealth and power by killing them, perhaps
without the need to follow any order to do so given by any representative of the
virtual political apparatus.
Note the “nasty, brutish and short” quotation from the still-influential 1651 book
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. The Leviathan of Hobbes’ title is the government
that imposes peace and perhaps law upon an otherwise unruly humanity: “Hereby it
is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all
in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of
every man, against every man… And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish,
and short” [22]. Ironically, the anarchic war of everyone against everyone else either
maximizes freedom, or minimizes it, depending upon how one values life.
Geralt enters the White Orchard area in the company of Vesemir, whom the wiki
describes as “the oldest and most experienced Witcher at Kaer Morhen. He is a
father figure to Geralt and the other witchers. He spends each winter in the fortress
and sets off on the road when spring comes. He is an excellent fencer and has great
knowledge of monsters” [23]. After killing some ghouls, Geralt mounts his horse,
named Roach, and follows Vesemir to the tavern in the town. If the player wants to
escape the identity of Geralt, it will be necessary to abandon both Vesemir and
Roach, but this is difficult to do in White Orchard. It will also be difficult to think of
the character not as Geralt, because non-player characters will often ask him his
name or call him by it. Therefore, our imaginary William James ignored instructions
from Vesemir as soon as possible, and began exploring White Orchard solo.
Jacob Moreno, whom we impersonated in Chap. 1, would say that psychodrama
expresses the player’s needs and personality, even when the character has a different
name. Games like Witcher 3, however, seem to follow the dictum of Constantin
Stanislavski, the advocate of method acting, in which a theater actor fully adopts the
personality of the character being played [24]. Exercising free will sets a new goal
for Witcher 3, not acting out the story as Stanislavski would demand, but acting
more in tune with Moreno, and acting on impulse and according to personal goals.
For a research project such as this one, the obvious goal is exploring the virtual
world, which means both its geographic territory and also the simulated human
beings found within it. That meant that Geralt must walk everywhere, leaving Roach
to graze near White Orchard, and interact with non-player characters along the way,
happily accepting missions for them, even while rejecting missions of the main
story.
An excellent mission with which to explore central issues is On Death’s Bed,
which comes very early among the side missions. It begins in a lonely cabin west of
town in White Orchard, where a rather attractive doctor and herbalist named Tomira
is treating an unconscious patient. The in-game database describes the premise:
“Once again Geralt had a near impossible choice to make – a choice between a
greater and lesser evil. While preparing to hunt the griffin, he had come across one
of the beast’s victims – a simple peasant woman named Lena. She had been on her
way to meet her lover when the griffin attacked. The beast had mortally wounded
her. A witcher’s potion could save her life… or cause her to perish in agony.” Geralt
needed to decide whether to provide the potion, thereby giving Lena a chance to
return to good health, but knowing that the result might be her death.
The specific potion is called swallow, named after the free-flying bird: “There is
no bird more beautiful than the swallow, the harbinger of spring. Even the dark
mages who developed the formula for witchers’ potions appreciated the charm of
this bird, lending its name to the potion that accelerates regeneration of a mutated
organism” [25]. It can be brewed by a Witcher with even only rudimentary alchemy
skills, give the right ingredients: five celandine flowers, one bottle of Dwarven
spirit, and a brain from an aquatic humanoid Drowner monster. Tomira often had
Dwarven spirit for sale. She also offered celandine flowers, but Geralt had been
gathering any herbs he encountered in his wandering and already had enough of this
yellow blossom. The challenge was to obtain one Drowner brain. A YouTube walk-
through of the mission by MrCodeslinger shows where along the river to kill
Drowner monsters, but strongly advises saving the game prior to fighting them [26].
Story-based solo player computer games often permit saving the situation at a
particularly good time, such as just before entering combat. Then, if the avatar is
killed, the player can restart from that earlier point in time, having the remarkable
freedom to travel backward in time. However, MrCodeslinger advised saving just
before attacking the Drowners not because Geralt might die in the encounter, but
because Drowners only seldom produce a useable brain when killed, so it might be
necessary to repeat the battle until one is found. When the version of Geralt that
represents William James returned to Tomira’s cabin, this pre-scripted dialogue

followed:
Tomira: “Yes?”
Geralt: Got a potion for Lena. Swallow.”
Tomira: “First sign of spring, symbol of rebirth… Fitting as names go.”
Geralt: “We’ll see. Like I said, could harm her. Deeply. Works on me immediately, but I
have a faster metabolism. Effects won’t appear in her case for a few days.”
Tomira: “Why’d you choose this in the end?”
Geralt: “Decided it was better than doing nothing.”
Tomira: “I like you, witcher.”
Geralt: “Tell me something about yourself. What’s your story?”
Tomira: “A sad one. Do you know the Temple of Melitele in Ellander?”
Geralt: “Do I know it? Can’t remember how many times I’ve been there, how many times
Mother Nenneke stitched me up.”
Tomira: “We must’ve missed each other. I studied to become a healer under Mother
Nenneke. Hm… I was but eighteen when they took me in. An age at which teachings
interest one far less than love. There was a boy – Goslav. He’d bear his chest to work.
The novices couldn’t keep their eyes off him – tipped over their own feet, dropped
things. I left the temple for him. We passed a lovely summer together, and then he left.
Nenneke refused to take me back. My parents uttered not a word, gave me a travel cloak
and a small coin pouch. I struggled long to find a place where I’d feel safe, needed. Until
I finally arrived here. End of story.”
At his next visit to Tomira’s cabin, Geralt hoped to learn what had happened to
Lena, but she had been taken away by Nilfgaardian soldiers before the potion had
its full effect. Nilfgaard is a great empire, that has recently conquered White
Orchard, and Lena belonged to the conquered Nordling tribe. Geralt must deal care-
fully with Nilfgaard soldiers, not only because if angered they might kill him, but
also because he hoped to explore the rest of the virtual world, of which White
Orchard was but a small part. He completed many side missions, and killed many
enemies, both kinds of action raising his experience level. He circled the area, find-
ing no escape. One measure of the thoroughness of his exploration is that he went
to all ten signposts, local teleport points, and none of them would let him leave
White Orchard.
Eventually he had no choice but to go to the town’s tavern, meet Yennefer, and
allow her to transport him to the royal palace in Vizima, where he was forced to
pretend he would undertake the main arc of missions. As soon as he could, he
escaped the palace and went to Velen, also known as No Man’s Land, from where
he could walk to Novigrad City and other northern locations, or use a signpost to
teleport back to White Orchard to visit Tomira. How or even whether he could reach
the remaining virtual territory, the Skellige Isles, was not yet clear. Again, he
accepted side missions for ordinary people and explored everywhere, ultimately
increasing the number of signposts he had visited to a hundred.
When he first entered the Nilfgaardian garrison in southeast Velen, a soldier
accosted him, apparently recognizing him from descriptions he had heard: “Geralt
of Riva, correct?” The soldier reports that Lena had survived, and he admits he was
her lover. Geralt comments, “Nice to see a Nilfgaardian soldier so concerned about
the fate of some simple Nordling. But kind of surprising, too.”
Like many other recent, high-quality story games, Witcher 3 incorporates limited
player freedom through the device of letting the player select among pre-scripted
alternatives during a conversation with an NPC. If Geralt comments, “Lousy spot
for a rendezvous,” the soldier will merely express regret. However, if Geralt says,
“Love knows no bounds, I guess,” the soldier gives a far richer response: “Not so.
Her parents told her that if they saw her with a Nilfgaardian, they would shave her
head, cut out her tongue and banish her from their home.” With that small differ-
ence, the dialogue is identical, regardless of what Geralt says:
Soldier: Listen, Lena… she has not fully recovered. I took her with me when I was trans-
ferred, thought she might get better. But no – she says nothing, recognizes no one, sleeps
most of the day.
Geralt: I warned Tomira. Witcher potions have powerful, usually permanent side effects.
Can’t do anything to help now. Maybe a mage could.
Soldier: I don’t know whether to thank you, or curse you for not letting her die with
dignity.
Geralt: Trust me – choice I had to make was harder.
An incidental quest with the name Strangers in the Night takes place at a small
camp beside a river, where a soldier, a merchant and a theophile are chatting. It
shows how the game’s programming can give the player a semblance of free will,
which can be diagrammed as a decision tree, labeled by the choices for what Geralt
may say:
MAINROUTINE
1. “Glad to join you.” They ask his name.
1. “Geralt.” SUBROUTINE begins.
2. “Name’s not important.” They suspect he is a spy and ask again for his name.
1. “Geralt. I’m a witcher.” SUBROUTINE begins.
2. “Think I should go.” The merchant and solder attack him and he is forced to
kill them both.
2. “Some other time.” Geralt is allowed to leave, and cannot resume the conversation.
SUBROUTINE
They seem suspicious, so he says:
1. “What’s new in the world these days?” Soldier decides merchant is a spy.
1. “Hands off the merchant.” Geralt and merchant kill soldier.
2. “Calm down both of you.” Solder asks Geralt to hold the merchant while he gets a
rope.
1. “Fine. I’ll hold him.” Geralt and soldier kill merchant.
2. “Rather stay out of this.” Soldier kills merchant.
2. “About time I left.” He leaves.
Of course, the outcomes of the choices are strictly determined, and the only way
Geralt can prevent a death is by leaving the scene. Consisting of a set of contingent
cutscenes, this episode bears comparison with a scene in a traditional motion pic-
ture. A movie audience cannot vote on which choice one of the characters must
make, so their freedom is severely limited, and even the actors typically have little
freedom, decisions being made through a complex interaction between script writer
and director. Thus, modern computer games seek to find a balance between scripted
control and player freedom.
William James, in the role of Geralt, experienced many such episodes, some of
which had longer-term consequences. In one brief battle he saved the life of a mer-
chant he met by chance on the road, and then later that merchant could be found
selling wares in one of the towns, and offering Geralt a lower price than usual in
return for his kindness. Eventually, Geralt’s choices diminished, as he explored all
of the main virtual territory. He could not teleport or swim to the Skellige Isles, and
the only way he could get there by boat would be to resume the game-imposed main
quest arc, which he refused to do. Having relinquished any personal relationship
with Yennefer and Cirilla, he freely decided to establish one with Tomira. He tele-
ported to the signpost nearest her cottage, and Fig. 5.1 shows them beginning their
romance.
Actually, it was not really possible to develop a deeper relationship with Tomira,
because that option was not part of the program. When Geralt entered her cottage,
she would always be bending over a work table, presumably puttering with her
alchemy. He could start a conversation with her, which most often involved the busi-
ness of buying and selling alchemy ingredients. He could stimulate her to repeat her
brief monologue about her life history, but he could not choose a different topic for
them to discuss openly. Indeed, Fig. 5.1 is not it seems, and she is not really looking
into his eyes with an open heart. Rather, I found that if Geralt threatened her, she
would go into a complex series of moves in reaction, then settle back to her putter-
ing. I simply did this several times, identified a good moment in her pre-programmed
animation, and took several screenshots until I got the one published here. At the
Fig. 5.1 A simulated free love affair between Geralt and Tomira
God Mode Fallout 103
current very limited level of artificial intelligence, NPCs certainly possess far less
free will than do human players, but that has the effect of diminishing rather than
increasing the player’s options.
God Mode Fallout
Now William James will enter Fallout 3, which his colleague Edward Jarvis had
entered in Chap. 1, but with the power to exert considerable free will. Freedom can
be conceptualized as the ability to violate rules, whether or not one chooses to do so,
and in computer games many of the rules are programmed into the software. The
terminology for rule-violation in computer science is uncertain, because common
terms are often defined on the basis of unsophisticated conceptualizations of the
technology. For example, one might propose new terminology in which a lie was
unauthorized corruption of the data, whereas a sin was unauthorized corruption of
the program. Yet anyone who has programmed for a variety of operating systems in
multiple languages knows that the line between data and program is blurry, so the
distinction between lie and sin would be useful only for casual discussion, and seri-
ous analysis would need to look deeply at the technical facts of the matter. With that
cautionary note in mind, we can distinguish exploits from hacks.
An exploit in a computer game is gaining an advantage that some players con-
sider unfair, by clever manipulation of otherwise legitimate features of the game.
The following chapter will report some spectacular exploits in ArcheAge, that
exploited bugs or design flaws, but all complex games are susceptible to exploits.
Exploits violate the fictional reality of the virtual environment, and the story of the
particular quest, but one could argue they represent a higher level of sophistication
in game playing, rather than criminal behavior.
A hack on a computer game alters the software program, in order to gain an
advantage, often by running an add-on, plugin or bot program simultaneously with
the game, using it either to change memory registers or simply to perform actions
within the game more quickly or decisively than a human player could. Many games
permit and even encourage add-on programs, so long as they do not give a player
some obvious advantage. The examples we shall consider here have all the features
of unfair hacks, except they were not considered criminal by the creators of the
game at Bethesda Softworks. The definitions could be restated: Exploits are deviant
behavior within a computer game, while hacks are deviant behavior performed out-
side the game but influencing events within it.
When a team or programmers and artists is developing a game, they need to test
parts of it constantly, fixing flaws and making all kinds of adjustments. Thus they
must often run the program, but cannot waste time playing their avatar all the way
from the beginning. Today’s games are often so complex, and may not be structured
in terms of separate levels, that programmers need control over all the key variables
so they can set up each test run to be maximally efficient as well as realistic. Fallout
3 presents a vast persistent world, that is not partitioned into levels, but does contain
many subareas, such as the town of Megaton illustrated in Chap. 1, and Craterside
Supply within it. Suppose the programmer needed to test buying and selling interac-
tions between the player’s avatar and Moira Brown, which might require repeatedly
changing how much virtual money the avatar had. The programmer could unlock
the equivalent of a hacking feature built into Fallout 3 by hitting the tilde key, ~.
Entering “player.additem 000000F 999” next would give the character 999 units of
the currency used to buy things, striking the tilde key again to return to game play.
Once a game completes its testing and development, it is a simple matter to dis-
able the tilde key, or remove the programmer’s control system altogether, before
selling a final version of the software to customers. However, this was not done with
Fallout 3 and many other solo games of its general period. In the absence of a seri-
ous study, we can only surmise that the control system remained functional in order
to stimulate some players to figure it out, compete with each other in posting its
commands online, and thereby motivate continued interest in Fallout 3 long after it
had been released. Popular games sell many of the copies immediately after release,
but profits can be increased by encouraging later sales through the social networks
of existing players. Thus money can be earned indirectly by sustaining the interest
of players who had already played through the game once, but were now doing it
repeatedly, trying different hacklike commands, and boasting to their friends who
might then buy the game. Technically, when a game leaves the door to such com-
mands open, they are called cheats rather than hacks, but often players must work
hard to discover some of them, so they do indeed have hacklike qualities.
Edward Jarvis made his way to Arlington Public Library without the use of any
cheats, but he did not by any means complete the game as defined by the designers,
and did not explore all the territory of the virtual Washington, DC, area. Thus, to
prove the reality of free will, I used the hack controls to give an avatar named
William James the ability to become a virtual tourist, traveling easily around the
area. By October 2015, several well-known websites offered all the necessary infor-
mation about what to type in after the tilde [27]. The most significant single com-
mand in violence-oriented games bears the evocative name, God Mode, and renders
an avatar invulnerable to harm from NPCs, although it may not protect against all
hazards, such as death caused by falling from a height. To invoke God Mode in
Fallout 3 and several other games, the command is “tgm” which stands for “toggle
god mode.” Entering it a second time turns it off. The William James avatar always
had it turned on, to give him freedom from damage and death, so he could explore
more subtle forms of freedom and control.
Fallout 3 begins with the birth of the avatar as a newborn baby, during which the
mother dies, seen through the avatar’s eyes. In the next scene, the avatar has just
learned to walk, received some instruction from his father, but when left alone
unlocks the playpen and begins to explore freely. I twice ran William James through
the tutorial scenes of his childhood, in which he learns to shoot a BB gun, has fights
with a gang of boys led by a bully named Butch, develops a friendship with a girl
named Amata, and completes the final exam from school. All this takes place in an
underground fallout bunker called Vault 101, where a tiny utopian community has
survived for many years under the dictatorship of Amata’s father, the Overseer.
The climax of this tutorial comes unexpectedly, as Amata frantically informs

William James that his father has left the Vault, and her father is seeking William
James, perhaps to kill him. Why this has happened is not immediately explained,
but seems to have been triggered by an act of free will on the part of the father of
William James, who leaves behind a message for him urging him to remain in the
safety of the Vault, and only hinting that some important purpose has caused his
father to escape.
The first time I ran William James through the tutorial in God Mode, I had him
wander for a while through Vault 101, fighting all the guards who attacked him, kill-
ing them even if they shot him and he merely used his fists. Eventually he was able
to unlock the sturdy door to the vault, where Amata met him to say farewell: “Now
you’re going to go… out there. And I’m going to go back and make up with my dear
old Daddy.” Unlike his rebellious strategy in Witcher 3, this time William James
decided to follow part of the main quest arc, seeking his own father, but using online
information sources to determine where his father was and going there directly,
rather than working through the steps required by the story.
First William James went to Springvale Elementary School, a place Edward
Jarvis had visited and I knew there would be many enemies against whom I could
test God Mode. Indeed, it provided invulnerability, and shooting a gun did not use
up any ammunition. Then William James visited a fancy refuge described in a game
wiki:
Tenpenny Tower is a fortified settlement in the Capital Wasteland containing one of two
locations for safe player housing (the other being Megaton)… A pre-War luxury hotel, by
2277 Tenpenny Tower had become a private and elitist residential and commercial building
owned by Allistair Tenpenny, who only permits the well-to-do or wealthy to reside there.
Tenpenny is prejudiced, especially against the “ghoul problem” that is the frequent attempts
of sentient ghouls to gain access and residence. Completing a very evil act, rigging
Megaton’s atomic bomb to explode, will gain the Lone Wanderer possession of their own
penthouse suite here [28].
Clearly, Megaton is an ethically normal if impoverished community, while Tenpenny

Tower is the evil home of an unjust elite. Since William James was the “Lone
Wanderer,” he had the freedom to chose either as his home base, illustrating the
philosopher’s point that free will was tightly connected with moral issues. To gain
entrance to Tenpenny Tower cost far more than 10 pennies, but 100 of the currency
units used in the game. So I hit the tilde key, entered the cheat command to give
William James 999 currency units, and he explored the place briefly, before continu-
ing his trek to the location of his father, which was Vault 112. At the door, a friendly
robot named Robobrain greeted him with outdated programmed text: “Welcome to
Vault 112, Resident! According to sensors, you have arrived 202.3 years behind
schedule. Please re-dress in your Vault-Tec issued Vault suit before proceeding. If
you have misplaced your suit, I am authorized to distribute a new one. Once dressed,
please proceed down the stairs to the main floor so that you may enter your assigned
Tranquility Lounger.”
The lounger was a capsule that took over the occupant’s bodily functions and
caused his mind to enter a computer simulation of an American town during the
Fig. 5.2 The Tranquility Lane simulation within a simulation
1950s. The system overpowered the free will that William James valued so much,
and he forgot all about his father and made no attempt to escape this second vault,
that would be his prison for the rest of his unnatural life. Figure 5.2 shows him as a
boy pretending to be willfully strong beside a speed limit sign that symbolized his
actual lack of will power, as two passing ladies glance at him, perhaps in
disapproval.
Tranquility Lane represents a fictional community, as it might have been broad-
cast over black-and-white American television, in the supposedly bland and con-
formist 1950s. But to take this picture I needed to use cheats. First I decided where
William James should stand, put him there looking in the desired direction, and
made him go into fighting stance. After pressing tilde, I entered “tm” to make the
graphs and text of the user interface disappear, and “tfc” to toggle free camera, then
pressed tilde again to get into active game mode. Using the controls that would usu-
ally move the avatar, I moved the camera to a viewpoint that would show William
James, the sidewalk, and nicely framed views of the houses, then waited. Non-
player characters constantly walked around, and by chance at one point two of the
women walked by and were momentarily both visible. They had been programmed
to look at the avatar, without of course feeling anything about him. I had the choice
of taking the screenshot either within the game, or with a separate program called
Fraps, and to symbolize my hacker ethic, I used Fraps.
The reader can exercise a degree of freedom, exploring any of the games
described in this book, not by playing them, but by viewing YouTube videos in
which players captured their experience through software like Fraps, or in a few
cases of Fallout 3 videos uploaded by children, by pointing a video camera at the
television screen. Indeed, among the options I chose not to exercise was to explore
the game through an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 videogame system, rather than my
personally preferred personal computer. Describing some videos that employed

God Mode will reveal a range of ways players chose to exercise their own
freedom.
Some players take an academic role, studying the mechanics of cheats then post-
ing a lecture illustrating how they can be accessed and used. A very useful recent
five-minute example was posted by someone using the NOELonPC moniker, titled
“Let’s Cheat on Fallout 3 PC – Console Command Cheats (ammo, godmode, etc),”
posted June 21, 2015, and viewed 4,544 times by October 9 [29]. He demonstrates
the steps required to switch God Mode on in the personal computer version of the
game, as well as the cheats to add currency, teleport the avatar to the location
required by a mission, kill all nearby NPCs, lobotomize NPCs so they cannot attack,
and add various skill points to the avatar. This tutorial links to a list of the cheats on
the popular game website, GameFAQs. YouTube provides only limited information
about the people posting videos, but NOELonPC’s “about” page says he lives in
Canada, joined YouTube on January 19, 2013, has 969 subscribers, had 289,100
views, and announced: “Welcome to NOELonPC’s Let’s Play page, where I play all
your favourite games. If there is a game you want me to play, comment on a video
with your request, subscribe to my page, and I will feature user suggested games”
[30]. NOELonPC narrates his videos in a cheery, friendly tone of voice, providing
very useful information clearly, and thereby expanding the scope of his game win-
ning by sharing his accomplishments in a way that is helpful to other players.
Way back on May 23, 2009, Korangarai uploaded a heavily edited “Fallout 3
Godmode ON” ten-minute video with musical background that might even be
described as an example of musical machinima, intended to be a dramatic work of
art based on videogame images. The action consists simply of killing enemies in
various settings with various weapons, and the video’s text description lists techni-
cal specifics: “MODS: None. Cheats: tgm (toggle god mode) console command
enabled. Programs Used: FRAPS 2.9.8, Windows Movie Maker (Vista) and Movavi
Video Converter 7. Weapons Used: Infiltrator, Minigun, Tesla Cannon, Heavy
Incinerator, Shiskebap, Assault Rifle, Jingwei’s Sword, Gauss Rifle and Experimental
MIRV Songs: Coming Undone – Korn (00:00–03:18) and Maybe I’m a Lion – THE
BLACK MAGES II The Skies Above (08:12-10:01). PLEASE NOTE: Watch in HD
(High Definition)” [31].
An example that could be called sadistic is one in which Sargent Killgore lives
up to his name by killing all the nice people in the peaceful town of Megaton, as a
way of sharing the joys of God Mode [32]. An example of how cheats can be com-
bined with self-imposed rules to modify a game was posted by CHICKENNUGGY:
“The rules are: I may only use weapons I find, I am not allowed to buy ammo,
except if I don’t have ammo for a specific gun. I have to kill at least one person with
each weapon I find (Mines not counting). I may only buy armor, weapons and parts,
and may only sell armor. I am allowed to repair my weapons though. [33]. A player
using the name Gayming 101 and describing himself as a geek posted a remarkable
3 hour and 37 min series of nine videos doing the entire game in God Mode, illus-
trating what might be called a marathon approach [34].
Fig. 5.3 A tense situation for Amata, a female William James, and the Overseer
When I ran William James for a second time, starting over at the beginning, he
freely chose to be a tourist, using God Mode to prevent being killed and killing
enemies only to remove the distraction from sightseeing they cause. He found his
way past barriers to the Washington DC Mall, visited the museums of history and
technology, gazed up at the Washington monument, and entered both the Jefferson
and Lincoln memorials, the last of which ironically was occupied by slavers. During
the initial tutorial in Vault 101, William James exercised his free will temporarily to
become female, allowing me to determine that this altered only minor aspects of
pre-scripted dialog, not any of the serious consequences, and “she” decided to kill
the Overseer rather than wait for the radioactive bugs to perform that task for “her.”
Figure 5.3 shows William James in female guise, holding the gun with which she or
he shot the Overseer, as Amata gazes down in horror at the corpse of her father.
Again, but with different words, Amata refused to choose freedom and escape
Vault 101 with William James: “Good. You’re leaving. I guess you were trying to
help me. But you… You didn’t have to kill him!”
William James responded, “I’m Sorry, Amata. But I had no choice.”
She did not accept the claim he lacked free will: “So you say. Maybe one day I’ll
be able to forgive you. But not now. I hope you never have to find out what it’s like
to see your father killed right in front of you. No, don’t listen to me. Just… just go.
Find your father. I have to go bury mine.”
“Why not come with me?” William James asked. “There’s nothing here for you
anymore.”
Her final words were saturated with doubts about free will: “No, I can’t. Not with
you, not now. You’d better leave before I change my mind about letting you go.”
Indeed, there was no way either to force Amata to leave Vault 101, or to give her the
free will to choose her own course of action. Indeed, as the next section of this chap-
ter will briefly illustrate, sometimes virtual free will may be an illusion.
A Quartet of Avatars 109
A Quartet of Avatars
For this brief example, we return to Guild Wars 2, in the roles of the four avatars
shown in Fig. 5.4, who belonged to the same account. We will imagine that William
James is the player, rather than some different William, who wishes to exercise free
will through the avatar on the left, a member of the Norn race, with the assistance
of the other three, a Sylvari, an Asura, and a Human. Guild Wars 2 had 80 levels of
experience, and the goal was to get the Norn to that level cap without engaging in
any combat after the tutorial of the initial 5 levels. Part of that was accomplished
by the exploration of cities described in Chap. 3, because the Norn would gain
experience points simply by reaching many target points, and he could teleport
from one city to another at no cost, thereby avoiding the dangers restricted to the
countryside. Guild Wars 2 is one of the minority of MMOs in which crafting earns
general experience points as well as skill points, but that could be successful only
if alt avatars did his fighting for him, sending him materials and money they had
gained through gathering, looting corpses of enemies they had killed, and complet-
ing quests.
Guild Wars 2 has eight crafting professions, listed in Table 5.1. Only two can be
practiced simultaneously, and it costs money to switch one for another, but skill
points are not lost when this is done. In research reported elsewhere, the Norn
reached experience level 34 and the 400 skill cap in two crafts, artificer and chef.
[35] He was supported by contributions from the Sylvari, who also served to
explore the world called Tyria, reached level 80, and took fully 154 hours to do so,
ending August 10, 2013. At that point, game updates began raising the level caps
from 400 to 500 for the six skills that produced weapons and armor, but it seemed
reasonable to forgo the effort to ascend above level 400, since the main badge of
honor in crafting is to become a Master Crafter, which is achieved when all eight
crafts reach skill 400.
Fig. 5.4 A team from four races: Norn, Sylvari, Asura, and Human
Table 5.1 Progress by the Norn in the eight crafting professions of Guild Wars 2
Skill gained with help from Number of recipes
Crafting profession Main products Sylvari Asura Human Level 34 Level 80
Armorsmith Heavy armor 50 50 400 44 293
Artificer Magical weapons 400 400 400 228 255
Chef Food 400 400 400 152 166
Huntsman Projectile weapons 50 350 402 119 310
Jeweler Trinkets, rings, 100 322 400 45 236
earrings
Leatherworker Medium armor 50 125 401 44 288
Tailor Light armor 54 100 401 39 307
Weaponsmith Melee weapons, 50 50 405 143 329
shields
The Asura took over the support role on July 25, 2015, and worked for 96 hours
until August 27, when he reached level 80 and helped the Norn reach level 49. The
Human then invested 65 hours, reaching level 74 on September 22, when the Norn
achieved level 80 and completed leatherworking to become Master Crafter only a
few minutes later. Coincidentally, the Norn was also played for 65 hours, so the total
virtual field research took 380 real-world hours.
Guild Wars 2 is an extremely well designed and complicated online game, with
many features to facilitate cooperation among players even when they are strangers
to each other, notably missions that spring up suddenly and attract players to con-
verge on a particular location. In many respects, the characters operated by a player
are connected, most importantly for this experiment sharing a single crafting mate-
rials storage. Thus, the three support avatars did not need to deliver materials to the
Norn by running to his location at the crafting facilities in Lion’s Arch, but could
transmit them to him with no cost or delay, from wherever they were. Similarly, loot
could be sold in the player-to-player auction house from any location, although I
had the Norn walk into the Lion’s Arch auction house when he used it, only a few
paces from the crafting area. Progress speeded up somewhat near the end, because
when the Norn reached 400 skill in one of the crafting professions, he could sell any
materials only used by that craft and use the proceeds to buy whatever resources he
needed at the moment. Near the end, most of the resources came from the auction
house, with money earned by selling other things to it. Table 5.2 shows the market
prices per unit of some of the most common resources, at 5:30 PM Eastern US time,
September 26, 2015, on the Sea of Sorrows server where the research was done.
The most common raw materials are classified as metal, wood, cloth, or silver.
Each is cataloged into six tiers, or levels, requiring increasingly greater skill. We
might predict that prices would also increase from tier to tier, following some simple
linear function, but we see only mixed evidence for this hypothesis. Silver and gold
have surprisingly low prices, being used by the less essential jeweler profession.
Presumably the relative low prices for tier 5 materials results from the fact that a
A Quartet of Avatars 111
Table 5.2 Prices of common raw materials on the auction house

Tier Metal Price Wood Price Cloth Price Leather Price
1 Copper 0.88 Green 0.87 Jute 1.70 Rawhide 0.37
2 Iron 1.54 Soft 1.96 Wool 3.40 Thin 0.78
Silver 0.35
3 Gold 1.15 Seasoned 2.44 Cotton 4.59 Coarse 1.64
4 Platinum 2.20 Hard 1.84 Linen 4.90 Rugged 2.31
5 Mithril 0.73 Elder 0.80 Silk 2.27 Thick 0.11
6 Orichalcum 3.37 Ancient 7.19 Gossamer 0.67 Hardened 0.18
large fraction of avatars were active at this level, thus gathering a greater supply
which therefore could not demand a high price.
To gain a sense of the logic of the work, we can consider how three different
crafts manufacture comparable helmets that use the same Assassin’s Linen Insignia,
made from 3 sharp claws and 1 bolt of linen which was assembled from 2 linen
scraps. A craftsman must reach skill level 250 in one of the three professions to
make this insignia, and combines it with other components that may require slightly
lower skill level, in this example 225. In contrast, a Cleric’s Linen Insignia is made
from 3 engraved totems plus 1 bolt of linen. Both enhance the power of an avatar
who wears the completed headgear, but the Assassin’s also enhances precision and
ferocity, while the Cleric’s enhances healing and toughness. The insignia provides
exactly the same enhancement to the statistics of helmets made by the three profes-
sions, but the other ingredients they use make a difference. The helmet described
here made by an armorsmith offers an additional 62 defense points to whatever else
an avatar is wearing, while the leatherworker’s helmet offers 49 defense points, and
the one made by a tailor only 37.
The armorsmith uses an Assassin’s Linen Insignia in making the Assassin’s
Tempered Scale Helm, along with two other components, a Darksteel Helmet
Casing, made from 1 ingot of darksteel, and a Darksteel Helmet Lining, made from
2 bolts of linen plus 1 spool of linen thread. A darksteel ingot is made from two
pieces of platinum ore plus 1 lump of primordium. The thread and the primordium
are purchased from an armorsmith vendor standing near the armorsmithing station
where all the work of this kind must be done, while the other components are either
scavenged while adventuring across Tyria or bought from another player through
the auction system.
A leatherworker stands near a leatherworking station to make exactly the same
Assassin’s Linen Insignia to make an Assassin’s Rascal Mask. Its Rugged Goggle
Padding uses exactly the same materials as the armorcrafter’s Darksteel Helmet
Lining, but looks quite different in shape. The other component is a Rugged Goggle
Strap made from 1 cured rugged leather square, itself made from two rugged leather
sections.
A tailor uses the insignia in making an Assassin’s Winged Headpiece. Its two
other components are a Linen Helm Padding made from 1 bolt of linen and one
spool of linen thread, and a Linen Helm Strap made from 1 cured rugged leather
square. A given insignia can also be used to make gloves, boots, and other articles
of clothing.
Making each component requires a recipe obtained from one of four processes:
(1) obtained simply by reaching a certain skill level in practicing the craft, (2) pur-
chased from a vendor, for some high level crafts, (3) looted during adventures in
Tyria, or (4) discovered through something like experimentation. After reaching
skill level 400, each of these three crafts had obtained 15 “refinement” recipes for
preparing raw materials, such as combining two scraps of linen to make one bolt.
Each also had 81 identical insignia recipes and 78 crafting component recipes that
were comparable, such as the pair in each craft to make the components of a helmet.
But the recipe to make a final product like Assassin’s Tempered Scale Helm required
experimentation called research. As a new set of insignia became available upon
reaching a new skill level, the player would naturally make one of each of the new
insignia, then make the same total number of each of the two craft-specific compo-
nents such as the helmet lining and casing.
Table 5.1 shows the numbers of recipes the Norn possessed at two points in time,
but some were shared by different skills so the total is less than the apparent 2,184,
and the fact that the two completed crafts gained skills without doing any work
reflected the fact that the other characters obtained some during their adventures.
Having a recipe offers the freedom to use it, so the Norn gained options through the
actions of the other characters, but each recipe must be followed exactly. Exactly
what moves take place in fighting an enemy, or what is looted from the corpse, is
determined by a random number generator built into the game’s program. Despite
their name, random number generators are not really random, but use complex cal-
culations to produce numbers that are meaningless, often based on a numerical seed
determined by when the player took some unrelated action. Thus freedom in a com-
puter game may mean selecting among a set of pre-determined choices in a decision
tree, or taking actions without any insight about what their consequences might be.
Conclusion
To begin to construct a convergent framework, we can adopt a simple concept from

personality psychology: locus of control [36]. Does it appear to ordinary people that
the location of power over their fate is internal (within the self) or external (in the
hands of other people or the material world). This is a psychological perception by
the individual, rather than an objectively scientific statement of fact. Furthermore,
to say that the locus of control is internal is not to claim that one has a transcendent
soul or to deny the importance of brain mechanics in producing decisions. And to
say that the locus is external is not to claim that it is deterministic [37].
To this might be added a more mathematical concept: predictability. What is the
probability that end condition X, rather than Y or Z, will result from some combina-
tion of starting conditions, A, B, and C? The probability that Geralt could reach the
Skellige Isles without accepting a main story mission that would give him ship pas-
Conclusion 113
sage was zero. But the probability that he could explore considerable interesting
territory was quite high. The chance that William James could convince Amata to
leave Vault 101 was zero, and in God Mode the chance that an enemy could kill him
was the same. So there seemed to be a distribution of freedom and control across
virtual persons, as well as internal versus external with respect to each of them.
When William James became the player in Guild Wars 2, he could decide the distri-
bution of duties and thus freedoms across the four characters, but not the rules of the
world in which he operated them.
Many of the essays in the collection of Convergence publications deal, implicitly
or explicitly, with the unpredictability of complex systems. For example the
Handbook chapter titled “Science and Technology Forecasting” examined the epis-
temological transformation of scientific thinking since it was realized that nature
consisted of complex, dynamic systems that would be exceedingly difficult to pre-
dict [38]. Another chapter, “Self-organization and Emergence of Dynamic Systems,”
[39] emphasized that complex systems could reach tipping points at which a cas-
cade of individually trivial events could trigger a radical transformation of the entire
system. A survey of Convergence discussions I wrote for an earlier book in the
series noted that eight concepts relating to stability versus instability in systems
were influential in many fields of science:
Conservation: Many properties are conserved, through symmetries, parity laws, and
feedback-regulated stabilities in complex adaptive systems.
Indecision: Inconsistency, undecidability, uncertainty, chance, deterministic chaos, and
similar concepts are fundamental principles in the dynamics of systems over time.
Configuration: Detailed, dynamic structures of objects determine their properties, notably
the unity of nature at the nanoscale.
Interaction: Elements of a system influence each other, generating higher-level dynamics
and other emergent phenomena.
Variation: Statistical distributions of properties are caused by the combination of chance
and divergent processes of interaction.
Evolution: Marked by drift, natural selection, and a trend toward greater complexity, evolu-
tion exploits variation to develop new configurations that compete through
interactions.
Information: Scientific laws can be analyzed in terms of information content, and flow,
while the doing of any science today relies heavily upon information technology.
Cognition: Mental or computational process is the dynamic aspect of information, funda-
mental to the human practice of science [40].
If the logical status of the free will concept is uncertain, then its moral status become
problematic also. It was all well and good for William James to say that we should
respect the dominant religious culture, but does that principle hold in societies that are
controlled by self-serving elites? Witcher 3 did not seem to raise moral issues, because
only one human being is affected by the result of the player’s decisions, namely the
player. However the example of boastful videos posed online, enabled by God Mode
in Fallout 3, suggests that every human player of a supposedly solo computer game
really may have human competitors, merely outside the game. We did not weep over
the way the Norn exploited the members of three other races in Guild Wars 2, because
they were fictional persons and all belonged to the same player. The next chapter will
consider the political implications of inequality, in online multiplayer games.
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Chapter 6
Modeling Social Stratification in Online
Games
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, doubts have been raised whether tech-
nological innovation may give unfair advantages either to the existing societal elites
or to a selfish rising class with special abilities to exploit new inventions [1]. This
chapter will employ a range of structural models of inequality in exploring two
related yet quite different MMOs: Rift and ArcheAge. Among the psychological
benefits of playing multiplayer online games is subjective social status, that may
through interactions with other players become modestly objective. Many sciences
analyze phenomena in terms of layered structures, strata they are called in geology,
and social scientists often use this concept in describing social inequality.
Stratification in sociology connects most directly to social class theories, in which
“up” signifies superior status, for example the three traditional layers of society:
upper class, middle class, and lower class. Rather than consider stratification from
the perspective of an individual social scientist, or a randomly-selected school of
thought, we would be best advised to consider it from the standpoint of game theory,
recognizing that this term is played in many ways. Games combine convergence
with divergence in a dynamic system, as people agree to follow a common set of
rules, but compete aggressively within the restraints of that structure. At the present
stage of human history, computer technologies seem to be competing against some
people, while other people use the technology as a tool to out-compete other people.
Both of these human-computer contests in real society raise ethical questions, that
can be simulated by virtual societies.
Ludic Structures
Games may be defined as action environments in which an artificial ruleset governs

the dynamics that create inequality, producing winners and losers. Some traditional
social scientific theories rejected the game metaphor, notably Functionalism. This
Pollyanna perspective asserted that inequalities in society reflected the proper

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_6
118 6 Modeling Social Stratification in Online Games
operation of processes that assured the wellbeing and persistence of society as a

whole. For example, in an influential 1945 journal article published in American
Sociological Review, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued that society deliv-
ers greater rewards to those members who are willing and able to play the most
important roles, thus basing inequality on justice: As you give, so shall you receive
[2].
Yet it is hard to accept this viewpoint when one considers that some members of
society were starving, while others possessed far more resources than necessary to
support long, comfortable lives. Functionalists tended to conceptualize society as a
unit, rather than limiting the term solely to winners in a great game, thus implying
that all members should benefit from societal unity. Associated with the work of
Thorstein Veblen, the concept of conspicuous consumption noted that the apparent
waste of resources by affluent members of society could be simply a cost they were
willing to pay to assert high social status [3]. This phenomenon was not limited to
capitalist societies, and the classical example was the potlatch ceremonies of the
indigenous people of the northwest coast of North America, as leaders dramatically
destroyed property in the presence of awed audiences [4].
An alternative perspective held that capitalist societies naturally destroyed value,
but did so in the process of creating greater value, as for example technological
advance rendered many old jobs obsolete and in the process threw many people into
unemployment. Called creative destruction, this theory assumed that the natural
workings of the marketplace would ensure, at least over the long term, that produc-
tivity and wellbeing would increase [5]. Over the short term, people who lost jobs
might or might not be able to find equal or at least adequate jobs in the new indus-
tries created by innovation, because their skills belonged to a bygone era [6]. In
recent years, however, a virtual monkey wrench has been thrown into this theory,
and indeed most economic theories, because it no longer can be assumed that indus-
try requires many human workers [7]. MMOs are themselves an example, because
the teams who create them are relatively small, compared with the numbers of play-
ers, and player-support services are either being mechanized or left to the players
themselves communicating through online forums. Indeed, much recent discussion
has concerned the possibility that information technologies have passed a water-
shed, and creative destruction will produce fewer jobs than it destroys.
A variety of more critical theories explicitly analyze society as a game. Some of
them, popular but frankly rather bland, associate game with play, psychologically
important but lacking serious negative results [8]. In economics, game theories tend
to focus on competition, in which loss can have harsh consequences [9]. In psychol-
ogy and sociology, theories often connect game-playing with role-playing [10]. In
political science, the fundamental Iron Law of Oligarchy, expressed a century ago
by Robert Michels (1876–1936), summarized the dynamics of competition for
power. Originally a member of the European Socialist Movement, Michels noticed
that when advocates for democracy gained power, they tended to behave just like
the old elite they had fought against, exploiting the situation to their own advantage.
He came to believe that human society was caught in what he explicitly called a
Dynamic Structures 119
game, in which the elite would tend to prevail, but in a system that oscillated
between democracy and tyranny [11].
Later we shall let Michels experience his own law, as an avatar in ArcheAge. But
rather than select one theory or theorist through which to explore stratification, we
can turn the gambling tables on this intellectual game, seeking to draw concepts
from a pair of games that have much to teach us. As we explore, we shall discover a
bewildering array of dimensions of inequality, often correlated with each other, but
sometimes only weakly or very indirectly.
Dynamic Structures
Rift and ArcheAge were brought to the North American and European markets by a
small California company named Trion Worlds, and I must admit I greatly admire
its energy and creativity in the highly volatile computer game market. In existence
for less than a decade, Trion has struggled to survive, and perhaps to thrive, follow-
ing a strategy that makes it an especially good example for this chapter. Each of the
games possesses many characteristics shared by several other MMOs, including
earlier ones, but each of them incorporates a large number of medium and small
scale innovations, including connections that extend far beyond California. While
much of this chapter will concern stratification of players’ avatars, these MMOs
actually illustrate five kinds of stratification.
First, of course, is the inequality between players’ avatars, most obviously the
fact that in the typical MMO an avatar ascends a status ladder of experience levels.
Especially in PvP combat, in which one player may defeat another, direct competi-
tion takes place, correlated highly but not perfectly with experience level. Avatars
differ in their wealth in terms of virtual money, and an MMO may have multiple
currencies. Related to their financial status, but not perfectly correlated, is their pos-
session of virtual goods and in some cases of real estate. Status becomes more social
than virtual, when an avatar joins a guild. As we saw in Chap. 4, guilds themselves
may differ in status, such as large versus small guilds, rich versus poor, and accom-
plished versus neophyte.
Second, the non-player characters in a role-playing MMO are connected to each
other in various social structures which have implications for players. Many quests
require first killing a number of rank-and-file enemies, before assassinating their
“boss.” Quest givers are often connected into fictional societies constructed on a
feudal model, even with a king or duke living in a castle surrounded by retainers. In
PvE combat, players prove they are superior to the NPCs they vanquish, and inferior
to the ones that vanquish them. Economic exchange often takes place through avatar
interaction with NPC vendors, and some NPCs serve as class teachers for players’
avatars. Figure 6.1 shows a host of NPC soldiers saluting one of my Rift avatars,
who is looking affectionately at her secondary avatar, an icon of imaginary status if
ever there was one.
Fig. 6.1 An avatar in Rift climbing a stairway toward high status
Third, MMOs and the companies responsible for them compete with each other.
The “king of the hill” in this area, everyone agrees, is World of Warcraft, and Rift is
in direct competition with WoW, as they belong to the same elaborate fantasy genre.
Yet Blizzard, the company behind WoW that is now honored by inclusion in the
Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market index, has vastly more customers and real-
world money that Trion, a huge challenge for the smaller company that amplifies its
motivation to be innovative. At present, the MMO industry seems rather similar in
structure and dynamics to the motion picture industry. Many of the most interesting
movie innovations come from independent film producers, who often must interact
in complex ways with the traditional big movie studios and distribution companies.
Many MMOs were developed by a small independent team, then either taken over
or distributed by a big company, often failing commercially despite having many
good qualities, leading to an exodus of game development personnel who often try
again with another MMO.
Fourth, MMOs exist in a wider system of global competition between nations
and media. Trion World is a perfect example. Rift may be compared with World of
Warcraft, which places it near the center of American MMO culture. ArcheAge, in
contrast, is an adapted form of a Korean MMO, created by XL Games, then adapted
for the Chinese market in collaboration between XL and Tencent Games, and to
western societies in collaboration with Trion. Game developers often use graphics
engines created by other companies, and ArcheAge uses CryEngine 3, developed by
the German company Crytek. South Korea and China are both very active in com-
puter game production, as well as having huge home customer markets. Asian
MMOs have somewhat different design qualities from American or European ones,
in addition to cultural and aesthetic differences, but are competing very aggressively
in the world market.
Rifts in Strata 121
Fifth, MMOs compete and cooperate with other electronic media. The previous
chapter showed how solo-player games can compare with MMOs, technically very
similar but lacking the presence of other real people, and amateur video in YouTube
can extend the scope of a solo game and render it somewhat social. In preparing to
study ArcheAge I made extensive use of YouTube videos, which their creators had
based on exploring the alpha or beta tests before the public release in North America
on September 16, 2014. To view them I often used not a computer but a “smart-TV”
with a huge display screen. After entering ArcheAge myself on October 2, I paid
very close attention to debates about its economic and social stratification dynamics
in two online text-based forums, the official one for the game and the rather intense
MMORPG.COM forum for this MMO. But the most powerful example of cross-
media interaction is Defiance, an MMO which Trion created in connection with the
TV series of the same name on the SyFy cable channel, which I will not explore
here, because I already did so in an earlier book [12].
I had studied Rift earlier, then returned to it immediately after the launch of
ArcheAge. These games can be played for free, but to understand the full status
systems I subscribed to each, and indeed subscribers have some elite advantages
over non-subscribers. Both games assume that players will want to do much killing
of NPCs, but when I began studying Rift and ArcheAge in parallel, the emphasis was
on stratification from the standpoint of the working class. That is, each avatar would
concentrate on gathering economic resources from the environment, and doing the
labor required to craft them into useful and hopefully valuable virtual goods.
Observation of all other aspects of stratification was important, including gaining
some familiarity with PvP without ever killing another player. Thus, my avatars
were peasants, not knights.
Rifts in Strata
As the Great Rift Valley in Kenya illustrates, in geology rifts are massive lines of
disjunction in a stratified structure. One way to think of a social rift is in terms of the
chaotic territory between two highly-stratified feudal societies. Each has its own
status system, but high status in one may not translate into high status in the other.
This is reminiscent of the status disjunctions between unconverged scientific fields,
for example that a Ph.D. anthropologist and chemist may respect each other’s
degrees and universities, but not have any basis to judge the other scientist’s indi-
vidual status within the unfamiliar field. There is one rift of that kind in Rift, the
division between two competing factions that emerged from a broken civilization,
the Guardians and the Defiant. But the name more specifically refers to rifts in real-
ity, that occur violently, unpredictably, and locally, allowing hordes of monsters and
demons to enter, requiring sudden cooperation between players to defeat the invad-
ers and close the rift.
I began Rift March 3, 2011, by creating a Guardian character named Mildryth,
which I took up to experience level 50, the cap at that time. In parallel I took a
Defiant character named Eilliam up to level 20, for both of them doing many of the
ordinary missions, with the goal of understanding the mythical culture of this virtual
world. That phase of intense exploration ended April 24, 2011, and I did not visit
again until October 5, 2014. By then, Rift had become “free to play,” and my two
surviving avatars were tentatively assigned to a new server especially devoted to
trial players who had not subscribed. After subscribing again, I moved the level 50
Guardian to a PvE server named Wolfsbane, and the level 20 Defiant to a PvP server
named Seastone, intending to compare the experience of one avatar who started
with all the advantages of upper class status in an easy environment, with the experi-
ences of a disadvantaged avatar in a difficult environment. Then, seeing the research
advantages of collecting quantitative data on guilds and their members, I created
two more characters, a Guardian on Seastone, and a Guardian on Faeblight which
explicitly encourages role-playing, taking both to level 10, just high enough to reach
their factions’ cities.
In line with the general excellence of the Rift user interface, a really fine system
lets one search all the guilds on one’s home shard (server), limiting the search to
one’s faction on Seastone, and therefore requiring me to have a second avatar there.
For each, a panel appears, with a button that allows one to send a short message to
the guild leadership, and this was the means I used to affiliate Mildryth with The
Elder Geeks and Eilliam with Nerve, two large guilds. Here are their self descrip-
tions, with their membership numbers – counting avatars not players – as of
September 21, 2014, in the original text including word omissions and
typographics:
The Elder Geeks (1,157 members) “TheElderGeeks = Lvl 23; Teamspeak; website; 5 vault
GB, dimension; regular contests, events & games w/prizes; dungeon runs & more. Also
just starting to get into raids. Age 18+ only, please.” Categories: Role-Playing, Leveling,
PvP, Casual, Raiding, World Content, Dungeons
Nerve (1,650 members) “Come join our ranks for some w/pvp action. We have some core
players for Raiding, Great Hunts’s and Dungeons, but we pvp mostly. We have weekly
guild events for all levels, too, so apply now.” Categories: Role-Playing, Leveling, PvP,
Hardcore, Casual, Raiding, World Content, Dungeons
Some of the terms in these advertisements will be unfamiliar to outsiders, thus
showing how language can assert insider status. For example, “GB” refers to a guild
bank, where members may share resources. TeamSpeak is one of the Internet-based
telephone services often used by gamers to coordinate action in realtime. In much
of Seastone’s world, an avatar belonging to one faction is open to attack from one
belonging to the other faction, and “w/pvp” probably refers to “world PvP.” While
members of both factions may belong to The Elder Geeks, only members of the
Defiant faction may belong to Nerve.
The categories at the end of each advertisement belong to a standard set of eight
provided to guild leaders in the interface where they enter their advertisements.
Thus, they are like fixed-choice items in a questionnaire, and can be tabulated as
such. In earlier research I had studied the values expressed through similar survey-
like guild advertisements in two outer-space oriented MMOs, Entropia Universe
Fishing for Honor 123
Table 6.1 Percent of guilds advertising each standard play preference

Preference Wolfsbane (normal) Faeblight (role-play) Seastone (PvP)
Role-playing 32.4 % 61.5 % 44.1 %
PvP 72.4 % 69.7 % 93.0 %
Hardcore 24.1 % 19.7 % 50.9 %
Raiding 61.6 % 52.6 % 69.0 %
Dungeons 88.9 % 86.8 % 89.1 %
Leveling 88.9 % 86.3 % 93.4 %
Casual 94.3 % 92.3 % 89.1 %
World content 80.5 % 81.6 % 82.3 %
TOTAL 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 %
Guilds 370 234 487
and EVE Online [13]. Here, Table 6.1 analyzes category choices in advertisements
of all guilds with at least 20 members on all three shards.
Many guilds may list most of the categories in their advertisement, but not all.
Only on Faeblight, the role-playing shard, do most guilds announce role-playing as
one of their important activities. This means that players will often pretend really to
be their avatars, construct life histories or distinct personalities for them, and be
cautious about discussing aspects of their lives outside the game. In contrast, a
majority of guilds on all three shards list player-versus-player combat, although at
least twenty percentage points higher on the PvP shard. Hardcore can mean violent,
ambitious, or actively playing many hours per week. Raids and dungeons are
instanced areas that are entered only by teams, with 10–20 members in the case of
raids, and 5 in the case of dungeons. Leveling refers to climbing the experience lad-
der, which typically can be done faster in groups, while casual is often taken as an
antonym to hardcore, but also is a vague description of people who play rarely or in
a relaxed manner. World content refers to an appreciation for the Rift quest stories
and virtual world environment, and shows the most equal pattern across the three
shards.
Fishing for Honor
Rift is not only high in quality, but high in complexity. Especially, it contains a vast
number of status ladders, all of which correlate with each other to some degree, but
also many possessing a degree of independence. The main correlation is caused by
the fact that general experience level determines which geographic zones an avatar
may safely enter, thus what resources may be gathered from nature or looted from
enemies, and how much virtual money the avatar has to invest. The best way to
illustrate this was to select one profession that was somewhat distinct from general
experience, and compare what my two original characters could accomplish in it,
given that Mildryth was level 50, and Eilliam only level 20. Additionally, the
profession should connect to some other important variable, and the dependence of
fishing on geography made fishing the ideal choice. Fishing was added to Rift on
April 18, 2012 in an update called Patch 1.8, so neither of my 2011 avatars had
achieved any status in it when the new phase of research began in 2014.
When Mildryth revived after more than 3 years of dreamless sleep, she found
herself in Sanctum, the home Guardian city, in a world that had changed since she
last saw it. Completing a few random missions simply to regain familiarity with the
environment, she discovered that it was now possible to learn how to catch fish, so
she hiked the moderate distance to Argent Glade in the Silverwood zone to take les-
sons from a master fisher NPC named Molly Graysby. Mildryth accepted the Fishing
Lessons quest from Molly, who said:
I love fishing so much – maybe you will too! Here, take this fishing pole, and I’ll teach you
about fishing. Ok, you’re all set. Go down to the water, use your fishing pole, and bring back
the first thing you catch.
[Drag your fishing pole inventory icon to your hotbar. Click the pole icon, then click on
the water. When you see the water splash, click your left or right mouse button once. Then,
if you didn’t loot something, wait for the water to splash again. When it does, click once
again. This cycle may repeat several times, but you’ll always catch something at the end!]
The text in brackets above is what role-playing gamers call OOC, out of charac-
ter, words that Molly herself would not have spoken inside the virtual world, but
were displayed in the interface. Rather quickly, Mildryth caught a lost sea turtle in
a nearby lake and returned it to Molly, earning 21 gold coins for completion of the
mission. Molly then explained that at most locations it was possible to find two dif-
ferent kinds of fishing environment, shallow water and deep water. Soon, Mildryth
had caught a forest pondleaper in shallow water, and a false shark in deep water.
MMOs tend to have two types of activities often called professions. Gathering
collects resources in the environment, and crafting uses resources to manufacture
products. In Rift, fishing has both aspects. Catching the fish is a form of gathering,
but it is also possible to craft things made from them. Molly gave Mildryth a quest
to manufacture a simple fishing lure, an irresistible water snail, using one forest
pondleaper and one smooth minnow. Both gathering and crafting can advance the
avatar up a ladder of fishing skill that is separate from general experience. Before
making the snail lure, Mildryth was level 8 in fishing, and level 9 afterward. Catching
a fish does not automatically increase the fishing skill, and at higher levels it took
several catches to gain one skill level. The function of the snail lure was to prevent
fishing up junk, always gaining a fish. Molly gave Mildryth a rayfin shad lure, which
allowed her to catch rayfin shad fish. In general, lures are temporary enhancements
for fishing, and a variety of lures were useful under different circumstances.
Fish and lures may be sold to NPC vendors or sold in the player-to-player mar-
ket. Thus, fishing confers economic status which may be transformed into other
advantages, for example buying better armor to protect in battle. But it is also pos-
sible to view fishing skill as a mark of status in itself. At skill level 1, Mildryth was
a mere novice, and it took great effort to get her to level 300, the maximum she
could achieve without increasing her general level of experience above the cap she
still experienced at level 50, not having purchased either of the game expansions.
Fishing for Honor 125
Level 300 was called master, which seemed a sufficiently advanced status to have
as her goal. At that point, she had the skill to craft four kinds of lure, and four kinds
of fishing pole arranged in a status ladder.
There was a separate set of status points achievable in fishing, and Mildryth
reached only 145 out of 655. Her first 5 points were earned October 9, 2014 at 5:49,
as the game’s user interface would ever afterwards report, by catching one of each
type of fish found in Silverwood: forest pondleaper, false shark, smooth minnow,
blue widemouth, silverwood angel, and silverwood devil. The primary area of this
virtual world, called Telara, was divided into 12 zones, some of them dominated by
the rival Defiant faction, and she earned an additional 10 points for completing all
of them, thus getting to 12 × 5 = 60 + 10 = 70. More points were earned by catching
rare fish and trophy fish, fishing up treasures, ascending the steps to master status,
and simply through the increasing number of fish she caught, which reached 1804.
Another entire set of status ladders concerned collecting artifacts, many of which
could on rare occasions be fished up, or they could be found scattered across the
landscape. They belong to specific levels of experience, and assemble into collec-
tions. One collection at experience level 10 consisting of three items was Secrets of
the Ascended, described thus in the interface: “While the Ascended Guardians share
their dreams and plans to bring Telara into harmony, there are some things they are
reluctant to speak openly about.” The artifacts were: Feather of the Messenger, Plot
to Kill Orphiel, and Abyssal Book of Names. Several of Mildryth’s collections
either were sets of books or pages that assembled to make a book:
Kobold Creation Story, level 44: “This is a rare written recording of a kobold creation
story.” (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5)
The Sorcerer-Kings, level 50: “This book discusses the tradition of the Sorcerer-Kings
among the Eth of the Shimmersand. (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5)
The Big Book of Eth Conspiracy, level 50: “The Eth with their industrialized sin have not
left Telara, but have arranged for all our troubles as part of an insidious plan.” (The
Ethian Calendar, Arcane Spell Construction, Defiling Sourcestone, Apostate Ascension,
To Kill a God, Dragon Powered Machines)
Books of Black Magic, level 50: “These are filled with the dark secrets taught to Aedraxis
Mathos and others in the corruption of Caer Mathos by the Endless Court.” (Book of
Undeath, Book of Curses, Book of Poisonous Intent, Book of Dark Doctrine, Book of
Hexes, Book of Immortal Rituals)
Moldy Tomes, level 50: “These books are ruined. The pages are illegible and the bindings
are barely holding together.” (torn book, ruined tome, marred novel, scarred book,
defiled encyclopedia, maimed tome, ancient codex, discarded compendium of demons)
Completing a collection constitutes completing a quest, which Mildryth could
turn in to an NPC named Fenric Duboard inside the Sanctum library, where a few
artifact books could also be found. He would reward her with experience, coins, and
a prize which often consisted of lucky coins which could be used to purchase bau-
bles from him. At the end of her research, she had 25 of these coins, enough to
purchase a nice lute on which she could play a few quick measures of tune. Notice
that collecting artifacts could increase status slightly in several ways, including the
subjective sense of becoming a highly cultivated person, with a library and some
appreciation for the high arts. Two of the five book-related collections outlined
above, Kobold Creation Story and The Sorcerer-Kings, actually produced readable
books, although only exceedingly brief. Mildryth’s library contained 16 other read-
able writings she had picked up in her wanderings. To her sorrow, it was not possi-
ble to read any of the books of black magic. Mildryth began her 2014 phase of
research with a considerable number of artifacts already, and bought others from the
player-to-player market, with the significant amount of money she had carried over.
She earned more money selling fish and artifacts that duplicated ones already in her
collection.
Having reached experience level 50, Mildryth was able just barely to complete a
set of instance missions defending the Sanctum against an invasion by monsters,
which gave her access to a high-level zone called Ember Isle where she could com-
plete the fishing goals she had set for herself. In Fig. 6.2, she stands beside the giant,
Cyril Kalmar, Champion of the Guardians, the first ascended soul. To the left stands
the king of the Dwarves, Borrin Gammult, Architect of Sanctum, and to the right,
the Elf priestess, Shyla Starhearth, Pentarch of the Vigil. They are at the entrance to
the Sanctum castle, honoring Mildryth for her defense of their citadel, at the top of
the stairs shown in Fig. 6.1, thus representing progress up a single status system.
Before the battle, she received a glorious rite to mark her great achievements, before
many Guardian NPCs who expressed their adoration, but a sudden attack began a
battle lasting fully 2 hours, ending with the triumphant scene in the picture.
Back in 2011, she had reached skill level 300 in two of her three chosen profes-
sions, apothecary and foraging, and 270 in the third, butchering. In 2014 she took
butchering to 300 and added another new skill, survival, taking it like fishing to 300,
often buying resources for survival crafting from the player-to-player market. Thus,
with some work, she was able to capitalize on the status she already possessed to
gain master status in five professions, plus demonstrating high cultivation in her
Fig. 6.2 The top of the status stairway for a level-50 avatar
Bandit Capitalism 127
collections. She could even interpret her fishing accomplishments as scientific hon-
ors, given that the work required collecting a variety of specimens and learning their
geographic distributions.
What, then, could Eilliam accomplish, given that he was starting at a much lower
level of experience and wealth, and operating in a player-versus-player environment
that added to the dangers of geographic exploration? Very little, as it turned out. He
was able to learn fishing and reach skill level 76, also learning survival to level 72
which gave him the ability to craft 11 foods from fish he caught, such as minnow
dumplings, salt-crusted pondleaper, and false shark soup. Then while fishing at
Granite Falls, he was murdered by a Guardian avatar named Territana, who took
advantage of her freedom to attack a Defiant in this PvP world, having gruesome fun
at his expense. Of course, he could revive, work his way painfully up the experience
levels, often being killed but resurrecting repeatedly. It seems that realism required
me to leave him dead, unworthy of an obituary.
Bandit Capitalism
The virtual world of ArcheAge is best considered as a convergence of two systems:

nature and economy. The natural environment is large and complex, consisting of
three continents, numerous islands, and the ocean between them. The economy is
centered on a sophisticated auction system in which players buy and sell between
each other, but also involves the usual array of non-player vendors. Some commen-
tators classify ArcheAge as a sandpark game, a hybrid of sandbox and themepark,
and indeed players may raise crops and animals on personally-owned farms, and
convert their earnings into weapons and armor for use in combat against other play-
ers. High-level activities consist primarily of PvP battles that may involve very large
numbers of players, including defenders and attackers of player-held fortresses,
who belong to one or the other of the two factions in the game. Given the extreme
emphasis on competition in the marketplace and well as on the battlefield, this is an
excellent MMO in which to examine social stratification.
The three main continents are named Nuia, Haranya, and Auroria. One faction
inhabits Nuia, the western continent, and the other inhabits Haranya, the eastern
one. Auroria, the northern continent, is the location of high-level battles and tempo-
rary seizure of property by large-scale guilds. I ran one avatar up to the level cap of
50 on Nuia, so this geography lesson emphasizes that third of the territory. If we are
to believe the maps, only about half of Nuia is actually accessible: Solzreed
Peninsula, Lilyut Hills, Gwenonid Forest, White Arden, Dewstone Plains,
Marianople, Two Crowns, Cinderstone Moor, Halcyona, Sanddeep, Hellswamp,
and Karkasse Ridgelands. As some of the names correctly imply, their geography
differs moderately, but within a realistic range. Mountains separate them so land
travelers must take certain roads to go from one to another, but it is also possible to
sail one’s own boat along a seacoast shared by most of these regions.
Fig. 6.3 A motorized farm cart driving through the streets of a Metropolis
Transportation can be accomplished in several ways, of which walking is pri-

mary. Early in the ascent of experience levels, each avatar gains a horse. A quest arc
provides a donkey that is slower than the horse but can help carry loads of goods,
either from one’s farm to market, or earning money from NPCs who want loads
delivered for them. There is a limited zeppelin service, and more extensive bus ser-
vice, by way of public transport, and rich farmers tend to have their own road vehi-
cles, one of which is shown in Fig. 6.3.
Each town has a location one may mark as one’s home base, and teleport there at
no cost. But the most common form of teleportation makes use of hereafter stones,
using one to travel within one’s continent to a previously-visited town. These here-
after stones connect the geography to the economy. Making one involves combining
three different kinds of resources. One needs one blue salt wedge, purchased from
an NPC for 5 silver coins. It combines with three stone bricks. Each brick can be
made from three pieces of stone mined from the fairly common iron veins, which
look like small piles of rocks. Thus one needs to start with nine stones. The third
resource required is labor points. A stone brick requires 5, so 15 are needed to make
three bricks, then another 50 are used in making one hereafter stone. Both silver
coins and labor points can be conceptualized as virtual currency, and the broader
economy uses several:
Coins are earned by completing quests, looting coin purses from NPC enemies, and selling
goods to NPC vendors or to other players. They are the most conventional medium of
exchange in ArcheAge, functioning just like real-world money or the virtual coins in
many other MMOs.
Gilda Stars are earned by completing quests or other game objectives, and are used to pur-
chase the blueprints needed to make houses, ships and other important manufactures.
They cannot be exchanged in the market place, and thus provide an independent control
the game designers have over the player economy. Purchases using Gilda Stars are made
on Mirage Island, a showcase for all the houses and other capital goods purchasable
with this specialized currency, accessed through special teleportation portals in urban
centers.
Labor points are used in all gathering and crafting work, and can be obtained in several
ways. ArcheAge is a free-to-play game, that also allows players to subscribe and become
patrons. An ordinary player earns 5 points for every 5 mins online. A patron earns 10
points for every 5 mins online, and 5 points for every 5 mins offline. Players cannot
directly exchange labor points, but an exchangeable item called Worker’s Compensation
does contain them.
One Worker’s Compensation contains 1,000 labor points, and may be sold through the
market place. They can be purchased in the game’s commercial store, at a cost either of
25 loyalty tokens or 300 credits. No more than one every 12 hours may be used.
Loyalty tokens are earned by patrons, 5 for every day during which the player logs into the
game.
Credits are purchased through the game’s marketplace, paying real-world money in
exchange for them.
Tax certificates are used periodically to pay for the right to have a house or farm that occu-
pies land. They can be bought in the store, and traded with other players.
Time is not explicitly a currency, yet notice that labor points, loyalty tokens, tax certificates
and the rate of using Worker’s Compensation are defined in terms of specific
durations.
The game’s commercial store is accessible wherever the avatar happens to be, by
clicking on a prominent icon at the lower right of the screen, and things purchased
are delivered immediately, via a special mail service accessible through an adjacent
icon. During the time I explored ArcheAge, $5 of US currency would buy 750 cred-
its. The best rate was by buying 18,500 credits for $100, implying an exchange rate
of 185 credits per dollar, or $0.0054 per credit. Since 1000 labor points could be
purchased for 300 credits, there was also an exchange rate of about two tenths of a
cent per labor point. Worker’s Compensation units could be sold for virtual coins in
the player auction system, with an exchange rate that varied from minute to minute.
At noon on November 25, 2014, one Worker’s Compensation unit could be bought
for a minimum of 32 gold and 70 silver coins. A 100 silver coins equal one gold
coin, and at this rate a gold coin cost about a US nickel.
Although players could not buy and sell Gilda Stars between them, players could
use Gilda Stars to buy blueprints on Mirage Isle, then sell them in the auction, and
indeed many were for sale at any given moment, effectively converting Gilda Stars
into gold coins. In consequence, almost everything of economic value inside
ArcheAge could be bought indirectly for US dollars, rendering this a “pay-to-win”
game, at least to a significant extent. The traditional subscription system, still fol-
lowed by World of Warcraft and a few other MMOs, required an initial purchase
plus a monthly fee that was typically between 10 and 15 dollars. Thus, players who
could afford the subscription were economically equal with each other, and their
status within the game depended upon their accomplishments including the devel-
opment of social bonds with other players. Being a patron in ArcheAge and many
other contemporary games that combine purchase of virtual currencies with optional
subscriptions, gives an advantage to players willing and able to pay extra.
Economist Edward Castronova argued that the traditional MMO subscription
system asserted a sense of social justice, in which everybody was created equal, and
could gain only through personal effort [14]. He also expressed hopes that this could
support a new egalitarian ethic in the real world, for example ending the practice of
inheritance in which the children of rich parents could gain wealth without earning
it. The “pay-to-win” approach may turn MMOs into casinos, in which people with
a few dollars desperately pay for virtual status, only, on balance, to lose. The player-
versus-player dynamic may exacerbate the problem, as people are forced to defeat
each other in order to gain status, rather than merely needing to defeat non-player
characters who do not suffer when they are defeated.
The fact that virtual valuables can be bought for real-world money is not the only
arguably unfair source of inequality. Also implicated are specific design features of
at least two interrelated kinds: (1) scarcity of land and (2) possibilities for exploits.
Unlike the situation in Age of Conan, where guild cities are instances that can exist
in any number, or in A Tale in the Desert, where buildings may be set up anywhere
in a vast territory, ArcheAge imposed fierce competition for land. The space required
for a house and farm was not large, but in very limited public areas set aside for that
purpose. There was too little land for most players to occupy any.
This meant that the beginning of the game was a land rush, and people who
grabbed land when it was available could hold it so long as they paid their taxes, or
sell it to others, perhaps at a high price. Before the game launched, players were
encouraged to buy founder’s packs costing at least $49.99, which gave them a 4-day
head start over those who wanted to try it on a free-to-play basis before becoming
patrons [15]. Some early players may have grabbed many plots of land, then sold
them to late comers, and during the game’s early weeks many land sale advertise-
ments appeared in the text chat, asking from 350 to 700 gold for relatively small
plots. To hold land, a player needed to pay tax certificates, and the instant the paid-
for time ran out, the property was automatically demolished and another player
could grab it. That gave latecomers some hope that they could get land at low cost
if only they waited.
However, in the game’s own text chat and in online forums I saw many claims
that unscrupulous players were using some kind of plugin or bot program to grab
land as soon as it was available. I cannot verify all the details, but the standard idea
was that the malicious program could be set to respond instantly to the availability
of land, beating out even quick players who were standing ready to click manually
to take the land. YouTube videos seemed to show the process, including one from
the perspective of a player using the ArcheAge Land Grabber software that appeared
to incorporate a database of all property that was near its termination moment [16].
An October 9 advertisement on one of the forums said:
The price of the plugin is $30USD and I accept only BitCoin for the purchase… Current
Features: Provides a list of expiring housing/farm plots and the time when they expire.
Provides “Go To” functionality so you can move your character automatically to the expir-
ing lot. Allows you to enter the item you wish to place on the lot and validate its existence
in your inventory. Allows you to spam the placement of the item on the lot coordinates you
specify. The coordinates are obtained from the list of expiring house/farm plots. [17]
Some forum posts expressed doubts that advertisements like this one were genu-
ine, fearing that one could pay $30 and get nothing in return. Another theory
expressed in the forums held that going to the seller’s website would place malicious
software on one’s computer. However, there is no doubt that ArcheAge was suffering
from manipulation by technically sophisticated thieves. On October 22, a little over
a month after the September 16 launch of ArcheAge in Europe and North America,
a spokesman for Trion using the forum name Scapes posted this forum notice:
Over 17,000 Botting, Hacking, or Spamming Accounts Banned
As players in-game just saw, we’ve announced that 10,000 accounts where third-party
botting, hacking, or spamming software use was detected have now been banned. This is in
addition to the 7,000 accounts banned last night for the same. Also, gold related to those
accounts are being removed from the game’s economy. Accounts that were caught using
third-party botting, hacking, or spamming software will not be unbanned. They’re welcome
to play on a new account legitimately.
UPDATE: We’ve identified a small percentage of accounts banned this week that had
been previously compromised, during which the use of third-party hacking software was
recorded. These accounts are being returned to their rightful owners and reinstated with any
ill-gotten gains removed. [18]
The “spamming software” referred to several practices, including the gold farmer
advertisements seen in the game’s text chat, that may either have been genuine vio-
lations of the game’s rules or enticements for credit card fraud. Here, however, is
one I received on November 21, about a month later:
From: Fdafqgfsd
Title: Successful Auction Notic [sic, no “e” at the end of “Notic”]
21.11.2014
<<WWW,Goldah,COM>>
<<WWW,Goldah,COM>> 100 G = = 5 $
<<WWW,Goldah,COM>> 100 G = = 5 $
Cheap Coupons Code “CC “
Hot Commodity Build Items
Hallowtide Giftpack = = = 2.34 USD
APEX = = = 11.99 USD
Lumber = = = 0.06 USD
Tax Certificate = = = 0.06 USD
The name of the sender, Fdafqgfsd, is clearly a random letter name of the sort
used by bots and scammers, which are common in MMOs that do not require pay-
ment of a purchase or subscription fee. The title makes the message look like a
notice from the auction house, when it appears on the list of messages a player may
open. The URL uses commas rather than periods, presumably expecting the player
to change them. All this is quite suspicious, but both land-grabbing and gold-selling,
real or imagined, reduce players’ sense of fairness in the economic system.
APEX is an item in the game, which any player may on rare occasions earn, that
can be opened to give the avatar 1250 credits, which then may be spent in the real
dollar marketplace. Thus, it offers an alternative to paying real money to get the
items that must be purchased for credits, and seems to mitigate against the unfair-
ness that rich people may buy status in the game. Thus it was discouraging to many
players in mid-November 2014 when it was widely reported that some players had
discovered a trick to get more than 1250 from an APEX. I cannot verify this, but
here’s what some reported: Obtain an APEX. Stand near the portal to Mirage Isle.
Click the APEX to get the credit, and immediately jump through the portal. Doing
so will prevent the APEX from destroying itself, and allow it to be opened again for
another 1250 credits. Jumping and clicking can extract vast sums from a single
APEX. In theory, this would work because destruction of the APEX had to wait for
data to travel to and from the server, somehow interrupted by jumping through the
portal. On November 30, APEX sales and use were halted, at the same time that
unusual lag was reported in communications, followed by temporary shutting down
of ArcheAge altogether.
A similar trick was reported to extract excess value from what players call RNG
boxes. These are little treasure chests, with a variety of names, which can be bought
or found. Again, without verifying by means of experimentation, here is the stan-
dard model of what happened. The “RNG” of the name refers to “Random Number
Generator.” An RNG box is like a one-shot slot machine. Open it, and you receive
one minor consumable such as food and a randomly selected but potentially valu-
able item we can call the prize. Prizes vary greatly in value. Obtain one example of
a very valuable prize and put it in your inventory as a decoy. Leaving two inventory
slots open, fill the rest of it with items that cannot be prizes from the particular kind
of RNG box. Purchase one of the particular RNG boxes that might hold that decoy
prize. It will go into the inventory, leaving one slot empty. Now open the box. It will
place the consumable item into the open inventory slot. Then it will select a prize
based on a random number. Probably, it will not match the decoy, and the box will
stop, generating a notice that the action could not be completed, because there was
not room for the prize in your inventory, and the box remains in your inventory
rather than self-destructing.
If you are standing near an access point to your bank storage space, move the
consumable item there, leaving again one slot empty in your inventory. The RNG
box will have returned to its starting condition, so you can open it again, probably
with the same result, over time obtaining many free consumable items. When the
RNG box at random generates the same prize as your decoy, it will stack it on top
of the decoy and self-destruct. You may then buy another RNG box and start over.
While you steal some value through the consumables, you are effectively forcing
the box to generate only highly valuable items, which you can sell at far more than
the cost of the box.
Whatever the real technical details, two very real exploits along these APEX and
RNG lines were happening in the general period November 15–25, 2014. The Trion
company issued contrite but ambiguous messages suggesting that both of the exploi-
tation models described above were incorrect, yet more than once the in-game real-
dollar marketplace was shut down for several hours. Any programming changes in
the game software apparently needed to be performed by XL Games in Korea,
rather than by Trion.
I must admit sympathy for Trion, who with limited resources were attempting to
mediate between XL Games and the players. Many players wrote rather insulting
Iron and Gold 133
messages on forums, and there was much talk both in the forums and on blogsites
like Massively and MMORPG.COM suggesting that all these problems were caus-
ing players to leave ArcheAge for safer and perhaps fairer MMOs. However, two
theoretical points offer radically different perspectives: Winning in a game by vio-
lating its rules is not really illegitimate, because it follows the exploit rule of the
computer metagame: You may win by any technically feasible means [19]. What
seems superficially to be unfairness in a computer game may merely reflect the fact
that human life is not fair.
Iron and Gold
My avatar Michels entered ArcheAge on the Nuia continent, October 2, 2014, to

assess the Iron Law of Oligarchy proposed a century earlier by his namesake, Robert
Michels, and reached the experience level cap of 50 on November 13, but kept
exploring for another month. It is said that at level 30, ArcheAge shifts from being
PvE to PvP, and indeed this is the level after which combat against players in the
other of the two factions becomes crucially important, and the point at which the
player may complete the main story quest arc. Each of the six races has a different
story, but Michels was a member of the Nuian race, named for the goddess Nuia, as
was the continent they shared with allied races.
Nuia had been a noblewoman, elevated to divinity when she saved her people
through magic that transported them away from disaster in their native Auroria, to a
new continent they named after her. The story experienced by Michels involved a
beautiful young woman named Marian, of uncertain origins, and a strange glowing
birthmark on his own arm. At various points, a cut scene explained aspects of this
complex myth, for example in the following text from two of them, the first from the
beginning and the second near the middle of the arc:
A firefly sting. That’s what they’d called the birthmark on your arm when you were a child.
But occasionally, it would flare up, producing its own light, and you saw the worried looks
it got. Its bizarrely regular shape would gleam on your skin like a torch. You’d never met
anyone else with one; you’d never even heard about anyone else with one. The land of your
birth was filled with legends… …the Library Expedition, the 12 adventurers who’d found
the birthplace of the worlds… the resulting exodus from Auroria, the northern continent…
…the settling of what was now Nuia. But in all the legends, there was no mention of anyone
with a gold, rune-like mark on their arm. It was a perfect anomaly…
It had always been clear that Marian came from wealth and breeding… but seeing her
guards, it struck you that she might not only be rich, but noble. Long ago, the ruling queen
was an elegant woman named Marian. She was forever memorialized in the name of the
city of Marianople. Three powerful families still ruled the city, vying for power between
them. Each named their daughters Marian, in the hopes of fating her to be the next queen.
And, of course, fating her family to ride her coattails to new heights of prominence and
wealth. Naturally, many commoners secretly named their daughters Marian for the same
reason… …but commoners didn’t typically have cadres of loyal guards. The Marian who’d
found you could be of noble blood -- a powerful ally, indeed.
Fig. 6.4 Riding past the crafting facilities in the town of Lacton in ArcheAge
When Michels first met Marian, her lodestone caused his runic birthmark to glow
brightly. The arc climaxed with her death, yet the birthmark brought her back to life
then vanished, as did she. Notice how deeply the story concerned social status.
Michels carried a divine mark. Marian apparently belonged to a noble family, yet
she respected Michels. Perhaps she was divine, and her death was a sacrifice like
that of Jesus. Yet Michels restored her to mortal life, at the cost of his only symbol
of transcendence. Indeed, very many of the ordinary quests around Marianople
involved oppression of serfs and peasants by nobility, and ignoble conflict among
the nobles. Yet for Michels, the main story arc ended in disappointment, because
Marian disappeared, and he seemed fated to become an ordinary farmer.
Except, he could not obtain any farmland. It was obvious when his exploration
began that all the land suitable for houses and farms had already been taken. He
found an area where 15 iron veins were arranged in a long line beside a ridge, such
that when he mined the last one the first one had restored, so he could mine them
endlessly, gaining experience, stone, iron and occasionally other metals. He would
then go to the crafting area shown in Fig. 6.4, smelt the metal into ingots and make
hereafter stones he could sell for gold in the auction. All this work transformed labor
points into experience, and something like half the points needed to get him to level
50 came through this labor.
A series of animal-raising missions assigned by Farmer Makella in Windshade
town illustrates the dubious nature of many claims to social status. He is an agent
for the Blue Salt Brotherhood that gives many quests, rewards, and status symbols
throughout ArcheAge. The first in the series, Raising Ducks, expects the player to
raise some ducklings to adulthood, feeding them ground grain, then deliver 30 units
of duck meat to Makella. Michels believed he could raise ducks in a public farm, but
Iron and Gold 135
Table 6.2 The various final status levels across professions of Michels
High Medium Low
Mining 20,000 Husbandry 655 Farming 89
Masonry 20,000 Logging 455 Construction 10
Fishing 10,310 Gathering 436 Weaponry 5
Handicrafts 10,105 Commerce 295 Cooking 0
Metalwork 9655 Machining 275 Leatherwork 0
Carpentry 5295 Tailoring 100 Printing 0
Larceny 1773 Alchemy 89 Artistry 0
he felt this would be shameful, because he really wanted the status of independent
farmer owning his own land. So, rather than raising any ducks anywhere, he bought
duck meat from another player through the local auctioneer. Next, Makella told
Michels to raise turkeys and deliver 20 units of turkey meat, followed by similar
assignments involving sheep to get mutton, pigs to get pork, dairy cows to get milk
and beef, and goats to get both meat and horns. His last such mission expected him
to collect many eggs from chickens to get three rare golden eggs. Clearly, this
sequence of tasks was designed to train Michels in the skills required to raise farm
animals, but in each case he bought the required items from the auction. The pay-
ment he received for completing the work included experience and money, but more
notably a full farmer’s outfit from boots to hat, and the exalted Blue Salt status of
Ranch Hand.
As can be seen in Table 6.2, Michels reached only level 89 in the farming skill,
through some very limited work in public farms. Mining, his main source of wealth,
reached 20,000, as did Masonry that processed the material he mined. To go above
level 20,000, he would have had to pay considerable money, and well as to labor
incessantly. Fishing and handicrafts had passed level 10,000, and metalwork was
nearing it largely on the basis of manufacturing thousands of fish hooks. The car-
pentry skill provided lumber and some valuable equipment that required it.
Unfortunately, very few trees could be chopped down, the majority on farmland that
limited chopping to the land’s owner, and very few of the thousands of trees on
public land could be chopped. Because of the scarcity of land, a few players planted
crops or trees in distant locations, and Michels tried this as well, often finding that
someone had stolen what he planted, and becoming an avid thief in return, grabbing
anything harvestable regardless of its ownership. Unfortunately, this did not work
on farms whose owners had paid their taxes.
Michels joined a guild, hoping that contributions to it could allow him to gain
status, but its membership faded away, and the second guild he joined never grew.
His third guild advocated piracy, a response to landlessness that ArcheAge encour-
ages, and members grumped in their chat about the unavailability of land. His fourth
and final guild was more cordial, but would have required him either to join the
battle on Auroria or tend a farm, but land remained scarce. He did get a little
experience raising very limited crops and livestock in public gardens, and a small
temporary garden already near 50. In desperation he bought the blueprint required
to have an underwater garden, but never found a site where he could try that bizarre
approach.
While waiting for land to become available, he invested about 250 gold coins
buying the raw materials and design required to build a farm cart, earned chiefly by
cashing in loyalty tokens, having exhausted his interest in mining. He also manufac-
tured a fancy sailing craft, called an Adventure Clipper Ship, and began developing
skills as a fisherman. Suddenly, one day, he saw that his occasional theft of trees and
vegetables other players had planted in public land had been noticed, and he was
wanted by the police. Once, as a tourist, he had visited the court in Marianople
where criminal avatars were tried by juries of their peers, often leading to imprison-
ment. And so, in the end he fled, stocking up on lures, bait, and fishing poles, taking
his horse, donkey and farm cart with him, and sailing off into the ocean, never to be
seen again.
Conclusion
Rift and ArcheAge on all their several servers were like a guild of games, intensely
focused on upward social mobility, and thus battling for a position among the elite
games, following the Iron Law of Oligarchy. These two games offer players many
kinds of compensatory social status. But mobility has a price, in terms of time,
money, and skill acquisition. The Iron Law describes an endless contest, in which
one can never achieve permanent aristocracy, as illustrated by the expansion from
60 to 65 in Rift’s experience levels, and the need to keep paying taxes and endless
other fees in order to hold land in ArcheAge. Thinking back to the end of the first
chapter of this book, what happened to the virtual Roman aristocracy as all their
estates vanished when Gods and Heroes failed? For sake of social-science argu-
ment, however, let us assume that social status in MMOs is substantially real. Then
we can question the ethics of allowing computer nerds and similar techies to buy or
earn social status through advanced technology that most people are incapable of
mastering.
Beneath the surface of public awareness, a debate has raged for some years about
the morality of allowing some people to employ technologies to become abnormally
effective in competition against other people [20]. Many contributors to the
Convergence reports addressed this issue, often having biological enhancement in
mind and offering philosophical analyses suggesting that traditional norms no lon-
ger apply. For example, Andy Miah considered biological enhancements for sports
competitors that went far beyond the use of performance-improving drugs, identify-
ing many direct and indirect ethical issues, and concluding that it would become
progressively more difficult to agree upon a clear definition of “artificial enhance-
ment” [21]. Wrye Sententia considered the neuroethics of memory enhancing drugs,
thus focusing on mental rather than athletic abilities, and Zack Lynch explained how
a diversity of future neurotechnologies is likely to render the situation ever more
problematic [22]. Julian Savulescu considered similar issues and concluded that the
Conclusion 137
best ethical principle was providing a good life for the individual person involved,
which might not be compatible with competition within a society organized like a
game [23].
Currently, society takes for granted the use of “assistive technologies” to assist
“disabled” people to live normal lives, but this assumes a clear definition of “dis-
abled.” In the very first of the Converging Technology books, Gregor Wolbring
argued against the popular stereotype of “disability,” while supporting efforts to
remove physical and cultural barriers that may discourage some segments of the
population for playing significant roles in charting the course of scientific and engi-
neering progress:
This is not merely an issue of fairness to diverse groups of people, including the disabled.
It is also an issue of imagination and insight. Convergent technologies will accomplish
much more for humanity, and unification of science will lead to much greater knowledge,
if they are free of the ignorant prejudices of the past. Specifically, science and engineering
will benefit from the varied perspectives that the disabled may have about what it means to
improve human performance. One essential tool to achieve this is to make sure that the
teams of researchers, designers, and policy makers include many talented people who hap-
pen to be disabled. [24]
Writing in one of the Convergent reports, Transhumanist leaders Anders Sandberg

and Nick Bostrom offer a clarifying concept: “Cognitive enhancement may be
defined as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind through
improvement or augmentation of internal or external information processing sys-
tems” [25]. Thus, a player in ArcheAge, who uses a bot program to buy land before
players lacking such a tool can do so, is merely exploiting an external information
processing system. Similarly a scholar writing a book who is adept at finding aca-
demic references online is using technology to enhance an ability that may already
be above average. James J. Hughes, also active in the Transhumanist Movement,
contributed a Convergence chapter suggested that no single ethical perspective can
resolve issues like these, and the future of technopolitics is likely to be a complex,
dynamic interplay between conservatives and progressives along three dimensions:
culture, economics, and technology [26]. Writing in the recent Handbook, George
Khushf concludes that only the collaboration enabled by convergence of all fields of
human endeavor can see beyond outdated conventions, and develop ethical under-
standings adequate for the human future [27].
Virtual worlds can be considered simulations of the real world, and as such they
may help us explore social issues such as the ethics of competition when money and
access to advanced technology are unequal. As this chapter and the previous one
showed, there may exist many means by which an individual player may escape
some of the restrictions built into the rules of a game or the if-then strictures of a
computer program. In solo-player games this may only very indirectly affect other
players, but in multiplayer-games the consequences can be quite significant. Players
can agree to follow the rules, and treat the game as mere play, but as soon as any of
them take the contest seriously, the motivation to depart from the rules begins to
grow. This dynamic can be conceptualized in terms of the convergence-divergence
process, and in the real world there is no assurance it will ever achieve stability.
Indeed, the Iron Law implies that human life will oscillate between different forms
of injustice. In more subtle but equally powerful ways, these principles will reap-
pear in the three concluding chapters, but first we need to consider dimensions of
online virtual worlds that are not so closely tied to social status, language and cul-
ture more broadly defined.
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Springer, pp. 795–814
Chapter 7
Linguistic Convergence and Divergence
in Middle Earth
Many of the social scientists considered in this book were theorists, including some
who also worked in various ways with empirical data, so for contrast this chapter
will consider a scholar who was skeptical of theory in his area, and dedicated to
documentation of vast troves of information. He was Angus McIntosh (1914–2005),
a leader in historical linguistics, who was a friend and student of J. R. R. Tolkien,
the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. An avatar based on
McIntosh will lead a team collecting linguistic data inside The Lord of the Rings
Online (LotRO), the virtual version of the literary Middle Earth imagined by
Tolkien. A study can be relatively atheoretical without being anti-intellectual, and
we shall draw ideas that could be framed as hypotheses, but without any strong
commitment to a generalized conceptual framework. The central research questions
concern divergences between languages, as reflected in proper names and transla-
tion of phrases. In Lord of the Rings Online, four cultures have converged for a
common ethical purpose: Humans, Hobbits, Dwarves, and Elves. Yet these four
fictional societies retain linguistic separation, even as players who role-play often
speak in what they imagine to be archaic colloquialisms. Although Tolkien wrote in
English, he imagined the Elf language, and was motivated to a great extent to the
suffering caused by wars between English and German speaking nations. Thus we
shall compare the English and German versions of the game, aware that these are
the two most popular brother languages in the Germanic branch of the Indo-
European family.
Historical Dialectology
Googling “Angus McIntosh” today is likely to turn up, as the first hit, the Angus
McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in
Scotland. Originally founded by him in 1952 as the Institute for Historical
Dialectology, the institute is the world’s leader in charting historical linguistic

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_7
142 7 Linguistic Convergence and Divergence in Middle Earth
variation across Scotland and England. His obituary on the website of University of
Edinburgh notes his involvement in the tremendously important British cryptogra-
phy facility of the Second World War, Bletchley Park:
The war interrupted his academic career, though not his intellectual development. A brief
spell as trooper in the Tank Corps was followed by service as a major in Military Intelligence.
The latter was to have a lasting effect on his career and his most significant posting was
Bletchley. Here, with many of his university peers turned cryptographers and translators, he
played his part in decrypting the German military communication Enigma codes. Against
his backdrop of philological training he witnessed the beginnings of modern computing.
Faced with numbers, an essentially qualitative research instinct began to foresee the poten-
tial of computers as a tool for linguistic analysis. Bletchley was to influence profoundly his
thinking about empirical research questions in the history of English: eventually it would
shape his entire approach to his subject [1].
When I first visited the Centre in 1956, it was involved in a major project to
document contemporary Scots dialectology, but its primary accomplishment, com-
pleted only after a third of a century of work, was an exhaustive documentation of
geographical variations in English vocabulary and to some extent grammar in the
century 1350–1450 [2]. As I wrote in Personality Capture and Emulation:
Angus’s magnum opus was A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, which took many
years to create with M. L. Samuels and Michael Benskin as co-authors plus a team of junior
scholars who went on to accomplish their own successes in later decades. Published in
1986, this is a four-volume work, based on applying a linguistic questionnaire to a thousand
English manuscripts that could be identified in terms of their geographic origin. The third
volume is a set of maps, showing how a word or linguistic construction varied across
England. A crucial scientific point to note is that the maps are all different, some very much
so, because communication patterns vary by the sector of human life the words concern.
Words relating to family relations may be determined very much by local culture, while
words and word forms having to do with economic exchange could have a wider geo-
graphic distribution determined by trading patterns. Variations may also reflect sequences
of historical events, that shaped different parts of language at different times in different
places [3].
McIntosh was kind enough to send me a copy of this massive work in 1986, but
today anyone may access it online [4]. In his introduction, he implicitly expressed
his own fundamental view of historical linguistics:
The material presented in the Atlas may strike students of the history of the language as
dauntingly complex. It is to be hoped, however, that those who use and build on it will come
to illuminate the order which underlies that complexity so that it will at least be found to
manifest what Herbert Spencer, in another context, calls a ‘coherent heterogeneity’. The
present work does not even attempt elaborate clarifications of the phenomena displayed in
it but it may serve to make this task a little easier for others. I believe that for us to have
attempted anything such ourselves would have made impossible the completion of the pres-
ent work within the lifetime of its initiators [5].
Thus, McIntosh did not deny the possibility of discovering meaningful patterns
in the data, possibly even capturing them in a general theory of language, but did not
consider that to be his task. Computers were used to manage the data, but were not
aggressively employed to analyze them. Yet McIntosh was an advocate of advanced
computation, and one of his closest associates was Michael Halliday, a leader in
Historical Dialectology 143
theoretical linguistics and pioneer in computer translation. Their joint publication,

Patterns of Language, contained 11 papers, six written by McIntosh, five written by
Haliday, but none co-authored. Halliday’s most influential chapter was titled
“Linguistics and Machine Translation,” and is today regarded as a classic in that
field. The following chapter, by McIntosh, is also about machine translation,
although the coy title does not reveal that fact: “A Four-Letter Word in ‘Lady
Chatterley’s Lover’” [6].
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an erotic novel by D. H. Lawrence that could not be
published in Britain without significant expurgation until 1960, the year in which
McIntosh wrote his paper about it, and during which the book was the focus of a
very public obscenity trial [7]. “Four-Letter Word” is a synonym for obscene in
ordinary language, and taboo word in linguistics [8]. The word McIntosh analyzed
was know, suggesting that his topic was carnal knowledge. But that was not the
case. He had found 293 instances of this verb in the novel, and analyzed the chal-
lenges of translating it into the French language. When I enter this simple, four-
letter word into Google Translate and request the French equivalent, I get savoir, but
with notes acknowledging that there are other alternatives, most prominent of which
is connaître. McIntosh did his own human job of translating each usage, getting 253
instances of savoir, and just 40 instances of connaître. How, then, could a computer
program do the translation most appropriately? McIntosh observed that always
translating know as savoir would give a low error rate, but be far from ideal. In his
1960 paper, McIntosh suggested that rules could handle most of the cases of know
in Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
1. If know has a clause object, select savoir (136 instances, all correct), if this is not the
case, apply other rules.
2. If know has no object, select savoir (60 instances, all correct)
3. If know has a pronoun object, and it refers to a person, select connaître. (12 instances,
all correct)
4. If know has a pronoun object, and it does not refer to a person, select savoir (30 instances,
28 correct)
This does not handle all the cases, and the last rule causes occasional errors.
McIntosh’s explicit point is that including grammar in the rules for machine transla-
tion can help solve – but not totally solve – a nagging problem sometimes called
word sense disambiguation [9]. A more subtle point is that machine translation can-
not ever be entirely accurate, unless the computer can think like human beings,
indeed like the specific human being who wrote the words in the first place. A very
different but compatible school of thought, always rather controversial in linguis-
tics, is General Semantics, a philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski who pro-
claimed: The word is not the thing. The map is not the territory [10]. That is to say
that human language is not simply description of a verifiable, external, unambigu-
ous, empirical situation.
In computer science, that four-letter word, word, is used to denote the natural
number of bits managed as a unit by particular hardware, but in lexicology even the
meaning of word is uncertain [11]. In information science, many metaphors describe
only approximately the meaning of the bits in a computer’s memory, for example in
Table 7.1 A team of avatars for linguistics in Lord of the Rings Online
Name Angusmcintosh Rumilisoun Ogburn Anraeda Anraeda
Gender Male Female Male Female Female
Race Hobbit Elf Dwarf Human Human
Class burglar lore-master minstrel minstrel Barde
Server Gladden Gladden Landroval Laurelin Belegaer
Name
Server Normal Normal Role- Role-Playing Role-Playing
Type Playing
Encouraged
Language English English English English German
Level 20 100 25 25 13
Reached
Hours 38 593 42 81 14
Operated
Role Central Extensive Music Observing Observing
coordination exploration crafting conversation conversation
terms of the scope of aggregation: bit, byte, data, metadata, information, knowl-
edge, wisdom. Indeed, the nomenclatures of all sciences and fields of engineering
are rife with metaphors, ambiguities, and transformation of meaning from one time
and context to another [12].
A four-letter word can be a cautionary tale, and McIntosh argued that the lower
levels of data collection and analysis were necessary preconditions for higher-level
theoretical interpretation. In his major projects, he worked in a team. Combining
these two principles, I used a team of five avatars to explore language usage in Lord
of the Rings Online, and will summarize their findings in several areas. Table 7.1
describes the avatars, the fictional races to which they belonged, and the different
variants of LotRO they inhabited.
The total investment of research time in this virtual world was 768 hours. For a
different research project, I created an Ogburn like the one featured in Chap. 2, to
explore music technology, so here we will chiefly use the data collected by the four
other members of the team. Our focus will be on how language is employed inside
this virtual world, including comparison of versions of it using two of the world’s
major languages, English and German.
The Value of a Treasure
J. R. R. Tolkien loved to invent fictional languages, but they play hardly any role in
LotRO [13]. One word especially stands out, however, mathom. He did not invent
this word, but took it from ancient Anglo-Saxon or Old English, where it was often
spelled māþum [14]. The online reference source Wiktionary gives this etymology
for mathom:
The Value of a Treasure 145
From Old English māþum (“treasure, object of value, jewel, ornament, gift”), from Proto-
Germanic *maiþmaz (“present, gift”), from Proto-Indo-European *moyt-, *meyt- (“to
exchange”), from Proto-Indo-European *mey- (“to exchange, swap”)… The word survived
into Middle English as mathem, madme (“treasure”), but became obsolete thereafter. It was
revived by J. R. R. Tolkien in Lord of the Rings [15].
The online Tolkien reference site, Tolkien Gateway, refers to a place for keeping
mathoms: “The Mathom-house was a museum-like building in Michel Delving
where the Hobbits collected and displayed ‘mathoms’: items for which they had no
particular use” [16]. The Tolkien Gateway also has a page about Angus McIntosh,
noting the theory that he helped inspire Tolkien to write about Hobbits and report-
ing: “Like Tolkien, McIntosh was enrolled in the British Army to decrypt Enigma
codes during World War II. At war’s end, he returned to a lectureship at Christ
Church Oxford, conducting seminars on Middle English with Tolkien, among other
things. In 1948, McIntosh moved to the University of Edinburgh, where Tolkien and
his daughter Priscilla were to visit him and his wife in July, 1973” [17]. Given these
connections, and the fact that all names in LotRO are single words, my Hobbit ava-
tar needed to be named Angusmcintosh and to visit the Michel Delving Mathom
House, as shown in Fig. 7.1.
Not all visitors could enter this special treasurehouse, not even if they were
Hobbits. When Angusmcintosh initially went to the Mathom House, on April 21,
2010, he first encountered Keeper Brombard Foxtail who assigned him a mission
Fig. 7.1 The Hobbit, Angusmcintosh, standing outside the Mathom House
concerning a document about the original legal establishment of the Shire as the
home of Hobbits, an exceedingly important mathom. He then spoke with Grelong
Bottomley, who explained that mathoms need not be of such fabulous value:
Hullo there, my young Hobbit, have you come to have a look around, or perhaps you’re
looking to make a donation to our worthy Mathom House? We accept all kinds of mathoms
you know, it’s amazing the odds and ends that Hobbits young and old have managed to col-
lect and what you can see here runs the whole gamut! If you ask me, this old museum says
more about us Hobbits than any old book or story could hope to tell. Right now we’re look-
ing for mathoms that have been given as gifts for some kindness or aid rendered. The stories
behind such objects are of great interest to us, regardless of what the mathom itself might
be. Anything you could bring us along those lines would be a fine gesture indeed.
Consider the language used. Hullo is an archaic or dialect form of hello. The
word look is used in three different senses, if we believe that looking to means
intending to and looking for means seeking. Mathoms seem to have value not
because they can be sold for money, or provide physical nourishment or security,
but because they tell stories. Yet telling is something that words do, not objects, in
ordinary language. It is an open question whether societies really differ in their
fundamental values, or only in superficial ways [18]. Yet Hobbits seem to value
mathoms more than Elves, Dwarves or Humans do.
As it happened, Angusmcintosh had already reached experience level 9, and pos-
sessed a gift mathom he earned from another Hobbit for a good deed, so he gave it
to Bottomley. This had the effect of increasing his positive reputation with the
Mathom Society. A LotRO wiki article about reputation explains: “Throughout
Middle-earth there are various factions, who may reward you if you gain sufficient
standing (reputation) in their eyes. Reputation may be gained by completing quests,
defeating specific mobs, turning in specific mob-drop items, crafting items, and
completing deeds” [19]. (Note the word mob, which does not mean a disorderly
crowd but in gamer lingo is a contraction of mobile and refers to an NPC that can
engage in combat.) Angusmcintosh began at neutral reputation with the Mathom
Guild, and had to reach acquaintance reputation to enter the Mathom House, which
required earning 10,000 points. Donating each Gift mathom earned him 700 points,
but at acquaintance reputation he could no longer gather gift mathoms, but only
ordinary mathoms worth just 30 points each.
At the very end of his research, on December 6, 2014, I decided he should increase
his reputation above acquaintance level, and at that point he happened to have in his
inventory many mathoms Rumilisoun had sent him, 57 ordinary mathoms and 10
well-kept mathoms which like the original gift mathoms were worth fully 700 reputa-
tion points, which she had earned on her ascent to experience level 100. Rumilisoun
had also sent gold coins to Angusmcintosh, so he went to the auction house in Bree
city, where he found that 100 well-kept mathoms could be purchased for 30 gold coins,
which he proceeded to do. The reputation levels for the Mathom Guild are: neutral,
acquaintance, friend, ally, and kindred, each conferring symbolic and material advan-
tages, such as reduced costs for services in the area, and a title that could be displayed.
Within a very few minutes, Angusmcintosh was able to buy his way up to the maxi-
mum kindred level, at which point he could buy from a vendor in the Mathom House
a beautiful golden Mathom Society uniform and a cute pony he could ride around.
Proper Names 147
Notice that gaining entry with an acquaintance relationship to the Mathom

Society required doing good deeds for Hobbits. But now he could buy improved
reputation for gold, even gold he himself had not earned. Thus mathoms may have
different meanings, depending upon how they were obtained, but that meaning may
not have material consequences. As a test, I checked the avatar team and discovered
that Ogburn had no reputation points yet with the Mathom Society. He was not rich,
like Rumilisoun, being only level 25 to her 100, and being on a different server she
could not mail him money inside LotRO. But he was able to sell the contents of his
inventory to have enough money to buy 100 ordinary mathoms for one gold coin
plus 200 silver coins, and 10 well-kept mathoms for two gold coins, at the Bree auc-
tion house. This did indeed increase his reputation sufficiently that he was able to
enter the Mathom House.
Ideally, however, most members would treat the Mathom Society as a real center
for social activity, with an emotional attachment and a sense of membership in a
community of Hobbits. The LotRO wiki says:
The Mathom Society is a reputation faction located in the Mathom-house in the Shire. The
Hobbits of the Shire enjoy many fine leisure activities when they are not so busy eating or
growing food. One such activity is the collection of mathoms, items that hobbits have no
particular use for but hold onto anyway. The Mathom Society are a group of hobbits dedi-
cated to the collection of such items, and they scour the countryside in search of new items
to add to their collection, when they aren’t busy planning a mathom society dinner that is!
[20]
The Mathom Society members enjoy many lavish feasts, and they routinely need to
restock their supply of various foods and drinks. Cooks who donate these delicacies can
gain reputation with the Society. The Mathom-house offers adventurers in good standing
with the Society the use of a Workbench and a Superior Study [21].
A standard observation in modern linguistics is that language can function to

support social solidarity, as well as to communicate impersonal information [22].
Social scientists have long considered the exchange of gifts in symbolic terms, and
their capacity to substitute for words and to strengthen the meaning of words [23].
In a very literal sense, therefore, mathom is a term of endearment.
Proper Names
Readers of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings became familiar with many names of
characters belonging to four friendly but distinct cultures: Hobbits, Men (Humans),
Elves, and Dwarves [24]. The hero of The Hobbit was Bilbo Baggins, and of the
trilogy that followed, his nephew, Frodo Baggins. Frodo was supported by three
Hobbit friends: Samwise Gamgee, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Peregrin Took,
names that seem to play with common nouns in the English language. Key “Men”
characters are Aragorn (also called Strider) and Boromir. Their fellowship includes
one Elf, Legolas, and one Dwarf, Gimli. The wizard Gandalf appears to belong to a
fifth race. When creating an avatar in LotRO, a player must select one of the four
main races, either male or female gender, and a name. Therefore, we can wonder if
players gave somewhat different styles of name to members of the four races, whose
cultures and modal personalities were distinct in the Tolkien mythos.
The first thing to note is that all avatar names are limited to one word, despite the
fact that many NPC Hobbit names are two words. Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins
share the family name Baggins. Already, at the Mathom House, we met two Hobbits
with the names Brombard Foxtail and Grelong Bottomley, and another Foxtail was
also in the neighborhood. But the Hobbit in the research team could not be named
Angus McIntosh, because the software would not allow it, but Angusmcintosh.
Throughout the Tolkien mythos, names are important, and aside from Hobbits
many are single words. The selection and pronunciation of names differ across
human languages. Thus we would expect the names of avatars to differ somewhat
across the four races. To explore this hypothesis with a substantial body of real data,
in mid-2014 I tabulated the race and name of fully 3194 avatars who had been reg-
istered on a website devoted to the role-playing Laurelin server, laurelinarchives.
org. Of these, humans were most common, totaling 1761, with Elves in second
place at 860, Hobbits next with 353, and Dwarves most rare at 220.
Many websites explain how to invent new names for members of the four main
races of LotRO, including the race page on the LotRO wiki. Simple principles are
offered for two of the races: “Dwarves tend towards short, simple Norse-styled
names.” Among Hobbits: “Men usually take very simple names ending in -o, or
aristocratic names drawing from the Frankish and Gothic languages… Women take
simple names ending in -a, or are named after flowers or jewels” [25]. Indeed,
Dwarf names were the shortest in the sample, averaging 6.6 letters in length, but the
“simple” names of Hobbits were not significantly longer, averaging 6.7 letters. The
longest names tended to belong to Elves, at 8.0 letters on average, compared with
7.1 letters for Humans. While the cultures of Dwarves and Hobbits seem to be con-
nected to actual European cultures of the past – Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Frankish,
Gothic – the Elves represent an exotic culture, and their names are in the fictional
Sindarin language.
The 3194 avatar names can be studied in many different ways. For example, I
checked to see if the 860 Elves had names that were simply the result of following
the advice on the wiki, selecting the gender of the avatar, then combining one prefix
with one ending from this chart:
Male Prefixes Adan-, Aeg-, Am-, Aran-, Bara-, Beleg-, Celeb-, Curu-, Dag-,
El-, Fela-, Fin-, Gal-, Gil-, Hal-, Ing-, Lin-, Mal-, Pen-, Tar-,
Thurin-, Ul-
Male Endings -adan, -aran, -bor, -born, -dir, -dor, -had, -ion, -las, -moth, -or,
-phant, -phor, -randir, -ras, -rod, -rond, -ros, -thalion, -thir, -
uil, -we
Female Prefixes Adan-, And-, Ar-, Bel-, Breg-, Celeb-, Dol-, Edhel-, El-, Fan-,
Find-, Galadh-, Gil-, Hir-, Ior-, Ir-, Lal-, Mel-, Mor-, Nim-,
Rod-, Sael-, Tinu-
Female Endings -anor, -dal, -dis, -el, -eth, -iel, -il, -gil, -los, -raen, -reth, -riel, -
rian, -rien, -uilas, -uilos, -wen, -wing
Tavern Chatting 149
Table 7.2 Use of common vowels in 3194 LotRO avatar names

Total (%) Man (%) Elf (%) Hobbit (%) Dwarf (%)
A 12.1 12.9 11.8 11.6 7.8
E 10.3 10.6 11.7 8.7 3.9
I 9.1 7.6 11.8 8.2 11.6
O 5.2 4.9 4.3 8.3 7.4
U 2.4 2.2 2.4 2.5 4.5
Total 39.2 38.2 41.9 39.4 35.2
A male Elf could be named Adanadan, Adanaran, Adanbor, Adanborn, etc. But I
found that so few of the 860 names followed this pattern that those few matches
could have been by pure chance. At the present time, many websites offer to gener-
ate Elf names, or Hobbit names, but I have no evidence that the LotRO players used
them. Rather, they seemed to have a sense of the flavor of names in each race, as we
already saw in the case of name length, and now can check in terms of vowel and
consonant frequency. Table 7.2 shows the frequencies of the five common vowels in
the complete sample and across the four races.
Elves and Men differ chiefly in their preference for I, Elves using this letter more
frequently than Men. Hobbits are somewhat more enthusiastic about O, as in the
case of the two heroes, Bilbo and Frodo. Dwarfs share the Elven preference for I
and rate U more highly than others but still using it only rarely. Dwarves are notice-
ably less enthusiastic about A and E than the other races. Table 7.3 reports the same
analysis for consonants, putting them in descending order of frequency in the total
sample.
Dwarves rate R more highly, and L below the others. In general, the four LotRO
races do differ in the frequency of the use of letters, but not to an extreme degree.
Counting letters is not the same as counting phonemes [26]. Sometimes Y is a vowel
rather than a consonant, but depending upon which British languages we are dealing
with, W could be a vowel as well, as in the Welch word cwm (pronounced koom),
referring to a valley or grotto, which occasionally appears in English.
Tavern Chatting
In the famous Bree tavern called The Prancing Pony, players often socialize while
role-playing, pretending really to be Hobbits, Dwarves or Elves [27]. Therefore I
sent both Anraedas to the versions of this tavern on the role-playing servers, to listen
to the conversation and thereby do ethnography [28]. It was easy to record, because
LotRO allows one to save all the text in chat, automatically. The German-language
server seemed less heavily populated, but there were enough avatars in the tavern on
some hours to explore how much English they were mixing in with their native
German, and it turned out they did very little borrowing [29].
Table 7.3 Use of consonants in 3194 LotRO avatar names

Total (%) Man (%) Elf (%) Hobbit (%) Dwarf (%)
R 10.0 10.6 8.9 8.0 13.8
L 8.6 7.5 11.1 8.6 6.3
N 8.6 8.7 9.6 5.6 7.9
H 4.5 4.6 5.1 2.6 4.4
D 4.5 4.7 3.8 5.1 4.8
T 4.3 4.4 4.6 4.0 3.2
S 3.3 3.4 2.7 4.5 3.0
M 2.6 2.1 2.7 4.2 2.8
G 2.4 2.3 2.0 2.5 5.7
Y 2.0 2.7 0.8 2.4 0.8
B 1.7 1.7 0.6 3.7 3.4
C 1.7 1.9 1.4 2.2 0.6
W 1.6 2.1 1.1 1.0 0.8
F 1.5 1.6 1.1 1.3 2.4
V 1.2 1.2 1.3 0.7 1.1
K 1.1 1.3 0.4 1.2 2.8
P 0.5 0.3 0.4 1.8 0.2
Z 0.3 0.4 0.1 0.3 0.6
J 0.3 0.4 0.1 0.5 0.1
X 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1
Q 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.0
In a few cases someone borrowed from English when referring to a very special-
ized term or proper noun, for example: “Oshallin: ‘Nabend :) Kann man sich den
Status VIP mit der Payesafecard kaufen ?’” An avatar named Oshallin greets others,
with “‘Nabend” being the contraction for “guten Abend” meaning good evening,
then smiles with the usual Internet emoticon of a smiling face before asking whether
one may pay for VIP status in the game with Payesafecard, an online payment ser-
vice. We don’t know if the player knows VIP is based on the English expression
very important person, but in this context VIP is the expression LotRO uses to
describe a subscriber paying a monthly fee. We shall approach the German language
from a different direction later, and here consider chatting in the socially more
active English tavern, shown in Fig. 7.2.
The entire, combined file of English text downloaded through Anraeda’s many
hours of observation totaled 126,313 words. A few thousand of these would be
information in the text that did not come from other players, but the total of what
they typed into the text chat certainly reaches 100,000 words, the size of a normal
book. If I took a screenshot to document the fact that a group of avatars was sitting
around a table, LotRO’s text capture system would insert the ID number of that
screenshot into the text, so it could easily be found in the download folder. The most
obvious analytical approach is counting the frequency of word usage. For example,
hobbit appears 46 times, and the plural, hobbits, 19 times. In this book, I capitalize
Tavern Chatting 151
Fig. 7.2 Anraeda in the Prancing Pony Tavern in Lord of the Rings Online
the names of races or nationalities, yet only 12 of these occurrences are capitalized,
and one would need to check the text to see how many of this dozen were the first
word in a sentence or part of a proper noun.
Given that the data were collected inside a tavern, it is worthwhile to tabulate
words relating to a primary activity in such settings, namely drinking. The NPC
proprietor, Barliman Butterbur, sells potions as well as ordinary tavern refreshments
in two categories. “Local produce” consists of five drinks: Barliman’s Best, Blind
Troll, Isenwine, Moor-boar Beer, and Stars of Old Cider. “Standard assortment”
includes wine, ale, cider, mead and beer. Ale is generally defined as a type of beer,
brewed in a particular way from particular ingredients, so one might expect beer to
be more common than ale, given that it names the more general category and could
refer to an ale. While both are available in real-world taverns, however, ale may
have an antique connotation in many people’s minds, thus preferred in a virtual
environment generally imagined to be in the distant past. Indeed, ale or ales appears
189 times in the text sample, and beer just 19 times [30]. The frequencies for the
three other drinks Butterbur serves are: cider (8 times), mead (36 times), and wine
(59 times).
Laurelin, the server on which these data were collected, is designated for
European users, so one could study the slight differences between British and
American English. As it happens, exactly equal numbers of variants of color and
colour appear, a dozen in each case. More relevant to the LotRO mythos, and sug-
gested by the high frequencies of ale and mead, we might look for archaic usages.
There is only one use of thou, and two of thee, but 102 of ye. The Lord of the Rings
mythos tends to minimize aspects of actual antique European societies that Tolkien
and his readers might find uncomfortable, such as oppressive features of feudalism.
Variants of king do appear 46 times, but peasant appears only twice and queen once.
These words do not appear: castle, duke, serf, vassal. Romanticization of the past
can also be seen in the facts that variants of kiss appear 46 times, and of lass, 32
times.
Of course, the denizens of the tavern use words to speak sentences, so one would
want to look at language in larger units. In fact, role-playing usually requires not
merely speaking in character but setting the chat interface for role-playing and
entering also descriptions of one’s avatar’s behavior. Screenshots taken during the
following conversation, record that Whunjo was lying on the floor, apparently
unconscious, and the others were standing around him. They are between the bar
and the bright fireplace, the same location shown in Fig. 7.2. Most participants are
humans, but three are Hobbits: Leeko and Chivo who speak, and Willmond who is
sitting beside Leeko on the floor but remains silent. Nereus was in the process of
leaving. Dorella is playing her lute.
Kenaz says, ‘You are all so mean, why nobody wants to kiss Whunjo?’
Aegaldred says, ‘Then you can do it!’
Aegaldred pats Kenaz’ shoulder and steps aside.
Dorella smiles and seems glad to see so many hobbits
Kenaz blinks at Aegaldred
Kenaz says, ‘You would let me kiss him?’
Froeydis snorted.
Aegaldred says, ‘If it would prevent me from kissing him…’
Leeko sways along to the song, slightly aloof due to the stout
Aellwenn tilts her head looking toward Ner “ Where did you go off to?”
Chivo says, ‘Oh, I love this tune. Muh grammy used t’ play this song and tell me stories of
a dark, secretive forest and a kind ol’ man who watched over it.’
Aegaldred says, ‘But remember the deal we had?’
Kenaz says, ‘..that’s not a nice reason why’
Froeydis says, ‘Nay, Aegaldred shall do so. It would amuse us more.’
Firam thinks for a second. “I will if you pay me.”
Kenaz says, ‘Joah…’
Aegaldred says, ‘If such a situation should occur.’
Froeydis says, ‘For how much? An ale?’
Kenaz says, ‘Hey hey, this lad!’
Kenaz looks at Firam
Aegaldred says, ‘Aye.’
Nereus looks to Aellwenn “..I want here?.. to the back”
Aegaldred looks over to Firam, grinning.
Aegaldred says, ‘You kiss him.’
Nereus went*
Leeko says, ‘Yer nan was quite an interestin’ lady, Chivo’
Firam grins fine but then one of you have to give me one.
Leeko says, ‘good stories, she had! Lots of em’ too!’
Kenaz points at Aegaldred “He will”
Froeydis says, ‘Aegaldred can kiss you then in return.’
Chivo says, ‘Aye, that she did!’
Froeydis laughed with kenaz.
While we can infer the meaning of much in this discussion, as is true in ordinary
human talk some things remain obscure to outsiders, and some expressions by one
individual may not be entirely clear to others. However, much of the meaning is
Tolkien auf Deutsch 153
reasonably lucid, which is not the situation when the text is in a language the reader
does not know. Since there are precious few examples of Hobbit or Elf language in
LotRO, as a practice exercise we can pretend that one of the continental European
languages is so exotic that no English-speaker understands it, and perform a pretend
decipherment, rather like when Angus McIntosh helped crack German codes at
Bletchley Park.
Tolkien auf Deutsch
A question worthy of a book rather than a mere paragraph is the relationship between
J. R. R. Tolkien’s English-language Lord of the Rings and Richard Wagner’s
German-language Der Ring des Nibelungen. To what extent did Tolkien seek to cre-
ate an antidote to Wagner’s ring, given that he had been horrified by two horrendous
wars between the English and the Germans? To what extent was he positively
inspired by Wagner, yet sought to express his private Catholic religion through the
same symbol set through which Wagner expressed his Paganism? Rather than invest
a lifetime unraveling such riddles, we can note that Tolkien has become rather popu-
lar in Germany, through translations of Der Herr der Ringe.
Tolkien complicated the process both by having his own poetic vocabulary, and
by inventing languages and imagining that many place and family names were
words in those artificial tongues. The beautiful Elven city available only to fairly
high level avatars, and that was a staging ground for the fellowship in Lord of the
Rings, was called Rivendell in English. But its original name, in the Sindarian lan-
guage of the Elves, was Imladris. The English-language LotRO wiki explains that
this word meant “deep valley of the cleft” [31]. The German name is Bruchtal, in
which Bruch can mean fracture, and Tal refers to a valley. Students who might
imagine Rivendell referred to a river rather than a rift, and Bruchtal to a brook,
would be mistaken, an illustration about how linguistic guesses can be wrong, even
as we are often forced to make them. In fact, brook in German is Bach, just as in the
name of the famous German composer, of whom Beethoven said, “Das ist kein
Bach; das ist ein Meer” (That is no brook; that is a sea.)
The home of the Hobbits is The Shire, which is rendered Auenland into German.
Google Translate offers alternative translations for shire, but prefers Graftschaft,
which it translates into English as county, a governmental district. Names of some
English counties include shire, including: Yorkshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire. So
the connotation is a traditional district of land, perhaps defined in archaic language,
and the quality of culture in The Shire is reminiscent of English countryside inhab-
ited by people who have little interest in the world outside their happy land. The
German version of Wikipedia explains in its article about Tolkien’s geography,
“Den Namen „Auenland” erhält das fruchtbare Land von den ersten Hobbit-
Siedlern.” Which Google Translate renders awkwardly as “The name ‘Shire’ is
replaced by the fertile land of the first Hobbit settlers.” We might prefer this human
translation: “This fertile land received the name ‘Auenland’ from the first Hobbit
settlers.” Auenland means flood plain, and is associated in Germany with Das
Holsteiner Auenland, an especially pleasant and green part of the country, loved by
tourists and natives alike. So, in translating The Shire as Auenland, the natural poetic
character of the land was the key consideration, rather than its political
organization.
Since the most ancient of times, people speaking somewhat different languages
have encountered each other and attempted to translate their words, the better to
understand their worlds. Today, computer science and linguistics have sought to
perfect natural language processing tools for automatic translation. Yet after mea-
sured success, both always encounter barriers that at times seem insurmountable
[32]. The easiest way to understand the problem is to note that nature does not given
humanity a precise, pre-existing set of categories, so every social group develops its
own ontology and assigns a name to each category. But since these category schemes
are not identical, neither are the meanings of the words. I shall use Google Translate
as my dictionary, facilitating easy translation and backtranslation, without assuming
that it or any other modern or traditional translation approach is perfect [33].
One of the standard classes of characters in EverQuest is the bard, who uses
songs and musical instruments to accomplish magic, both to heal comrades and to
attack enemies. Of course both music and magical spells are forms of language,
both expressing wishes and seeking to transform reality by manipulating symbols
[34]. In LotRO, the equivalent class is called the minstrel in English, but Barde in
German. Each class acquires various abilities, which naturally have names and brief
written descriptions in LotRO’s user interface. Both avatars named Anraeda belong
to this class, and Table 7.4 lists their music-oriented abilities in their native
languages.
It could well be argued that music is a form of language, and each style is a dif-
ferent dialect. But it certainly is true that talking about music employs a rather vast
lexicon of technical terms. I must admit I did not immediately recognize the distinc-
tion between minor ballad and major ballad, thinking initially that the major one
was more powerful. Only when I saw the German version did I realize my stupid
error. Minor, major and perfect refer to intervals between two different tones, as in
minor third, major third, and perfect fifth, to give the examples of the most common
intervals in traditional musical chords.
The three stances are buffs that prepare an avatar to perform certain actions,
essentially placing the minstrel in a temporary but perhaps enduring role. The call
to fate requires dissonance stance, because it is an attack and dissonance implies
conflict. In contrast, resonance stance prepares the avatar to perform healing music
for comrades. Ballads unlock anthems and codas. Each one of these skills is repre-
sented by an identical icon, across the two languages, and their functions are also
identical.
However, errors in translation can distort reality. The last German translation in
the table, copied exactly from the game interface, contains two errors. Light has two
common meanings in English, referring to both illumination and to the opposite of
heavy. Thus, Lichtschaden should really have been something like Leichtschaden,
minor damage that is not heavy. Google Translate indeed translates light damage as
Tolkien auf Deutsch 155
Table 7.4 Music related combat actions of minstrels (Barde) in two languages
English title and definition German title and definition
Anthem of Increases the Hymne des Krieges Erhöht den Schaden aller
War damage of all Gefährten
fellowship members
Minor Ballad Boosts Tactical Moll – Ballade Stärkt Euren taktischen
damage and harms Schaden und schädigt Euren
your foe Gegner
Major Ballad Boosts healing Dur – Ballade Stärkt Euren Heilungsvermögen
capacity while und schädigt Euren Gegner
damaging the foe
Perfect Ballad Reduces Power Perfekte Ballade Verringert Eure Kraftkosten
costs and harms und schädigt Euren Gegner
your foe
Call to Fate Deals Light damage Appell an das Fügt einem einzelnen Ziel
to a single target, Schicksal Lichtschaden mit hoher
with a high Critical Wahrscheinlichkeit auf einen
chance kritischen Treffer zu
Timeless This powerful chant Zeitloser Widerhall Dieser mächtige Gesang
Echoes of recalls great deeds des Kampfes erinnert an die vor Urzeit von
Battle done in battle by the den mächtigen Valar im Kampf
mighty Valar when vollbrachten Taten und
the world was demoralisiert Eure Feinde
young,
demoralizing your
foes
Raise My Quickly heals Auferstehung meiner Heilt schnell Eure eigene Moral
Spirit Morale Seele
(self-targeted)
Dissonance – Your charismatic Dissonanz – Haltung Eure charismatische Rede flößt
Stance speech drives fear den Herzen Eurer Gegner Angst
into the hearts of ein
your enemies
Melody – A neutral stance, Melodie – Haltung “Melodie” is eine neutrale
Stance Melody is focused Haltung, die weder heilen noch
on neither healing Schaden bringen bevorzugt,
nor harming, but jedoch die Möglichkeit bietet,
offers the ability to beides in Maßen zu bewirken.
do both in
moderation
Resonance – A healing stance, Resonanz – Haltung Eine Heilungshaltung, in der
Stance wherein the die wiederherstellenden
Minstrel’s Fähigkeiten des Barden
restorative abilities perfektioniert sind
are at their finest
Coda of Fury A Finishing Skill Coda der Wut Eine Abschlussfertigkeit, die
that deals enormous dem Ziel enormen Schaden
damage to the target zufügt
(continued)
Table 7.4 (continued)

English title and definition German title and definition
Dissonant A damaging melee Schlag der Dissonanz Ein Nahkampfangriff, der
Strike attack that increases Schaden verursacht und die
the potency of Effektivität der empfangen
incoming healing Heilung erhöht
Dissonant Your shout does Durchdringender Euer Ruf verursacht bei Euren
Piercing Cry light damage to Schrei Feinden Lichtschaden und kann
your enemies and Ihre Aktionen unterbrechen
can interrupt their
actions
Lichtschaden, but translates Lichtschaden back into English as photodamage. Even

worse, because it is capitalized, Ihre is the polite plural form of your, while without
the capitalization could mean their. The cry interrupts their actions, not yours. In
English, cry can mean shout, but often means weep, while the German word Ruf can
mean reputation, and Schrei would have been a better compromise between cry and
shout. But apparently in both languages the definition tries to avoid reusing the
word to be defined. As if any word in any language had definite meaning!
Translating Tasks
As a form of scholarly role-playing, we can pretend that German is totally unknown

to us, but we have discovered a possible means for deciphering some inscriptions
written in that strange language [35]. One of the subsidiary ways to earn general
experience points in LotRO, plus improved reputations with some local groups of
NPCs, is to accept tasks from the task bulletin boards found in many towns and
major outposts. Completing a task is accomplished by delivering 10 units of some-
thing that can be looted from defeated enemies, whether they are animals or war-
riors, such as dirty wings or broken daggers. In LotRO, quests provide much
experience, and simply killing an enemy provides little, so this is a way of allowing
players to gain some additional experience from these kills. However, 10 dirty
wings or broken daggers could also be sold for virtual money to NPC vendors. The
examples of dirty wings and broken daggers suggest correctly that these things do
not have other uses in LotRO, such as being resources used in crafting.
We begin in the two geographic zones for lowest-level avatars, The Shire where
Hobbits live, and Erid Luin where Dwarves and Elves live. Switching back and
forth between the English and German versions of the user interface, we can com-
pare what is written on the board in the two versions of the town of Hobbiton. Each
board lists ten tasks. The English-language ones are preceded by “TASK:” and the
German-language ones by “AUFTRAG:”. Immediately we guess that auftrag is the
German word for task. The two boards have labels at the top: “TASK BULLETIN
BOARD” and “AUFSTRAGSANSCHLAGTAFEL.” We deduce that the German
Translating Tasks 157
term for bulletin board is sanschlagtafel and observe that German tends to aggre-
gate noun phrases into single compound words [36]. Any reader who actually knows
German will detect that we have made some small errors, but our general approach
is promising.
We carefully copy the writing on both boards. As a practical matter, this was
done by taking a screenshot of each one, cutting out the area depicting the board,
then reversing back and white because the originals have white writing on a black
background, then printing out on paper for convenient analysis. Here are the lists of
tasks offered in The Shire in both languages:
English: German:
BENT CLAWS DRECKHAUFEN
BROKEN DAGGERS LEICHTE PANZER
BROKEN SWORD SHEATHS MATTE FELLE
DIRTY EARS MATTE TIERHÄUTE
DIRTY FILTH SCHMIERIGER SCHLEIM
DIRTY WINGS SCHMUTZIGE FLÜGEL
LIGHT CARAPACE SCHMUTZIGE OHREN
MATTED FUR VERBOGENE KLAUEN
MATTED SKINS ZERBROCHENE DOLCHE
SQUISHY GOO ZERBROCHENE SCHWERTSCHEIDEN
We see that both lists are in alphabetic order, and given how different the words
are between the two languages we must assume that the placement of a German task
does not provide evidence about the English equivalent. The alphabets seem to be
the same, except for the fact that two of the German letters have some kind of accent
over them: Ä and Ü. Not counting spaces, there are 112 characters in the English
inscription, and 155 in the German. This suggests, but certainly does not prove, that
more clusters of letters in German represent single phonemes.
All but one of the 10 English examples consist of two words, an adjective fol-
lowed by a noun, and the same number of German examples are also two-word
phrases. In Spanish, we happen to know, an adjective can often follow the noun it
modifies, so what evidence do we see about German? The adjectives broken and
matted are used twice in the English list, and dirty three times. The nouns are never
duplicated. We see a similar but not identical pattern in the German, three pairs but
not three of any first word. This suggests that adjectives come first in German as
well, and that discrepancies may arise if the two languages classify qualities slightly
differently. The fact that one English task consists of three words, and one German
task of only one, may also indicate slightly different ontologies in the two
languages.
Our approach is a modern version of the pioneering translation of the Rosetta
Stone, an ancient Egyptian tablet that presented the same text in two versions of
Egyptian writing and in Greek [37]. It can be a painfully slow process, aided by any
situations in which some short equivalent text is physically isolated in both scripts.
Now we can compare the task board from Hobbiton, with this one in Erid Luin:
English: German:
BROKEN DAGGERS DRECKHAUFEN
BROKEN SWORD SHEATHS LEICHTE PANZER
DIRTY FILTH MATTE FEDERN
DIRTY WINGS MATTE FELLE
DULL BEAKS MATTE SCHNABEL
LIGHT CARAPACES MATTE TIERHÄUTE
MATTED FEATHERS SCHMIERIGER SCHLEIM
MATTED FURS SCHMUTZIGE FLÜGEL
MATTED SKIN ZERBROCHENE DOLCHE
SQUISHY GOO ZERBROCHENE SCHWERTSCHEIDEN
The lists for Erid Luin are similar to those for The Shire, but not identical. Most
noticeably, two from the Hobbiton list are absent: BENT CLAWS and DIRTY
EARS in English and SCHMUTZIGE OHREN and VERBOGENE KLAUEN in
German. BENT CLAWS and VERBOGENE KLAUEN had unique adjectives, so
they may be equivalent. DIRTY EARS and SCHMUTZIGE OHREN shared their
adjective with at least one other task. We may tentatively surmise: bent = verbogene,
claws = klauen, dirty = schmutzige, and ears = ohren. And two from the Erid Luin
lists are missing in The Shire: DULL BEAKS and MATTED FEATHERS, MATTE
FEDERN and MATTE SCHNABEL. Here, the fact that the adjectives are different
in English but the same in German means we cannot tell which translates to which,
and suggests again that the ontologies are not identical.
English is not a heavily inflected language, but it does distinguish plural usually
by adding s at the end of a noun. Do we see anything like that in the German? First
of all, the two English inscriptions differ in that two nouns are singular in one and
plural in the other: fur versus furs and skin versus skins. We do not see any such
discrepancy in the German, nor do the nouns end in the same letter, if they were
formed as plurals following a system like that in English. However, many of the
German adjectives end in e, which might possibly represent a plural. Two that are in
both inscriptions do not, SCHMIERIGER SCHLEIM and the one-word
DRECKHAUFEN. Two of the English tasks involve mass nouns that are seldom
placed in the plural: FILTH and GOO. We can tentatively surmise that these pairs go
together, but cannot yet determine which is which.
Having sent Rumilisoun to all 40 task boards with different lists, copying each in
both languages, all across Middle Earth, we found many other examples of the
words filth and goo. In Western Gondor one task sought toxic filth but no goo of any
kind, and the German list included giftiger dreck, which suggests that dreckhaufen
was the translation of dirty filth, anomalous in form because dirt and filth are near
synonyms, so a literal translation would be redundant. In Wildermor one task sought
slimy filth, and the German list included schleimiger dreck, hinting that schleim
meant slime. This leads us to suspect that schmieriger schleim means squishy goo,
and dreckhaufen means dirty filth. Cataloging all the terms in all 40 bilingual tran-
Translating Tasks 159
Table 7.5 Using Google translate for translation and backtranslation

Google translate
English German back to English
Bent claws verbogene Klauen Bent claws
Broken daggers zerbrochene Dolche Broken daggers
Broken sword sheaths zerbrochene Schwertscheiden broken sword sheaths
Dirty ears schmutzige Ohren Dirty ears
Dirty filth Dreckhaufen Pile of dirt
Dirty wings schmutzige Flügel DIRTY wings
Light carapace leichte Panzer Light tanks
Matted fur matte Felle Dull skins
Matted skins matte Tierhäute Matt animal skins
Squishy goo schmieriger Schleim Slimy mucus
scriptions, and analyzing in this way, could offer a reasonably good start in deci-
phering this strange language into English.
Now we can dispense the role-play fiction that we are utterly ignorant of German,
and admit there are some minor errors in the above. We can use online resources like
Google Translate to compare the English and German versions of Wikipedia. Table
7.5 reorganizes the Hobbiton inscription, arranging the German terms in the same
order as the English, and giving the result of pasting the German into Google
Translate and telling it to provide the English. This is a standard method for reli-
ability evaluation, called backtranslation. One thing to notice is that we have capi-
talized the nouns in the German phases, because common nouns as well as proper
nouns are indeed capitalized in that language.
Backtranslation confirms accuracy for the first four terms, but renders
Dreckhaufen as pile of dirt. Google Translate renders dirty filth into German as
schmutzig Dreck, and backtranslates that as dirty dirt. In fact, dreck is used in
English, perhaps borrowed from Yiddish which got it from German, and Wikipedia
lists it as one of the loan words English took from Yiddish, meaning manure, to use
a polite definition [38]. A correct translation of dirty wings is schmutzige Flügel,
and playing around with both singular and plural in sentences confirms that Flügel
serves as both singular and plural, number often being differentiated by an adjective,
although case endings could also appear. According to Google Translate, “The bird
had a dirty wing” is equivalent to “Der Vogel hatte einen schmutzigen Flügel.” “The
bird had two dirty wings” is equivalent to “Der Vogel hatte zwei schmutzigen
Flügeln.” Often, translation of sentences breaks down in today’s computerized sys-
tems, but since we are imagining that a team of linguistic scholars is only beginning
to document a previously unknown language, perfect accuracy is not to be expected.
The five intrepid virtual researchers did, however, find some errors. One was the
use of matted four times in the English list at Erid Luin, and only three in the
German list. Google Translate says that matted is verfilzten in German. Matted
means tangled or disheveled, whereas matte means dull on its surface. Thus, at least
three of the four matte tasks in the German list were mistranslated by the people
who adapted LotRO from English to German. More complex is light cara-
pace = leichte Panzer = light tanks. A carapace is the upper part of the shell in some
armored animals, such as lobsters, and German possesses the same word with the
same technical meaning: Carapax. Google Translate, however, renders carapace as
Panzer, meaning armor. In accounts of the Second World War, German armored
military vehicles are described in English by the German word panzer. Thus a ste-
reotype based on that horrible conflict prejudices the translation of carapace.
Conclusion
Although massively-multiplayer online games are the most modern artform, they
draw upon legends and symbols from the distant past. Lord of the Rings Online is
said to be in the Medieval fantasy style, which cherishes antiquities whether or not
they are named mathoms. But all MMOs make heavy use of language, most often in
the form of text even when representing conversation. It is common for popular
MMOs to serve players having many native languages. LotRO handled that by cat-
egorizing servers by language into English, German and French. Many speakers of
German and French may actually use the English servers, and migration across
languages is facilitated in a virtual Europe by the fact that the time zones of Britain,
France and Germany are similar, while English-speakers in North America must
adjust their playing hours if they plan to become tourists or language-learners on the
German or French servers. As Rumilisoun demonstrated, however, LotRO allows
players on any server to switch the interface from one language to another, thus talk-
ing in German with NPCs and reading task boards in German even on English-
language servers. One wonders why it has not become common for language
courses to exploit online gameworlds as teaching laboratories.
As we shall see in Chap. 9, Final Fantasy XI used a different approach, each
server having a user interface that could be set for either English, German, French
or Japanese, and offering a built-in phrase book so that players could communicate
across these four languages. When I studied it, Entropia Universe had a single
server with polyglot text chat, and guilds (called societies) advertised in fully 15
preferred languages [39]. Historical linguistics is just one of many ways to approach
MMO language scientifically, so this chapter only begins to suggest the possibilities
for future research.
Many nations are language communities. French is spoken in France, German in
Germany, and Russian in Russia. In one view, the existence of a people speaking the
same language is the basis for the emergence of a nation, and a nation is simply the
political expression of a language community. Liah Greenfeld has argued the oppo-
site, that a nation often creates a language in order to assert its unity and uniqueness
[40]. For example, as McIntosh documented, prior to about 1450, practically every
village in England spoke a slightly different version of English from every other
one, and the emergence of modern England promulgated a London-based, elite dia-
lect as the official national language [41]. In recent centuries, many groups have
References 161
invested considerable effort in developing standard languages to express national

identities, such as Norwegian [42], Afrikaans [43], Modern Hebrew [44], and
Indonesian [45].
Probably, nationalism and language influence each other, and we would expect
each nation of the world to have a distinct language. Of course today there are two
major kinds of exceptions, languages that are spoken in several nations (notably
English and Spanish) and nations that have several languages (notably India and
China). There is no particular movement today to amalgamate the English-speaking
nations politically, but it is possible that future political considerations will bring
this about [46]. As their nations unify, Europeans may eventually settle on a shared
language that might for a time co-exist with local languages. English-speakers can
make strong arguments that their own language will be the lingua franca of the
Internet age, yet it is not inconceivable that German will dominate within the
Eurozone.
Neither English nor German, but Polish was the native language of Magdalena
Bielenia-Grajewska who contributed two chapters in linguistics to the Convergence
Movement reference works. Two principles she considered in depth are especially
relevant here: First, linguistics with all its natural paradoxes will be central to human
use of future information technologies: “Because language is strictly related to elec-
tronic proficiency, linguistics will determine different aspects of electronic literacy,
such as computer literacy, information literacy, multimedia literacy, and computer-
mediated communications literacy, mainly all the skills that are necessary to survive
in the information era” [47].
Second, the complexity of the world’s languages results from the chaotic inter-
play of forces pressing toward divergence versus convergence. While Internet and
globalization promote convergence, the diversification of technical fields and sub-
cultures defined by shared special interests work to some degree against it, suggest-
ing a strategy Bielenia-Grajewska calls calibrated linguistic identity: “Calibration is
understood through the perspective of not only adapting to new situations, but also
with creating the hybrid forms that result from the interactions between interlocu-
tors and their environments. In this regard, calibration is not only connected with
linguistic alignment but also with the creation of new linguistic identities, unique in
their usage and the selection of linguistic repertoire” [48]. From that perspective, all
people, not Tolkien alone, create new language, and atheoretical documentation of
linguistic diversity as practiced by his student, McIntosh, will continue to be impor-
tant, even within the context of theoretical debates concerning convergence versus
divergence.
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Chapter 8
Functional Equivalence Across Virtual
Cultures
Does the globalization represented by Internet doom cultural anthropology? The

economic and technological unification of the world erodes the differences between
cultures, and transcends the conditions under which anthropology was created as an
autonomous science. Originally, cultural anthropology was both an outgrowth of
colonialism and a corrective for its abuses. If all peoples of the world are well edu-
cated and communicate over Internet, will sociology replace cultural anthropology
as the scientific means for understanding them? Or could all of the social sciences
dissolve into a more general science of information and communication? In this
chaotic convergence, will many cultures simply die? The original impetus to study
Vanguard was a reaction to the news on January 24, 2014, that it was being shut
down at the end of July, followed by a flood of online discussions about how the
game had been seriously flawed when it launched back on January 30, 2007. I had
studied City of Heroes only when I learned it was being shut down, but it was a very
successful game and deserved all the last rites it could receive. To be sure it would
be valuable to understand the limitations of any really massive virtual world, adding
to the data we have for understanding the entire genre, just as linguistics prioritizes
the study of dying languages. But there was a further motivation for studying
Vanguard, considering its situation in the context of very serious issues about the
continuing viability of cultural anthropology. Classical anthropologists like
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) are famous for studying specific other societ-
ies, like his Trobriand Islanders, rendering them the most influential test cases on
which to base general theories. After many pre-industrial societies have been stud-
ied, with a diversity of cultures, is there any point studying one more? After every
traditional culture is dissolved by convergence into the global economic and com-
munication system, will any distinct cultures survive to be studied by qualitative
rather than quantitative methods?

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_8
166 8 Functional Equivalence Across Virtual Cultures
Cultural Extinction
Cultures in the real world, like games on Internet, compete with each other, and
there are winners and losers in both realms. Why was Vanguard a loser? Key
Vanguard developer Brad McQuaid, who had been centrally involved in creation of
the original EverQuest, told an interviewer, “Vanguard was meant to be a spiritual
successor to EverQuest – to take what we thought were the best parts of EverQuest
and modernize them” [1]. By “modernize,” McQuaid largely meant taking advan-
tage of more modern desktop computers, for example with far better graphics and
using the greater memory and speed of recent machines to support a more integrated
virtual world, not broken into literally hundreds of subareas as was true for
EverQuest. But his words “best parts” speak volumes. Like EverQuest, Vanguard is
broken into highly limited missions that lack a readily apparent unifying narrative,
so that the local environments and the missions given by NPCs in them fail to com-
municate any larger meaning. In the interview, McQuaid attributes the ultimate fail-
ure of Vanguard to the fact that for financial reasons it was released before it had
really been completed, possessing many bugs and minor design flaws, plus being
hosted on Internet by a server system that was suboptimal, even as many player’s
computers were not fully capable of handling the memory and graphics demands.
Many of the bugs may have been squashed by the time I entered Vanguard, 7
years after its launch, but by no means all of them. I was using a high performance
gamer computer, with a good Internet connection, but several times an hour there
would be a brief lag, lasting as much as 3 or 4 seconds, which may reflect lingering
server problems, or suboptimal design in the procedures for moving data in and out
of the working memory of the user’s computer, although the latter seems less likely
because I had installed the game on a solid-state drive rather than one with a physi-
cally rotating disk.
Not infrequently, especially when my character was swimming, the point of view
would wind up inside a hillside, totally defeating the realism of the scene. Twice my
character fell through the top of a hill into a dangerous dungeon, because there was
a gap in the dataset that defined where the surface of the hill was. Climbing stairs
was often difficult, because the steps were too high for an ordinary step forward, but
the lower step was too narrow for a running jump to the next. Most annoyingly, it
was often difficult to click the mouse cursor on an enemy during a battle, because
the database covered the visible enemy invisibly with an area around the visible part
of a nearer object, such as another enemy. Thus instead of targeting a second enemy,
I would be stuck looting from the corpse of a first one I had just killed. While
Vanguard sold a reasonable number of copies of the game initially, reportedly
almost 250,000, subscriptions dropped quickly, so there was little income to rein-
vest in either fixing bugs or adding new story content.
Vanguard’s Wikipedia page reports that the player population dropped to a very
small number in 2009, before increasing somewhat [2]. Once some bugs had been
fixed, and more players had computers that could handle the graphics, one might
have expected the popularity to increase, given how vast and beautiful the virtual
Cultural Extinction 167
world is and how large the roaming gamer population had become. In his interview,
McQuaid noted the competition, especially World of Warcraft, and suggested that
WoW had been so successful because it was so easy for inexperienced players to get
started in it, while Vanguard was admittedly a difficult game. After reading the
interview, I read as many of the reviews of Vanguard linked from Metacritic that
were still available, to see what the early public criticism had been [3]. Here is a
summary of what I found, placing some of the criticism in the context of my own
much later experience:
1. The penalty for dying was severe, yet the difficulty of combat rendered defeat frequent;
apparently the resurrection system was simplified after the game’s launch, but when my
character “died” he lost a considerable block of experience.
2. There was a steep learning curve facing new players, a factor I found aggravated by the
fact that the game’s low popularity meant that few people posted informative wiki arti-
cles or forum guides for solving various challenges.
3. Once one had climbed up that learning curve a short distance, many of the activities
were so repetitious as to be boring, notably in harvesting resources like wood and miner-
als from the environment, or using them in crafting virtual goods.
4. After early levels, it is very difficult to solo, yet the low population of players means
there seldom were people to form convenient questing teams with, and the huge geogra-
phy meant one seldom encountered other players outside a few towns.
5. The difficulty of Vanguard meant it was intended for experienced players, such as those
who had become bored with World of Warcraft, yet many of its features were so conven-
tional that it might not interest veteran gamers seeking novelty.
6. Very little was provided in the way of a meaningful context for the missions or even the
entire virtual world, which means that the play degenerated into the repetitive task of
killing one group of monsters after another, with little sense of purpose.
From the standpoint of an anthropologist, each of these points resonates to issues
many societies face in real life. Frequent and costly death is a metaphor for setbacks
of all kinds, which are frequent in societies that are poorly organized or just plain
poor, and it increased disorganization unless dealt with through effective commu-
nity rituals [4]. In traditional societies as well as modern ones, the educational sys-
tem may be dysfunctional, providing less than ideal mentoring of children. Life can
be toil in many jobs, especially if the drudgery is not balanced off by comfort and
security. Cooperation with other people is necessary in every society, yet social
disorganization and attenuated systems intended to encourage collaboration often
leave individuals to their own inadequate devices. Highly competitive economic
systems may benefit a well prepared elite class, but impose impossible burdens on
people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The sixth point in the list is more subtle
but theoretically rich, because it concerns the features of culture that provide a
meaningful context for social organization. A review of Vanguard by Mardsen
Connell echoes the words of several other reviewers:
In many MMOs, the backstory of the game is set in motion by a series of cataclysmic events
that set up the ensuing rivalries and factions. This doesn’t seem to be the case in Vanguard;
instead, there is a lot of room for faction and racial relationships to develop over time and
for the players to (hopefully) create a shared history. There are three nations, whose cultures
are very loosely based on Celtic/Norse, Asian, and Middle Eastern environments and design
elements, each with a starting island. As with many games, quests and missions send the
player on an ever-widening arc of exploration that finally ends with forays to the other
islands. The game delivers nothing in the way of cinematics or cutscenes to place the player
in a context; there are plenty of clues into the backstory during missions and quests, but the
initial “why am I here?” question never gets answered [5].
Technically, narratives that provide no backstory begin in media res, in the midst
of things. Outside the boundaries of art and literature, this is comparable to a society
that has no schools and no written history, and is entered from outside, just the situ-
ation encountered by many cultural anthropologists roughly a century ago.
Discovering the meaning of anything in an alien, undocumented society requires
skill, diligence, and even innovation, with the constant hazards of misinterpretation
and exaggeration. Even such errors can be interesting, because they stimulate
thought that can generate new social science hypotheses, but then there must be an
opportunity for later studies that verify and extend the initial anthropologist’s first
impressions. That opportunity does not exist for Vanguard, because its entire world
ceased to exist July 31, 2014, and the preliterate societies studied by pioneers like
Bronislaw Malinowski have largely been assimilated since he began his ethno-
graphic field research exactly a century earlier.
The Polish Argonaut
This provides a good entrance for an anthropologist, especially one of Malinowski’s

stripe. He was among the leading anthropological field researchers who shared the
view of armchair theorists that successful cultures provide rather coherent systems
of meaning that structure social action and provide a consistent framework for indi-
vidual cognition. Malinowski was so hugely influential, and documented his own
thinking and experiences so extensively, that it would take years to fully understand
the man. However, when we impersonate someone in a research project, we always
seek to create a hybrid of ourselves and that person, with the option to invest more
or less time studying the person’s life as preparation for our role-playing. In particu-
lar, Malinowski offered the richest view of culture, conceptualized in a sophisti-
cated manner and looking toward humanity’s future as well as its past:
Culture is clearly the fullest context of all human activities. It is the vast instrumentality
through which man achieves his ends, both as an animal that must eat, rest, and reproduce;
and as the spiritual being who desires to extend his mental horizons, produce works of art,
and develop systems of faith. Thus, culture is at the same time the minimum mechanism for
the satisfaction of the most elementary needs of man’s animal nature, and also an ever-
developing, ever-increasing system of new ends, new values, and new creative possibilities
[6].
While I never met Malinowski, I based my impersonation of him on having read

four of his books many years before, most especially on the several cases in which
I cited his work in my own publications. That is to say, any of us may have a per-
sonal connection to another person, even if we never met them face-to-face, if their
life has already in any way influenced our own lives. I was reading Malinowski
around the time I began ethnographic field research on the communal, polytheistic
The Polish Argonaut 169
religious “cult” called The Process Church of the Final Judgement, briefly described
in Chap. 4. I initially planned merely to do a brief study to provide data for ethnol-
ogy, the comparison of multiple cultures, but The Process proved so fascinating that
my project morphed into a detailed ethnography, focused on that one radical cul-
ture. I explained in the introduction to my book, which used the pseudonym Power
for Process:
The evidence on which this book rests was collected intermittently over a period of nearly
six years through a variety of ethnographic methods. I first encountered Powerites in Boston
near the end of 1970, when I was just completing a six months’ study of another cult which
I will call Technianity. At first I planned to investigate The Power only briefly, along with
other groups, and develop a comprehensive theory of culture-creation through comparative
analysis. Consequently, I began my research following the classical anthropological
approach exemplified by Malinowski’s work. Although I allowed myself to be initiated into
the cult, I did not become a core participant but developed the status of friendly associate,
an unobtrusive observer of Process rituals and interviewer of native informants. Although I
felt my main task was documentation of the official culture of the group, I kept a detailed
diary of field observations that included many reports of member interactions, problematic
disruptions, and other revealing incidents [7].
After writing the ethnography of The Process, I did publish an ethnological study
in the form of a chapter titled “Cultural Genetics” which drew upon concepts from
evolutionary biology, for example including a chart showing how The Process had
been born in the marriage of Scientology and Individual Psychology, that variant of
Psychoanalysis developed by Freud’s schismatic disciple, Alfred Adler, in the con-
text of a family of groups related to the Rosicrucian and Psychoanalytic traditions
[8]. Note that the word family has technical meaning in both social science (a kin-
ship structure comprising many persons) and evolutionary biology (a taxonomic
structure comprising many species). The society studied most closely by Malinowski
was the Trobriand Islanders who are distributed across an archipelago of atolls in
the western Pacific near New Guinea. Among Malinowski’s main research topics
was precisely the family structure of the Trobrianders, and the consequences it had
for culture and even personality.
Malinowski’s own personality may have been shaped by his Polish roots, as well
as by personal life experiences, and like me he may not have intended to spend so
much time studying one “tribe.” Most accounts explain that the outbreak of the First
World War marooned him in the western Pacific, preventing a return to Europe,
although he took this as an opportunity rather than an imprisonment. His most
famous book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes the socio-cultural struc-
tures that motivate these islanders to take hazardous voyages across the open sea to
exchange symbolic gifts with each other and thereby sustain a wider culture [9]. The
title suggests the Trobrianders were heroic Argonauts, but by implication Malinowski
himself was an heroic Argonaut. Indeed, he may be the most prominent example of
anthropologist as adventurer, even as he was also among the very most prominent
theorists of culture, and thus deserved all the fame he received.
The most interesting analysis of his work I have found is “Tenting with
Malinowski” by Murray Wax, perhaps ironically published in American Sociological
Review rather than an anthropology journal [10]. Wax asserts that Malinowski was
not really marooned for long, but chose to stay longer among the Trobrianders in
developing what was at the time a radical departure for anthropologists, intention-
ally investing much time to understand an exotic culture well. Wax acknowledges
the debate over whether Malinowski really respected, let alone admired, the “primi-
tive” people he studied. Additionally, Wax says, Malinowski despised the European
colonial institutions that so severely exploited the natives. His evaluation became
complex, viewing himself as the archetype of anthropology, superior to both
Trobrianders and Europeans, so his failure to immerse himself completely in
Trobriand life was balanced by alienation from Europeans, who at the time were
slaughtering each other in an unprecedentedly savage manner.
In preparing to send him on one more adventure, into Vanguard, I chose not to
read the extensive biographical – and indeed autobiographical – information avail-
able about him, but to supplement my decades-old reading of his major works by
downloading a dozen relevant journal articles available from the online JSTOR
archive. I happened to have documentation about one of my early classroom lec-
tures about Malinowski, which I will share here not out of narcissism but as an
example of how we often may have access to historical information from our own
lives that documents our connection to the person we seek to impersonate. When I
arrived at the University of Washington in 1975, my first big lecture course was
Social Deviance, and the topic naturally attracted so many students that it was one
of the classes for which the undergraduate student government produced lecture
notes, rather like ethnographic field notes an anthropologist might write during
some primitive ceremony, of which I received a copy. A diligent student, Carol
P. Paurer, took notes in each lecture, which were provided to other students who
subscribed to the lecture note service. Here is how she reported the beginning of the
lecture for December 2, 1975, which continued a discussion of Malinowski from the
previous class, and used his Trobriand research to illustrate the concepts of cultural
relativism and functional equivalence:
In the Trobriand Islands, the norms for young sexual behavior were quite different from
what they have been traditionally in the United States. For example, it was acceptable for
young people to have sexual intercourse. Young couples that were going steady and living
in “bachelor quarters” would share a bed as long as the relationship lasted. However, they
did not share the eating of meals. This is an example of cultural relativism.
The prohibition against eating together in the Trobriand Islands and the prohibition
against premarital sex in our society may serve the same function. They may be called
functionally equivalent norms because they display the same functions. One norm or the
other is needed to serve that function. You do not need both, but you do need one of them
that may preserve the value of the family. Here in the United States the young couples may
exhaust their interest in going out to dinner together. When the two want to share a bed
together, they traditionally should get married in the United States. In the Trobriand Islands,
when the couple want to eat together, they get married. Something that is normal for the
marriage relationship is forbidden for the non-married. This produces the functionally
equivalent norms.
Malinowski recognized that under difficult historical conditions a culture could

disintegrate, or become temporarily disorganized during a period of transition, but
he repeatedly asserted that under usual conditions the norms of a society would
The Polish Argonaut 171
serve definite functions for the community, fitting together in a coherent manner. He
did not view society as a totally homogeneous group, but as a coherent collection of
groups toward which the individual could have stable relationships [11]. Functional
equivalence allowed societies at the same level of technological development to
have very different cultural structures, however, and Malinowski strongly believed
that each culture should be understood and respected as a distinct unit. This will be
a key theme for his research on Vanguard, because the cultures depicted in a virtual
world may very seriously violate this functionalist and unitary concept of culture.
Indeed, that may be a reason that Vanguard failed.
Students found the Trobriand sexual customs sufficiently stimulating that one
year some of the women posted a sign over the entrance to their dormitory, calling
it a bukumatula, the term Paurer rendered as “bachelor quarters” [12]. The part of
Malinowski’s work most obviously relevant to impersonation is his thoughtful cri-
tique of psychoanalytic theories, comparable to Moreno’s critiques of Freud, in two
popular books, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, and The Sexual Life of
Savages in North-Western Melanesia [13]. I recently summarized his argument
thus:
Perhaps the earliest really influential critique of psychoanalytic theory came from one of
the very most eminent anthropologists of the twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski.
Focusing on the claim that the oedipal conflict was universal among human beings – or at
least among men – Malinowski argued that in fact many different family constellations
existed around the world, each presumably producing its own distinctive conflicts.
Malinowski’s primary research was carried out among the Trobriand islanders of the west-
ern Pacific, a matrilineal culture. This means that they reckoned wider family relations
solely through women, assigning a child to its mother’s family and giving the father a
weaker role in the immediate family. Ideally, in Trobriand families, any male authority over
the child rests with the mother’s brother, and the biological father played a much more
nurturant role. Thus, Malinowski argued, there is no oedipal conflict in Trobriand society,
and Freud’s theory does not apply universally across all humanity [14].
By the middle of the twentieth century, other anthropologists had expanded this
view into a Culture and Personality school of thought that tended to agree that cul-
tures were unified normative systems, and thus each culture produced a modal per-
sonality, not shared by every member but representing the society’s distinctive
definition of normality. Given cultural relativism, the normal personality in one
society could be psychopathological within another [15]. If societies become highly
differentiated, with different norms for different roles, there may be multiple stan-
dards of normality. Or, a culture could change the definition of normality rapidly
during times of society-wide stress [16]. All this amplifies Malinowski’s view that
there must be multiple theories of personality, each appropriate for a different con-
text, which implies that impersonation must take the unique life circumstances of
the individual into account.
The fourth book by Malinowski that influenced my own thinking was a posthu-
mous collection of essays, Magic, Science and Religion [17]. In the pair of books
presenting our comprehensive theory of religion, Rodney Stark and I cited
Malinowski’s theory of magic. Our most systematic analysis, A Theory of Religion,
is based on the concept of compensator, a psychological substitute for a real reward
discussed here and in the following chapter. Our first citation after defining this term
was “Malinowski’s celebrated theory of magic – as an attempt to provide people
with a compensatory sense of control over dangerous or vital events they cannot
control” [18]. In The Future of Religion we introduced Malinowski’s idea this way:
He argued that magic is a substitute for science, an attempt to give humans control over
important phenomena that they lack direct methods to deal with. Thus, for example, farmers
do not try to use magic to get the weeds out of their fields; they know how to pull weeds.
They do often try to use magic to make it rain, for they have no scientific means to control
the weather [19].
This does not mean that magic is necessarily dysfunctional, because it can help
organize teams of people to cooperate more confidently with each other, especially
if rituals prepare them mentally for the particular practical task ahead. Malinowski
explained this in the cases of group fishing and boating, difficult tasks requiring col-
lective action that varies by the time of the year and the area of water involved,
which were crucially important for people who lived on islands [20].
Thus, while Malinowski’s concerns with cultural relativism demand that research
in Vanguard consider more than one of its fictional cultures, his interest in magic
demands that the research also emphasize the magical power possessed by some
classes of avatars. Together, these two goals required the use of multiple avatars, all
representing the same person but belonging to different cultures and including sev-
eral possessing a diversity of magical powers.
Culturally Relative Avatars
In studying a gameworld, it is usually a good principle to run at least one avatar to

the top experience level, which in Vanguard was 55. As I saw discussed in the player
forums and discovered myself when my first Bronislaw avatar reached level 35, in
the last 20 levels there are hardly any missions designed for solo players, and some
of the very few that claim to be soloable require fighting so many wandering ene-
mies inside the confines of a cave that they are impossible for single players. Yet
there were far too few players online at any given time, for there to be enough at
about the same level to form a team. However, very few of the missions even
approaching level 35 offered any real opportunity to learn more about the virtual
cultures of Vanguard, and most such information came in the first ten levels. The
one saving factor was that Sony increased the rate at which adventuring experience
could be gained for the final months of Vanguard, explicitly so players could get an
avatar to the level cap and gain a sense of winning.
However, in the context of this research project, it proved necessary additionally
to run other avatars shorter distances up the experience ladder, to compare many of
the competing fictional cultures and the classes that used magic in different ways.
Ultimately, I ran 12 avatars, one to level 45, two to level 20, three to level 15, and
six to level 10. Table 8.1 lists the dozen avatars by race and class, giving the hours
Culturally Relative Avatars 173
Table 8.1 Variants of the Bronislaw avatar used to explore Vanguard in its last days
Race, class, time
played Race description Class description
Thestran Thestrans are tenacious humans, Druids perform wonders and control
Druid with influence throughout the the elements of earth and sky
107.4 hours world
Kojani Kojani are human island dwellers Rangers command nature, to heal and
Ranger to attack
21.1 hours
Qalithari Qalithari are the dominant human Paladins call upon the power of the
Paladin race, wealthy but politically gods, wield swords, and use shields
19.5 hours corrupt and heavy armor
Orc Necromancer Orcs are universally hated, Necromancers command the dead to
11.7 hours primitive invaders, weakened by serve as their minions
brutal conflict between their own
clans
Gnome Gnomes are fanatical in serving Sorcerers channel the powers of the
Sorcerer their leaders elements, chiefly frost and fire
5.7 hours
High Elf Elves suffered the most of all Psionicists control psionic powers for
Psionicist races, but the High Elves have destruction, controlling enemies, and
9.9 hours built Leth Nurae for their haven strengthening allies
Wood Elf Wood Elves are reclusive, Shamans bond with patron spirits and
Shaman distrustful, perfectionist, having commune with other spirits, gaining
4.9 hours retreated into the forest spells and manifestations
Dark Elf Dark Elves are distrusted because Blood mages transform the physical
Blood mage they seek to rule the world qualities of both friend and foe, often
2.5 hours transferring life from enemy to ally
Dwarf Dwarves, despite a reputation for Clerics enhance and protect
Cleric grumpiness, has a sense of humor teammates, with divine powers
3.9 hours and are steadfast in their loyalty
Lesser Giant Lesser Giants are the largest race Dread knights strike fear into enemies
Dread knight of humans that weakens them
3.1 hours
Varanthari Varanthari are humans who Monks employ an internal power, Jin,
Monk traditionally roamed the plains on following what appear to the Asian
4.1 hours horses spiritual traditions
Vulmane Vulmanes are humanoid wolves Disciples are primarily healers, who
Disciple who built Dahknarg city after like monks employ Jin
3.6 hours evolving beyond living wild
invested online in each, for a total of 197.4 hours of direct ethnographic observation,
numbers obtained by entering “/played” into the text chat for each avatar. The
descriptions were distilled from the information offered the player inside Vanguard
when selecting race and class for an avatar.
Perhaps the first theoretically relevant discovery was the complex history of how
players entered this virtual world. It consists of three main regions, as described in
the game’s Wikipedia article: “Thestra is a land resembling northern and eastern
Fig. 8.1 A high-altitude view of terrain in Vanguard
Europe, with mountains, wetlands, forests and misty, haunted coastlines.” “Qalia –
This southern continent (pronounced KAY-lee-uh) has an atmosphere reminiscent
of the Middle East and North Africa, with great deserts and rugged mountains.”
“Kojan is an archipelago with an Asiatic flavor, comprising many small islands,
some of which are utterly barren, while others are home to communities of inscru-
table wizards and unusual races” [21]. Regions of both Thestra and Qalia ranged up
the full ladder of experience levels, while Kojan stopped about level 20. Figure 8.1
shows the Gnome sorcerer flying high above the surface of Qalia.
Originally, there were a dozen starter areas strewn across the three regions, but
one of the early fixes to the game reduced them to just three, one for each region. An
interview with one player who had been in Vanguard since the beginning indicated
that the game developers had been so rushed they could not complete the quests and
related material for so many starter areas, and other evidence confirmed that some
quests were moved to concentrate them better for the players’ progression up the
levels of experience. Another veteran player provided a different explanation, say-
ing that as soon as the population of new players plummeted, there were not enough
in any of the starter areas to form teams, so the reduction from twelve to three was
an attempt to concentrate beginners. In either case, one consequence was converg-
ing the cultures to a significant degree.
Culturally Relative Avatars 175
Unintentionally, the game designers were mimicking the behavior of colonial

powers in their treatment of the local populations they conquered and dominated.
Indeed, in political terms, cultural anthropology arose as an adjunct of European
colonialism, but evolved into a partial corrective for its excesses. In a brief but
remarkably intense essay, Malinowski severely criticized colonial administrators
for destroying native cultures, partly because their goal was economic exploitation
with no concern for the well-being of locals, partly because missionaries urged the
suppression of anything that conflicted with Christianity as they rigidly interpreted
it, and partly out of sheer incompetence given that the entire colonial enterprise
would fail if the local cultures collapsed:
Broadly speaking, the evil is mainly caused by the destruction of all vital interest for the
native, by taking away from him of all that was dear and valuable to him, of all that gave
him the joy of living. Whole departments of native law and morality, of custom and usage,
have been senselessly wiped out by a superficial, haphazard legislation, made in the early
days often by newcomers unused to native ways and unprepared to face the difficult prob-
lem. They applied to the regulation of native life all the prejudices of the uneducated man
to anything strange, foreign, unconventional and to him incomprehensible [22].
By a remarkable coincidence, the first of Malinowski’s many examples in that

essay is the suppression of native games. In another essay, on warfare among the
natives of the Trobriand Islands, he stated that neither economic profit nor ethnic
competition were relevant for them, but war was still common. He explained that
“the mere fact of fighting as a sport, and the glory derived from a display of daring
and skill, were an important incitement to warfare.” “It was in consequence rather a
form of social ‘duel,’ in which one side earned glory and humiliated the other” [23].
This sounds very much like a player-versus-player online gameworld, and like
Vanguard involved supernatural magic. True, the magical spells in Vanguard actu-
ally work, but in a sense they did in the Trobriand Islands as well. Morale on each
side would be bolstered by rituals performed by partisan magicians, but one side
might flee the battlefield if a slight setback suggested their own magic was not
strong enough.
The initial simplification of starter areas in Vanguard greatly reduced the narra-
tive interest, as we shall see in the case of Orcs. Later, a new starter area was created,
the Isle of Dawn, which was culturally a part of Kojan and Asian in cultural flavor,
but to which it was physically impossible for an avatar to return after once having
departed it. A Vanguard wiki article calls the isle “a concentrated starting area aimed
strongly to ease both new and returning players into the world of Telon” [24]. At
some point, it apparently was a free-to-play area allowing an undecided user to try
Vanguard before subscribing. But this detached it from the general narrative, and
frankly starting my main character before the others on this isle gave me very little
conception of what Vanguard was about in a narrative rather than technical sense.
Like EverQuest, Vanguard offered a bewildering array of races and classes, far
too many for the developers to create fully, given the financial and time pressures
they suffered. Thestra had seven races: Thestran Human, Dwarf, Halfling, High Elf,
Vulmane, Varanjar, and Lesser Giant. Kojan had six: Kojani Human, Wood Elf, Half
Elf, Orc, Goblin, and Raki. Qalia also had six: Qaliathari Human. Gnome, Dark Elf,
Kurashasa, Mordebi Human, and Varanthari. Three of these were humanoid ani-
mals: Vulmane wolves, Raki foxes, and Kurashasa big cats. Elves, Goblins, Gnomes
and Halflings were derived from existing fantasy traditions, Halfling being the vari-
ant of Hobbit used by Dungeons and Dragons to avoid any implicit intellectual
property rights restricting Hobbits to Lord of the Rings properties. Crosscutting the
19 races were 15 classes. I decided to explore all eight explicitly magical classes:
casters who primarily used magic to attack enemies (druid, sorcerer, psionicist,
necromancer) and healers who specialized in group play where they restored health
to wounded teammates (cleric, shaman, disciple, blood mage). The four other
classes were selected to achieve variety across the two other major categories: offen-
sive fighters (ranger, monk, bard, rogue) and protective fighters (paladin, dread
knight, warrior).
The Bronislaw main entered Vanguard on January 26, 2014, just 2 days after
Sony announced the game would be shut down, and at that point there were still
many people playing on the single North American server, so he was able to join a
player guild, called Twighlyte Song. By mid-March, the population had dropped
catastrophically, such that joining a guild was difficult for the alts, and only three of
the 11 alt avatars were able to do so. By then, the total population of the server was
always below 100 when I was on, often fewer than 50, some of whom had also been
attracted by the chance to visit a dying world before its demise, and thus not helpful
sources of information. As the population dwindled in February, player communica-
tions indicated that many were participating in the large weekend betas tests then in
progress for Elder Scrolls Online, and in any case the remaining players of Vanguard
were in the process of migrating away.
Crafting an avatar is a somewhat uncertain business, because only after playing
for a while can one really understand the characteristics selected, and like many
games Vanguard locked an avatar into its original race and class – unless one pur-
chased a magical race change. It turned out that the choices for the Bronislaw main
were rather good: a Thestran Human druid starting on the Isle of Dawn. The logic
was that Bronislaw was a human anthropologist, especially interested in magical
culture, starting in an area that was not integrated into one of the primary environ-
ments where the major research would be done. The 11 alts began in the three more
traditional starter areas, nine of them doing their best to explore the abandoned areas
originally intended for their races.
The main avatar was a Human, of the kind dominant on Thestra that would nor-
mally start in the area called Tursh Village. Since that avatar had started on Isle of
Dawn, the High Elf psionicist started at Tursh, but immediately after documenting
its starter quests hiked the difficult distance to Leth Nurae where High Elves tradi-
tionally had started, and did the concluding missions of the old starter sequence
there. The human alt in the paladin class naturally started in the Qalia starter area on
the Cliffs of Ghelgad, so the Gnome started there as well but travelled immediately
to the original Gnome starter area at Mekalia. The human ranger began at Shang
Village in Kojan, where the Orc necromancer was also forced to begin but quickly
teleported to the original Orc starter area at Grimsea Watch. This proved to offer the
most anthropologically interesting sequence of missions.
Ritual Orcish Initiation 177
Ritual Orcish Initiation
When Telon’s starter areas were reduced from 12 to 3, an explanation was required.
A flash screen seen just before an Orc first enters Telon explains:
While you are a citizen of Martok, recent events have changed your fate. While the clans of
orcs and goblins have been at war with the humans to the south for quite some time, you
have a unique opportunity. The human Emperor has called for mercenaries from all of
Kojan to help them with the Ulvari threat. To escape the arguing and feuds that plague
Martok, you are heading south to join the humans, to train in their ways, and to help them
drive the Ulvari back.
In his Orc role, Bronislaw refused this offer, and made the difficult trek to the
original Orc starter area, thereby rejecting assimilation into a cosmopolitan society.
He was able to reach the seacoast at Grimsea by level 5, and to experience almost
all of the introductory missions. As in World of Warcraft, Vanguard’s Orcs are prim-
itive tribal invaders. The race selection text in the character creation module of the
software says, “These savage raiders would pose a threat to the whole of Telon if not
for the animosity among their own clans.” Orc characters belong to the Martok clan
but apparently had been held captive by the rival Gulgrethor clan. Early missions
required killing many level 1 and 2 Gulgrethor invaders on a beach, where they had
just landed by ship. Note that Orcs apparently lack a culture like those of the
Trobrianders which allowed separate groups to live in peace with each other, main-
tained in part by the ritual voyages between islands to share gifts as described by
Malinowski. A Necromancer starts life with a conjured minion called an abomina-
tion, that can be sent to attack an enemy, as well as having magical damage-inflicting
spells.
Soon the Orc experienced a complex initiation ritual with deep mythic signifi-
cance. In real human societies, the most significant initiations for men occur at the
transition from childhood to adulthood, but for Bronislaw the initiation was required
to test him for re-entry into the Martok clan, after escaping from the Gulgrethor clan
[25]. For women in tribal societies, marriage may have some parallels with
Bronislaw’s experience, assuming the marriage system stresses exogamy, which
means the woman must leave the social group in which she was born and raised,
joining instead the social group of her husband. Intense initiation rituals often have
the form of symbolic death, a brief period in limbo, followed by rebirth as an adult
member of the tribe, and Bronislaw’s experience followed that form, because he had
to enter a series of subterranean caverns, emerging again into the light only at the
end.
A wiki article about all the races says of Orcs that they, “hold a deep spiritual link
with their ancestral spirits. Their warseers commune with these spirits to foretell
portents of the future and earn favor with Ghalnn, god of slaughter and lord of bat-
tle” [26]. Bronislaw did many early routine missions for a warseer named Grenik,
chiefly collecting magically useful materials by killing animals, but including one
quest to liberate a worthy spirit at a nearby graveyard so it could join Ghalnn, who
was also called the Souldrinker. Once the spirit had been captured inside a talisman,
Bronislaw was required to place it on the offering stone of the Altar of Ghalnn,
which would cause the spirit to attack him, and defeating it had the effect of liberat-
ing it. This was in effect a dry run for the greater ritual to follow.
Warseer Grenik then sent Bronislaw to meet warseer Joonta at the base of
Grakkor Mountain, who sent him into Fanx Caverns to meet warseer Fezzik who
officiated over the ritual. The first task involved no danger, but reading the inscrip-
tions on three tablets – Usurper, Massacre, and Hero – that described the heroic
journey taken in the distant past by the hero after whom the mountain had been
named. They explained that a cataclysm had destroyed the continent of Koja, leav-
ing only an archipelago in its place. Both before and after, the Orc tribes battled
each other for possession of a greataxe called Harvester, which was an avatar of
Ghalnn, until only two tribes survived, Martok and Gulgrethor. In the great Massacre,
the Martok were defeated, and Grakkor sought to rally them, which required pass-
ing through the Fanx Caverns, invested by monsters, to light a beacon on the highest
peak of the mountain range. The ritual that would unite Bronislaw with the Martok
would require him to retrace Grakkor’s path through incredible dangers to the
summit.
Step one required killing at least eight each of razzenbak dragons and krinknax
lizards, and collecting tinder from the nests of the former, and oil from the glands of
the latter, to gain fuel for the beacon fire. Completing it coincidentally took
Bronislaw a big step forward in his Orc incarnation, to level 10 of adventuring expe-
rience. The second step took place deeper in the series of caverns, collecting three
eggs from wood beasts to make the fuel more flammable. Step three required killing
at least ten Gulgrethor oppressors, defeating a fierce dragon called a great wyrm,
and seizing a magical Heart of Flame. Step four required him to defeat Grakkor
himself in a fighting pit, just as liberating the worthy spirit earlier had required
defeating it in combat. From the corpse Bronislaw took the Shard of Grakkor, then
ascended a stairway atop the mountain to place all the materials within the sacred
beacon, as depicted in Fig. 8.2. Through completion of all these steps, Bronislaw
returned to the Martok family, as warseer Fezzik called the tribe, its flame forever
burning in his heart.
A major quest arc that followed his reintegration into Martok society bore simi-
larities to Malinowski’s description of the Trobriand voyages across the Pacific to
other islands bearing symbolically meaningful gifts to cement relationships with
their inhabitants. King Gruul of the Rothak Ogres could be found deep within a set
of heavily defended caverns. To get there, Bronislaw was forced to kill many Ogres,
and Gruul was not very pleased to receive the offering. Then the quest arc became a
second-order initiation rite, in the form of another trial of challenges, to transform
Bronislaw into an affiliate of the Ogres and thus to serve as ambassador with his
own group, the Martok Orcs. He had to kill ten frenzied boars and bring Gruul their
bones. Gruul instructed him to deliver them to the Ogres’ senior shaman, Bonesinger
Trok, who would have additional trials. In the Test of Strength, the shaman ordered
Bronislaw to inhale a magic powder that put him into a battle trance, in which he
defeated the daughter of the giant tortoise, Garanaka. In the Test of Spirit, he carried
magic beads while defeating an incarnation of Martok’s greatest enemy. This battle
Ritual Orcish Initiation 179
Fig. 8.2 Completing a sacred initiation ritual on Grakkor mountain
took place within a ring of stones, visually different from Stonehenge but compa-
rable in symbolism. At the center of the circle, Bronislaw read the inscription on a
pedestal, which evoked a ghostly spirit named Incarnation of Deathlord Vilonis.
Reporting back to Gruul after defeating the spirit completed the alliance between
Martok and the Ogres, who would now fight together against the Gulgrethor.
Like many MMOs, Vanguard represents the degree of hostility of NPCs by col-
oring the names or other symbols floating in the air over their heads. Green means
the NPC is safe and cannot be attacked. Yellow means the NPC can be attacked and
will fight back, but will not spontaneously attack the avatar. Red means the NPC
will attack the avatar if it comes too close. When Bronislaw first approached the
Ogre caverns, the indicative colors were all red except for Gruul himself, whose
color was yellow. After delivering the gift to Gruul, Bronislaw could leave the cav-
erns without being attacked, even standing close to Ogre guards, although their
color remained red, a paradox that added dramatic puzzlement to the episode. When
the bones were delivered to Gruul, the color indicating the disposition of the ordi-
nary Ogres switched to yellow, and when Bronislaw completed the quest arc they
became green.
A very interesting conclusion to Bronislaw’s development as an Orc required
him to don a disguise and enter Khenvor, a huge collection of rude wooden platforms
and buildings built out over the sea and currently occupied by the Gulgrethor. He
pretended to be a loyal servant of the enemies of Martok, taking on several missions
for them killing beasts and fighting attackers called the Loamites, who were strange
clay people. Eventually, one of them spoke to him, and additional quests, including
diving deep under water to retrieve bones so they could be identified, revealed the
full truth. Khenvor was the place where the great Massacre had occurred, and the
Loamites were the reanimated corpses of the Martok victims, still fighting against
their enemies, the Gulgrethor.
Of all the quest arcs Bronislaw experienced in Vanguard, this long series was
anthropologically the most interesting, and it seemed a great shame that players
who created Orc avatars were urged to become mere mercenaries to the Humans,
rather than experiencing their own initiatory arc. All parts of the arc were still intact,
and only one small bug was discovered. Near the end, when Bronislaw swam deep
under water to retrieve the bones of the Massacre victims, he was supposed to have
a special food from the innkeeper that would allow him the breathe under water. But
he had long since completed that apparently separate quest and used up the food.
Thus, a tiny continuity flaw required him to swim to the absolute limits of his endur-
ance, which indeed was a difficult trial.
Miscellaneous Observations
Cultural anthropologists may focus on particular theoretical issues when studying a

culture, yet they often wind up collecting data on many other topics, plus theory-
relevant pieces of information that may not be entirely integrated into their primary
research plan. Malinowski, for example, published incidental articles on fishing and
calendars among the Trobrianders that helped him develop his theory of magic, but
these topics were not significantly related to his study of the family system that
illustrated his concept of functional equivalence [27]. His research on their beliefs
about the dead revealed that collectively they possessed multiple beliefs, not entirely
compatible with each other, and they occasionally disagreed openly with each other.
The standard stereotype of pre-industrial societies is that they are totally unified
around one distinctive set of beliefs and practices, but in fact there is great variation.
Robert Edgerton reported results of interviewing members of four East African
societies about their conceptions of mental illness, finding not only that the typical
opinion differed from one society to another, but also that societies differed in how
uniform their views were, and one of the four contained a substantial number of
people who frankly said they had no ideas about folk psychiatry [28].
Bronislaw the multi-modal avatar did discover fragments of culture in Telon,
some of which deserve mention here, even though they do not fit into a nice, linear
narrative like the Orc mission arc. Some of these fragmentary insights reflect the
mechanics of MMO design, and all relate in one way or another to the environment
in which impersonation could be performed. Many of the twelve Bronislaw avatars
had magical powers. For eight of them, the class was selected explicitly to explore
Miscellaneous Observations 181
the magic of Vanguard, four as Spellcasters who primarily used magic for combat,
and four Healers who were expected to use magic to assist other avatars on a team
but also possessed magical attack spells used during their necessarily solo play.
Among the most obvious ways in which MMOs differ from reality is that magic
works, in a technical sense, such that healing spells heal and killing spells kill.
Malinowski’s ideas about how magic can serve to organize social action seem less
significant in MMOs, except possibly when avatars with healing spells team up
with others who are likely to need healing, but the extremely low population of
players meant this could not be explored through research in the last days of
Vanguard.
Bronislaw found many of the initial quest arcs of the 12 races he explored to be
rather uninteresting, but occasionally similarities produce insights rather than bore-
dom. In his High Elf form, he explored two starter areas, Tursh Village and Leth
Nurae, both of which highlighted quest arcs inside the equivalent of magical librar-
ies, which involved battling books as well as librarians in order to gain supernatural
lore. The Gnome experienced the same kind of challenge, clearing a room of
humanoid enemies before attacking books that fought back. College students may
well enjoy conceptualizing their educations as battles against books and teachers,
but it certainly is true that intellectual life is a refined form of struggle. While the
Gnome had no difficulty reaching level 10 of adventuring experience, the Gnomish
city of Mekalia had been closed about 2 years earlier, apparently in preparation for
transformation into a group battle instance that never took place.
Especially problematic was the situation faced by Bronislaw’s Varanthari mani-
festation, because the Lomshir starter area, immediately north of the Hathor Zhi
starter area for Dark Elves, had been transformed into a secondary adventuring area
for avatars who had already reached level 10. The Varanthari was easily able to get
there at level 1, facing nothing like the hour and 15 mins of trauma faced by the
Dwarf when he worked his difficult way at level 1 to the original Dwarf starter area
at Bordinar’s Cleft. But there were no low-level enemies or quests at Lomshir that
could allow the Varanthari to gain experience. Apparently there was a tiny flaw in
the programming that had transformed the area to level 10, and there were still rare
basilisks that were only level 3. Buying improved armor with money mailed him by
the Thestran main, the Varanthari was just barely able to kill one, which immedi-
ately took him to level 2. But there was no way he could reach level 10 at Lomshir,
so he traveled back to Tursh in a mood of defeat.
Tursh Village was the traditional starting area for both Thestran Humans and
Halflings – the Vanguard equivalent of Hobbits – but these two friendly races actu-
ally had different starting points within the wider Tursh area. So the Varanthari
walked a short distance to Rindol Field, the Halfling starter area, where he found
what looked for all the world like a Hobbit village, having exactly the architectural
style shown in the movies, with houses blending naturally into hillsides. He found
no quest givers who could guide him in gaining adventuring experience, but unlike
the case in Lomshir local creatures had not had their levels increased, so he began
killing level 1 and 2 enemies, soon went on to killing animated jack-o’-lanterns,
then at level 9 returned to Lomshir where he was able to pick up just one quest to
kill young lions, finally reaching level 10 by killing horse flies without benefit of
any mission to do so.
The death of a virtual world means the deaths not only of avatars but of real
human relationships. The four guilds that Bronislaw joined – one in each of four of
his manifestations – illustrate different types of player group, each with its own life
and death issues. Twighlyte Song was what could be called an open guild, that
actively invited everybody to join after it was founded in 2010, and thus recruited
many beginning players who may not have been active for long. As of noon Eastern
US time on April 4, 2014, it had fully 2,223 members, although most of them had
not been online for a long time, and the in-game data base reported exactly 26, not
counting Bronislaw, had played since the beginning of the month. Of course, this
was a count of avatars, not people. Twighlyte Song had ceased active recruiting, and
appeared to be a close-knit group of virtual friends, playing together so long as they
still could.
The Orc version of Bronislaw had joined a German-language guild, Weltensegler,
which had 199 members, only 4 of which had been online since the beginning of the
month, but 40 had been online in March. Successful guilds in Vanguard tended to
build virtual headquarters, which for this active but modest guild was a three-room
house in traditional Central European style, the construction of which had begun
July 9, 2013, and was one of only three such structures on a cliff overlooking the sea
at Eastwatch in Thestra. Twighlyte Song had an immense guild hall in a region filled
with halls and personal houses, as did The Preferiti to which the Qalithari belonged.
With 131 member avatars, only three of which had been online yet in April, and
only an additional 5 in March, The Preferiti were a dedicated role-playing group
that intended to stay together even after the destruction of Vanguard. Their website,
Castaways of Telon, explained: “We are a gaming community formed over many
years and through many shared experiences. Due to the closing of our chosen game,
we have created this site to maintain friendships no matter the gaming worlds within
which we find ourselves” [29]. The Gnome belonged to a satellite guild of The
Preferiti, founded in mid-March and having 20 members, called Castaways of Telon
and using the same website. It had been created to recruit “players looking for a
home during the last days of Vanguard!”
Conclusion
Having counted cultural anthropologists as friends all my life, and having once
chaired a joint sociology-anthropology department, I believe very strongly in the
value of the discipline to which Malinowski belonged. Yet in his day it seemed
designed as a qualitative approach for documenting exotic cultures that had not yet
fully joined the world community, and as a corrective to colonialism. Thus it is not
clear to me what its future is. In an important 2011 “Long-Range Plan,” the American
Anthropological Association referred to its cluster of disciplines as holding a “dis-
tinctive position at the nexus of the sciences and humanities” [30]. Has cultural
Conclusion 183
anthropology become that branch of history that studies pre-literate or pre-industrial

societies? Or was it a Vanguard of social science, that like NASA’s Apollo Program
had its day of glory in the sun, and now dissolves as even lowly sociologists adopt
its methodology? Perhaps it is better not to dwell upon such questions, and worry
instead about how to preserve enough information about discontinued virtual worlds
of the first decade of the twenty-first century, so that future generations can under-
stand the cultural and technological transformation of this period in human history.
By right of alphabetical order, the very first article in the two-volume conver-
gence encyclopedia, Leadership in Science and Technology, is titled “Anthropology.”
It seeks to understand the meaning of leadership from an anthropological perspec-
tive, thereby suggesting ways in which anthropologists can today serve leadership
functions. The author is Marietta L. Baba, Dean of the College of Social Science,
Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Human Resources and Labor Relations,
at Michigan State University. She notes that the focus of traditional anthropology on
the unity of social groups may have mitigated against emphasizing leadership as a
research topic, but today this need not be true, especially when anthropologists turn
their gaze toward scientific and engineering cultures. She herself has been at the
forefront of anthropological research both in manufacturing industries, notably the
Ford and General Motors automobile companies, and information services, such as
the Services Science innovations within IBM that have been the topic of conver-
gence publications by other authors [31]. She especially believes anthropology has
much to contribute in understanding and guiding global science and technology
convergence:
A shift toward greater interest in global phenomena has been emerging among anthropolo-
gists studying science and technology-oriented venues at the turn of the millennium. This
interest is being propelled by shifts and realignments in the social, economic, and political
relations among nations, regions, and peoples (the process of globalization) [32], and it may
be a response to postmodernist criticism, which called into question previous claims regard-
ing knowledge and representation of localized cultures. Culture is acknowledged (if it is
acknowledged at all) as inherently ambiguous, uncertain, contradictory, and at times the
imaginary construction of anthropologists and their ethnographic productions. Global phe-
nomena that are set in (or linked to) multiple research sites may serve as prime illustrations
of the situated, multivocalic, and ever-shifting nature of culture and, therefore, (perhaps)
more appropriate as a focus in the aftermath of postmodernism, which demanded new kinds
of subjects and new ways to study them [33].
Postmodernism, like existentialism before it, was a reaction against scientific opti-
mism and technological determinism. The Convergence Movement does not reject
but seeks to transcend its side in the great debate about the human future. It would
be too cute to call convergence post-postmodernism. Yet many participants in the
conferences and books recognized that the notions of automatic progress associated
with the era of industrial mass production were naive, so they sought to weave
enthusiasm and criticism together to produce a balanced fabric with which to cover
technological progress.
Ethnographic research inside virtual worlds brings Malinowski up into the mil-
lennium where Marietta Baba and many other technology-oriented anthropologists
work. Writing in the convergent Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction,
Václav Rajlich explained that every genre of software can be conceptualized as a

culture [34]. As ethnic tribes converge into a unified world population, each science
and field of engineering, as well as each sector of the productive economy, becomes
the research equivalent of a tribe. Some, like the Trobrianders, persist in some
degree of cultural independence, and others like Vanguard become extinct. If the
example of Vanguard seems trivial, given that it was a fictional world, it should be
noted that about a year after Sony announced impending doom for Vanguard, Sony
Online Entertainment itself ceased to exist. Or, rather, Sony sold that division,
which then became Daybreak Game Company. Sony remains a successful multina-
tional corporation, born and headquartered in Japan, so one might optimistically
view this Daybreak as the dawn of a post-colonial era. Time will tell, but full com-
prehension of that tale will require the work of many anthropologists in worlds both
virtual and real.
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Chapter 9
Individual Incentives for Investment
in Gameworlds
Even within a single field, social scientists often disagree, and disagreement between
groups is fundamental to the stories that give meaning to gameworlds. This chapter
uses an avatar based on social theorist George Caspar Homans (1910–1989) to
explore Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV), after a short consideration of a predecessor
MMO, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI). Homans respected the work of Malinowski, the
vehicle for the previous chapter, and tended to dismiss the perspectives of the social
scientists who feature in the following chapters, seeing them as fanciful while he
was realist. Both Final Fantasy games minimize conflict between factions of play-
ers, yet potentially this pair of games battled each other, and Final Fantasy XIV
rather dramatically tore itself apart. This chapter examines a prominent case of bad
game design from a theoretical perspective well-prepared to learn from its failure
some fundamental principles not merely about games, but about human behavior. In
particular, when individual humans converge into large social groups, can their
behavior be explained in terms of macrosociological principles that apply to entire
societies, rather than behavioral and cognitive principles that apply to individuals
alone?
Homansian Sociology
Homans was the most influential sociologist belonging to the Behaviorist school of
thought, associated with his friend and colleague B. F. Skinner, yet his work had a
powerful cognitive element and might have been classified as cognitive science if
sociology had been one of the fields that amalgamated to form cognitive science, or
if he were still working today [1]. Late in his life, he was very favorable about the
potential of new computer-based research methods, for example privately express-
ing admiration for the computer simulation modeling of the evolution of coopera-
tion carried out by Robert Axelrod [2]. Homans was selected for this study largely
because his theories could help explain why the particular online game had such a

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_9
188 9 Individual Incentives for Investment in Gameworlds
Fig. 9.1 George Homans working, while secondary avatars of other players watch [3]
poor public reception, and draw more general lessons from studying it. Taken to its
logical extreme, his theoretical approach explains both play and fantasy.
George Homans would have analyzed MMOs as if they were workplaces, and
Fig. 9.1 shows a picture of his avatar in the early days of his exploration of FFXIV,
prior to its apocalyptic reboot, apparently demonstrating something while lecturing
to a classroom of rapt students. Actually, he is practicing leatherworking, one of the
crafts in this MMO, and the short avatar near him is another player in the process of
leaving the area. It is a business center, which in FFXIV’s first manifestation was a
place where players could set up secondary avatars, to stand in one place eternally,
and selling whatever the player’s main avatar had collected. Thus the apparent class
of students is really a bazaar of merchants.
Homans titled his autobiography, Coming to My Senses, implying that other soci-
ologists were still deluded and needed to come to their own senses [4]. He believed
that very simple intellectual frameworks could explain human social behavior, that
many traditional theories were vacuous, and that all branches of social science
should be united under a single theoretical framework, influenced by behavioral
psychology and economics [5]. During the quarter-century lifetime of the Harvard
Department of Social Relations, he was the most vocal member who rejected its
intellectual orthodoxy, often called structural functionalism, based on abstractions
he decried, such as culture and values [6]. His 1950 masterwork, The Human Group,
derived a large number of simple theoretical statements from reconsideration of five
classical empirical studies [7]. Later, in Social Behavior he sought to derive similar
principles from a short list of axioms he called propositions: [8]
Homansian Sociology 189
1. The Success Proposition: For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular
action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action.
2. The Stimulus Proposition: If in the past the occurrence of a particular stimulus, or set of
stimuli, has been the occasion on which a person’s action has been rewarded, then the
more similar the present stimuli are to the past ones, the more likely the person is to
perform the action, or some similar action, now.
3. The Value Proposition: The more valuable to a person is the result of his action, the more
likely he is to perform the action.
4. The Deprivation-Satiation Proposition: The more often in the recent past a person has
received a particular reward, the less valuable any further unit of that reward becomes
for him.
5. The Aggression-Approval Propositions (A and B): When a person’s action does not
receive the rewards as expected, or receives punishment he did not expect, he will be
angry; he becomes more likely to perform aggressive behavior, and the results of such
behavior become more valuable to him. When a person’s action receives the reward he
expected, especially a greater reward than he expected, or does not receive punishment
he expected, he will be pleased; he becomes more likely to perform approving behavior,
and the results of such behavior become more valuable to him.
6. The Rationality Proposition: In choosing between alternative actions, a person will
choose that one for which, as perceived by him at the time, the value, V, of the result,
multiplied by the probability, p, of getting the result, is the greater.
In our work in the 1980s, Rodney Stark and I were very much influenced by both
Homans and Malinowski when we developed a deductive theory of religion, begin-
ning with seven axioms: [9]
1. Human perception and action take place through time, from the past into the future.
2. Humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and avoid what they perceive to be costs.
3. Rewards vary in kind, value, and generality.
4. Human action is directed by a complex but finite information-processing system that
functions to identify problems and attempt solutions to them.
5. Some desired rewards are limited in supply, including some that simply do not exist.
6. Most rewards sought by humans are destroyed when they are used.
7. Individual and social attributes which determine power are unequally distributed among
persons and groups in any society.
The full theory requires an entire book to derive the features of religion from
these propositions, including definitions of 104 technical terms, the last of which is:
“Secularization is the progressive loss of power by religious organizations.” One
implication of secularization is that for increasing numbers of people, religion loses
the power to provide what they perceive as rewards, so they turn to other societal
institutions as substitutes. The fundamental turning point of the theory is the con-
cept of compensator, as outlined in seven of the definitions:
Compensators are postulations of reward according to explanations that are not readily
susceptible to unambiguous evaluation.
Explanations are statements about how and why rewards may be obtained and costs are
incurred.
Compensators which substitute for single, specific rewards are called specific
compensators.
Compensators which substitute for a cluster of many rewards and for rewards of great scope
are called general compensators.
Religion refers to systems of general compensators based on supernatural assumptions.
Supernatural refers to forces beyond or outside nature which can suspend, alter, or ignore
physical forces.
Magic refers to specific compensators that promise to provide desired rewards without
regard for evidence concerning the designated means.
To explain religion, the theory notes that the human mind evolved to process
information needed to gain rewards and avoid costs, but some rewards are difficult
to obtain, and some costs like death cannot be avoided. The human mind does not
merely learn reward contingencies in a rote Behaviorist manner, but assembles cog-
nitive explanations about how to gain rewards and reduce costs, that over time
become increasingly complex. Humans do this not merely as individuals, but
through social interaction. Homans wrote extensively about this process, notably
returning again and again in Social Behavior to the example of two people, one
seeking advice and the other seeking approval which could be obtained by giving
good advice. In The Human Group, he had already explained that people join groups
to gain rewards they already value, but over time come to value the group itself
because participation in it becomes mentally associated with reward.
When rewards are difficult to obtain, people seek explanations from each other,
and thus explanations themselves are a form of instrumental reward, and people also
come to be valued as instruments for obtaining rewards. For very difficult rewards,
the explanations are difficult to evaluate, and gradually over history human societies
develop first magical and than religious explanations. Some of these concern
rewards, like social status, which some people possess, but others face difficulty in
obtaining. Each religious group becomes a subjective status system, for example
asserting that its members deserve honor because they are close to God. Other reli-
gious explanations often substitute for rewards that cannot easily be evaluated, such
as an afterlife in Heaven, to compensate for death. This line of logic can be applied
to virtual world games, which have some qualities of heavens in which virtual life
and social status can be enjoyed.
Homans’s stimulus proposition speaks of similarity. Actions that in the real
world are generally rewarding, will give a sense of reward to similar actions inside
a virtual world. Thus MMOs must be rather realistic, but suggest plausibly that
rewards are easier to gain than under mundane conditions. That is to say that fantasy
must be minimally fantastic, and provides compensators by imitating reality.
A Vast Mythos
As the Roman numerals attached to their names imply, Final Fantasy games belong
to a vast collection of virtual environments, mostly solo-player videogames, but
including two MMOs, Final Fantasy XI which launched in North America in May
2002, and Final Fantasy XIV, which launched September 30, 2010. The many
games in the series are not directly connected, but concern comparable cultures at
different points in their history, with continuity also in game design philosophy. It is
a remarkable fact that FFXI and FFXIV are about the only popular MMOs created
A Vast Mythos 191
in Japan, although Japan was an early center of videogame development and even
now two of the three main videogame systems, Nintendo and Playstation, are
Japanese.
When I entered FFXI in 2010, it was already 8 years old, and it was still active
years later, evidence that players find it rewarding. One striking feature of FFXI is
that it can be accessed through multiple computing platforms: personal computers
running Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox 360. Also, it is multilingual in Japanese,
English, French, and German. A user can quickly select a phrase from a long set of
nested lists, and it will be displayed to other users in their native languages. This
allows people who do not have a language in common to cooperate.
If human beings seek rewards and avoid costs, as Homans argued, they must
calculate when deciding about undertaking new actions, such as subscribing to and
investing time in a new game. Players of FFXI would logically expect that FFXIV
would offer rewarding experiences, because it would be similar to FFXI, which had
been rewarding in the past. Thus, we might imagine that the moment FFXIV
launched, activity in FFXI would drop precipitously. This may have worried the
company that created both MMOs, Square Enix, which updated FFXI a few days
before the FFXIV launch, adding five experience levels plus a new battlefield. Thus,
I carried out a set of censuses of players online in FFXI during the period in which
FFXIV launched, so to speak viewing the reward-costs calculus of the new MMO
from afar.
Table 9.1 reports the results of censuses taken at 9 AM and 9 PM Eastern US
time, every Saturday during this period. FFXI has a nice search system to see what
avatars of desired levels and abilities are nearby at the moment, to facilitate assem-
bling teams. I was able to adapt this system to take a census. For example, at 9 AM
Table 9.1 Censuses of Final Fantasy XI by experience level in 2010

Levels Sept. 4 Sept. 11 Sept. 18 Sept. 25 Oct. 2 Oct. 9
1–10 2.8 % 2.1 % 3.0 % 2.0 % 1.7 % 2.6 %
11–20 1.9 % 1.7 % 1.5 % 1.5 % 1.6 % 1.9 %
21–30 1.8 % 1.1 % 2.2 % 1.5 % 1.5 % 1.5 %
31–40 2.4 % 1.4 % 1.3 % 1.7 % 2.2 % 1.7 %
41–50 2.1 % 1.4 % 1.6 % 1.2 % 1.0 % 2.1 %
51–60 2.7 % 1.5 % 2.4 % 2.3 % 1.8 % 1.9 %
61–70 3.6 % 2.1 % 1.3 % 1.7 % 2.2 % 1.9 %
71–80 82.7 % 47.3 % 26.6 % 18.6 % 16.5 % 13.5 %
81 0.0 % 19.2 % 13.6 % 9.1 % 5.7 % 5.0 %
82 0.0 % 3.7 % 6.2 % 4.1 % 4.6 % 3.4 %
83 0.0 % 4.4 % 5.4 % 5.0 % 3.3 % 3.0 %
84 0.0 % 2.1 % 5.1 % 4.6 % 4.3 % 3.7 %
85 0.0 % 12.1 % 29.8 % 46.8 % 53.6 % 58.0 %
Total 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 %
AM users 2,142 2,323 2,154 2,195 2,104 2,131
PM users 1,345 1,842 1,426 1,373 1,366 1,281
on September 4, 2010, I typed “/search all level 1–10” into the text chat, and got a
list of names of avatars currently online anywhere in the virtual world, who were
level 1 through 10 in the experience system, plus the datum that exactly 59 fell into
this search category. The total number online was 2,142, and 59 represents 2.8 %.
The censuses reported in Table 9.1 were done on the Fenrir server, one of 24 identi-
cal versions of FFXI running on Internet, so we can estimate that the total number
of players online was something like 50,000.
Much of Table 9.1 represents the percentage distribution across experience lev-
els, and on the morning of September 4, fully 82.7 % were in the top band of levels,
71–80. (In fact, 63.4 % were level 80.) It takes many hours to reach the top levels,
perhaps 200 for the average member of a reliable team, so this demonstrates that
FFXI was a very mature game, in which most players were veterans. The lower level
avatars may belong to new players, but they are very likely to be alts of veteran play-
ers, who are using them at the moment to explore a different aspect of the virtual
world, perhaps teaming up with the alts of other experienced players. It is practi-
cally impossible to ascend beyond about level 25 in Final Fantasy XI without play-
ing in groups, because the non-player enemies often stand closely bunched together
such that they will gang up and defeat a solo player.
Over the week following September 4, the new expansion raised the top experi-
ence level of FFXI from 80 to 85, and we see that by September 11, already 12.1 %
of players online had already zoomed up to level 85, and by October 9, 58.0 % had
done so. Thus adding more game content and giving players more opportunities to
achieve status, is one way to sustain interest. Gaining levels can be perceived as
receiving rewards, in at least two ways. First, one’s level is a direct status symbol,
and the 12.1 % who immediately reached level 85 could feel proud of themselves
[10]. Second, one’s level is also an instrumental reward, giving one the ability to
gain more valuable virtual rewards such as armor and weapons, and making one a
more valued team member.
At the bottom of Table 9.1, two rows show the total numbers online at 9 AM and
9 PM each Saturday. Given that these are Eastern US time, 9 AM chiefly represents
Japanese players plus perhaps some Europeans, whereas 9 PM would include many
more North American players. FFXI has always been most popular in Japan. From
September 4 to September 11, the 9 AM population jumped up by 8.5 %, but the 9
PM population rose fully 37.0 %, suggesting that the chief immediate effect of the
expansion was to get players to play more hours of the day. By September 25, the
populations had returned to their original level. Final Fantasy XIV opened on
September 30, and we see only a very slight drop in the populations by October 2,
suggesting that few FFXI players had switched to FFXIV, despite the fact that
FFXIV was 8 years newer and heavily publicized.
We cannot be sure why the population of FFXI held so steady when FFXIV
launched, but this striking fact encourages informed speculations. Initially, FFXIV
was available only for personal computers, with the plan of adding Playstation 3 in
a few months, and in difficult negotiations with Microsoft over whether an Xbox
version would be created, while FFXI was already available on older versions of all
three systems. Additionally, only high-end graphics PCs could run FFXIV properly.
The Costs of Stumbling 193
It may be that many PC users had long ago defected from FFXI to World of Warcraft
or other more modern games, notably the very beautiful Lord of the Rings Online.
So a second possibility is that people get locked in by the particular hardware they
own, and this also can be a factor committing people over at least the medium term
to sticking with a particular online activity.
The Costs of Stumbling
When Final Fantasy XIV launched late in 2010, it was a great surprise, bordering on
consternation within the industry, because FFXIV proved to be very seriously
flawed, garnering almost universally negative reviews. The leaders of the FFXIV
design team apologized, stopped charging subscription fees for many months,
resigned from their positions, and were replaced by a new team that created a
replacement for the original FFXIV two years later.
On August 23, 2012, a rumor spread across blogsites devoted to online games
that retailers had been instructed to destroy all existing copies of FFXIV, so I imme-
diately obtained one and registered a subscription [11]. Shortly thereafter, it was
announced that FFXIV would shut down on November 11, but saving all player data
as of November 1, with the hope of relaunching later. On September 7, YouTube
began carrying an hour-long video of a presentation by the game’s designers that
was held in Japan a week before, in Japanese but with English subtitles. It confirmed
that the new version of FFXIV would be very different, and might be delayed sev-
eral months [12]. In June 2013, I briefly explored the unfinished revision in a closed
beta test, and then on August 27 was able alongside thousands of players to enter
Final Fantasy XIV: A World Reborn.
In early September, 2012, I checked several of the original online reviews of
FFXIV. The game’s Wikipedia page reported, “The initial PC release of Final
Fantasy XIV received generally negative reviews. Complaints ranged from its
essentially broken structure to numerous bugs and glitches, leading to a consensus
that the game was unfinished, if not totally unplayable” [13]. Rory Manion’s
GameSpy review was part of this negative consensus: “It is the definition of obtuse:
poorly designed, aggressively underexplained, and shoddy in almost every respect
that matters… Nothing in FFXIV is intuitive or approachable. Crafting is a chore;
starting a quest requires flipping through no less than four menus; even creating
parties is an exercise in frustration” [14]. At IGN, Charles Onyett agreed:
“Considering how frequently you need to interact with the interface in combat and
while buying and selling, it’s surprising Square Enix decided to build in something
so inelegant. For some reason it’s required that you open a main menu tab to access
any of the critical menus like ability customization menus, gear layout, and quest
journals, and there are way too many submenus that must be opened in order to get
the simplest of tasks accomplished” [15].
One problem I noticed, that had also marked Final Fantasy XI, was that entering
combat against an NPC enemy locked the avatar to that NPC, making it difficult to
perform complex actions and inhibiting escape. I analyzed this feature as an anach-
ronism, common in earlier games but obsolete now, given how easy it is for modern
computers to handle much more complex and more free player actions. The origin
is the mathematical logic of the earliest games in the tradition, which were rigor-
ously turn-based.
In his GameSpot review, Kevin VanOrd listed two virtues of FFXIV: “impressive
visual engine; flexible class system lets you be what you want, when you want.” But
then he said this “laborious online role-playing game is a step backward for the
genre” and listed five failings: “absolutely miserable interface; does a poor job of
communicating important information; limited questing means you’re always look-
ing for something fun to do; everything about the economy stinks; every aspect of
the game is filled with dumb obstacles” [16]. At PCGamer, Tom Senior hammered
home the key point: “FFXIV demands incredible patience for almost no reward”
[17].
“Aha,” George Homans would have exclaimed: “reward!” This, as noted above,
was the root concept of his theory of social behavior, but in virtual worlds the nature
of rewards is problematic and thus deserving of close examination. In the physical
world, humans evolved skills needed for food gathering, self defense, and biological
reproduction. But when they use these skills in a gameworld, their actions do not
lead to the usual real-world results. However, there are parallels, as when eating
virtual food temporarily increases the avatar’s abilities.
While the negative reviews of FFXIV contain many criticisms, two were often
repeated. One was the clunky nature of the user interface, which required much
work for little reward. The other was the lack of many story-based quests that might
give meaning to the player’s actions. Each of these might be countered by a super-
ficial explanation. For example, the interface was designed for use on both personal
computers and videogame systems, which use very different control devices and
have different graphics parameters such as the inability of videogames to display
much text at once. The lack of many questing missions related to major story arcs
may simply represent the different culture of Asian computer games, which west-
erners decry as mere grinding, killing many of the same monsters over and over
again. Homans decided to set aside these excuses, and experience FFXIV for him-
self, from the perspective of his theory.
When creating an avatar, a primary decision is which class it will belong to.
FFXIV has four categories of classes. Disciples of War and Disciples of Magic are
combat classes, differing in whether the avatar wields a physical weapon or casts
magical spells, with the spell-casters also serving healing functions when working
in groups of players of different classes. Disciples of the Land and Disciples of the
Hand are non-combat classes, the first garnering natural resources from the environ-
ment, and the second using resources collected by all three other classes to manu-
facture virtual goods like weapons, armor, and potions. Aware that quests were
minimized in FFXIV, and reluctant to risk his life in combat, Homans decided to
become a Disciple of the Land, assuming he could become rich selling harvested
resources to Disciples of the Hand. There are three Land classes, and he elected to
start as a miner, thinking he might dig up gold and silver, and reasoning that
The Costs of Stumbling 195
Table 9.2 Distribution of experience across classes in one sample of FFXIV avatars
Percent in 457
Mean of Mean of Level Level
Class 488 457 0 50 Required weapon or tool
Disciples of war:
Gladiator 32.2 33.7 11.6 % 48.1 % Sword, macuahuimeh
(macuahuitl)
Pugilist 31.3 32.8 9.0 % 46.6 % Claw, metal knuckles
Marauder 31.8 33.4 19.9 % 54.9 % Two-handed axe
Lancer 30.7 32.2 17.5 % 47.0 % Spear, lance
Archer 31.1 32.6 18.8 % 47.9 % Bow, arrows
Disciples of magic:
Conjurer 38.1 39.0 6.6 % 58.6 % Wand, cane
Thaumaturge 36.5 36.9 9.6 % 59.1 % Club, staff
Disciples of the land:
Miner 19.9 21.2 26.5 % 21.0 % Pickaxe, sledgehammer
Botanist 16.6 17.7 32.6 % 13.6 % Hatchet, scythe
Fisher 13.8 14.7 39.6 % 14.2 % Rod, bait
Disciples of the hand:
Carpenter 18.1 19.3 35.9 % 16.2 % Saw, hammer
Blacksmith 19.0 20.3 29.1 % 20.4 % Cross-pein hammer, file
Armorer 18.5 19.7 35.0 % 22.1 % Raising hammer, pliers
Goldsmith 20.4 21.8 30.2 % 24.1 % Chaser hammer, grinding wheel
Leatherworker 16.8 18.0 37.2 % 16.8 % Knife, awl
Weaver 18.8 20.0 33.7 % 19.7 % Needle, spinning wheel
Alchemist 16.4 17.5 38.1 % 13.8 % Alembic, mortar
Culinarian 13.3 14.2 44.9 % 12.0 % Skillet, kitchen knife
becoming a botanist or fisher would be less lucrative. Thus he began with the
assumption that the ultimate reward was money, denominated in Final Fantasy
games as the currency called gil, and chose an initial path in an analysis that weighed
likely rewards against possible costs.
Table 9.2 lists all the original FFXIV classes, along with data from a census of
all English-speaking Excalibur-server players momentarily online in the evening of
September 28, 2012. The data were extracted manually from the game’s database,
while Homans was online. This required searching the in-game system for all the
players currently in one class who identified English as their language, opening a
window of data about each player, taking a screenshot, doing the same for every
other category to find all the players, and then later entering the data manually into
a spreadsheet. This laborious approach was used because the two more efficient
alternatives were not available for this game. Much comparable research on World
of Warcraft was able to adapt an add-on program called CensusPlus, written in the
Lua scripting language and almost instantly producing a complete census data file,
which the game company permits players to use [18]. One remarkable set of studies
of EverQuest II employed data directly from the game’s servers, provided by the
game company, as well as a survey of a sample of players [19]. FFXIV differed
from those very successful games not only in the difficulty of extracting data from
it, but also in that it has a very different conception of class, allowing each avatar to
develop any and all of the 18 skillsets, not just a small selection as in the case of
other MMOs.
Each of the 18 specializations requires use of a distinctive kind of tool, such as a
sword or a fishing rod; better and more diverse tools of that type must be obtained
as the avatar’s skills increase. This particular data set is based on 488 avatars simul-
taneously online on one server, and it cannot be considered a random sample. While
some of its patterns may be representative, it is best used as an introduction to the
social world of FFXIV. In fact, I had reason to doubt that all 488 actually were ava-
tars of genuine players, so before analyzing the pattern we need to examine why
some of the 488 need to be removed.
Many times when the Homans avatar was at particular locations in the virtual
world where avatars could sell looted or gathered goods to an NPC, he observed
very strange groups of avatars, marked by two features. First, their names did not
make any sense, often unpronounceable. This suggested they had not been created
by real players who invested their characters with meaning. Second, they moved in
a halting but group-centered manner. This is the way multiple avatars operated by a
single person move, what is called multi-boxing because it often but not always
requires use of a separate computer for each avatar. I myself have done two-computer
multiboxing in both World of Warcraft and Second Life.
The anomalous nature of some FFXIV avatars was made apparent by a group of
five with the names Exc Ggjja, Exc Ggjjb, Exc Ggjjc, Exc Ggjjd and Exc Ggjjh. The
interface in FFXIV that allows players to team up other players displays results in
an order determined by geographic location, so we know these five really were
together. Their class levels were remarkable. Every one of them had reached the
maximum level of 50 in all seven of the War and Magic specializations, but was at
level zero in all the Land and Hand specializations. I found five other suspicious
groups, but members of each of them tended to be advanced in just one specializa-
tion. One hypothesis is that the five Exc avatars are innocent agents of Square-Enix,
who were artificially given top levels in the seven combat specializations, to allow
them free reign to test the current status of the game.
The five other groups may have been gold farmers like one mentioned in Chap. 6,
multi-box agents of independent groups who were using wholesale tactics and bot
software to gather up virtual resources for sale to genuine players. At the time these
data were collected, there was great excitement that FFXIV would relaunch in an
improved state, and widespread understanding that the avatars and all their posses-
sions would be preserved for the relaunch. Thus, gold farmers may have flocked to
the game, to prepare to make a profit after the hiatus when many new players were
attracted to FFXIV. Indeed, a year later, after FFXIV relaunched, gold farmers were
advertising their ill-gotten wares aggressively. This is yet another example of the
issue that affects the real world as well as the games: How are we to judge people
who succeed by violating the rules that other people obey?
A Disciple of the Land 197
For much of Table 9.1, the suspected gold farmers or Square Enix agents were
removed, leaving 457 avatars. For the 457 genuine cases, the Magic pair of classes
had the highest mean, 38.0 out of a possible 50.0, and War came second at 32.9.
Square Enix had noticed this difference, and the relaunch added a third magic class to
provide greater magical variety. Slightly surprising is the greater popularity of Hand
classes with a mean of 18.9, compared with 17.9 for Land classes. This is a small dif-
ference, but given there were far more Hand classes, we might have predicted each
would be less popular. The Land classes allow players to gather natural resources as
they travel across the landscape, so one might have thought they would do more of it.
A Disciple of the Land
My main George Homans avatar began as a miner, seeking money, but naturally I
had a somewhat different ultimate agenda for him, very quickly learning all about
FFXIV before November 1, and ultimately I advanced him in nine of the skillsets:
gladiator, archer, conjuror, miner, botanist, fisher, carpenter, leatherworker, and
alchemist. To practice a skill, the avatar must hold the particular tool required for it,
and switching from one tool to another has the effect of switching class, experience
level, and the specific commands available to the player. At the beginning, George
received a free pickaxe for his mining, but any other tools would need to be bought
with money he gained selling resources to non-player vendors or to other players.
It took George a while to get the hang of mining, in its complicated original
form. A miner needed first of all to scout around until he found a rocky outcropping
with a bright light marking a minable spot. An episode of mining required swinging
the pick several times, occasionally moving an interface indicator up or down to set
the level of a series of whacks, and each time selecting a spot within a circular dis-
play where the actual hit would occur. The exact timing of a strike would determine
how powerful it was. All this was very difficult to figure out, and the interface pro-
vided only very vague hints locating the right spot to gain a mineral reward. As he
worked, George gained mining experience and abilities for finding the spots to
mine, but the process was exceedingly tedious, and he obtained very little ore. He
wondered if he should try chopping trees instead.
Unfortunately, a hatchet would cost gil from a vendor, and selling what little ore
he had mined did not earn him nearly enough. Miners have the ability to throw
stones, and George discovered it was just barely possible to kill one of the many
level 1 lost lambs in the area, by repeatedly throwing stones at it, and hoping that the
lamb would not kill him first by butting him with its head. Once he had earned about
a thousand gil, from selling mutton, hides, and other minor rewards from his slaugh-
ter of a couple dozen lambs, he was ready to buy a hatchet, but decided to buy a
sword instead. Wielding the sword, which transformed him into a gladiator, George
could slaughter animals more easily, earning money he used to buy not only a
hatchet and a fishing rod, but also a lightly armored vest and a shield. The next thing
he did was theorize.
In switching from miner to gladiator, Homans enacted his Aggression-Approval

and Rationality propositions, but the decision to switch represented more than
merely aggression triggered by frustration. It also reflected cognition. Becoming a
gladiator, although slaughtering animals rather than fellow gladiators, was far more
profitable than mining, but once he could afford a hatchet, Homans found that he
was pretty good at chopping trees, the early task in being a botanist. To buy the
tools, he needed to explore the shops in the nearest city, a seaport called Limsa
Lominsa, where he discovered some non-player characters with exclamation marks
over their heads, who offered him missions to perform.
One of the earliest missions George did was a very simple task for the innkeeper,
which gave him the right to spend each night in the inn. He discovered that resting
increased the rate at which he would gain experience practicing his skills. His pri-
mary goal was still amassing money, but spending some of it on tools increased his
rate of earning, as did ascending the ladder of skill experience. Resting increased
the rate of experience gain, and thus indirectly the rate of money gained, and doing
the quest for the innkeeper had provided a means for increasing the rate of experi-
ence gain. Thus Homans had rediscovered the primary principle from his book The
Human Group: Doing what other people want can be a means for increasing your
own rewards. So he began doing all the special missions offered by any quest-giver
he encountered.
This led him to a discovery about the initial version of Final Fantasy XIV.
Essentially all the special quests were training missions, and their frankly vestigial
stories were merely frameworks for explaining the tasks required. Some provided
the first experience exercising a skill, while others sent the avatar to new locations
where valuable resources could be found. When reviewers criticized FFXIV for
lacking much in the way of story-based quests, they failed to note that its fundamen-
tal conception was very different from their conception. The quests were really just
tutorials to prepare the player for the main activity of the game, which was slaugh-
tering beasts, monsters, and occasional humanoid enemies.
Much of the time, for his real work, Homans would go to a particular non-player
character in one of the cities, who offered him a number of very simple levequests,
with a paragraph of story attached but not really scenes from a drama such as in the
other MMOs described here. He would go to a designated location and start a
30-min timer, during which he would kill a designated list of beasts, gaining not
only the experience and loot from killing each one, but also bonus experience and
money for completing the levequest. Given that his goal was gaining the ultimate
reward, money, this was perfectly satisfactory to him. But then, he pondered the fact
that FFXIV was an Asian game, and the criticisms he had read online about the
game were written in English, a western language. He assumed that the interface
problems with FFXIV were indeed the result of designing it for multiple hardware
systems, perhaps aggravated by objectively inferior solutions to their requirements.
But the quest-related criticisms seemed to reflect cultural differences between the
American critics and the Japanese game designers. This presented a serious
challenge to the behaviorist theory of George Homans, because he did not believe
in the concept of culture.
Cultural Relativism 199
Cultural Relativism
In reminiscing about the stage in his intellectual development when he first articu-
lated his doubts about the utility of the culture concept, Homans wrote:
I had always believed in the folk-saying, “Human nature is the same the world over.” Of
course there were superficial differences between the behavior of Japanese and that of
Americans, but at a deeper level we shared the same physical and social characteristics as
members of the same species. The “culture vultures” laughed at my folk-wisdom. They
almost went so far as to claim that Japanese and Americans were fundamentally different
kinds of persons and different because they were products of different cultures (ways of
living and thinking). Clyde Kluckhohn once said to me that, if one were asked why the
behavior of members of one society differed institutionally or otherwise from that of mem-
bers of another, all one could answer was, “Because of the culture.” Though I had not yet
begun to think about the nature of explanation, I considered this a singularly poor one. All
it amounted to saying was that the reasons people in a given society behaved as they did was
that the older generation had taught them to do so. But why that particular way rather than
another? That was the real question [4, p. 7].
Thinking along these lines leads to a very different insight: The audience and
style of MMOs has been changing rapidly, and different companies, let alone differ-
ent nations, may be ahead or behind in this transformation process. The assumption
of most early MMOs was that people will play it in groups, not solo, but today a
very difficult design challenge is how to balance solo play with group play, so that
players can decide for themselves how to play. As noted above, it is practically
impossible to ascend beyond about level 25 in Final Fantasy XI without playing in
groups, but George had no trouble reaching the top level 50 as a gladiator in Final
Fantasy XIV, playing almost always alone. So, Square Enix was following that par-
ticular global trend, away from the group play associated with Asian games.
One factor emphasizing MMO group play in Asian countries early on was the
fact that players often could not afford to buy their own computers, so they played
in gaming parlors, naturally teaming up with the players sitting beside them.
Economics also featured in the Asian emphasis on grinding, simply killing one
enemy after another without much variety provided by a story. It costs money to
create story-rich games. In addition, especially for Japan which produced two of the
three current videogame systems – Nintendo and Sony PlayStation – the technical,
economic, and social characteristics of videogames influenced FFXIV which was
intended to run on PlayStation 3. Often, videogames are played by children through
the family television set, which sets a priority for a string of short simple missions,
both because the children may have short attention spans, and because their parents
may want at any moment to take over the TV.
Some game-related research gives plausibility to cultural explanations, however
[20]. An excellent example is a study by Long Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi,
contrasting the values and practices of amateur software programming communities
in China versus the United States. They found that status in China depended more
on being a mentor than an innovator, and the communities were organized – or dis-
organized – in different ways [21]. Yet such differences may represent the different
stages of development reached in the two nations, rather than a fundamental cultural
divide that would persist indefinitely. Homans did not deny that people in different
societies behave differently. He had written extensively about differences in land
tenure, for example [22]. His problem with the concept culture was that it was too
vague to serve in a rigorous explanation. At best it was an orienting concept, sug-
gesting a direction for research but contributing nothing to the findings.
His behaviorism led Homans to believe that individuals would rapidly adjust
their behavior to the contingencies of rewards in the environment, rather than being
mentally trapped within a rigid set of cultural assumptions. This is an empirical
issue, as well as a theoretical one, and Homans may have underestimated the degree
of rigidity to the adult mind, and the difficulty of gaining new skills appropriate for
functioning in a new environment. But the opposite perspective struck him as fatally
flawed.
For example, culture-oriented anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote an influential
book claiming that Japan was a shame culture, not a guilt culture like Europe and
America [23]. She said that in Japan human behavior was controlled by immediate
social influences, and once taken outside their intimate social groups, Japanese peo-
ple might violate any law or norm without experiencing any reluctance. In contrast,
she said, people of European descent had internalized the norms of their culture, and
would feel guilty about violating rules whether or not they were under direct social
control. Homans agreed with Benedict about the Japanese, but would have argued
against her that Americans and Europeans are identical in this respect to Japanese.
Near the end of his teaching career, he assigned Internalization of Norms by John
Finley Scott to students in his social behavior class [24]. Despite the title, Scott
argues that human beings do not internalize norms, taking the behaviorist line that
everybody is quite malleable, responding to contingencies of reinforcement in a
way that emphasizes recent rewards and costs. Students were also assigned to read
the main behavior modification textbook by Albert Bandura, which also takes this
position [25].
No single dataset can decide such huge issues as the significance of culture and
the internalization of norms. Although each avatar may practice any or all of the 18
class activities, at any given moment only one was active, determined by which kind
of tool the avatar was using. The interface used to find players to invite to a team
allowed searching by active class, skill level in that class, and primary language, it
a way that simplified tabulation and did not require a screenshot of data for each
individual avatar. Table 9.3 compares the two most common languages, and thus
Japanese versus English-speaking cultures, at one point in time, on ten FFXIV serv-
ers, which required me to create an additional nine, low-level Homans avatars.
The table divides avatars into those level 1 through 49 on the given skill, who are
therefore in the process of advancing in status and ability, with those level 50 who
are exercising achieved status and skills. The balance across major categories is
quite different depending upon level. The level 50 collectors and crafters are pro-
ducing wealth for sale or for sharing within their guild, and may be using those
skills either when teammates are not online, or there is a pause in the fighting. The
interfaces used to collect the data permitted determination of whether an avatar was
Cultural Relativism 201
Table 9.3 Momentary class distribution of 13,568 FFXIV players

Levels 1–49 Level 50
Class Japanese English Japanese English
Warriors (disciples of war):
Gladiator 6.0 % 7.3 % 8.3 % 5.9 %
Pugilist 5.4 % 5.6 % 5.8 % 7.1 %
Marauder 5.1 % 6.6 % 9.4 % 11.9 %
Lancer 4.3 % 6.7 % 7.9 % 8.3 %
Archer 6.3 % 6.3 % 8.8 % 7.0 %
Magicians (disciples of magic):
Conjurer 11.3 % 8.1 % 22.5 % 16.9 %
Thaumaturge 7.4 % 8.6 % 21.7 % 20.4 %
Collectors (disciples of the land):
Miner 4.2 % 6.0 % 2.4 % 3.6 %
Botanist 3.6 % 3.2 % 1.1 % 1.1 %
Fisher 3.6 % 4.8 % 1.5 % 5.4 %
Crafters (disciples of the hand):
Carpenter 4.7 % 5.2 % 0.9 % 1.0 %
Blacksmith 4.2 % 4.3 % 1.1 % 1.7 %
Armorer 4.5 % 3.5 % 1.2 % 1.4 %
Goldsmith 5.2 % 6.1 % 2.3 % 2.8 %
Leatherworker 4.7 % 4.3 % 1.5 % 1.6 %
Weaver 5.0 % 4.9 % 1.6 % 1.8 %
Alchemist 9.9 % 5.3 % 1.0 % 1.5 %
Culinarian 4.6 % 3.2 % 0.7 % 0.8 %
100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 %
Cases 3,126 1,386 6,952 2,104
currently in a temporary team, versus playing solo at the moment, and Table 9.4
shows the percentages in the gross class categories, then the percentage within each
that is currently in a party.
Presented with these tables, Homans would argue that most of the differences
were the result of random factors, but others might result from the different gaming
circumstances in Japan versus North America. The biggest difference is the sheer
number of players using the languages, 74.3 % of the total 13,568 using Japanese in
what was, after all, a Japanese game. Yes, there was a hint that Japan was a more
collectivist society, because a larger fraction of Japanese warriors and magicians
were currently in a team. Why were more Japanese playing magicians? Was this
because Japanese religion gave more room for magic, while Christianity in
English-speaking nations discouraged it? Or was this merely the fact that teams
needed healers, while magicians were less effective in solo play?
Given his appreciation for computer simulation, Homans might well have
informed himself about the technical and economic context around FFXIV. The
commercial dominance of Nintendo and Sony PlayStation in Japan had the implica-
Table 9.4 Social versus solo play

Levels 1–49 Level 50
Class category Japanese English Japanese English
Momentary category distribution of players:
Warriors 27.1 % 32.5 % 40.3 % 40.2 %
Magicians 18.7 % 16.7 % 44.3 % 37.3 %
Collectors 11.5 % 14.1 % 5.0 % 10.1 %
Crafters 42.7 % 36.8 % 10.4 % 12.5 %
100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 % 100.0 %
Cases 3,126 1,386 6,952 2,104
Percent of players currently in a party:
Warriors 37.0 % 34.2 % 73.0 % 63.7 %
Magicians 47.8 % 48.9 % 70.8 % 66.3 %
Collectors 7.8 % 8.7 % 18.6 % 17.9 %
Crafters 6.4 % 9.8 % 18.4 % 24.7 %
tion of preventing most MMOs from attempting to compete inside the country. For
example, to bring even hugely popular World of Warcraft to Japan would require a
tremendous translation effort, yet the distribution of information technology hard-
ware is very different. Desktop computers in Japan tend to be used for work not
play, while the two indigenous videogame systems dominate the gaming market.
Like FFXI, FFXIV was originally run entirely off servers in Japan, which meant
that lag to North America and Europe could often be considerable. The fraction of
Japanese gamers who had computers rather than videogame systems may have been
especially international in their outlook or ambitions, but they faced lag when play-
ing World of Warcraft on American or European servers.
Thus, the fact that the original version of FFXIV was more popular with Japanese
speakers – despite the fact they are greatly outnumbered in the world compared with
English speakers – would not necessarily convince Homans he was wrong to dis-
miss the significance of Japanese culture. Indeed, Homans would argue that the very
fact one could debate the independent importance of culture, rather than reducing it
to the effect of current technological and economic conditions, proved the vacuity
of the concept. The real test, he would say, was whether a Japanese company, with
almost entirely Japanese personnel, could rebound from this catastrophic failure,
and produce a new version of XXIV that was popular outside Japan. Wonder of
wonders, they did succeed!
A World Reborn
The reboot of FFXIV would be subtitled A Realm Reborn, and required a story
about how that had happened. This would need to be a tale of profound change,
because FFXIV would be reprogrammed essentially from scratch, as a specialized
A World Reborn 203
wiki reported: “A Realm Reborn would carry over the original game’s setting, lore
and story, but feature a new client, server structure, graphics engine, interface, ter-
rain, and content” [26]. This could be conceptualized as an apocalypse that would
transform the land as well as society, and allocate new missions based on radically
altered circumstances. Of course, apocalyptic thinking has been common in many
societies of the world, including even Europe and America [27]. As a fantasy
mythos, Final Fantasy weaves supernatural forces into the natural world, and like
many other MMOs postulates a unique set of gods and historical eras:
The First Umbral Era brought an end to the age of the gods, and there have been six such
eras of calamity since the First Astral Era ushered in the age of man. Each of the Umbral
catastrophes has, in turn, borne the characteristics of one of the six elements. With all the
elements now represented, it was believed the current Astral era would last into eternity. But
in the seventh verse of the Divine Chronicles, Mezaya Thousand Eyes prophesized a less
fortunate fate. The “senary sun,” or Sixth Astral Era, would indeed end, and the “septenary
moon,” or Seventh Umbral Era, would cast its shadow upon the land [28].
Specifically, this prophecy means that magical forces would cause a moon named
Dalamud to smash into the planet. Figure 9.2 shows Dalamud looming in the sky, as
Homans practices his fishing skill in the ocean, prior to the closure of the first ver-
sion of FFXIV. When the Homans avatar returned to the continent of Eorzea after
the apocalypse, he found himself at Ul’dah city, about 5 years after he had left it. A
Fig. 9.2 George Homans fishing in the last days before the apocalypse
good deal of the damage had been repaired, he had neither gained nor lost experi-
ence, and one way or another he was able to retrieve all his possessions. However,
he had lost all the status he had gained with respect to the city, and indeed the virtual
geography.
He was surprised that Momodi, the proprietor of the hotel, did not remember
him, and he had lost his reservation for one of the bedrooms. Thus, he was forced to
complete a number of low-level missions, to regain status as an Adventurer and resi-
dent. As in many other MMOs, there are quick travel systems, mainly riding giant
flightless birds from one outpost to another, but also airship flight between the big
cities. Before the apocalypse, he had visited each point and done everything else to
gain the right to travel fast, everywhere it was possible. He had lost all those rights.
Relatively speaking, Homans was wealthy, in terms of virtual goods like armor
and crafting materials, but poor in social status. He partially dealt with the status
deficiency by joining a guild led by experienced players, named Last of Us. But he
and I were also poor with respect to information, so the primary goal we set was to
explore the entire territory of Eorzea and regain all the lost travel rights. His original
home had not been Ul’dah but Limsa Lominsa, where he had joined the Lominsan
Fishermen’s Guild, which gave him initial training and sent him out to “document
the habitats and migration patterns of different varieties of marine life,” so it seemed
quite reasonable to continue that scientific mission. Prior to the apocalypse, he had
taken fishing only to level 15 of skill, but now he aimed for 50, and resolved to do
so as well with one of the magical skills, selecting conjuror. This proved to be effi-
cient, because his fishing and general exploration required him to revisit all the low
and middle level zones, defending himself and completing occasional quests as a
conjuror.
On December 7, 2013, Last of Us had 55 members, about 20 fewer than its peak
since George had joined. The group as a whole had no formal motto, but Captain
Archangel Aziza personally proclaimed this one: “Don’t be afraid of a shadow. It
means that light is nearby.” On February 28, 2014, the online FFXIV database listed
53 members, so clearly the Society had achieved a degree of stability, and many
members were far advanced in many classes. Table 9.5 gives the mean level across
all classes for the 55 members on December 7, George’s concluding levels, and the
levels achieved by the six members of Last of Us holding officer rank by February
18. Archangel Azazriel held Admiral rank; Archangel Aziza continued to hold
Captain rank, and there were four Commanders: Crzy Yayokid, Honora Saintrelmaux,
Rakurai Delacroix, and Vryth Masamune.
At the time of the December census, it was possible to determine how recently
members had been online, and the median was 28 days, frankly implying that half
the members had effectively dropped out, even though their avatars were still mem-
bers. This could have several meanings, but one deserves emphasis. The Excalibur
server was originally populated by both Japanese and English-Speaking players, but
after the reboot it was situated in North America, and Japanese players may have
been especially likely to switch to a more convenient Japan-based server, with lower
lag and a greater number of players active during peak local hours. Initially, the only
way they could do this was to leave their old avatars where they were and create new
Conclusion 205
Table 9.5 Class experience achievements of a 55-member guild

Mean George
of 55 Homans Azazriel Aziza Crzy Honora Rakurai Vryth
Warriors:
Gladiator 14.2 50 50 46 30 0 34 50
Pugilist 11.9 0 50 30 12 50 30 15
Marauder 9.1 0 50 30 43 16 50 8
Lancer 10.5 0 50 50 10 50 36 1
Archer 13.8 15 50 50 2 50 50 37
Magicians:
Conjurer 17.5 50 50 50 6 23 50 34
Thaumaturge 16.7 0 50 30 1 50 50 10
Arcanist 9.9 0 50 50 4 50 50 1
Collectors:
Miner 10.4 15 50 50 0 50 50 0
Botanist 7.4 15 50 50 0 50 50 0
Fisher 6.7 50 50 50 1 50 1 3
Crafters:
Carpenter 5.0 17 27 50 0 50 1 1
Blacksmith 4.0 0 50 13 1 50 50 0
Armorer 5.2 0 50 1 6 50 50 0
Goldsmith 6.0 0 50 2 0 50 50 0
Leatherworker 5.8 15 25 50 0 50 50 0
Weaver 7.2 0 50 20 0 50 3 0
Alchemist 5.9 15 32 50 0 50 50 0
Culinarian 3.5 0 25 50 0 50 50 0
Mean level:
December 7 9.0 12.7 29.3 23.3 6.1 25.8 32.4 8.4
February 18 – 12.7 45.2 38.0 6.1 44.2 39.7 8.4
ones. Of the four Commanders in Last of Us, two were inactive. As of December 7,
Vryth Masamune had been offline for 31 days, and Crzy Yayokid for fully 64 days.
As the bottom two rows of the table show, these two avatars continued to be inac-
tive, as was George Homans, while the four other officers were active and advanced
significantly in mean experience level.
Conclusion
While the George Homans avatar had learned how to obtains rewards in the pre-
apocalypse version of Final Fantasy XIV, for gamers in general the Homansian
theoretical propositions predicted an excess of costs over rewards, thus commercial
failure. Did many players, across many nations, find A Realm Reborn rewarding?
Remarkably, yes. Essentially all of the flaws cited in negative reviews had been
eliminated. Avatar movements were no longer constrained during combat. A vast
number of meaningful quests had been added. Interesting repeated events were
added, with dramatic dynamism that would culminate in a crescendo of action. As
of the end of 2014, versions were online in Japanese, English, French, German, and
Mandarin Chinese. Square Enix returned from economic loss to profitability,
according to one report, over the last 9 months of 2013 having net sales of 1 billion
dollars, with a profit of 51 million dollars [29]. Admittedly, the 2014 annual report
of the corporation shows that most income is gained in Japan [30].
Conceptualizing these results in terms that are both Homansian and convergent
raises interesting issues. Homans very much believed in unification of the social
sciences, as he explained in his 1967 book, The Nature of Social Science, but as
noted above he rejected the macrosociological notion that large-scale social laws
existed that ensured the institutions of society would serve positive functions. He
was a self-avowed reductionist, believing that no general scientific laws could be
discovered at the level of large-scale social groups, but that all social behavior could
be analyzed in terms of interactions between individuals. Behavioral science itself
could be reduced to explanations based in biology, which could themselves be
explained in terms of chemical principles, that could be further reduced to the pri-
mary laws of the universe explained in terms of physics. Thus, were Homans still
alive, he could be a leader of the Convergence Movement and could have made
valuable contributions to the Handbook and the earlier conference volumes.
However, his presence at the conferences would have raised serious challenges
to the optimism of other participants. He was a reductionist, while the Convergence
Movement seems to take the opposite course, what philosophers call emergentism.
This is the belief that new, coherent realities emerge as systems increase in com-
plexity, for example beneficial new forms of society resulting from technological
advances. Consider the meaning of divergence, as often used by members of the
Convergence Movement: Once fields of science and technology have converged,
they produce innovations which diffuse to other fields where they trigger new cycles
of convergence-divergence [31]. Thus, within the Convergence Movement, diver-
gence refers to the creative effect of diffusion of innovations, with typically benefi-
cial effects. For Homans, divergence is chaotic. Here is how I expressed his
perspective in a chapter contributed to a book titled Chaos, Complexity, and
Sociology:
A small number of axioms does not imply that society is simple. Homans himself identified
two complicating factors, historicity and divergence. Historicity is the infinitely complex
set of prior events that serves as the background for even the most elementary human
decision. Every human action is taken in the context of a particular, unique historical
moment, and it may never be possible to learn enough about the antecedents of that moment,
including the history of the individual human being, to understand or predict that action
with confidence. Divergence is the principle that even a seemingly small decision could
have immense consequences. Homans explains: “In divergence, a force weak in itself but
just tipping the scales in a balance of stronger forces has big and spreading effects over
time” [5, p. 97]. Thus, Homans anticipated ideas of the recent intellectual movement that
focuses on chaos, non-linearity, and complexity [32].
References 207
One thing Homans definitely did not anticipate, however, was progress in social
science, and I often wonder what discoveries since his death in 1989 might have
caused him to rethink his pessimism. Although he wrote general theory and some
history, his main field was social-psychology, so that is where we should look for
progress to support or refute his theory. His own work is not influential today, yet
the field resonates to his pessimism. In the exact year of the death of Homans,
William Sewell published a gloomy reminiscence on the Golden Age of interdisci-
plinary social psychology, roughly 1940–1965, judging that four factors had caused
the failure of this grand attempt at convergence: (1) Convergence across psychology
and sociology threatened the departmental structure of universities. (2) Funding was
inadequate to support comprehensive research. (3) There were no breakthroughs in
social psychological theory. (4) Advances in research methods did not produce dis-
coveries [33].
As recently as 2008, James House published a comprehensive perspective on the
dreary state of social psychology, with Sewell’s observations very much in mind,
noting that by many measures social psychology was in decline, compared, for
example, with economics [34]. Homans greatly respected economics, but its suc-
cess in recent years might be explained more by its practical relevance for finance
in a market-oriented society than by solid discoveries having implications for other
social sciences. The most recent, and in some ways worst, testimony to the sorry
state of social psychology was an August 2015 report in the widely-read journal
Science that found that only 25 % of the studies in the main psychology journal of
the field, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, could be verified through
careful replication [35]. While Homans might employ the metaphor of “the last nail
in the coffin,” perhaps restated as “the final fantasy of social science,” we can more
optimistically hope that convergence via the cognitive and information sciences
could achieve a rebirth for social psychology, comparable to that achieved by Final
Fantasy XIV.
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Chapter 10
Divergence in the Fall of a Virtual Civilization
The rise and fall of a civilization can be conceptualized as a large-scale cycle of

convergence and divergence. To be sure, many different meanings can be attached
to the word civilization, for example whether it is created by violent conquest, rep-
resents peaceful cooperation, or both. From the scientific standpoint, it can be nar-
rowly defined as a self-sustaining social order sufficiently rational to support science
among its many well-functioning institutions. Yet here we shall employ theorists of
the collapse of social order, as avatars to explore a vast virtual post-apocalyptic
world appropriately named Fallen Earth. Essentially all of the conferences and pub-
lications in the Converging Technologies movement recognized the possibility that
science might have harmful unintended consequences, yet optimistically believed
that convergence of the world’s entire population could prevent disaster and proba-
bly sustain endless progress. This chapter will conclude by linking social theories of
civilization decline to a major theory in fundamental physics that implicitly depends
upon social science, thus representing a major conceptualization of convergence
that has not receive much attention very recently, perhaps because of its pessimistic
implications. Called the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, here presented in its
Omicron variant, this theory holds that the physical characteristics of the universe
were defined by the fact that only in such a universe could human beings evolve and
seek to learn truths about nature. Omicron is the point in time at which the entire
universe begins to disintegrate inexorably, as seen from a human perspective.
Nightmare Intellectuals
Fallen Earth, a remarkable post-apocalyptic MMO, is often compared with Fallout

3, the solo-player game we considered in Chaps. 1 and 5, and bears comparison with
Xsyon, explored in Chap. 2. By the year 2156, global civilization had fallen. In an
area perhaps a thousand square miles around the Grand Canyon in the American
southwest, small groups seek to live off the land, as mutant animals and enraged

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_10
212 10 Divergence in the Fall of a Virtual Civilization
humans attack from all sides. Other than the rules coded into the game program,
laws prevail only within tiny areas controlled by a single faction. The groups all
need to deal with the fact that civilization has fallen, developing idiosyncratic theo-
ries about why it happened, and radical plans for what to do about it. This MMO
expressed the fundamental theory behind the majority of them: Humans are doomed
to battle each other to the death. The only question is which other humans will
become allies, and which, enemies.
When the barbarian invader, Alaric, conquered Rome in the year 410, the shock
jolted the entire classical world, because the Eternal City no longer seemed eternal,
yet it held the Mediterranean together [1]. St. Augustine reacted to this trauma by
writing The City of God, which imagined that transcendent stability somehow
existed on a spiritual plain far above the actual Italian peninsula: “Incomparabiliter
superna est ciuitas clarior, ubi uictoria ueritas, ubi dignitas sanctitas, ubi pax felici-
tas, ubi uita aeternitas” (“The heavenly city is far above thine, where truth is the
victory; holiness the dignity, happiness the peace, and eternity the continuance.”)
[2]. The fall of Rome loomed large over the Dark Ages, and defined the Renaissance
not as objective progress but as restoration from a degraded condition. Yet in The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wondered
why Rome took so long to fall, given its social pathologies, and we may well won-
der whether our own civilization has become equally corrupt and perhaps more
fragile because of the destructive power of the technologies developed since the
days of the Caesars [3]. Among the greatest works of American art from the 1830s
is a sequence of five romantic paintings by Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire,”
showing the same Romelike location as civilization rises and falls [4]. Yet the most
intense and intellectually rich explorations of this profound issue came from the
period a century later, when many intellectuals believed the end was neigh, in the
period between the two world wars.
Jacob Moreno, encountered in Chap. 1, was only one of many intellectuals who
were gripped by fascination with the potential end of modern civilization. Sadly,
today’s social network researchers fail to see the intense merit of the most important
work in their tradition, his bizarrely titled book Who Shall Survive?, dating from
1934. Still valuable today as a collection of demonstration studies or even a text-
book, it included sociograms, statistical studies such as one of the social relations of
505 girls living in a reformatory, and a catalog of theoretical concepts on which he
based the new science of social networks he called sociometry. When I summarized
this pioneer book in 1997, I ended thus:
Moreno believed that sociometry provided the information necessary to reorganize groups
to the benefit of all members. Social isolates could be brought into contact with people who
would become their friends. Those individuals with hostile relations toward each other
could be separated. When a new community is being planned, individuals who want to live
in it could be given a population test to determine their sociological suitability. Migration
from one town to another could be guided rather than haphazard, to create healthy com-
munities. Publishing in the very year when Hitler gained control over Germany, Moreno
believed that sociometry could be used to understand relations between Germans and Jews,
and perhaps to create more favorable bonds between German Jews and the society sur-
rounding them. Moreno’s dream that his techniques could cure society of its pathologies
Nightmare Intellectuals 213
never became reality – but sociometry has become an essential tool of sociological research
[5].
Briefly mentioned in Chap. 7, Polish aristocrat Alfred Korzybski had the same
ambition, and announced the lofty goals of General Semantics in books with titles
as bombastic as Moreno’s, Manhood of Humanity in 1921 and Science and Sanity
in 1933 [6]. For this chapter, we shall revive the thinking of three other Europeans
who wrote about the fall of civilization, Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Pitirim
A. Sorokin (1889–1968) who like Moreno and Korzybski reacted to the First World
War, and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) who took a somewhat longer perspective.
Spengler is usually dismissed today, or not even remembered, in part because top
Nazi leaders drew upon his theory, but also because both his pessimism and the
huge scope of his ideas failed to harmonize with the narrow but fundamentally opti-
mistic teachings of living social scientists. His most influential work was titled The
Decline of the West and predicted the immanent fall of European civilization, not
exactly a unique idea in the wake of the Great War [7]. Indeed, his conceptualization
was a form of Idealism, arguing that every great culture is based upon and derives
its energy from a single great idea. In the case of the West, it was boundless space,
and science fiction fans might be interested to know that Spengler actually did asso-
ciate this concept with astronomy, while more mundanely it captured the Age of
Discovery in which for the first time the world became something approximating a
unit, through European exploration and near-dominance.
The Nazis may have naively conflated boundless space with Lebensraum, the
much more constricted idea that Germany needed more territory. One would not
ordinarily associate Nazism with optimism, yet Spengler did not believe that mili-
tary aggression could long delay the death of Western Civilization, because all civi-
lizations die once their key ideas are exhausted. Spengler’s pages in both the English
and German versions of Wikipedia note that in fact Spengler and the Nazis did not
see eye to eye, and he was not a racist [8]. Some modern conservatives mirror
Spengler’s thinking, notably James Burnham in the 1964 book Suicide of the West,
but they are not widely discussed in academic social science [9]. The most promi-
nent contemporary scholar in Spengler’s tradition is Patrick J. Buchanan, who has
written books with similar titles, The Death of the West and Suicide of a Superpower,
but one senses that Buchanan believes Western Civilization might possibly survive,
if it returns to what he believes are its Christian roots [10].
Spengler had experienced the disaster of the First World War from the German
side, and Sorokin had from the Russian Side. He barely survived imprisonment by
the Bolsheviks, having served in the interim government they overthrew, and like
Moreno and Korzybski emigrated to the United States, where he founded the sociol-
ogy department at Harvard University. He agreed that civilizations are formed
around a set of ideas, and that these ideas could decay in purity and effectiveness
over time, but he held out hope that after a fall a civilization could arise again [11].
He was critical of Spengler’s particular formulation and believed he had developed
rigorous empirical methods for charting a culture’s rise and fall, yet today’s sociolo-
gists practically never mention him. At Harvard, he dismissed the formulations of
an upstart named Talcott Parsons, whose ideas were more ornate than Sorokin’s, but
not in contradiction of them, except in the minor detail that Parsons believed in the
possibility of unending progress [12]. Parsons will play a supportive role in the next
and final chapter of this book.
I began my research in Fallen Earth before deciding to base my avatars on great
thinkers from the real world, so for purposes of this chapter I will rename my main
avatar Gibbon, expert on decline and fall. We remember Edward Gibbon as an
eighteenth-century historian, but his huge masterwork actually does include theory,
and some very modern thinking. The original Gibbon belonged to the Enlightenment,
and unlike St. Augustine was thoroughly secular. The first of his virtues was his
willingness to work exceedingly hard, and his multi-volume work has immense
scope. Many writers would have concluded the project with the fall of the city of
Rome, but the empire had earlier divided into a Latin western half, ending in the
year 476, and a Greek eastern half based in Byzantium, that lasted nearly a millen-
nium longer. Gibbon wrote about the entire decline and fall, in both west and east,
but paused after the fall of the city to offer a concise analysis, as well as peppering
his narrative with disparate hypotheses.
The fundamental cause of Rome’s fall was that its greatness was immoderate,
requiring usual commitment by the citizens, whose fervor and commitment decayed
over the centuries. This sounds rather like the arguments of Spengler and Sorokin,
that great civilizations are created in a remarkable process of social and cultural
consolidation, that ultimately will decay. Gibbon disagreed with those of his own
century who said the division of the empire into two halves was at fault, saying that
the foundation of Constantinople preserved the east, but did not weaken the west.
He noted that for a long time the Romans did not understand their changing world,
the prime example being the rising strength of barbarians. Perhaps Gibbon’s most
hotly debated argument was that Christianity contributed to the growing national
weakness that lead to the fall of Rome, even as it moderated the ferocity of the con-
quering barbarians.
My original avatar in Fallen Earth, which here we name Gibbon, worked long
and hard, in several stages reaching the maximum level 55 of experience. Deciding
I needed both a broader intellectual basis and a reconsideration of the introductory
levels, I ran avatars named Spengler and Sorokin up to level 20. Although their tours
of duty were later in time, given the nature of their assignments it makes sense to
begin with them.
War and Peace
The fundamental theme of my research on Fallen Earth was the variety of ways this
virtual world suggested human society could be rebuilt on the ruins of a fallen civi-
lization. That meant that one major set of tasks would require documenting the
competing ideologies of many of the widespread factions and local communities.
But another would be comparing the different ways an individual avatar could
War and Peace 215
progress, economically, in skills, and in level of experience. Having explored many

alternatives with Gibbon, the two other avatars would specialize, almost like two
comparison groups in an experiment. Both Spengler and Sorokin considered human-
ity to be a naturally violent species, but Sorokin was more optimistic. So I decided
that after the initial in-game tutorial, he would never kill a human or humanoid
NPC, while Spengler would have no compunctions against murder if he could gain
from it. To complete the contrast, Spengler refused to gather resources from the
natural environment or manufacture anything, while Sorokin would gather and craft
constantly. Which strategy would be more successful?
Each avatar’s reincarnation took place in a pathological future that stressed his
courage and his intellect to the breaking point. At the very beginning of their time
in Fallen Earth, Sorokin, Spengler, and Gibbon must have died. Each reawakens to
find himself inside a facility at Hoover Dam, which he must escape by battling
enemies led by Alec Masters, and cooperating with the enemies of the enemies. His
memories are hazy, but the facts are these. His body is a clone of the original, into
which his mind was copied from a computer database at a LifeNet pod, of which
there are many across the landscape. But he dies again, and is resurrected 4 years
later, viewing a promotional video for the LifeNet system:
Welcome to LifeNet, a product of GlobalTech! If you’re seeing this, you are dead. But,
don’t worry. With LifeNet, death is just a minor setback. You may be feeling confused,
disoriented, or even a little scared. It’s understandable. You just had your vigorous happy
life interrupted by… (heart attack, suicide, head injury, stroke, cancer, gunshot, explosion,
car accident) Explosion! Please, accept our condolences. But, no more dwelling on the past!
Right now, LifeNet is reconstructing your body, thanks to our patented… < interrup-
tion > The magic of rebirth happens inside LifeNet’s patented regeneration pods < interrup-
tion > …and your perfectly cloned body comes out. You’ve also been fitted with a wireless
neural scanner providing dynamic syncing between your brain and the LifeNet database.
Your memories will be… < interruption > But wait, there’s more! < interruption > [13]
The interruptions led to one of the story-based quest arcs, concerning the evil
plans of the leader of GlobalTech, that threatened the LifeNet system as well as the
weak grip on life held by local residents. But the crucial aspect of this fragmentary
video was the information it conveyed about the LifeNet system. Each clone wears
a radio collar that transmits his recent experiences into the LifeNet database.
Whenever he is killed, which happens often, he is regenerated in the nearest LifeNet
facility, which are half-wrecked underground outposts, as the data from his experi-
ences are combined with his cloning template to bring him back to life. Also, some
of the LifeNet facilities are set so that visiting one allows one to regenerate there
intentionally, from one of the others, to reduce travel time across the huge land-
scape, but at the cost of some chips, the poker chips looted from casinos that have
become the post-apocalyptic currency in the Grand Canyon region.
After revival, an avatar may select where to enter the world, at one or another of
various starter towns, all in the southern Plateau region of this virtual world. Sorokin
began at Midway, Spengler at Boneclaw, and Gibbon at Clinton F.A.R.M., which
stands for Fire, Alpine Rescue and Medical. The Fallen Earth wiki provides a near-
sociological analysis of each:
Midway is a pistol and rifle starter town with a focus on crafting missions. Before the fall,
Midway was a high-class neighborhood. Nowadays, it is considered a manufacturing town
where most of its supplies go through to trade hubs such as Odenville. Although nominally
a town under the protectorate of the CHOTA, control of the town is left to two Traveler
families, the Burnses and the Kellers fighting for dominance of the run-down town. [14]
Built in an abandoned rock quarry, the CHOTA have made Boneclaw their last defense
against the attacking Blade Dancer raiders while fighting off mutant insects and monsters
from below. Once a prosperous mining town for the CHOTA, it was bombed by Alec
Masters and was only recently resettled. The town is lead by Strongarm, the Warchief of the
Slaughter Kings, and is having trouble keeping Boneclaw together as remnants of Old
Boneclaw still cling to old bonds. The Oldclaw, the old residents of Boneclaw led by a
woman named Chernobyl, are sowing seeds of dissent from the Kings from Fracture of
which Strongarm is a part of. Meanwhile, some are skeptical and afraid of being posted so
near the edge of the inhabitable zone of the Plateau, and with the recent death of the sha-
man, the town’s future seems bleak [15].
Built out of an old training station for Fire and Rescue response, Clinton F.A.R.M. is
under siege from Blade Dancer raiders who are excavating deadly toxins from the mine
beneath the town. Before the Fall, Clinton FARM was where they trained people to be rang-
ers, EMTs and other kinds of service officers. The town is governed by a family who
changed their names to Clinton and has been living in the FARM since the fall. The FARM
acts as an academy and continues to train cadets, rangers and doctors up to this day thanks
to the Clinton Family [16].
Many of the factions are composed entirely of non-player characters, some like
the Blade Dancers destined to be enemies and others like the Clinton family capable
of befriending the avatar. Six factions are composed of players, as well as non-
player characters, the CHOTA and Travelers being two of them. Fallen Earth had
the most complex player faction system of any MMO I have studied, even changing
the system of relationships between the factions during the period of my research. It
was highly ideological, thus helping us understand how some of the best game-
worlds can be not only great works of art, but intellectual documents.
The territory is divided into three main sectors plus some other advanced zones,
each with its own features and missions, arranged so that avatars could gradually
work their way up the 55 levels of experience and explore everything and every-
where. The word gradually is an understatement, because progress is slow, perhaps
the slowest of any major MMO. There are three ways of looking at that low velocity
of progress, all of them favorable to the game. First of all, an avatar is not limited to
any particular class of character, and could at any time switch his style of play,
which meant there was no need to have multiple avatars to gain different experi-
ences, investing a lot of time across several of them. Second, although the story-
based missions were not especially abundant, there were so many other interesting
things to do, that rushing through the sectors was not wise. Third, the difficulty of
ascending all the way through Fallen Earth was a reflection of real life, and despite
its fantasy elements this virtual world was among the most realistic.
Fallen Earth is sometimes described as a sandbox game, with the effect that one
could progress without completing missions assigned by NPCs. Thus, while com-
pleting a quest confers experience points, so does killing an enemy or crafting a
weapon. Among the most important ladders of status somewhat separate from expe-
rience is reputation, one’s standing with a faction. Positive status allows one to
War and Peace 217
Table 10.1 Faction reputations at level 20 of a non-violent and a violent avatar

Points gained in sector 1 Points gained in sector 2
Faction Sorokin Spengler Sorokin Spengler
Players cannot join:
Townspersons 1,000 1,075 0 79
Bankers 300 1,800 0 0
Franklin’s riders 0 6,230 0 550
Players can join:
Vistas 0 0 33,150 −76,534
CHOTA 0 0 11,700 −38,996
Lightbearers 0 0 7,950 −50,260
Travelers 0 0 −15,900 25,126
Enforcers 0 0 −23,400 19,498
Tech 0 0 −66,300 38,265
Sum of positives 1,300 9,105 52,800 83,518
Sum of negatives 0 0 −105,600 −165,790
accept more missions from NPCs who are fellow members, to avoid being attacked
by its members, to enter a town belonging to that faction, and to trade with its busi-
nesses. Taking both non-violent Sorokin and violent Spengler up to experience level
20, allowed them to explore far into the second sector, where membership in one of
the six player factions was possible, and thus to complete an experiment about the
extent to which killing enemies was required to earn faction reputations. Table 10.1
shows how many reputation points the two earned with nine factions in each of the
two sectors.
Townspersons are not an organized faction, but simply NPCs who lived in or
near a town and wanted help, whether killing enemies or gathering natural resources.
In Sector 1, the Plateau, both researchers gained 1,000 Townperson reputation
points, but Spengler gained 75 more. Bankers actually can be found in banks, and
offer delivery missions as well as killing missions. With them, Spengler earned six
times as many reputation points as did Sorokin who refused to kill. Franklin’s
Riders are like the Pony Express of the old Wild West, but their missions require
combat rather than mere mail delivery. When they left the first sector, Spengler had
far more total reputation points than Sorokin, 9,105 compared with 1,300.
Sector 2, Northfields, is where an avatar may join any of the six player factions,
doing so by completing missions for its NPCs and making its main town the home
base. We shall discuss the ideologies of these factions later, but each is the mortal
enemy of another, such that earning one positive reputation point with one earns two
negative points with its foe. As part of the wider experiment, I had Sorokin and
Spengler affiliate with different factions, but the magnitudes of their reputations
would have been about the same if they had chosen different specific affiliations. As
the comparison of positive points clearly shows, both avatars were able to gain sub-
stantial reputations, but Spengler’s was much higher. Another way of thinking about
the difference is to realize that Sorokin gained many experience points gathering
resources and crafting them into products, something that Spengler refused to do, so
both could reach level 20 without having identical faction reputations.
Sorokin’s total negative reputation is exactly twice his positive, just as we would
expect. Twice Spengler’s positive reputation of 83,518 would be 167,036, some-
what higher than his actual negative total of 165,790, which suggests that occasion-
ally he killed the wrong NPC. The ratio of positive reputations, Sorokin/Spengler, is
about 0.14 in Sector 1 but 0.63 in sector 2, which suggests that the reputational
disadvantage of non-violence is less with respect to player factions than non-player
factions. Having a rough grasp of the mechanics of faction reputations, we can now
move to the more interesting topic of faction ideologies.
Non-player Factions
Many MMOs contain two kinds of factions: (1) groups of non-player characters,
each united around some cultural premise, that provide challenges in a series of
game missions, (2) groups that contain some non-player characters but primarily
serve to assemble teams of players. As sociologists of the Chicago School have long
known, social disorganization on the large scale produces intense social organiza-
tion on the small scale, so Fallen Earth logically is the home of a large number of
NPC factions [17].
Among the many interesting examples is Clerics of Gates, a millenarian cult that
wants to destroy the remaining people on Earth, to usher in a reboot age that starts
everything on a new basis, conceptualized as a new operating system. Exultant
members shout computer commands: “Control C!” “Page Down!” “Escape,
Escape!” “Alt-Tab! Alt-Tab!” I believe this is a parody of The Road Ahead by Bill
Gates, pope of the Microsoft church, and the fundamental idea is replacing all
human laws by computer code [18]. Players cannot join this faction, nor can they
develop either positive or negative reputations with it, but it can be found in several
areas and is the focus of many missions. It is described more fully in my earlier
book, eGods [19].
A similar widely-dispersed NPC faction is the Judges, a religious group suffi-
ciently well organized to operate churches, that seeks to save a few divinely-chosen
survivors, killing all the unworthy. One of its recruiters proclaims: “I have come to
purge the unworthy, to separate them from those who could still achieve true enlight-
enment and salvation. Evil creates fear and corrupts those who might be saved.
They hide from what they know to be righteous, blinded by those around them who
have spread their corruption. I am here to end the oppression of the righteous and
rescue the souls who have been trapped.” This recruiter also explains why a player
cannot join: “I see you are soulless. Tonight after prayer and meditation I will cry
for you and all that you will never achieve. You are fortunate that you have no capac-
ity to understand the joy of faith. You would mourn the false life the wicked ones
have cursed you with.” That is to say, as an artificially-created clone, a player’s
avatar lacks a soul and thus is an abomination deserving pity but also destruction.
Non-player Factions 219
A player can earn positive reputations with six of the NPC groups, not including
the Clerics or Judges, but does not earn a reputation less than zero by opposing them
as does happen with the player factions. Killing bandits of many kinds has the sec-
ondary consequence of increasing the player’s reputation with Townspersons, who
are the ordinary inhabitants of the many small communities of NPCs trying to sur-
vive across the devastated landscape. But killing Townspersons does not lead to a
negative reputation with them. Bankers run the Grand Canyon financial system, to
the extent there is one, and operate local storage facilities where players can keep
many virtual resources. Each avatar carries a small inventory, and each of the five
mounts Gibbon ultimately earned, after discarding the feeble horse he began with,
could store a little as well, but the bank vaults were much larger. Franklin’s Riders
were named after Benjamin Franklin, first Postmaster General of the United States,
and their function was communication between towns. After doing many missions
for them, Gibbon earned one of the very highest-quality horses available in this
virtual world. By level 55, he had positive reputations with all three: Townspersons
(11,226 reputation points), Bankers (18,782), and Franklin’s Riders (30,280).
Three other NPC factions conferring reputations were hostile to other groups,
similar to Clerics of Gates and the Judges. Shiva’s Favored have some similarities
to Clerics of Gates, but are at odds with them. Near the entrance to an abandoned
missile silo containing four nuclear warheads, Enoch explains: “We are the heirs of
the Earth. Shiva has touched and re-shaped the world, and its blood is His blood, as
it is our blood. Your time is short now, your days numbered. And when the CoGs
release what they call the ‘Purifying Fire,’ the last traces of your cloying, insipid
species will be expunged. We shall praise Shiva as radioactive flames spill forth
from these silos and wash the land clean.” Shiva, of course, is the Hindu god of
destruction, and the Fallen Earth wiki explains that a virus plague named after this
deity was largely responsible for the fall of world civilization:
Officially the SHIVA virus is identified in 2054 with its point of origin being somewhere
between India and Pakistan, where it was believed to be a biological weapon and resulted
in a nuclear exchange between the two countries. A strain of the virus known as SHIVA II
spread through the remainder of Asia as a result of this nuclear exchange and set off further
nuclear incidents. In 2056, approximately two years after its identification, a variant of the
SHIVA virus reaches the Hoover Dam region where a great deal of the population die,
however it has not been ascertained whether the SHIVA virus or protracted nuclear exchange
was the root cause of this [20].
Note that three unconverged advanced technologies are involved: (1) information
technology promoted by Clerics of Gates, (2) biological technology inspiring
Shiva’s Favored, and (3) nuclear technology over which they compete. Gibbon often
killed members of Shiva’s Favored, and did very few missions for them, nearing the
end of his explorations with a neutral 0 reputation. Then he discovered their outpost
called Tabara in the high-level Deadfall region. Roxxa, the local leader, explained
the origins of Shiva’s Favored, and told Gibbon they hoped to change course, no
longer doing everything they could to pollute the environment:
We became what we are to survive. Our ancestors were scientists who were brought here
from far away by GlobalTech. During the Fall, they used their knowledge to save them-
selves. If not for these changes, they would have perished. They had to adapt.
When we are out of the Wastes the changes stop, but without any pollutants we soon die.
Pure air and earth are poisonous to us. For a long while we hoped to pollute your lands just
enough, so that we could survive and the mutations would stop. We have since learned that
this path is folly.
The continual battles between our people weaken us both. No, what we must do is find
a way for our people to survive in your lands, without pollutants.
We have developed a serum that keeps us alive for while. Unfortunately another group,
those who call themselves the Shiva’s Blessed, have stolen the serum from us. The Shiva’s
Blessed revel in the changes wrought upon them. They do not care that they are being
reduced to primal beasts.
Gibbon accepted a mission to retrieve the serum, then undertook many more
missions for Shiva’s Favored, eventually gaining a reputation of 17,564 with them
and earning his most advanced mount, a gigantic mutated wolf the general size and
shape of a rhinoceros. Another group he encountered was the Human League, who
wanted to destroy all mutants and shut down the LifeNet stations so that clones like
himself would perish. In Deadfall, he interacted more positively with them, and
ended with a reputation of 1,500. Another group interested in LifeNet, which he
never fully understood, was the Outsiders, with whom he eventually had a 0 reputa-
tion, despite doing some missions for their agents in Los Alamos, the town in New
Mexico that had played a significant role in the development of the atomic bomb.
Non-player factions differ in terms of the complexity of their ideologies, yet central
are themes of technology, religion, and the meaning of life in the face of death.
Player Factions
As in most MMOS, Fallen Earth’s virtual territory is organized into a sequence of

sectors for avatars of ever higher experience scores. Sector 1, called Plateau, is pri-
marily populated by NPC factions, to give the player time to become accustomed to
the gameplay before interacting with the six joinable factions. The largest town is
Embry Crossroads, and the many crashed aircraft in its vicinity suggest that that it
was named after Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, which has a campus in
Prescott, Arizona. Player factions are first encountered in Northfields, the second
sector, where the main population and commercial center was New Flagstaff, a
ruined city center in a rather more uniform architectural style than today’s real
Flagstaff, Arizona. Figure 10.1 shows one of the huge mutant wolves, trained to be
a mount for a player, in the central park of New Flagstaff, which was a focus for
social life, having storage facilities, the auctioneer NPC, and various other
vendors.
Gibbon entered Northfields at level 18 of experience, and by level 22 had devel-
oped strong positive or negative reputations with all six factions, then went through
a major realignment over the next three levels. The ideologies of these six groups
Player Factions 221
Fig. 10.1 A mutant wolf at New Flagstaff, Arizona, in Fallen Earth
are reflected in a very large number of missions, in which non-player characters

express their beliefs and assigned Gibbon tasks expressive of their worldviews.
Below I have summarized the ideological focus of each group, adapting text from
three sources: the Fallen Earth wiki, the game’s website, and the user interface
inside the game [21]:
Lightbearers
Society: Sages who seek to restore the old world though medical healing, favorable
biological mutations, and spiritual enlightenment.
…mystics, healers, and warriors, united on a quest for harmony and peace
Vistas
Nature: Environmentalists who believe that nature’s law is primary, and anything
that damages the natural ecology should be outlawed.
…work to create a harmonious existence between humankind and nature
Children of the Apocalypse (CHOTA)
Chaos: Anarchists who seek to prevent the re-establishment of stable government,

because they believe it would lead to another catastrophe.
…work to destroy the remains of the old world to create a new world where all men
are free
Travelers
Self: Wandering individualists who place personal economic gain before all other
values and resist the constraints of community and law.
Table 10.2 Gibbon’s changing reputations with the six player factions of Fallen Earth
Reputation at experience level
Faction 22 25 35 38 55A 55B
Lightbearers 36,230 −75,686 −170,984 −303,447 −376,543 6,513
Vistas 43,914 −128,232 −144,324 −304,280 −375,192 82,085
CHOTA −5,642 −67,236 −87,882 −104,999 −199,660 4,950
Travelers −77,064 28,091 71,774 137,994 174,542 −13,026
Techs −90,364 64,116 72,162 152,138 187,594 −164,190
Enforcers −26,624 21,331 19,799 28,357 75,686 −9,900
…do what it takes to get the most benefit with the lowest cost, even if that means
breaking a kneecap or two
Techs
Science: Scientists and engineers who hope to tinker the world back together, con-
sidering technology to be the fundamental basis of civilization.
…only by restoring the scientific accomplishments of the old world can the new
world be saved.
Enforcers
Order: Militarists who believe they are the primary defenders of law and order,
perceived by opponents as the enemies of human freedom.
…labor tirelessly to restore law and societal standards in a world where chaos and
death reign
The six factions are divided into three pairs of archenemies: Enforcers-CHOTAs,
Lightbearers-Travelers, and Vistas-Techs. Each represents an ideological dimension
that has implications for society’s laws: society versus self, order versus chaos, and
nature versus science. Each faction had two allies, plus two enemy factions that are
the allies of the archenemy. Table 10.2 shows the reputation scores he had achieved
at six different points on his ascent of the experience ladder to the level cap at 55.
For a time he did many missions for the Vistas, who are allied with the CHOTA,
even doing a few missions for a CHOTA NPC located in the Vista town, killing
Enforcer NPC spies, and gaining a negative reputation with the Enforcers, despite
their being allies with the Lightbearers. At level 22, I decided for research purposes
that Gibbon had learned enough about the Lightbearers and Vistas and really needed
to belong to the Tech faction, thus allied with both the Enforcers and the Travelers,
even though he then had very bad reputations with them. At that point in the history
of Fallen Earth, the general algorithm for awarding reputation points was as fol-
lows. Earning + X points with one faction earned + X/2 with each of its allies, −X/2
with its enemies, and fully −2X with its archenemy. Negative reputation with a fac-
tion prevents one from doing missions for that faction in order to regain a neutral
reputation.
One plan was to move Gibbon back to mission activity for the Lightbearers, thus
slowly building his reputation back up with their allies, the Enforcers, then once he
Player Factions 223
was positive with the Enforcers to do missions for them, thereby building up his
reputation with their ally, Tech. However, this looked like it could take a lifetime.
Another plan was to build his reputation more directly with Tech by killing their
archenemies, the CHOTA, but experience soon showed him he would need to kill
more than two thousand of them to achieve his goal by this route. Luckily he
encountered a disaffected NPC in New Flagstaff, who gave him the once-in-a-
lifetime opportunity to erase all his reputations at no cost, giving him a zero reputa-
tion with Tech that allowed him to visit their town and begin doing missions for
them, achieving by level 25 the results shown in Table 10.2.
This simulates a very real phenomenon in human society, which we considered
in Chap. 6, the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Because the oligarchy tends to organize itself
into competing factions, it is not possible to obey all the norms. At the extreme, it is
thus not possible to avoid being a criminal, merely possible to choose which laws to
violate by allying oneself with a particular faction and following its distinctive nor-
mative pattern. People who refuse to violate any norms supported by any faction in
the oligarchy, naturally drop down into the underclass, where they can be exploited
by all the factions. Societies vary in the degree to which they have a mechanism like
the one in Fallen Earth for a fresh reputational start, for example via religious con-
version or by moving to a new community.
Just after the first of my phases of research in May 2012, Fallen Earth added new
player-versus-player features, which required a simplification to the faction reputa-
tion system. No longer would there be what the designers called shoulder factions
that gained or lost reputation when Gibbon did work for or against one of their
allies. Months earlier the developers’ blog had explained, “With the introduction of
Global Territory Control, a system that combines the recently introduced Faction
Territory Control keep mechanics with conflict towns and allows players to capture
territory to contribute towards a global advantage for their faction, we also want to
make sure it is clear to all players who they are fighting for and who they are against”
[22]. Thus, the reputation system fragmented into three pairs of enemies with no
implications for each other, which is what Spengler and Sorokin experienced when
they entered later on. In theory, Gibbon could have begun killing Enforcers, without
affecting his Tech reputation, and after a thousand of those murders could have
gained a positive reputation with CHOTA.
This change in the system represents what can happen in a real-world social
system, when the relations between factions shift. Some individuals may be able to
realign some of their allegiances, but other individuals, like Gibbon, will be so heav-
ily invested they cannot do so. Indeed, social disorganization can exist on multiple
levels, that fluctuate somewhat separately. It is seldom the case that an individual
can consider all the political issues of the day, form an idiosyncratic perspective on
each of them, and then find a faction or combination of factions to achieve perfect
ideological harmony.
When Gibbon completed most missions in Northfields, and had consolidated his
relationship with the six major factions, he moved on to Kaibab Forest region, the
third sector which represents the real Kaibab National Forest around the Grand
Canyon in Arizona. There he found towns for all six factions, plus neutral towns,
and for a while dwelled in Chemtown, the Tech base. Kaibab possessed somewhat
fewer and less interesting missions to perform, so it was a chore to advance his
experience level, chiefly through hunting and gathering. Many of the missions he
did undertake at this point in his ascent up the experience ladder in Fallen Earth
involved competition between the factions to which he was already committed.
After Kaibab Forest came some high-level regions, and Gibbon did many inter-
esting missions in Deadfall and Alpha County, plus a couple in Terminal Woods.
Deadfall lacks towns belonging to the six player factions, and is centered on Los
Alamos, which is neutral with respect to the factions. There Gibbon sometimes
observed duels or pitched battles between players belonging to competing factions,
but he was not forced to participate in them. Alpha County, also called Sector 4, did
have faction towns, and the Tech base was Camp Sagan, undoubtedly named for the
popular scientist Carl Sagan. Alpha County was a dangerous quarantine region,
separated from other regions by an immense wall guarded by sentries operating
high powered guns, that could be reached only from a special “postmortem reloca-
tion” LifePod at the southern end of Terminal Woods. Several times, Gibbon was
offered missions that were contrary to his three factions, representing aggravated
social disorganization in the highest regions, but he refused to accept them.
As his reputation with the Tech faction increased, Gibbon had received promo-
tions up four ranks: student, apprentice, journeyman, and technician. As we have
seen, Gibbon earned nice rewards in the form of elite mounts, a thoroughbred horse
and mutated wolf he could ride, from gaining reputation with Franklin’s Riders and
Shiva’s Favored, so Fallen Earth offers many ways of rising in status, beyond sim-
ple levels of experience from 1 to 55. Each of 11 tradeskills also offered status lad-
ders, and practicing a tradeskill could also raise general experience. For example,
something like a third of Gibbon’s general experience gained over the last ten levels
came from simply making paper, using his science skill. Tradeskills also are central
to the economy, because players buy and sell both raw materials and finished
products.
Table 10.2 has two columns for level 55, because I decided that Gibbon should
again change factions for the final phase of the research, and I paid about ten real
dollars to again set player faction reputations to zero. This permitted him again to
build a positive reputation with the Vistas.
The Environmental Vista
To understand the Fallen Earth factions better, we can examine one more closely,
the Vistas. Sorokin and Gibbon completed all the soloable Vista missions they could
find, Sorokin limited to Sector 2, and Gibbon visited all the settlements belonging
to this faction. They are usually called camps rather than towns or fortresses, because
this Environmentalist group tended to camp out in the wilderness. The Fallen Earth
wiki explains:
The Environmental Vista 225
Before the Fall, the Vistas were an environmentalist movement that had come to the Grand
Canyon Province to oppose GlobalTech’s methodical environmental exploitation, but now
they have become the last defenders of what remains of the ecosystems of the old world.
While always willing to commit acts of violence in defense of the environment, since the
Fall they have become feared wilderness warriors who protect their charges with rifle and
blade… Vistas are not opposed to technology in general, but they are opposed to the single-
minded pursuit of technology at the expense of the natural world. This, they believe, was
the impetus for the fall of the old world [23].
Although some Vista NPCs are encountered in Sector 1, it is not possible to join
them until Sector 2, where they occupy Thorne’s Bluff, in the Pleasant Hill area in
the south of Northfields. The area used to be a zoo, before the fall of civilization, a
symbolically appropriate location for the Vistas. A decorative brick wall surrounds
the settlement, not providing much protection, and a pond with an island is at its
center. Several stone buildings had apparently housed small animals on display, and
a few have been co-opted for the armorcraft and ballistics workshops, and the medi-
cal and science laboratories. Other facilities occupy improvised tents of many dif-
ferent shapes and sizes. Several outdoor pens are occupied by tame animals
including a panther, a bear, a gorilla, and a wolf. Some of the more dangerous and
numerous beasts an explorer encounters in the wider wilderness are African lions,
which presumably multiplied ferociously after escaping from this zoo.
In Sector 3, Kaibab Forest, the main Vista settlement is named Gaia, after the
Earth Goddess. It is primarily a heavily wooded and rather large round area enclosed
by a dirt wall topped with ruins of a low stone wall, but some occupied buildings are
outside this barrier, which it is easy to climb over. Exactly what this area was before
the Fall is not entirely clear, but one area looks like an oldstyle tourist motel, in
which small cabins are arranged in an arc near a larger building. A long distance
away, on the other side of a high hill capped with a large building, stand three primi-
tive privies where tourists in bygone days might have performed private bodily
functions. All structures are built from virtual wooden boards and shingles, having
peaked roofs, except for a concrete building housing the science laboratory, with a
domed extension that looks as if it might have been a small planetarium. The Vista
inhabitants of Gaia live and work over a very wide area, as if they prefer solitude
rather than clustering together for emotional support. Among the few additions they
have made are some dog pens and a solar panel array on the hillside. Not far away
they have been building a geothermal power plant, shown in Fig. 10.2, itself pow-
ered on an interim basis by wind turbines.
Kaibab Forest also contains an unnamed cluster of widely-separated Vista tents
in the Timberland area a couple of miles east of Chemtown, the Tech headquarters.
Each tent is large, hexagonal, and raised above the ground, with perhaps a dozen
Vista Ranger NPCs wandering around it. The trees are somewhat separated in this
area, but still numerous. Growing around the tents are harvestable vegetables, sugar
cane, grain, and fruit. On a hill to the west, overlooking the tents, is a set of small,
square tents and a cooking fire, flanked by cactus and mender ferns from which one
could harvest acid and healing accelerants for use in concocting medicines. Between
this Vista outpost and Chemtown lies Toxic Pool, a deep, heavily polluted valley
Fig. 10.2 Gibbon standing on a hillside overlooking the Vista geothermal experiment
inhabited by humanoid mutants, representing the serious conflict between Tech and
Vista in their orientation toward technology. This outpost offers Vista faction mem-
bers no resources other than the harvestables, and no quests, but gives members of
the Tech faction a way to earn resources and experience by killing Vista Rangers.
The highest-level Vista base is in Alpha Zone, a near-lifeless blasted territory
centering on the Blockade PvP battle zone. Called Unspoiled Grove, the base is a
tiny forest inside a crater, whose walls protect against incursions by monstrous
beasts. The entrance is a gap in the crater wall, flanked by observation towers
bravely flying the Vista flag of a green tree spreading its branches into a nearly per-
fect circle, representing the Earth. Several structures could be called tents, yet
remind me of the curved, soaring roof of Yale University’s hockey rink, designed by
Eero Saarinen who was a Yale alumnus. A huge central structure was assembled
higgledy-piggledy from girders and sheets of junk metal that were cut from the
sides of wrecked trucks. It is possible to climb up on the roofs and look down upon
the peaceful green trees, and the many Vista flags flying here and there. A half dozen
NPCs give a small number of quests, three of which require teams, and Unspoiled
Grove mainly serves as a staging area for teams preparing to battle against the Techs
and other enemies inside the Blockade battleground.
A Skillful Economy
When Gibbon was originally resurrected near the rim of the Grand Canyon, at the
very beginning of his climb up the status ladder of experience, he found himself in
the village named Clinton, which was under attack from Blade Dancers, a gang of
A Skillful Economy 227
sword-wielding maniacs inspired by ancient Norse religion and led by a charismatic

psychotic named Loki, after the Norse trickster god. Clinton had been a training site
for park rangers, and several residents immediately began teaching Gibbon how to
cope with his dangerous new environment. The Blade Dancers were attacking in
order to seize deadly toxins in a mine beneath the village, and one of Gibbon’s first
lessons concerned how to gather copper to make bullets for the weapon he first car-
ried, a pathetic air rifle. Later on, he would be able to craft ammunition for a power-
ful rifle from copper, lead, steel, and gunpowder made from geologic and biological
chemicals, all harvested from the environment.
From missions and some defeated enemies, Gibbon gained poker chips he could
spend with NPC vendors and in the very effective market partly supplied by other
players, but he made for himself much of what he needed using combinations of
eleven different tradeskills. Three of them are primarily gathering specializations
that take resources from nodes scattered across the landscape: geology, nature, and
scavenging. Each node requires a specified level of skill to access, and nodes near
the high end of a player’s skill can increase skill, up to a limit determined by the
avatar’s achieved level of two statistics, intelligence and perception, as well as gen-
eral experience. Others combine resources to create things, from bullets to medi-
cines. Table 10.3 outlines all eleven tradeskills, along with the maximum level
Gibbon achieved when he ceased exploring Fallen Earth at the maximum general
experience level.
Gibbon reached maximum levels of 196 with the three gathering professions,
and equally high 180 levels of the two tradeskills he emphasized for research pur-
poses, medicine and science. He did not need to take the other tradeskills to that
level, but would have been a more effective fighter had he done so. At the higher
levels of general experience, he carried two rifles, one in his hands and the other
slung over his back. They used different ammunition, one medium caliber and the
other heavy, as a hedge against the fatal error of exhausting his ammo, because if the
gun in his hands ran out, he could switch to the one on his back, then replenish both
before his next expedition into the wilderness. The ammunition used the ballistics
tradeskill, and required him to have reached level 45 in it before he could make any.
Producing it raised his level still further, but not indefinitely. At level 75 he gained
the ability to make more efficient kinds of ammo, but at much greater cost in materi-
als, so he did not bother. Indeed at that point he found it more efficient to buy his
ammo from the market and put his crafting effort into other skills.
Table 10.3 lists some of the things Gibbon could make, having both the recipe
and skill required. Only the most dedicated players take many skills to the maxi-
mum level around 196, because they can often buy or trade for what they need.
Gibbon joined a clan, the Fallen Earth term for guild, but it was of very little use.
Late in his history he noticed that the guild leader was changing frequently, and
communicated with the current one, discovering that it had become merely a bank
storage space for resources belonging to an all-Russian clan called Red Alert. After
the faction system changed, he read the Tech chat frequently, finding little use to
that player faction, either. Tremendously useful, and interesting for my research was
the Help chat, which was constantly filled with advice for new players, but also
Table 10.3 The 11 Fallen Earth tradeskills

Tradeskill Product examples Northfield books Level
Combat:
Armorcraft Work pants, long sleeve shirts, Dress to Kill – Literally; Hiding 85
ranger hat, cowboy hat Mutations with Style; New Bullets
from Old Armor; Pret-a-Porter (et
Manger)
Ballistics Plattmaster pistols, crossbows, Advanced Triage: Gunshot 86
rifle ammunition Wounds; From Lead Pipes to Hot
Lead; New Bullets from Old
Armor; Rock, Paper, Scissors,
Gun
Weaponry Tomahawk, chef’s knife, Dress to Kill – Literally; From 63
crude sledge hammer Lead Pipes to Hot Lead; Hit ‘Em
with a Rock!; Lethal Lessons of
Our Ancestors
Research:
Geology Mining coal, metals, and Cool Facts about Hot Lava; 196
ceramic; refining to improve Earthwalker: Meteorite Mutant;
quality Hit ‘Em with a Rock!; Smelt to
High Heaven
Mutagenics Impure gamma converter, Earthwalker: Meteorite Mutant; 122
crude gamma restorer, scrap Get Mutations Down to a Science;
injector Healing Your Inner Freak; Hiding
Mutations with Style
Science Refine plain paper, average BAM! Explosive Edibles; Get 180
phosphorous grenade, frayed Mutations Down to a Science;
kevlar Rock, Paper, Scissors, Gun; Smelt
to High Heaven
Support:
Cooking Apple turnovers, desert flank 30 min Meals, All Day Health; 154
steak, Tanner’s whiskey Explosive Edibles; If There’s
Meat, It’s OK to Eat; Pret-a-
Porter (et Manger)
Medicine Average antiseptic foam, 30 min Meals, All Day Health; 180
average adrenal dose, average Advanced Triage: Gunshot
resuscitation kit Wounds; Guano: Nature’s Secret
Panacea; Healing Your Inner
Freak
Nature Harvesting materials from Cool Facts about Hot Lava; 196
plants and killed animals; Guano: Nature’s Secret Panacea;
seeds for use in farms If There’s Meat, It’s OK to Eat;
Lethal Lessons of Our Ancestors
Other:
Construction Farmer’s shack, harvesters for None 64
scrap silver, glass, and plastic
Scavenging Gathering metals, plastic, None 196
water, fabrics, and chemicals
from junk, wrecked vehicles,
and even human corpses.
A Skillful Economy 229
exchanges of advice among advanced players. It was a moderated chat, with both
game employees and respected players enforcing a friendly tone, and sharing vast
amounts of valuable information.
Central to all the attempts to rebuild civilization is information, which takes
many forms, including the traditional medium through which Classical Civilization
was reborn during the Renaissance, namely books. Crafting any particular product
required a recipe contained in a book, some of which could be bought from NPC
vendors, but it was also possible to scribe a recipe book using paper and a pen, and
by performing experiments crafting specific products for which Gibbon already
possessed the recipe. Another kind of book did not contain recipes but rather very
general wisdom about tradecrafts, which librarians in each of the three sectors asked
Gibbon to collect from rubbish scattered across the landscape. In fact these books
could not be read, but they symbolically represented the knowledge and technology
requires. Table 10.3 lists the books for the Northfield collection, which Gibbon
completed. Note that each book had to be collected twice, to be bound together into
two different topical collections. The collections themselves fit together into three
major topic areas which were a logical ontology but not used during crafting: com-
bat, research and support.
As he prepared to leave Kaibab Forest and enter the highest levels of experience,
Gibbon began thinking he really should advance more crafting skills than just sci-
ence and medicine. Armorcraft and ballistics would be obvious choices, because
they would enhance his ability to defeat enemies in battle. However, his goal was
knowledge more than power, so he decided to emphasize two tradecrafts conceptu-
ally related to the ones he was already advancing, mutagenics and cooking. It
appeared that mutagenics would require careful study, so he first worked on
cooking.
Cooking proved useful when he was doing a variety of missions for Shiva’s
Favored in Deadfall, because he decided to do absolutely everything they asked of
him, and two missions required producing edibles. He did not have the necessary
skill level, and lacked one of the required recipe books, so first he cooked other
things. At skill level 135, Warleader Cezar asked for ten cheese biscuits. The ingre-
dients to make five were one edible egg, 5 units of questionable grain, two each of
questionable milk and savory spice, plus 1 unit of bleu cheese – so Gibbon had to
cook twice. Five units of bleu cheese required that Gibbon had studied the Cooking
Components 3 cookbook plus possessing 1 unit of savory spice and 2 each of ques-
tionable milk and questionable vegetable, while the biscuits themselves required
him to have the Improved Baking 3 cookbook. Another of the Shiva’s Favored,
Magda, wanted fried cola and fruit cobbler, the latter of which required cooking
skill level 150 and possession of the Advanced Baking 2 cookbook.
Far more important, the Shiva’s Favored in Tabara needed the special serum that
might allow them to survive in nontoxic environments. After Gibbon had retrieved
some from the rival Shiva’s Blessed sect, he began bringing load after load of ingre-
dients from which more of the serum could be concocted. Each load earned him 50
points of general experience, 400 poker chips, and an additional 250 reputation with
Shiva’s Favored. A load consisted of units of average coagulant and 5 tattered
Fig. 10.3 A farm shack, with a few vegetables and a riding wolf in the background
splint packs, both of which Gibbon could make once he had raised his medicine
skill sufficiently.
When he turned to mutagenics, Gibbon suffered a disappointment. Sometime
during the gaps in time when he was not active, the mutagenics tradeskill had been
halted, and players bought the products from special new vendors in major towns.
Recipe books were no longer available, but Gibbon could himself create one new
one, Gamma Manipulation 3, if he could raise his mutagenics experience level from
74 to 120 by crafting things for which he already had the recipe. Gamma is one of
three energy pools, the other two being the usual MMO health variable that led to
death if depleted to zero in combat, and stamina which enables physical feats.
Mutagenics could shift energy from one pool to another, on the assumption that the
clones coming out of LifePods were designed to permit such transfers given appli-
cation of the correct technology. Once he had a copy of Gamma Manipulation 3, he
saw that it would enable him to produce a copy of Gamma Manipulation 4, and thus
keep ascending the experience levels.
However, Gibbon decided to invest time and energy in one other tradeskill he had
not tried before, construction, which would allow him to make a farm. The first farm
he could build in Fallen Earth turned out to be a rude shack, shown in Fig. 10.3, and
it required constant tending for many hours, to raise crops, chickens, and cows.
Thus, Gibbon found it both a chore and a disappointment, but adding to his under-
standing of what would be required to resurrect a fallen civilization.
Conclusion 231
Conclusion
Intellectually deep post-apocalyptic science fiction, like Fallen Earth, can have
three meanings. First, it is a prophecy of the actual future that may lie ahead, unless
social science achieves a better understanding of societal dynamics and gains suf-
ficient political influence to steer humanity away from doom. Second, it offers a
simulation of reality in which competing philosophies may be compared, certainly
in terms of their claims and possibly also in terms of their consequences. Third and
most troubling, it represents what many people wish would happen, expressing their
anger, their unfulfilled ambitions, and even their mixture of sadism and masochism.
Meanwhile, the real news, transmitted over Internet, almost like an MMO in which
the actions the player may perform are limited to clicking on web links, becomes
gloomier and gloomier. If post-apocalyptic science fiction represents dysfunctional
divergence, can convergence of all the sciences from physics to sociology accom-
plish something better?
When William F. Ogburn wrote about the mortal danger of nuclear war, he sug-
gested several responses, yet central was the belief that the world could no longer
survive as separate nations that could battle each other, but must unit into a single,
stable civilization [24]. The exact set of events that destroyed civilization in Fallen
Earth remains unspecified, but nuclear war between India and Pakistan triggered
this tragedy, contaminating other nations through contagious biological weapons.
While using caution to avoid being denounced as politically incorrect, the massive
2013 report Convergence of Knowledge, Technology and Society implies forcefully
that world unification is essential if humanity is to survive, and that can be achieved
only by replacing outdated political systems with a far more scientific form of gov-
ernment. Ogburn would have agreed; Spengler and Sorokin probably would have
disagreed, and Gibbon might have considered this a noble goal but beyond our abil-
ity to achieve. Here is but one of many paragraphs in the report, expressing opti-
mism but recognizing uncertainty:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So Dickens described the revolutionary
changes of a past century. But the words aptly describe the collection of scientific and social
revolutions currently raging today, some admirable—such as increased human connectivity
enabled by new digital technologies, and the eradication of starvation and epidemic dis-
eases in nation after nation facilitated by medical and social innovations—and some lamen-
table, such as global economic crises and bloodshed fueled by ethnic and ideological
intolerance. The most powerful creations of the human mind—science, technology, and
ethical society—must become the engines of progress to transport the world away from
suffering and conflict to prosperity and harmony. Today, because science and society are
already changing so rapidly and irreversibly, the fundamental principle for progress must be
convergence, the creative union of sciences, technologies, and peoples, focused on mutual
benefit [25].
The quotation that begins that paragraph originally began the novel A Tale of Two
Cities by Charles Dickens, set in the context of the French Revolution, also a time
when the science-assisted Industrial Revolution was transforming society, in ways
that may primarily have been good but unleashed many evils [26]. Among the many
ways to conceptualize our current times is to note three terrible questions framed
around nuclear physics: (1) Can nuclear power save the Earth from disastrous pol-
lution from the burning of fossil fuels. (2) Must all nuclear technologies be aban-
doned to prevent any possibility of atomic war? (3) Can fundamental physics answer
our deepest questions about the nature of reality, perhaps thereby rendering religion
obsolete? This third question does not get the attention it deserves in current popular
discourse.
Many physicists hope to discover abstract laws of nature, perhaps representing
mathematical statements having absolute truth, to explain the relationships between
constants of nature, such as the ratio of the mass of a proton to that of an electron.
The public is only dimly aware of the noble struggles scientists of this perspective
experience in pursuit of this dream, reflected in mysterious concepts like string
theory and dark energy. Yet there is an alternate perspective, explored by many seri-
ous theorists but not easily amenable to empirical test, most influentially expressed
in the 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and
Frank J. Tipler [27]. They note that life depends upon the characteristics and plenti-
tude of the chemical element carbon, yet if the characteristics of certain isotopes of
carbon, beryllium, and oxygen were quantitatively only slightly different than they
are, the stars would not have produced sufficient carbon, through the nuclear fusion
by which all elements beyond hydrogen were formed. The sun would either be too
cold or too short-lived to support the long evolution of intelligent life on Earth, if the
gravitational constant were slightly different from its actual value [28].
While the details are new, the fundamental point may not be, and it was enunci-
ated in scientific terms over a century ago by Lawrence Joseph Henderson, a con-
vergent leader of both biological chemistry and sociology at Harvard, in his
provocatively titled book The Fitness of the Environment [29]. Indeed, Henderson
suggested an explanation that had also been considered by the ancient Greeks,
called the argument from design that seeks to prove the existence of God on the
basis that the world seems so well suited for human life that it must have been cre-
ated intentionally to serve this purpose. The Anthropic Principle is not necessarily a
rehash of the design argument, however, because today we are aware that the uni-
verse is vast, and thus the suitability of our planet for intelligent life may merely be
a selection effect. In an infinitely diverse universe, one planet, somewhere, will be
suitable just by chance.
An empirical challenge for the Anthropic theory is the fact that astronomers gen-
erally find that essentially the same natural laws are in effect as far as their tele-
scopes can see. However, clearly most planets are unsuitable for life, and the
universe may be much larger than the realm we can currently observe. For example,
one model of the origins of our universe says that it began with an inflationary
period much more extensive than the popular conception of the Big Bang, and that
universes may even generate offspring universes through a potentially infinite series
of such explosions, each with slightly different physical parameters [30]. The notion
that an infinite number of parallel but diverse universe might exist sounds like a sci-
ence fiction fantasy, yet serious scientists have explored such possibilities. These
Conclusion 233
ideas are certainly compatible with chaos theory, in mathematics and thus applica-
ble across all the rigorous sciences [31].
A theory paper I gave at the 1996 meetings of the American Sociological
Association, subsequently published in a book titled Chaos and Complexity in
Sociology, went one step further, proposing that a particular moment in time, called
Omicron, represented a tipping point, after which chaos would degrade rather than
construct human reality [32]. Omicron is a letter near the middle of the Greek alpha-
bet – “little o” – while the last letter is omega – “big o.” Omega may signify an
ultimate goal, and for theologian and amateur scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
the omega point represented the point of convergence of God and man, possibly at
a specific time in the future [33]. But if God does not exist, and human life serves
no transcendent goal, the key point in time may be near where we currently are,
rather than in some ideal future.
Omicron is the moment when the question was for the first time well and fully
asked: “Why is the world suitable for human life.” Humans may have wondered
about the fitness of the environment since our prehistoric beginnings, but perhaps
the question cannot be asked in all its implications until science had documented the
complexity of the universe. Writing in Scientific American, George Gale dated it
precisely to work done in 1961 by Princeton physicist Robert H. Dicke [34]. Yet we
might also say that some ancient Greek philosophers already asked the pivotal ques-
tion. In The Laws, Plato seeks to demonstrate the existence of the gods with the
argument from design: “Why, to begin with, think of the earth, and sun, and planets,
and everything! And the wonderful and beautiful order of the seasons with its dis-
tinctions of years and months!” [35]. If all the laws of nature are determined ulti-
mately by the conditions required for someone to ask the pivotal question, then it is
logical to deduce that those conditions will begin to erode, slowly but inexorably,
after Omicron. Yes, the physical universe can persist for billions of years, but there
is no reason to believe that any sociological laws exist, beyond those required to
support a philosopher like Plato in a city state like ancient Athens. If that argument
is strictly true, then all societies more complex than the ancient Greek city states are
precarious constructions beyond what nature requires.
That possibility resonates with the theories of Gibbon, Spengler, and Sorokin. If
Gibbon was right that the Roman Empire was an unlikely and difficult social con-
struction beyond what humans can normally sustain, then the same is probably true
for all of modern civilization. If Spengler is right that each civilization is based on
an idea, then all of human existence may be based on a bigger idea, such as the
existence of God, that will fail in the decades after the Omicron point gives the piv-
otal question its modern Anthropic answer. The optimist in this trio, Sorokin, would
predict a permanent sine wave of historical oscillation, far into the human future, as
societies temporarily converge at scales larger than the ancient Greek city state,
periodically crashing back to basics, as in Fallen Earth.
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32. Bainbridge, W. S. (1997). The omicron point: Sociological application of the anthropic theory.
In R. A. Eve, S. Horsfall, & M. E. Lee (Eds.), Chaos and complexity in sociology: Myths,
models and theory (pp. 91–101). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
33. de Chardin, P. T. (1964). The future of man. New York: Harper.
34. Gale, G. (1981). The anthropic principle. Scientific American, 245(6), 154–171.
35. Plato (1934). The laws of Plato. (p. 275). London: Dent.
Chapter 11
Alienation and Assimilation in a Warcraft
World
The highest level of science and technology convergence is globalization, as

Internet, transnational corporations and a uniform scientific culture encircle the
Earth. Some social scientists, such as Samuel P. Huntington, have doubted that uni-
fication is possible, and predict that our world will continue to be a dangerous “clash
of civilizations” [1]. The concluding chapter of a book that employs role-playing
impersonation of social scientists in virtual worlds needs to select its topic, charac-
ters, and environment wisely. The topic will be globalization, and the position of an
individual in a multi-ethnic society. The characters will be three twentieth-century
intellectuals, two of whom were sociologists, while the third was that surreal form
of psychiatrist popularly mislabeled a comedian. The environment will be the domi-
nant gameworld of its era, World of Warcraft (WoW), which has the effect of impos-
ing a uniform technological environment upon that unlucky number of clashing
civilizations, 13. The total research time spent gathering information inside WoW
for this chapter alone was almost exactly 400 hours. In 2010, I published a book,
The Warcraft Civilization, conceptualizing WoW as both a total work of art and as a
real cosmopolitan society, and also edited the proceedings of a major 2008 confer-
ence of scientists and scholars I organized inside it [2]. As the year 2014 came to a
close, WoW boasted 10 million subscribers, and a total of 100 million accounts
since it launched 10 years before. Here we shall survey its entire complex system,
but emphasizing the races and continents that were added most recently.
Two Intertwined Viewpoints
In many respects, MMOs are politically incorrect. Yes, players are encouraged to
battle against evil, yet evils are rampant, and some of them are unavoidable. A World
of Warcraft avatar must belong to a race, and with only one exception, each race
belongs to a particular faction. Human avatars belong to the Alliance, Orcs to the
Horde, and only Pandarens begin outside the faction system, but must select either

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33020-4_11
238 11 Alienation and Assimilation in a Warcraft World
Alliance or Horde upon leaving a low-level tutorial zone. Many of the NPC factions
represent other races, political movements within one of the playable races, or a
religion. In selecting social scientists as models for avatars, I could have chosen
researchers specifically in the area of race relations, but I found it conceptually more
fruitful to impersonate a pair of much more general sociologists who had a complex
relationship with each other that could illuminate many issues, Seymour Martin
Lipset (1922–2006) and Daniel Bell (1919–2011).
I had an opportunity to come to know both Lipset and Bell well at Harvard in the
early 1970s, when they both taught there, along with George Homans, who was
featured in Chap. 9, and Talcott Parsons whose work Homans disparaged, but whom
both Lipset and Bell admired. This was not the first time Lipset and Bell had been
together, because as young men they had belonged to a network of small socialist
movements in the New York City area, including one that was radical enough that
members chose pseudonyms. In a 2011 interview, shortly before his death, Bell
wrote about how reading Political Parties by Robert Michels contributed to his
intellectual evolution away from Marxism, and he implied that he had inspired
Lipset to read Michels and be influenced by the Iron Law of Oligarchy critique of
socialism [3].
Lipset, author of Political Man, bridged between sociology and political science,
and in his mature years drew in eclectic manner upon a number of schools of
thought, in an emotionally detached manner [4]. In 1959 he had published
“Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism” in American Sociological
Review, where he argued that poorly educated low-status people tend to support
authoritarian movements because of psychological insecurity and lack of sophisti-
cation, which may explain the success of the Communist Party in poor countries,
thus contradicting the Marxist view that it really represents the economic interests
of the working class [5]. Naturally, Marxist colleagues hated and denounced it, and
periodically over the years other sociologists would either support his arguments, or
condemn them, in a roller-coaster of love and hate [6]. Lipset commented that either
way he benefitted, because his opponents merely added to the fame of the paper.
Despite attachment to the nation of Israel, and his early history in far-left political
movements, Lipset was a great admirer of the United States [7].
Back in 1973, Bell had published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and
gave a talk about it at Harvard, with many students and faculty in attendance, includ-
ing Harrison White, a pioneer of computational social network research, who is still
alive at the time of this writing [8]. White and Bell were rare among sociologists in
foreseeing the information society in which we dwell today, but they saw it from
very different perspectives. White held two doctorates, one in sociology and the
other in theoretical physics. His book Chains of Opportunity analyzes social mobil-
ity using a model derived by mathematical analogy with the movement of “electron
holes” in semiconductors, and White very much believed that sociology should be
the same kind of science as physics [9]. After Bell had said a little about his ideas,
White criticized them harshly, for being vague, empirically unsubstantiated, and
unsuited for rigorous science.
Two Intertwined Viewpoints 239
Despite the erudition and elegant style of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,
its principles were politically radical. Bell argued that society was being changed so
fundamentally that traditional social institutions were becoming obsolete, in ways
that threatened both stability and social justice. Responsibility lay with science and
technology, both as cause and cure of this profound maladjustment. Bell said this
transformation had five dimensions:
1. Economic Sector: the change from a goods-producing to a service economy, with harm-
ful side effects such as the decline of the labor unions.
2. Occupational Distribution: the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class,
which would become the new elite.
3. Axial Principle: abandonment of cultural traditions, transferring over to theoretical
knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formation for the society.
4. Future Orientation: the need for formal technology assessment to control technology for
maximum benefit.
5. Decision Making: the creation of new intellectual technology.
Looking back more than four decades after publication of Bell’s book, we can
see much evidence for some of his points, but not others. Into “new intellectual
technology” we can read computers and Internet. However, we do not see the main
development he believed was necessary for this revolution to benefit humanity. Bell
believed that a new system of political, economic, and technological governance
was required, as I summarized in 1997:
The system would begin with a series of social indicators, fundamental information col-
lected to chart social change and the consequences of particular government actions. These
would measure mobilization of human resources in four areas: (1) the social costs and net
benefits of innovations, (2) the nature and magnitude of social ills such as crime and family
disruption, (3) performance in meeting social needs like housing and family disruption, and
(4) opportunities for socio-economic mobility. Such a system would place great responsi-
bilities upon social scientists and upon intellectuals in general, creating a meritocracy in
which the most intellectually capable and educated individuals essentially ruled the world
[10].
Lipset did not have quite so revolutionary a perspective, believing that America
was moving in the right direction, and reserving much of his late-career concern for
other parts of the world. A 1963 paper had even calibrated the modest cultural dif-
ferences among the English-speaking democracies [11]. Having written throughout
his career on the social sources of democracy, he returned to this subject in the early
1990s, for example expressing concern that racial and ethic conflict was not des-
tined to fade away as liberal optimists had hoped, but would continue to corrode
politics in many nations [12]. In a self-conscious 1996 memoir, he wrote candidly
about his early falling away from socialism, and indeed identified Robert Michels
as a major influence. But over the years he came to reject the extreme pessimism of
Michels, “recognizing that competing parties that offer a choice defines democracy,
even though the internal structure of subordinate groups representing interests and
values are oligarchic” [13]. The relevance to MMOs is subtle. Each faction in the
typical MMO, WoW prominent among them, is run by an oligarchy of NPCs, who
give avatars only limited freedom, and give low status NPCs none at all. But the
player is free to create avatars in different factions, hopping back and forth at will,
and can exercise some choice about which missions to accept from NPCs.
In his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Lipset
stressed that a precondition for democracy was prosperity, thus expressing pessi-
mism about most poor nations [14]. Notably, he also emphasized the importance of
religious culture, saying that Islam opposed democracy, Catholicism was neutral
toward it, and only Protestantism among the major traditions energetically sup-
ported democracy. He would not have been surprised at the apparent failure of the
Arab Spring in which democratic movements briefly flourished two decades later.
Lipset’s enthusiasm for Protestantism was not religious chauvinism, because
both he and Bell were self-consciously Jewish, rather than being Protestants. Indeed,
one of the main reasons I find them both very interesting, is that throughout their
lives they creatively, and at times in different ways, managed potentially contradic-
tory cultural orientations. Both were very strong supporters of Israel, yet were com-
mitted citizens of the United States. In his understanding of Protestantism, Lipset
based his thinking on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written at
the very beginning of the twentieth century by German sociologist, Max Weber
[15].
Although both Lipset and Bell were born in the United States, their parents were
immigrants, and they grew up in areas of New York City where European intellec-
tual traditions were strong. But I believe their strongest link to Weber was the
American sociologist Talcott Parsons, the son of a Protestant minister and translator
of Weber’s book. For many years, Parsons was the dominant figure in Harvard soci-
ology. Both Lipset and Bell valued his judgment, and sought his intellectual advice
from time to time. Parsons was an optimist, believing that human society was pro-
gressing through a natural process of cultural and organizational evolution, with
religion as one of its foundations [16]. Both Lipset and Bell, although I think Bell
to a greater extent, followed the general Parsonian theoretical strategy of developing
abstract cognitive structures, using Weber’s postulate of ideal types, that could
describe a society in terms of a small number of clearly-defined dimensions. An
example relevant to World of Warcraft is the dimension particularism-universalism,
describing the extent to which a culture emphasizes loyalty to one’s own immediate
group, versus following objective norms that would apply to everybody [17]. That
happens to be the theme of a remarkable novella, “Of Blood and Honor,” by Chris
Metzen, lead WoW designer, that debates what moral obligations a member of the
Alliance might have to a member of the Horde [18]. Universalism can be conceptu-
alized as the ethical dimension of convergence.
Another reason Lipset, Bell and Parsons liked the work of Max Weber, was that
he seemed one of the best antidotes to Karl Marx [19]. In fact, both Lipset and Bell
had begun their intellectual lives very much saturated with Marxism, prior to evolv-
ing into sociologists. Some of their early publications were critical of the superfici-
ality of Marxist thinking. However, even well into that political migration, both
were very critical of the right wing in American politics [20]. Yet both came to be
called neo-conservatives, a label Lipset was comfortable with but Bell rejected.
When asked his politics, Bell liked to say he was a socialist in economics, a liberal
Joining the Alliance 241
in politics, and a conservative in culture. Some of his early publications were

critiques of Soviet society and Marxism in general, setting the stage for him later in
his career to argue that a socialist state needed to be ruled by social science, not by
a political party [21]. Cultural conservatism may have expressed Bell’s affinity with
Jewish traditions, but also connected to Weber, who said that capitalism grew in
large measure from the asceticism of Protestantism, which encouraged frugality and
careful investment. Indeed, Bell was deeply concerned that American capitalism
had become contradictory, promoting hedonism rather than asceticism [22].
From this brief consideration of two vast intellectual careers, we can build a
framework for understanding World of Warcraft, in terms of (1) particularism versus
universalism, (2) hedonism versus asceticism, (3), and the interplay of potentially
contradictory cultural forces. We begin with the process through which avatars
based on Lipset and Bell entered World of Warcraft, acquiring mixed ethnicity simi-
lar to but exaggerating that possessed by the men themselves, and seeking to under-
stand the very complex world in which they found themselves.
Joining the Alliance
As Chap. 4 mentioned, in its introduction to discussion of guilds in World of

Warcraft, the factions are convergences of many races, but this does not result in
assimilation to a “melting pot” culture. For The Warcraft Civilization, I had created
23 avatars, belonging to all the races plus all the classes that existed in 2008, and
making sure that priests and shamans from all races were included. Thus, in 2014
when I planned to send avatars based on Lipset and Bell into WoW, I naturally
assigned them to races that would provide new data. Very briefly, I ran an avatar
based on each up to level 10 in the Gnome and Troll races, because originally these
two lacked distinct starter areas, duplicating the low-level experiences of Dwarves
and Orcs, and playing the role of refugees in the Dwarf and Orc cities. But this pro-
vided very little new information, so more effort was invested in running Lipset and
Bell avatars belonging to the Worgen and Goblin races, who became playable only
in 2010.
As it happened, this pair of new races allowed exploration of the sociologists’
twin identities, Jewish-American, but each in a different way. Of course, every per-
son has multiple identities, which is another way of saying that each person plays
many roles in life. The roles Lipset and Bell played in World of Warcraft do not map
exactly onto the changing roles they played during their lives, yet given that both
sociologists were fascinated with theories about group relations, they would have
used the Worgen and Goblins as salient case studies.
The 2010 WoW expansion that introduced Worgen and Goblins as playable races
was aptly called Cataclysm. Familiar territories, notably the Barrens and
Stranglethorn Vale, were torn by major geological upheavals. At the same time,
social upheavals occurred in many places and for many groups, as well as an
increase in the experience level cap from 80 to 85. Technically, Cataclysm allowed
WoW to update the graphics for its original areas, and add features, such as the abil-
ity to fly freely over the old territories, as had been possible for relatively new areas
that had been added in two previous major expansions. Socially, it supported stories
of revolutions, experienced by Worgen and Goblins. In both cases, a player’s char-
acter begins in a separate geographic region, shut off from the rest of the world, and
the player cannot return to it after completing the early missions and voyaging once
outside.
Lipset began his experience in WoW on November 8, 2014, not as a wolf-man,
but an ordinary Human, living in a city of European Medieval style named Gilneas.
He listened as a mounted noble, Prince Liam Greymane, exhorts soldiers, while
they prepare to repel an attack by Worgen. These enemies are similar to werewolves,
and derive with modifications from traditional mythologies. Demonic wolves in
J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythology are called wargs, and as such they appear in the MMOs
Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan. In the table-top game, Dungeons and
Dragons, they were called worgs. In its fully developed form, the WoW backstory
for them says they were a sect of druids that long ago broke away from the Night
Elves, who are one of the races in the Alliance, and who worship the moon goddess,
Elune.
In The Warcraft Civilization, I explained that WoW druidism was derived from
the ancient religions of Western Europe, with a pre-Christian veneration of nature
that at least mythologically allowed command over special powers. One Horde race
possessed Druidism as well, the Tauren, who are humanoid cattle, with an eclectic
culture reminiscent of a diversity of western Native American peoples:
In WoW, Druidism is an ancient religious movement among the Tauren and Night Elves
exclusively. It is connected to the Elune faith of the Night Elves, which is unknown among
the Tauren, and may be an offshoot of it, in the same manner that Christianity is an offshoot
of Judaism. Concrete evidence of this connection is the fact that Moonglade, one of the
zones of Kalimdor, is managed jointly by both Night Elf and Tauren druids, and druids of
both races can teleport to Moonglade whenever they wish. The Night Elf influence pre-
dominates in Moonglade, and we can speculate that the movement arose among the Night
Elves, then spread to the Tauren, with some mythological simplification along the way [23].
A druid may shape-shift, assuming the form of an animal, along with some of its
behavioral characteristics, which is a nice metaphor for shifting from one role to
another, or one culture to another. In creating the Lipset avatar, I decided to make
him a hunter, which would allow him to have a hunting pet, a secondary avatar that
could be controlled simultaneously with the primary avatar, thus representing the
fact that sophisticated people can play more than one role at once.
The city of Gilneas was similarly complex, having seceded from the Alliance but
still Human in culture. It was composed of five districts: Merchant Square, the
Military District, Greymane Court, the Cathedral Quarter, and Light’s Dawn
Cathedral at the center. In WoW, Human religion is centered on the Holy Light,
which is an ethical principle more than a divine personage, although some of the
missions assigned in the Human capital city, Stormwind, reveal that the clergy and
aristocracy are corrupt, exploiting faith in the Holy Light to their own advantage.
Joining the Alliance 243
Fig. 11.1 The auction house in Stormwind, center of the Alliance economy
Interestingly, two of the missions of that type which I analyzed in The Warcraft
Civilization, are no longer available. They were assignments to kill two renegade
Human leaders, Edwin Van Cleef who led a workers’ revolt called the Defias
Brotherhood, and Colonel Kurzen who was based on the character Kurtz from
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [24]. Neither NPC still lives, but Kurzen’s des-
iccated corpse can be found, if one knows where to look. Apparently, after each had
been virtually killed repeatedly by millions of players, eventually their temporary
deaths became permanent. A general challenge that many of the best MMOs have
faced in recent years is how to give players a sense that actions actually have conse-
quences in the history of the virtual world. In a different way, the fate of Gilneas
reflects that principle.
Lipset accepted many missions, in furious battle, ending when Lord Darius
Crowley led Lipset and a few other stalwart defenders to the cathedral, not really to
defend it, but to divert the attacking Worgen so that most of the city’s population
could escape. Bitten by an enemy, Lipset was infected and became a Worgen him-
self, without entirely losing his human spirit. Given a potent medicine to render him
no longer infectious, he was allowed to join the Alliance, first completing many
missions in Duskhaven and other territory around Gilneas. Then with other refugees
he sailed by boat to the Night Elf island capital, Darnassus, given sanctuary because
of the druidic history. After performing various deeds of valor for the Night Elves,
he voyaged to Stormwind, because he was, after all, Human at heart. Like druids, he
has the ability to shift between Worgen and Human form, and in Fig. 11.1 we see
him standing in human form, fully armored, at the center of the auction house in
Stormwind.
The fact that Gilneas had seceded from the Alliance before Cataclysm, according
to the city’s backstory, explained why members of the Alliance could never visit
there in the past. The fact that it was completely conquered may explain why they
cannot go there now. Many much smaller examples illustrate the general principle;
the auction house in Fig. 11.1 is a different building from the original, which stands
nearby but cannot be entered. Lipset’s experiences in and around Stormwind, quest-
ing up to level 25, were those of an immigrant, or the son of immigrants growing up
in an ethnic community, half native and half foreign. At that point I decided he
should experience the meteoric career the real Seymour Martin Lipset had, in which
he became a professor at several of the highest prestige American universities. The
most recent WoW expansion, Warlords of Draenor, gave each subscriber the ability
to jump one character up to level 90, without climbing the long status ladder below
that exalted level, so Lipset took that leap. As a practical matter, it also gave him the
ability to travel easily throughout the virtual world, thus of continuing value for my
research.
In visiting the auction house, Lipset followed his belief that free markets were an
essential precondition for democracy, and the player-to-player market illustrates it
very well. Two of the avatars in the picture, the large one on the left and the small
one the right, are running out after making purchases or placing virtual goods for
sale. On the stage in the background stand three NPCs who are auctioneers, and
clicking on one opens the auction interface. Also on the stage, toward the left, is a
Christmas tree, and there is a pile of gift-wrapped presents on the right, as well as
colored holiday lights hanging from the ceiling. WoW never quite admits that these
things represent a Christian holiday, yet both Lipset and Weber could have given us
long lectures about the historic role of that religious tradition in the history of poli-
tics, economy, and even science.
From Stormwind, Lipset visited Ironforge, the Dwarf city that contained many
refugee Gnomes, running along the subway tunnel between the two cities called the
Deeprun Tram. When he jumped from level 25 to level 90, he discovered that he
instantly gained all Alliance flight paths in the original WoW areas. Normally, a
character must first walk to a flight destination, thus adding it to the list of those that
can be flown to, at modest cost to the local flight NPC. Therefore he was able to take
a scenic route to revisit Darnassus, flying to Booty Bay at the southern tip of the
eastern continents, taking a boat to Ratchet on the western continent, then flying to
Darnassus. From there, he flew to The Exodar, the crashed spaceship of the Draenei
which served as their city.
Each of the two factions has four main cities for low-level characters, with a dif-
ferent racial pattern from one to the next. Table 11.1 shows results of a census of
named NPCs listed on the pages for the four Alliance cities of the traditional WoW
wiki, appropriately called Wowwiki. Many other NPCs inhabit these cities, but lack
names, and of course we are examining the creations of the game designers here, not
the behavior of players. Stormwind is the most important Alliance city, and Humans
have led the Alliance since the original 1994 game, the full title of which was
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Given its easy and free railway connection to Ironforge,
it is not surprising that Stormwind also contains many Dwarves, yet Ironforge has a
Joining the Horde 245
Table 11.1 Census of named non-player characters in major Alliance cities

Race Stormwind Ironforge Darnassus The Exodar Total % male
Human 166 9 2 0 177 63 %
Dwarf 24 119 2 0 145 75 %
Gnome 9 52 0 0 61 74 %
Night Elf 17 6 124 0 147 45 %
Draenei 6 3 3 90 102 53 %
Goblin 6 5 2 1 14 71 %
TOTAL 228 194 133 91 646 61 %
slightly less diverse population, mostly Dwarves but with a number of Gnomes as
well. Darnassus and The Exodar are hardly diverse at all.
Humans are most numerous, but constitute just over a quarter of the sample. The
religion of the Night Elves centers on Elune, the moon goddess, and all its clergy are
female, which may explain why alone of all the alliance races, named NPCs are
minority male, while the Dwarves and Gnomes, both of whom tend to be engineers,
are predominantly male. The Goblins do not belong to the Alliance, but often act as
traders and quest givers for both factions. They represent another technological cul-
ture, more surreal and comic, that will be explored through Bell’s avatar.
While we must not take WoW too seriously, if for the moment we think of it from
the perspective of a Gnome, then it is worth noting that the Dwarves offered them a
refuge in Ironforge, as their own home became uninhabitable. To be sure, the
English-speaking nations were not the only ones that did something similar during
the Holocaust, and they bear criticism for not being as fully open to refugees as they
could have been. Within WoW, the one playable race that faces possible extermina-
tion from the hostility of vicious bigots is not the Gnomes or even the Worgen, but
the Undead who belong to the Horde. Still, there are parallels worth sociological
consideration. As it happens, I have shared membership in sociology departments
with colleagues who wrote books about both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism
[25]. Lipset, were he really to return to the land of the living, would quickly add that
his life had been wonderful, being both Jewish and American. Indeed, the Gnomes
and the Dwarves forged a beautiful alliance, not requiring one hundred percent
assimilation, but achieving a closer partnership than any two other groups in their
diverse virtual world.
Joining the Horde
The decision to represent Daniel Bell as a Goblin named Danbell in World of

Warcraft was simple. It was the only remaining race I had not tried, and it had a
reputation for independence of intellect. Goblin NPCs had existed in WoW since the
beginning, acting as capitalist entrepreneurs, trading between the two factions, and
showing no tendency toward loyalty other than to money. They were rather comical,
and the generation of Jewish-Americans to which Bell belonged also included innu-
merable television comedians. Goblins were also highly technological, often serv-
ing as innovative engineers. All three professions – capitalist, comedian, and
engineer – were marginal to the general population of the United States, and each
required considerable intellect. The same could be said for Bell’s own profession,
sociology.
Goblins were similar to Gnomes in some respects: both were physically short,
excelled in engineering, and often misused technology to comical effect. Among the
differences was that two four-letter words applied to Gnomes but not Goblins: cute
and nice. Here is how one of the WoW guidebooks described Goblins:
Goblins area a creative race that often fails to see the forest through the trees. This might be
because of their penchant for cutting down entire swaths of landscape. Many Goblins have
a fascination with technology and innovative engineering. Often found on neutral ground,
many Goblins weren’t interested in taking sides between the Horde and the Alliance. There
isn’t much profit in the choice because it closes out a huge market from the other side.
However, recent developments in the world have made it impossible for the Goblin race to
sit on the sidelines. As such, some have joined the Horde and are ready to lend their inven-
tions to the cause [26].
Gnomish and Goblin engineers have a long-standing rivalry. It’s uncertain to outsiders
which side is more dangerous to their friends and enemies! [27]
It is said that over time WoW had been nerfed. That is gamer lingo that refers to
making something easier or less powerful. Each time I returned to WoW, I found it
easier and quicker to get an avatar up the ladder of experience, so much so that I
could not attribute the difference to my increasing MMO skills. Also, by the third
expansion, WoW was adding minigames that were rather like short arcade action
games, with a very simple bar of control icons at the bottom of the screen replacing
all the usually complex interface, so the player could operate in a new situation
quickly, without practice, such as flying over an enemy fleet and dropping bombs,
or riding in a robot that rushes through crowds of enemies, mowing them down.
Given their technological obsessions, and the opportunities for satire they offered,
the Goblin’s starter zone was rather like an amusement park, even including a roller
coaster that masqueraded as the area’s highway system. This was a perfect if satiri-
cal expression of Bell’s theory that capitalism suffered from a cultural contradic-
tion, having become hedonistic rather than ascetic as required by Weber’s theory
about Protestantism.
Danbell already possessed some status within Goblin society, when he entered
WoW on November 7, 2014, being CEO of the Kajaro Trading Company, which
Wowwiki describes as “a small company within the Bilgewater Cartel that does a
variety of things from mining Kaja’mite to processing oil and even producing
Kaja’Cola.” He has an attractive executive assistant named Sassy Hardwrench –
that’s wrench not wench – who gives him his first quest:
Taking Care of Business
“With all of the troubles down in the Kaja’ mine, Foreman Dampwick’s been going crazy
trying to find you. He said something about some ‘defiant trolls.’ The kaja’mite that our
trolls are mining is critical ingredient in Kaja’Cola. That bubbly stuff is making us a
fortune, and it’s going to get you a promotion to Trade Prince! But first, we have to get
Joining the Horde 247
Fig. 11.2 The avatar of Daniel Bell performing anthropological field research
production flowing again. You’ll find the foreman to the east. Here, give him this as an
incentive to get his act together.”
Quest Objectives
Deliver Sassy’s Incentive to Foreman Dampwick at KTC Headquarters on Kezan.
Rewards
You will receive: Experience: 10
Despite gathering much loot and experience, Danbell found that the path went
downhill from there, until his corporation had collapsed, Sassy had abandoned him,
and he had escaped Kezan, never to return again [28].
Danbell began a new life as a social scientist at Orgrimmar, the capital city of the
primitive Orcs who led the Horde. Figure 11.2 shows him in one of his archeologi-
cal moments, standing on a wicker crate beside a huge rock with primitive ancient
painting, in the North Barrens area south of Orgrimmar. A bovine Tauren named
Tonga Runetotem had assigned him the mission of taking the eagle in the picture to
a sacred site on a mountaintop that was directly south of this landmark, earning both
silver and experience, but also gaining anthropological data. He soon reached the
Goblin port town of Ratchet, hospitable to members of the Alliance as well as the
Horde, from which he took ship for Booty Bay, at that time the most extensive inde-
pendent Goblin town. At the two Goblin locations he found a total of ten short lore
books, that recorded the history of other ethnic groups, and proved intellectually if
not financially valuable, as Danbell morphed from being capitalist to scholar.
Like the Gnomes, the Trolls had been in WoW from the beginning, but gained a
different starting experience with Cataclysm. Originally, they had begun life in the
same rock-walled valley as the Orcs, but now they came into being on the Echo
Isles, an archipelago that had earlier been held by a Troll traitor but now had been
retaken and turned into a training base. Like the Tauren who had affinities with a
variety of indigenous peoples of western North America, the Trolls in WoW are
Table 11.2 Census of named non-player characters in major Horde cities

Race Orgrimmar Thunder bluff Undercity Silvermoon Total % male
Orc 127 1 4 3 135 77 %
Troll 42 0 0 0 42 64 %
Tauren 21 92 0 1 114 61 %
Undead 10 11 113 1 135 63 %
Blood Elf 5 1 3 97 106 52 %
Goblin 17 5 5 1 28 89 %
TOTAL 222 110 125 103 560 65 %
loosely modeled on a real ethnic group, Afro-Caribbeans. Table 11.2 shows the
racial breakdown of the Horde capital, plus the other low-level cities of that
faction.
While Orgrimmar is predominantly Orcish, with a goodly number of Trolls, it
also holds several Tauren. Their main city, Thunder Bluff, is on the same continent
as Orgrimmar, and before Cataclysm it used to be easy but time-consuming for a
low-level character to walk from one city to the other, picking up the flight path for
easier subsequent visits. But now, Danbell began life already having that flight path.
Thunder Bluff, Undercity, and Silvermoon are populated almost entirely by their
native races. When a small minority of one race is found in a city, often they are
NPCs who perform special functions, for example serving as trainers for classes and
vendors for the equipment they need. It used to be necessary to visit one’s trainer
frequently, but this was nerfed in the 2012 Mists of Pandaria expansion, such that
class trainers had hardly any functions. This has some sociological implication,
because as Michael Hechter long ago noted, cultural division of labor can help sus-
tain ethnic divisions within a society, but once everybody can perform any function,
assimilation proceeds more rapidly [29].
Nothing in Moderation
The Mists of Pandaria expansion added one more race to WoW, the Pandaren
humanoid panda bears, along with another continent, and raised the experience
level cap from 85 to 90. The 2014 expansion, Warlords of Draenor added an alterna-
tive version of an existing planet plus a garrison system rather like an embedded set
of solo-player games, and took the experience level cap to 100. Not only did these
developments demand study, but they offered the opportunity to explore from a dif-
ferent vantage point. Therefore, I created a Pandaren avatar, based on the early tele-
vision pioneer and comedian Ernie Kovacs (1919–1962). A new class was added in
Mists of Pandaria, the monk, ideal for Pandarens but available to other races, so
naturally Erniekovacs would be one. Notably, Pandaren culture was very obviously
based on traditional China, in NPCs names, the style of architecture, and in having
the monk class be kung fu fighters.
Nothing in Moderation 249
Like Lipset and Bell, Ernie Kovacs was the son of immigrants, but Hungarian
rather than Jewish or Chinese. In the early days of television, many of the top come-
dians were Jewish and had learned their craft in earlier media including New York
radio and the nearby Borscht Belt live performances, then hosting TV variety shows
with comedy skits not unlike vaudeville. Among the best known examples were
Milton Berle (1908–2002) and Sid Caesar (1922–2014). Kovacs grew up in nearby
Trenton, New Jersey, and reportedly his father became somewhat prosperous as a
bootlegger during Prohibition. Arguably, both comedy and social science require a
person to be somewhat alienated from the wider society, yet ambitious to achieve
within it, thus both critical and creative. Yet, seemingly, there is a huge difference,
in that social scientists claim to discover truths about society, whereas inventive
comedians offer untruths that happen to be entertaining.
That analysis may contain a false assumption. As Harrison White was quick to
point about Daniel Bell, we can doubt whether the standard tradition in sociology,
represented by Lipset, Bell and Parsons, was a form of science. Lipset did occasion-
ally cite quantitative data, for example from opinion polls, yet the primary method-
ology of this famous trio had nothing to do with formal experiments, mathematical
models, or technical frameworks. Rather, following Weber and a host of other
Europeans, the primary methodology was to read books and news reports, then try
to capture apparent trends with simple concepts that could be understood by any
educated person. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society stated that technical devel-
opments were transforming society, yet no technical expertise at all was required to
read Bell’s famous book.
In the university context, sociology was part of a liberal education, in more than
one sense of the term liberal, that prepared students to live within a complex and
changing world, yet gave them no particular professional qualifications. Had soci-
ety been fully socialist, as Bell wished it would become, then sociologists could
take the place of legislators or government bureaucrats, but in their nation, at least,
this did not happen. Thus, Lipset and Bell were academic commentators on society,
using ordinary language in a self-consciously scholarly context. That was not very
different from what Ernie Kovacs did in the mass medium of television, not merely
as performer, but also as author, because he wrote his own TV and radio skits, and
even a novel, titled Zoomar after a high-technology TV camera lens, trashy but also
critical of the mass media culture [30]. While Lipset and Bell published in American
Sociological Review, Kovacs published in Mad Magazine, which was different in
style but arguably at the same intellectual level.
Kovacs did employ a different analytical method, not categorizing societies or
social classes, but characters. He created and played a swarm of fictional charac-
ters – avatars, we would call them today – each expressing a Weberian ideal type of
person, role, or culture. It should be obvious how perfectly this matches the meth-
odology of this book. Like Moreno, his methodology was psychodrama, but with
the goal of creating insanity rather than curing it.
Perhaps best remembered was his effete poet, Percy Dovetonsils (not to be con-
fused with Percy Bysshe Shelly) who composed sensitive verses, such as “Thoughts
While Falling off the Empire State Building.” Others were private detective Martin
Krutch, horror show host Uncle Gruesome, and magician Matzoh Hepplewhite who
tended to do too good a job when he sawed a woman in half. In a recent book about
the ideology of the space program, I referred to his radio character, Space Commuter,
who parodied the popular view that spaceflight would be easy, given that he lived on
Earth, worked in a department store on the Moon, and commuted by way of Saturn
[31]. At present, the radio programs of Kovacs do not seem to be available, but many
videos of television skits can be watched on YouTube, or in a set of DVDs, The
Ernie Kovacs Collection.
At times, Kovacs would draw upon his Hungarian cultural roots, notably when
role-playing one of his many invented characters, Miklos Molnar the TV cook, but
he did not have either the benefit or the inhibition that ethnic humor might have
provided. Professionally, his first medium was radio, where as a disk jockey playing
music recordings he would occasionally perform skits or stunts. But television was
his natural medium, beginning in 1950. It is worth realizing that in the beginning,
very few people owned television sets, and they tended to be well-educated. Budgets
for program production were very low, but audiences could suspend disbelief
because the medium was so new, giving creators credit for experimenting. One
result was a temporary trio of intellectually fascinating science fiction programs for
children, Captain Video (1949–1955), Space Patrol (1950–1955), and Tom Corbett,
Space Cadet (1950–1955), that could no longer compete for viewership after TV
had evolved into the mass medium par excellence. Given how primitive early broad-
cast television was, innovators like Kovacs and children’s sci-fi producers experi-
mented with simple but remarkable special effects.
I recall one of his simulated advertisements, for a portable door, in which he
stood next to a large dollhouse and moved a door from place to place, opening to
show what was inside, employing realtime combination of images from two cam-
eras to do so. His Wikipedia article lists others that can still be seen in recordings
today: “He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and impro-
vised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One
innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper
roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract
images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled
mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceil-
ing” [32]. The Wikipedia article includes photographs showing how by combining
images from two cameras Ernie could appear to be looking through a hole in a
woman’s head.
In his personal life, Kovacs juggled many conflicting factors. He gambled and
preferred not to pay income tax, going deeply into debt. He savored good booze and
heavily smoked cigars, this latter vice becoming a virtue when he acquired a cigar
manufacturer as a commercial sponsor. He constantly changed jobs, and late in the
1950s began making movies in Hollywood, where he became a close friend of many
leading performers. He had custody of the two daughters from his first marriage,
because his wife was judged even crazier than he was, but she kidnapped them and
the extreme saga of their return was told by the movie, Ernie Kovacs: Between the
Laughter, in which he was played by Jeff Goldblum. His second wife, Edie Adams,
Refusal to Pander 251
was a remarkably good, classically trainer singer, who balanced his eccentricities,
inspired him to incorporate classical music and other high arts in his skits, and after
his death paid off all his debts [33]. Whether his untimely death in 1962 was caused
by his intemperance, or the technical flaws of the Corvair car he was driving, we can
never know [34]. However, the inscription on his tombstone is apt: “Nothing in
moderation” [35]. In the present context, this could be translated, “Infinite
divergence.”
Refusal to Pander
Erniekovacs entered World of Warcraft shortly before midnight, December 21,

2012, and celebrated New Years during his first steps in the training ground of
Master Shang Xi on The Wandering Isle. His steps were forthright but eccentric,
what might technically be called galumphing. Physically Erniekovacs reminded me
of one of the simian ballet dancers in Ernie’s famous choreography of a dance for
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, in which expert danseurs execute the graceful moves
flawlessly, while dressed in ape costumes.
Being a monk would allow Erniekovacs to leap around comically while fighting,
but did present certain challenges of discipline. In real life, Ernie tended to ignore
instructions given by bureaucratic superiors, and kept being fired by one TV net-
work before being hired by another. Indeed, the concluding show in one of his
programs, during one of those involuntary transitions, ended by pretending to set
the studio ablaze with special effects flamers. I do not know if he intended that as a
visual pun on the word fired. Yes, in WoW he could take an order from his monk
instructor, but what he would do with that order was anyone’s guess.
He did complete a series of introductory missions for Master Shang Xi. There
seemed special symbolism in the fifth of seven steps, “The Lesson of the Burning
Scroll,” which began by snatching a flame from the hand of the master, then using it
to destroy an ancient document called the Edict of Temperance. Interestingly, at that
time several players complained in the online Wowhead quest database that this
mission seemed bugged, because they could not complete it, yet Erniekovacs had no
difficulty [36]. Upon completion, the master told him the Edict recorded ancient
wisdom, that needed to be destroyed because its teaching had become obsolete:
“Every lesson has its time and place, and with darkness on the horizon, the time for
this particular wisdom has passed.”
By the time he had reached level 9 of experience, Erniekovacs had become aware
that the Pei Wu Forest in the southern quadrant of The Wandering Isle was walled
off, and could only be accessed through a locked gate. But with some difficulty,
including one death, Erniekovacs was able to find an alternative way in from the east
along the south coast. But only after he dutifully followed quest-giver instructions
again and again was he given the option to leave the isle, and this required him to
make a choice he did not want to make, namely to decide whether he would be a
member of the Horde or the Alliance, since Pardarens do not begin life automatically
belonging to one or another. Only halfheartedly did he select the Horde, because he
saw it as the less inhibited of the two World of Warcraft factions. Oh yes, The
Wandering Isle turned out to be a massive joke, because it was not an island but a
gigantic swimming turtle.
At level 12, Erniekovacs flew from The Wandering Isle to Orgrimmar, the Orc
capital at the center of the Horde. Residents of the Isle were the equivalent of refu-
gees from the main Sinophile panda bear continent, Pandaria, which was inhospi-
table to avatars below level 85, so he would face a log slog before uniting with his
conspecifics. Despite Ernie’s reluctance to become a mere member of any ordinary
social group, I imagine he would have preferred belonging neither to the Horde or
Alliance, but to a third Pandaren faction. Thus he was not very interested in quests
assigned by Orcs or otherwise related to Horde stories. He did what was required to
advance up the experience ladder, but placed his greatest enthusiasm in the profes-
sion most closely associated with the original Ernie Kovacs, engineering, such as
his invention that combined a TV camera with a toilet paper tube.
After doing many Pandaren missions and some Horde missions, Erniekovacs
became progressively more independent, preferring to explore his own whims rather
than following orders. Despite his motto, “nothing in moderation,” he decided to be
as moderate as possible in one thing: obedience. Thus, as he explored Pandarian
geography above experience level 80, he was extremely frustrated by the fact he
could not reach the central zone, called the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. The standard
route to that most exalted area was by completing a set of religious trials for some
arrogant monks, but Erniekovacs has long since rejected all monkish missions. An
alternative was to be teleported there by a teammate, but he had none. The third way
to the get there was to fly, and he was an experienced aviator at that point. But two
things were required to get a flying license for Pandaria: paying 2500 gold coins,
when he seldom had more than 100, and visiting the flight trainer, who himself was
stationed inside the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.
Engineering Satire
When Ernie Kovacs was young, he was by nature a poor student. Or, rather, he
learned his own way, rather than paying attention to teachers. Ditto, Erniekovacs.
Ernie often parodied technology, as in a skit apparently dating from 1956 on the
DVD collection. It pretended to be a real life interview by Helen Spacebar (Edie
Adams) of Professor J. Burlington Gearshift about his newly invented Mechano
Almanac. It was a bizarre computer that would answer any question: “How do
houseflies manage to walk on ceilings?” “Because ceilings are sticky.” When asked
how the machine works, he mutters completely inarticulately, ending with the word
“explanation.” At one point early in the interaction, they struggle on opposite sides
of a door, then Spacebar explains, “It was I.” He mutters in utter confusion, “Aren’t
you the real you anymore?” A search of the web indicated that a smaller version of
the machine dating from 1952 to 1954 sold at auction for an undisclosed sum. It
Engineering Satire 253
Fig. 11.3 A Pandaren aviator based on a television pioneer
consisted of a wooden crate covered with cardboard covered with representations of

dials, switches, and a display of question difficulty by four levels: easy one, hard
one, doozie, and double-doozie [37]. We can wonder how he would have parodied
Google.
Once his engineering skill had reached 300 in WoW, he was able to make a flying
machine, depicted in Fig. 11.3. The raw materials were obscure and costly, but with
much mining effort he was able to afford or craft them: 2 fel iron casings, 20 units
of elemental blasting powder, 20 iron bolts, and 8 pieces of star wood. With proper
training, he was able to zoom all around many continents, but not Pandaria. On one
of his vacations, I sent him on a tour of the locations where the May 2008 scientific
conference had been held. The first location was just east of Orgrimmar on the sea
coast, but Cataclysm had rearranged the shore line, so the exact spot could not be
found except by latitude and longitude. The sewers of Undercity seemed about the
same as they had been for the second of the three sites of plenary sessions, but the
old fortress near Booty Bay where the third session was held, had been destroyed,
as shown on the right side of the picture. The town is in the center background, and
the ship is about to depart for Ratchet.
Table 11.3 lists some of the more amusing devices Erniekovacs was able to build,
as his engineering skill advanced toward a cap of 600. His most treasured device
was rather like the portable door from the faux ads Ernie Kovacs broadcast in the
1950s, a wormhole generator that worked only in Pandaria, that would teleport him
to a great but randomly selected distance. After buying the instructions, he com-
bined twelve trillium bars with two spirits of harmony, and – voila! He teleported
here and there in Pandaria, never knowing his destination, until by chance he found
himself inside the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Quickly, he found a commercial flight
path out, which he could retrace back in whenever he wished.
Table 11.3 Among the more amusing devices an engineer can craft
Name Function Materials
Mist-piercing Equip: Allows you to see additional mining 8 ghost iron bars, 2 spirits of
goggles nodes and herbs while in Pandaria harmony
Mechanical Use: Teaches you how to summon this 4 ghost iron bars, 6 trillium
Pandaren companion bars, 2 spirits of harmony
dragonling
Gnomish shrink Use: Shrinks the target reducing their 1 mithril tube, 1 unstable
ray attack power by 250. That’s what it usually trigger, 4 mithril bars, 2 jade
does anyway
Gnomish mind Use: Engage in mental combat with a 10 mithril bars, 4 truesilver
control cap humanoid target to try and control their bars, 1 gold power core, 2
mind. If all works well, you will control star rubies, 4 mageweave
the mind of the target for 30 s cloths
Gnomish Use: Turns the target into a chicken for 15 2 hardened adamantite
poultryizer s. Well, that is assuming the tubes. 2 khorium power
transmogrification polarity has not been cores, 10 arcane dust, 2
reversed large prismatic shards
Gnomish X-ray Use: Allows you to see players without 6 titanium bars, 2 dream
specs clothing and armor shards, 2 handfuls of cobalt
bolts
Gnomish gravity Use: Temporarily reverse your gravity. 6 electrified ether, 3
well Cannot be used in combat hardened elementium bars
Noise machine Equip: Melee attacks against you have a 2 froststeel tubes, 2
chance to invoke a sonic shield, absorbing overcharged capacitors, 8
1,100 damage. This effect can only occur handfuls of cobalt bolts
once a minute
High-powered bolt Use: Fires several charged bolts at an 10 obsidium bars, 8
gun enemy for 11,198 damage and briefly handfuls of obsidium bolts,
interrupts casting. Consumes a handful of 4 electrified ether
obsidium bolts each time it’s fired
Electrostatic Allows a skilled engineer to occasionally 4 obsidium bars, 6 handfuls
condenser collect volatile air while mining, skinning, of obsidium bolts, 4 volatile
or collecting herbs earth
Ornate spyglass Use: Allows you to look far into the 2 bronze tubes, 2 whirling
distance bronze gizmos, 1 moss agate
Target dummy Use: Drops a target dummy on the ground 2 bronze bars, 2 wool cloths
that attracts nearby monsters to attack it.
Lasts for 15 s or until killed
When he reached experience level 90, the maximum available before the 2014
expansion, he needed an ironic place to stay that would carry appropriate symbol-
ism. As in real life he had bounced from one TV network to another, here he wanted
to bounce between factions, but the programming of the game would not allow him
to defect from the Horde and join the Alliance. So he flew his gyrocopter into the
Alliance capital, Stormwind, being finally shot down in Cathedral Square, where
guards killed him. His ghost ran from the cemetery at distant Eastvale Logging
Camp in Elwyn Forest, reanimated his corpse, and entered the Cathedral. Attacked
Engineering Satire 255
again, he ran directly to the hidden catacombs, for a second death. Running again
from Eastvale, his ghost was invisible to the Alliance guards, and I knew that the
catacomb was deep enough that none would detect him there. Restored to life, he sat
in an open coffin, and on May 11, 2013, meditating, as I logged out.
When I logged back in on November 7, 2014, he was still sitting in the coffin.
Rather than try to run out, he teleported to Orgrimmar, then began the preparations
for the Warlords of Draenor expansion that came two days later. An entire book
could be written about WoD, and I’m sure it will. Via time travel, an army of non-
Horde Orcs were invading again from their homeworld, the planet Draenor, which
Erniekovacs had visited when it was called Outland and was in the process of disin-
tegrating. That is to say, the second time he explored Draenor was earlier than the
first time he explored it.
WoW offered a vast number of new quests, over territory that was somewhat
familiar but not completely, including many of the brief and tightly controlled
arcade gamelets. The most distinctive feature was the personal garrison he acquired,
a private, instanced area encircled by a stockade, and containing workshops and
resources, some of which he could select, and all of which could be updated through
three levels of effectiveness. Taking the garrison framework from level two to level
three would have cost him 5,000 gold coins, plus comparable cost to improve the
facilities: alchemy lab, engineering works, fishing shack, Goblin workshop, great
hall, herb garden, mine and tavern. The garrison and all its facilities were filled with
NPC assistants, who were in constant motion, including vendors, and even Thrall,
the most famous Orc leader.
The mine provided materials for engineering projects. The Goblin workshop
produced powerful weapons, which, however, he never used. Mining and engineer-
ing filled his quota of two main professions, but the herb garden and alchemy work-
shop, tended by NPCs, effectively allowed him also to practice herbalism and
alchemy. His favorite alchemy products were potions that allowed him to breathe
under water, and to walk on the surface of water. He acquired some special NPCs
called “followers,” up to a total of twenty, whom he would send on special missions
rather like hands of a card game, through an interface in the great hall. He would see
only the beginning and end of a mission, which would earn him gold, garrison
resources, or equipment, and earn the followers experience, most of whom reached
level 100, as did he. Indeed, Ernie Kovacs effectively retired to his garrison for the
final level, earning 100 by mining and other tasks. He maxed out mining, engineer-
ing and fishing at level 700, and cooking at an elevated 715, in memory of that
Hungarian cook, Miklos Molnar.
Although no longer doing quests outside his garrison, Erniekovacs did occasion-
ally travel, as a tourist, visiting all areas of Draenor, and fishing at many locations
to bring back eggs of many species so he could fish them in his own pond. For one
vacation he combined three of the advanced and expensive new devices he learned
in his engineering works. A wormhole let him select the kind of land to visit, choos-
ing Grassy Plains which instantly transported him to a tree limb high above Spirit
Woods in Nagrand. Accompanied by a robot parrot, he rezzed a hologram of him-
self, and the trio danced together. He also built a device that would shrink the world,
but decided never to use it. Through follower missions, mining, herbalism, and
quick teleports to and from the Orgrimmar auction house, he saved up the 2500 gold
coins required to learn to fly in Pandaria, and finally completed full exploration of
his people’s own continent.
Extreme exploration also led Erniekovacs to a shrine dedicated to a recently
deceased colleague of Ernie Kovacs. At level 90, Erniekovacs had joined the Science
guild, which I had founded in April 2008 for the scientific conference, and which
was still in existence so many years later. Just after Erniekovacs reached level 100,
on December 15, 2014, one of the original conference participants happened to
mention in the Science guild chat that a memorial had been created by the World of
Warcraft designers, for popular comedian Robin Williams, who had killed himself
August 11, 2014. Hidden on an island off the southwest coast of Draenor, an antique
magic lamp lay upon the ground. Touching it would cause a huge genie to emerge
and exclaim “PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS!” But then it would shrink back
into the lamp, saying “Itty bitty living space.” This was a reenactment of a scene
from the Disney cartoon feature movie, Aladdin, for which Williams had provided
the voice. Williams had been a highly expressive improviser, but unlike Ernie
Kovacs was neither an avant-garde comedy writer nor an explorer of new techno-
logical possibilities. Perhaps this contrast between Robin Williams and Ernie
Kovacs reflects no inferiority on the part of Williams, but, rather, the general decline
of technology-based civilization.
Conclusion
As previous chapters documented, most MMOs are structured around factional con-
flict, with the pacifist A Tale in the Desert being one of the few exceptions. Having
two factions and thirteen races distributed across vast territory, World of Warcraft
demonstrates how the real world conceivably could remain largely peaceful for
decades, under conditions of cold war that becomes hot only in limited areas. Half
of WoW’s servers follow PvP rules, thus accentuating factional conflict without
quite leading to all-out warfare, but all servers confine conflict to certain areas and
situations. It is worth noting that much of the second half of the twentieth century
resembled that situation, a cold war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, that ended
only when the Soviet Union dissolved peacefully. We can speculate whether greater
restraint on the part of Germany might have allowed the Axis to survive long after
1945, in a very different cold war. Or we can brood about whether the real human
future is disastrous, accurately modeled by Fallout 3, Xsyon, and Fallen Earth.
Similar concerns were behind the most recent of the Converging Technologies
reports and the capstone Handbook. Note that the full title of the report concerned
society: Convergence of Knowledge, Technology, and Society. It asserted that the
world was “an integrated natural, human, and technological system,” and “future
activities need to be focused on the sustainability of global society by considering
demographics, societal needs, and governance, and enabling CKTS solutions for
Conclusion 257
mitigation and life security within the Earth system’s boundaries” [38]. This is just
one step short of advocating world government, leaving that logical conclusion to
the reader. In the Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence, Claudio
Cioffi-Revilla conceptualized our world as a single socio-ecological system:
The real world is a triad of human, artificial, and natural systems coupled in inextricable
ways, such that it is fundamentally multi-, inter-, or trans-disciplinary, not fragmented into
disciplines – i.e., it exists “already converged,” so to speak. Science and technology neces-
sarily consists of specialized disciplines, because that is the way in which the STEM (sci-
ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines have traditionally organized
knowledge across domains. Universities consist of colleges and departments that are most
often disciplinary in orientation, specialization, and faculty composition. By contrast,
research centers and advanced study institutes are often multidisciplinary (e.g. focusing on
health, climate change, study of civilizations, sustainability science), which is more aligned
with real world systems, empirical processes, and public policy issues [39].
Without yet being able to proclaim a new ideology for human unity, embodied in
a specific political platform, several chapters of the Handbook harmonized with this
assessment and examined the prospects for new forms of public policy manage-
ment. David Feldman argued that world government would not be necessary, if
adjacent governmental jurisdictions are able to negotiate solutions for their shared
problems [40]. However, other authors believed that many crucial problems required
global convergence, such as a sustainable global food supply, achieved scientifically
through global risk assessment and whole-Earth monitoring [41]. Given that the
laws of nature are uniform across the observed universe, it would seem that science
would also be uniform around the Earth, once all nations were in active communica-
tion with each other and had all reached modern levels of technical development.
Yet many nations contribute little to scientific progress, and non-industrial fields
like the social sciences are practically absent in many technologically advanced
societies [42]. In social science, Demographic Transition Theory many decades ago
asserted that human population growth would gracefully adjust toward stability as
the entire world became technologically modern, but today this theory is in serious
doubt, and it is equally plausible to argue that population will grow to natural limits
set by starvation and warfare, or that it will shrink to passive human extinction [43].
We can imagine that the reader entered World of Warcraft for a seminar with the
avatars of Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell. Given their passion for exploring
the implications of new ideas, we cannot predict what direction the conversation
would go. For example, since WoW takes place on two inhabited planets, they might
brood about the apparent halt in human exploration of outer space, and postulate
some new form of social science that might understand the conditions under which
humanity could become a multi-planet collection of divergent civilizations [44].
Lipset might observe that none of the thirteen races in WoW seemed to have a cul-
ture conducive to democracy, with the possible exception of the Pandarens. Bell
might observe that the real rulers of WoW were technocrats, neither players nor
non-player characters, but the designers who create the software and art. Together,
they would debate whether our real world could achieve convergence unless many
current cultures are abandoned in favor of those few that encourage research and
democracy, and the extent to which current political structures need to be replaced
by expert bureaucracies of scientists and engineers.
Just as the debate was spiraling toward indecision, Ernie Kovacs enters. “Your
vergence is a cross-eyed con game,” he complains. “Nothing in moderation, neither
convergence nor divergence!” Lipset and Bell interpret Kovacs to mean that the best
future for humanity required a balance of convergence and divergence, until they
notice that he was arguing for an impossible point of view, at both plus and minus
infinity, escaping all conceivable boundaries. So, they laugh. “Yes!” Kovacs
exclaims. “World of Warcraft is so wonderful, and all the other gameworlds, because
they make fun of the terrible problems we experience in the so-called real world.”
He then began to dance, galumphing the choreography programmed into male
Pandarens, based on “Party Rock Anthem,” a video in which civilization has disin-
tegrated because everybody is dancing to a wild tune, and singing, “Everybody just
have a good time (yeah), and we gonna make you lose your mind (whoa!).” He
halts. looks directly into your eyes, and recites his must fundamental motto: “It’s
been real.”
References
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William Sims Bainbridge

ISBN 978-3-319-33019-8 ISBN 978-3-319-33020-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940513

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Virtual Sociocultural Convergence ................................ 1

Conclusion ................................................................................................ 205

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 1

Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies in Society

Bell (1919–2011), and Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006). In addition to these

While largely forgotten by academics today, Jacob L. Moreno (1889–1974) was a

Fig. 1.1 Jacob Moreno at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in Second Life

Table 1.1 Prominent psychology groups in Second Life

Table 1.1 (continued)

Convergence of the Past with the Future

When an academic researcher plans an individual role-playing project, it is legiti-

Bethesda Softworks. Jarvis was president of the American Statistical Association

Fig. 1.2 Edward Jarvis near a nuclear bomb in Fallout 3

Fig. 1.3 Realistic and mythical characters in Gods and Heroes

Fun [ ] Not Fun [ ] Sort of Fun [ ] Average [ ] Fun [ ] Very Fun

Difficulty [ ] Very Easy [ ] Easy [ ] Average [ ] Hard [ ] Very Hard

Length [ ] Too Short [ ] Short [ ] Average [ ] Long [ ] Too Long

Reward [ ] Valueless [ ] Negligible [ ] Average [ ] Good [ ] Very Good

Story [ ] Farfetched [ ] Unlikely [ ] Average [ ] Good [ ] Very Good

The three gameworlds we just explored illustrate important dimensions of variation

4. Bainbridge, W. S. (Ed.). (2004). Encyclopedia of human-computer interaction. Great

Psychodrama focuses on individual human personalities, and how relationships

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 25

The Virtual Lake Tahoe

In many ways, Xsyon is an unusual gameworld, so one of the lessons it teaches is

Joining the Pawnee Tribe

It is easy to imagine a technological innovation that cannot actually be achieved, but

Table 2.1 Ogburn’s collection of twenty helmets in Xsyon

When Ogburn crafted a helmet in Xsyon, a software production system operated on

Cities can be conceptualized as massive multi-component machines, vast aggrega-

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 45

An almost universal design feature of MMOs is placement of the equivalent of

Areas of Paragon City

Table 3.1 Intact areas of Paragon in City of Heroes

Fig. 3.1 The government center of City of Heroes in Atlas Park

Table 3.2 Socially disorganized areas of Paragon in City of Heroes

Fig. 3.2 The Ascension Monument in The Matrix Online

each member is an artificial intelligence that has achieved a degree of autonomy

Among the most complex cities within a geographically diverse gameworld is

This vision connects directly to the convergent thinking of the century-old

This chapter illustrates in a rather comprehensive manner how traditions from

1. Papachristos, A. V. (2012). The Chicago school of sociology. In W. S. Bainbridge (Ed.),

Compensation and Collectivity

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 69

communes to be economically, socially, and culturally independent from the sur-

Arguably the Largest World

Table 4.3 Censuses of three World of Warcraft guilds

Ancient Virtual Egypt

Fig. 4.2 A wedding in A Tale in the Desert

Table 4.4 Data on the largest guilds in A Tale in the Desert

Multiple Guild Functions

Table 4.5 Census of ten guilds in Elder Scrolls Online

Type of Item or stack of Units or stacks for sale Percent of total