CHAPTER 5

Socio-economic Structure and Dynamics

The social and economic systems of a virtual world tend to overlap significantly, but not to be identical. Typically, as, for example, in World of Warcraft, pairs of individual avatars may be “friends,” which means they can notice when a friend comes online and can easily set up a private chat. Essentially every MMO supports persistent groups, typically called guilds, in most cases allowing an avatar to belong to only one, such that each group should develop loyalty and social cohesion. Within a guild, players may exchange virtual products, as gifts, as barter items, or by selling for the virtual currency used within this particular virtual society. In most cases, there also exists an automated auction house, through which strangers may buy and sell items. But much of the economy involves buying and selling between a player’s avatar and automatic non-player character (NPC) simulated people. Comparison of the systems in different MMOs can offer insights into how to set the parameters for support of social relations, and development of a vigorous local economy, in real-world communities.

The skills and material resources used by artisans in manufacturing are associated in a myriad of ways with other features of technological society. As we saw in Chapter 2, a pair of avatars in Lord of the Rings Online could profit from a very strict division of labor, in which a key part of the structure was the raw materials required for production of particular goods. We cannot yet be sure what range of products will be produced by local manufacturing, yet presumably many of them will be made by small workshops with a small staff. This implies that skill specialization will develop under conditions very different from mass production, in which the number of employees is large enough to include many highly specialized workers. Some expertise can now be offloaded on computers, but it will often be necessary for one person in a local workshop to possess multiple skills. Alternately, some individuals will be highly specialized but work only part-time in their specialty, perhaps in what has come to be called the gig economy.

Structural Division of Labor

Massively multiplayer role-playing games differ greatly in the significance they invest in virtual manufacture and in how it is organized. World of Warcraft is an example of a relatively simple and rigid system, in that it allows each avatar to participate in only two of the main gathering and production activities, supplemented with a few minor occupations that any avatar may practice. Here we can get a clear picture of the system with decade-old data I collected on January 12, 2008, on two contrasting Internet servers, Emerald Dream that was designed to emphasize player-versus-player combat, and Scarlet Crusade that was not.¹ Using an add-on program called CensusPlus, I captured data on the 1,517 avatars active that day, sampling hourly over a period of 16 hours. Only 54 of them practiced none of the main professional skills, 83 practiced 1, and 1,380 practiced 2 skills. Of this last group, 130 had two gathering skills, which implied they were collecting resources simply to sell, or to give to a second avatar of the player which specialized in production, or to share with a guild. Table 5.1 tabulates the specialties of the 1,019 avatars that practiced 1 gathering skill and 1 production skill.

As avatars travel across the virtual landscape, they encounter two kinds of nodes from which resources can be peacefully gathered, plants from which herbs can be taken, and metal outcroppings that can be mined. After killing many kinds of animals, an avatar with the right skill and tool can skin off the leather hide. So, the three gathering skills in WoW are herbalism, mining, and skinning. Table 5.1 clearly shows that herbalism provides the raw materials for the fanciful form of chemistry called alchemy, whereas skinning provides the raw material for leatherworking. The situation for mining is more complex, because three forms of production require the materials it can gather: blacksmithing, engineering, and jewelcrafting. Note that far more of the avatars practice mining, given the bigger market it serves. In second place is skinning, somewhat more popular than herbalism, perhaps because every avatar needs to kill animals from time to time and can profit from being able to skin the hides off them.

Table 5.1 Skill combination in a census of 1,019 World of Warcraft avatars

Production skill	Gathering skill
	Herbalism	Mining	Skinning
Alchemy	89.9%	0.4%	0.0%
Blacksmithing	0.0%	32.7%	1.4%
Enchanting	4.4%	8.8%	8.9%
Engineering	0.4%	31.7%	1.7%
Jewelcrafting	0.4%	22.5%	1.0%
Leatherworking	0.0%	0.2%	78.2%
Tailoring	4.8%	3.6%	8.9%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
Avatars	228	498	293

The majority of the avatars in Table 5.1 practice the gathering skill that supplies materials for their own production skill. This raises the question of how social their players are, rather than experiencing World of ­Warcraft solo. Yet combining two skills that harmonize well with each other can increase the level of performance of both. This is true because we are really talking about two very different definitions of skill: (1) the ability of the avatar to perform a particular gathering or production activity at an increasing level of difficulty and (2) the knowledge possessed by the player that supports good decisions about what actions to take, such as gathering materials for a particular product that can sell for a high price in the marketplace.

Depending upon the particular MMO, an avatar can gain production-related skills in primarily four ways: (1) by practice, repeatedly performing the same skill-related action; (2) indirectly by gaining general experience that can raise a limit set on the skill or offer access to territories from which more advanced materials can be gathered; (3) by purchasing and using recipes or schematics; and (4) by receiving explicit training from specialized NPCs. A similar diversity of routes to progress may exist in the future work of distributed manufacturing, but there may also be government regulations or professional standards set by occupation-specific organizations, comparable to the World of Warcraft limit of two tradeskills. MMOs probably do not simulate all the factors that will operate in the real world, but comparing several of them can highlight issues that need to be considered.

Lord of the Rings Online imposes a level of structure above the separate professions, calling it vocations. As described in Chapter 2, each vocation is a combination of three professions. A player may select a vocation for an avatar, but cannot freely select professions. Apparently, the game designers developed this complex system in order to balance solo and social dimensions. To get a sense of the structure of this division of labor, Table 5.2 reports numbers of avatars in each vocation and profession from a dataset that will be analyzed differently in a future publication, from a sample of 2,452. The full dataset was collected by examining every manufactured item for sale in the public market in each of the 10 LotRO servers, but here leaving out the unusual Brandywine server where very extensive sales of high-level manufactured items required a different method of analysis. Seeing the market on a particular server requires having an avatar on it, positioned in an auction hall. Many items for sale had been collected, often in combat with an NPC, but manufactured items were clearly labeled as such because they displayed the names of the avatars who created them. The name of the avatar who posted the item on the market was often different, either an alt of the player whose other avatar made the item, a sales representative for that avatar’s guild, or even the avatar of a player who bought items cheap in hopes of selling them for a higher price. I even saw cases in which an avatar had been moved from one server to another, at some dollar cost, in order to transport items to a market that would pay higher prices in the game currency.

Table 5.2 Numbers of avatars having the given trio of professions in their vocation

	Vocations
Professions	Armorer	Armsman	Explorer	Historian	Tinker	Woodsman	Yeoman	Sum
Gathering
Farmer				572		291	162	1,025
Forester			418			291		709
Prospector	315	193	418		501			1,427
Production
Cook					501		162	663
Jeweler					501			501
Metalsmith	315							315
Scholar				572				572
Tailor	315		418				162	895
Weaponsmith		193		572				765
Woodworker		193				291		484

A page of a LotRO wiki titled Crafter Interdependence correctly reports:

Many of the crafting Professions are interdependent, or more correctly, dependent on a particular Profession other than their own. This feature of the crafting system is by design and is intended to foster development of the crafting community. It is common for Production Professions to be dependent on Gathering Professions. For example, a Metalsmith relies on a Prospector to gather Ore and refine it into metal bars that are essential for metalsmithing.²

Metalsmiths happen to be one of the three professions found in only one of the vocations, in this case armorer, the first column of data in the table. They can make shields, armor, and tools, all of which require metal ingots, which the prospector profession can provide.³ Therefore, an armorer can accomplish much of metalsmithing without collaboration with another avatar, because all metalsmiths are also prospectors. However, the tailor profession that is also included in the armorer vocation requires materials that can be provided only by foresters, so it pushes an armorer to connect to other avatars and players, or at least to be active in the marketplace. There are 315 armorers in the table, so also 315 metalsmiths. But both prospector and tailor professions belong to more than one vocation, so their numbers are higher, 1,427 and 895, respectively. In Chapter 2, we already mentioned the jeweler profession, which also belongs to only one vocation.

The scholar profession, possessed only by the 572 historians, has some of the qualities of gathering as well as producing:

A Scholar requires a Scholar’s Glass in order to study relics, texts, carvings and trinkets from days gone by. The Scholar can find these items by using the Track Artifacts skill, which directs him to the nearest Artifact in the world around him. Once he has studied the Artifact sufficiently, the scholar may then combine the knowledge he has gained with components purchased from a Novice or Expert Scholar vendor, to craft a new, useful item. A number of advanced recipes requires Crafting Rare Components.⁴

Scholars can make master journals that improve the productivity of other professions, including metalsmiths and tailors. Both metalsmiths and tailors can make armor, but of different kinds for avatars belonging to various adventuring classes. Metalsmiths use metal to make heavy armor for guardians, captains, and champions. Tailors make light armor that any class may use and medium armor from cloth and leather. Lore-masters, minstrels, and rune-keepers are limited to light armor. Metalsmiths and tailors produce armor that may be used by classes of avatar other than the crafter, thus connecting the classes socially through the various equipment their specializations require.

A Wide Range of Alternatives

Many MMOs do not require selecting a specific small set of crafting professions, but follow different philosophies of specialization. In ­Anarchy Online, progress up the fully 220 levels of general experience earns improvement points, which may be invested as the player wishes.⁵ The standard summary states:

Your skills define what you can do, and how good you are at it. Items have skill requirements for using and or equipping them, nano programs have requirements for uploading and executing them. At each level, your character is awarded a certain amount of Improvement Points. These allow you to raise the skills that in turn allow you to use better weapons, armour, nano-programs and other general equipment. It is not possible to maximise all the skills, as you are not awarded enough IPs to do so; therefore you have to concentrate on the areas of most use to your character...⁶

AO takes place on a planet named Rubi-Ka, and a very extensive online database called People of Rubi-Ka offers quantitative data, but does not include information about avatars’ improvement point distributions.⁷ However, to understand how crafting skills fit into the larger social structure, we can use as a proxy variable the general avatar class, confusingly called professions in Anarchy Online, as suggested in an online article titled Introduction to Tradeskilling:

Some professions are “made” for tradeskilling, by this I mean that they have a lot of items that can be used to increase tradeskill skills, they have good bonuses in armour that is specific for them and to spend Improvement Points on tradeskills isn’t as costly as for professions that are not “made” for Tradeskilling. The professions that have a good toolset when it comes to tradeskilling in particular are Engineers and Traders. However there are quite a few ­professions that have a particular tradeskill they are good with. For example, Meta-Physicists and Nanotechnicians with their Nano Programming, Fixers with Break and Entry skill, ­Doctors with PhamaTech.⁸

In Anarchy Online, guilds are often called organizations, and the designers require creation of one to involve six players who decide which of six size-structures to adopt, five of them requiring one player to be the formal leader:

Department: seven ranks (president, general, squad commander, unit commander, unit leader, unit member, applicant)

Republic: five ranks (president, advisor, veteran, member, applicant)

Faction: five ranks (director, board member, executive, member, ­applicant)

Feudalism: four ranks (lord, knight, vassal, peasant)

Monarchy: three ranks (monarch, counsel, follower)

Anarchism: one rank (anarchist)

All except anarchism, in which decisions are supposed to be made by majority vote, are highly stratified. New members automatically go into the lowest rank and can be raised to a higher rank only by members who already are higher. The practical implication of rank in most organizations is unclear or minimal, and much of the activity on the planet Rubi-Ka can be completed solo. Therefore, it may be that avatars are promoted only if they frequently participate in team combat missions, and many of the lowest-rank members are respected for other functions they perform, such as manufacturing. They cannot avoid combat altogether, because they need it to earn improvement points to invest in tradeskills, but exploring vast Rubi-Ka and doing solo missions are quite sufficient for that. For the present analysis, I focused on organizations structured as departments, not merely having selected that choice at founding but actually having promoted some members, finding 205 organizations with at least 100 members each, at least 20 of which were above applicant rank. Each organization had its own page of data listing all the members, which could be manually scraped and pasted into a spreadsheet, which ultimately had 136,259 rows of data, 1 for each avatar. Table 5.3 shows their distribution across the seven status ranks, including columns for four of the professions most suitable for tradeskilling.

Table 5.3 Fractions of organization ranks in each of four commercial classes

Rank	Mean level	Total number	Percent engineers	Percent traders	Percent ­ nano-technicians	Percent doctors
President	205	220	8.2%	4.5%	5.5%	10.0%
General	181	3,338	7.8%	6.1%	5.2%	11.3%
Squad commander	166	13,266	7.1%	6.4%	6.3%	9.4%
Unit commander	133	4,494	7.4%	6.7%	8.5%	8.4%
Unit leader	129	2,292	7.2%	6.8%	8.0%	6.9%
Unit member	131	11,975	7.8%	7.4%	7.6%	8.0%
Applicant	105	100,674	7.4%	6.9%	7.9%	8.1%
Total	117	136,259	7.4%	6.9%	7.7%	8.3%

Even among the 205 organizations that did promote at least 20 of their members, most were never promoted, 100,674 out of 136,259. The mean experience level among applicants is the lowest of any rank, 105 out of the 220 maximum, but reaching level 105 takes a lot of time and effort. The status ranks would not graph perfectly as a pyramid, given that squad commanders outnumber those in each of the three unit ranks, and I tend to think that we are really seeing three overlaid structures. The presidents, generals, and squad commanders represent a combat core membership of the organization. The unit ranks represent a combat periphery, with some of the avatars being alts of main avatars that have higher ranks. The applicants represent more casual or solo players, and many who played the game for a while and then quit, without being rejected from the corporation but possibly reduced in rank. This structure resembles the social structures reported in many studies of open-source software communities, which distinguish core from peripheral participants, often implying a wider population of interested but relatively inactive members outside the so-called periphery.⁹

Engineers appear equally distributed across the 7 membership ranks, keeping in mind the small number of generals and thus the imprecision of its 8.2 percent figure. Traders and nano-technicians seem less common at higher ranks, whereas doctors are more common. This may reflect the fact that doctors’ healing function may be needed directly in combat, whereas the other two professions may produce valuables outside of combat. But given that profession is only a proxy for tradeskill, and some of the percentage differences are small, we cannot have great confidence about how informative this analysis is about manufacture in Anarchy Online. More reasonably, it suggests that many questions need to be asked, especially in observational studies of real-world distributed manufacturing, about how technical skills will factor into social status.

RuneScape is an example of an MMO in which all players are allowed to develop all the specialty skills, of which there are 27, several of which relate to manufacture. At the present time, players enter either free-to-play, which gives them only 17 of these skills, whereas paying subscribers can advance skill in all 27.¹⁰ Most begin at experience level 1 and can be advanced through practice to level 99. One exception is constitution, which begins at level 10 and is not conceptualized as a skill in other MMOs but as a fundamental characteristic of the avatar’s general experience level. A wiki explains:

Constitution (also known as health, and formerly as Hitpoints or HP) is a combat skill that affects how many life points (LP) a player or monster has. Life points represent the amount of damage a player or monster can withstand before it dies. Death occurs when a player or monster’s life points reach zero. The current minimum requirement to be ranked (at approximately rank 1,500,945) on the hi-scores for Constitution is level 15. As of 16 August 2018, there are 240,048 current members that have achieved level 99 in Constitution.¹¹

Current data on avatar achievement can be obtained from a website that offers a vast amount of detailed information, much of it organized as leaderboards.¹² Table 5.4 offers data collected on September 30, 2018, on over a million RuneScape avatars, expressed as a summary of the leaderboards, thus representing the status distribution for each of the skills, which begin with constitution, followed by a dozen production-related skills. The minimum skill level reported is 15, so beginning players are excluded. The online database can be set to report all the avatars in descending order of a particular skill, and 1,535,488 had reached level 15 in constitution already, 34,543 more than the wiki editor had found back on August 16. It was straightforward to jump quickly down the list of avatars to find the one ranked exactly 250,000, and that one was at constitution skill 98, whereas the one at rank 500,000 was at skill 80.

Table 5.4 Avatar level comparison across economically significant skills

Selected avatar skills	Avatars at skill 15 or above	Skill level of the avatar at rank
		250,000	500,000	750,000	1,000,000	1,250,000	1,500,000
Constitution	1,535,488	98	80	64	48	30	15
Woodcutting	1,306,507	90	76	61	43	20
Mining	1,247,867	80	65	52	36
Cooking	1,229,481	90	70	54	37
Firemaking	1,217,412	90	70	53	35
Smithing	1,173,075	82	63	48	33
Fishing	1,150,083	85	68	54	33
Crafting	1,081,080	81	61	46	26
Fletching	900,161	87	67	37
Construction	750,865	76	48	15
Hunting	715,336	74	49
Farming	680,787	71	38
Invention	213,323

All avatars have the constitution skill, but in principle the others in Table 5.4 are optional, although the ones that immediately follow it are trained in the tutorial. Among the first tasks performed by a new avatar is chopping wood, making a fire, and cooking over it. Mining is trained immediately afterward. The first craft in which fewer than a million avatars are counted as having reached level 15 is fletching, which frankly is somewhat specialized, as the skills page of the wiki explains: “Create projectiles (such as arrows, bolts, and darts) and bows/crossbows.”¹³ The four even less popular skills in Table 5.4 are those that require a paid subscription, also described on that page:

Construction: Allows players to build a house and its contents, such as chairs, tables, workshops, dungeons, and more. Every player’s house is located inside its own instance, separated from the rest of the game. Portals around the world are used to gain entry into the player’s own house, and to gain access to other ­players’ houses, allowing anyone to gain access to some of the very useful, high level rooms and furniture.

Hunting: Allows players to track, net, deadfall, snare, and trap animals for their hides, abilities and treasures. Some of the animals caught can be used in other skills.

Farming: Allows players to grow plants (such as fruits, vegetables, herbs, or trees) in certain patches across the world of Rune­Scape. Farming is notably very useful for collecting many common and rare herbs for Herblore.

Invention: Allows players to disassemble many in game items in order to break them down into components used in creating new contraptions. These contraptions can benefit the player in a number of ways, including upgrading and increasing the damage of a weapon.

Anarchy Online and RuneScape show that the division of labor in manufacturing-oriented social systems can still vary even when tradeskills are not limited to two or three as in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. In principle, avatars in Anarchy Online could learn all the crafting skills, but the need to invest improvement points from a limited supply prevents them from doing so. In RuneScape, learning more skills costs time and effort, but any sufficiently motivated player can simultaneously climb all the status ladders. In real-world small-scale distributed ­manufacturing, the nature of the product and the processes required to make it may determine whether workers must master a small number of skillsets, as in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, or can develop unique patterns of skills covering a wider range, as in Anarchy Online and RuneScape.

The Most Classic of the Virtual Worlds

The oldest MMO examined in this study is Ultima Online, still very much alive after more than two decades. Although, like other successful role-playing games, UO required a good deal of combat, the emphasis was really on assembling teams of players, collecting simulated natural resources, and constructing homes and fortresses. Thus, it fulfills the definition of virtual world and is capable of being a location for sociological field research. Other sources of information include several online wikis and encyclopedias, plus text-based discussion forums. Among several other UO forums, Stratics proclaims itself “the oldest continually running MMORPG Fansite on the Internet,” providing vast information to the UO community since 1997.¹⁴ Like WoW and LotRO, UO exists in several distinct Internet server versions—shards or instances—the same world but serving different populations of players. The section of the forum devoted to shard-specific communications contained 10,675 forum discussions containing 48,431 messages, for the Atlantic shard I had studied via participant observation.

Rather than focus on the forums, to get a sense of the social structure of the Atlantic shard I myself had explored required searching for its guilds on UA’s official website.¹⁵ The database is rather complex, and much manual labor was required to transfer the data into a spreadsheet for analysis. One selects a shard and then must enter a name, in either a character (avatar) or guild search field, and I could have begun by collecting the names of avatars who posted in real time on the Atlantic text chat. To explore methodological options, I tried other approaches. I searched online for names of prominent guilds, finding a couple of lists, and discovered other guilds by entering search terms likely to be the first word of many guild names, such as clan, empire, and lord. I found other guilds by searching for avatars having very common first names, finding 509 of whom exactly 200 belonged to 96 guilds. Many guilds were inactive, notably Lords of Chaos which listed 51 members, but not a single one had been active in the previous 90 days, so no data about them were available.

Finding a guild in the database allowed one to see a full list of all its active members, each name being a link to a page giving a few statistics describing the particular avatar. Concentrating just on guilds having at least 25 members, I wound up with the data shown in Table 5.5, for 24 guilds and 3,398 active avatars in 2017. If one were funded to perform a major research project, it might be possible to write software to scrape all the data off the web automatically, but in this case all the work was manual, a mixture of typing and copy–paste actions, taking almost exactly 1 minute per avatar, or about 7 full 8-hour work days, not counting the many hours invested in participant observation and working out the data collection method. In creating an avatar, a player must select its gender and race, there being three races: Human, Elf, and the rare Gargoyles.

Table 5.5 Census of two dozen guilds in the Atlantic shard of Ultima Online

Guild	Avatar members	Percent who are		Mean skill-related statistics
		Elves	Female	Strength	Dexterity	Intelligence
United We Fight	899	47.1%	32.7%	109.8	55.2	75.9
HOT	509	44.4%	38.1%	113.7	56.4	82.1
The Syndicate	500	41.2%	33.8%	107.9	55.4	79.8
The Wheel of Time	209	42.1%	40.7%	109.3	55.1	77.1
Fated to Win	120	25.0%	33.3%	111.9	60.1	81.0
99 Bottles	117	32.5%	29.1%	96.9	46.4	75.3
Dread Pirates of Sosaria	95	46.3%	18.9%	106.0	54.1	75.5
House of Skye	79	3.8%	87.3%	47.5	24.7	84.2
Helping Hands Young Club	73	46.6%	38.4%	96.3	43.9	83.5
Owned on Another Shard	71	40.8%	31.0%	113.9	60.0	84.0
Kitty Kat Club	70	38.6%	58.6%	97.5	49.3	62.1
We Are Everywhere	68	52.9%	0.0%	41.5	18.9	57.5
Euro Stars	63	46.0%	36.5%	111.7	71.4	70.4
Rhonai	61	3.3%	45.9%	59.0	22.6	28.8
Death Riders	60	43.3%	65.0%	93.9	52.4	72.2
Blood Order of Brotherhood	59	23.7%	35.6%	112.6	46.8	84.1
The Brotherhood of the Dragon	58	46.6%	37.9%	110.2	45.3	76.3
Defenders of the Peace	54	33.3%	46.3%	107.5	54.5	72.2
Survivors of the Storm	44	29.5%	40.9%	109.5	51.8	76.5
Empire of Oceania Blade	42	11.9%	78.6%	46.2	30.6	53.1
Four Horsemen	41	51.2%	41.5%	105.6	43.7	86.4
Clan of Khaos	38	39.5%	52.6%	97.1	49.9	84.1
The Gray Corps	36	0.0%	19.4%	71.8	26.7	58.3
Leather Neck Raiders	32	25.0%	25.0%	107.1	43.4	88.9

For each avatar, it was possible to copy several pieces of information about its skill set, which effectively defined the particular avatar’s typical role in the social division of labor of long-term guilds and brief adventure teams.¹⁶ Fundamental are three characteristics called strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Players often call them stats, short for statistics. An avatar gains points in these variables by taking a vast number of specialized actions inside the virtual world. Each skill-related statistic has a maximum of 125, and the total of all three cannot exceed 260, thus enforcing a division of labor in which avatars must specialize. The highest average total of 257.9 belongs to the 71-avatar guild, Owned on Another Shard, whose name suggests it belongs to very dedicated players who are active on multiple UA shards. Fully 46 of its 71 avatars have reached the very difficult goal of 260 primary stat points. Dedicated players may have multiple avatars, but getting them to the top skill levels may take hundreds of hours. Avatars can be conceptualized as roles, as positions in a social organization, or in other sociological terms. That requires understanding the values of the stats, suggested by their formal definitions:

Strength—Determines how much can be carried, amount of melee damage, and number of hit points

Dexterity—Determines stamina and is important for skills such as snooping and parrying

Intelligence—Determines the amount of mana a player has and can affect skills such as magery¹⁷

Hit points, also called health in many other virtual worlds and morale in Lord of the Rings Online, refer to the variable that determines when the avatar will lose a fight, which happens if hit points are beaten down by an enemy to zero. Hit points tend to regenerate, can be increased temporarily by various actions, and are seldom meaningful outside of combat. So, avatars that primarily play combat roles will tend to increase their strength to the maximum, which means that one or both of the other two stats must be weaker. But strength is also important for crafting useful virtual objects and architecture, because that work requires carrying heavy things. Mana is like hit points, but measures the momentary reserve of magical power the avatar possesses. Therefore, intelligence is valued by avatars with magical roles, such as healing comrades during combat or performing alchemy to produce healing or empowering potions that can be used at a later time. Strength, dexterity, and intelligence can be considered primary statistics of an avatar, whereas healing and alchemy abilities are secondary statistics in a set of dozens, and the dataset includes information about both categories.¹⁸ Table 5.5 shows quite clearly that the guilds differ not only in their level and distributions of average stats, but also in the fractions of avatars that are Elves or females.

A total of 56 different skills were among the three most developed for at least one of the 3,398 avatars in Table 5.5, the most popular being magery, the ability to cast magic spells, placed with the other most popular skills in the middle of Table 5.6 which prioritizes crafting skills. In second place and possessed by 901 avatars was “evaluating intelligence,” a skill that increases the damage of offensive spells, and 599 were skilled at meditation which increases the supply of mana required for spell casting.¹⁹ Often, avatars would combine this trio. The fact that the three most popular specialized skills all concerned magic-based battle highlights the fantasy orientation of Ultima Online, and in fourth place with 582 avatars was resisting spells. Most other popular skills concern nonmagical combat, except for animal lore and animal taming, which allowed avatars to take charge of wild animal NPCs. Table 5.6 shows that manufacturing skills were much less popular, indicating that a relatively small subset of avatars produced goods to give or sell to warriors, in this virtual world’s division of labor.

Table 5.6 Popularity of crafting skills and the related statistics in Ultima Online

	Number of Avatars	Mean Skill-Related Statistics
		Strength	Dexterity	Intelligence	Total
Crafting skills
Blacksmithy	250	107.1	38.8	65.3	211.2
Tailoring	214	111.7	41.3	68.5	221.5
Arms lore	86	110.3	42.5	64.4	217.2
Alchemy	85	99.0	36.3	79.9	215.2
Fishing	76	104.6	46.4	74.3	225.3
Cartography	68	106.9	29.0	96.7	232.6
Mining	62	101.5	39.4	59.6	200.5
Bowcraft and fletching	53	92.7	40.3	63.1	196.1
Carpentry	45	110.0	44.5	63.8	218.3
Tinkering	42	95.1	27.1	61.1	183.3
Lumberjacking	31	100.5	51.5	47.0	199.0
Cooking	30	89.2	37.5	75.0	201.7
More popular skills
Magery	1,024	101.1	23.5	104.1	228.7
Evaluating intelligence	901	100.9	23.8	106.7	231.4
Meditation	599	91.1	25.0	98.0	214.1
Resisting spells	582	109.0	61.1	77.7	247.8
Anatomy	579	106.7	101.8	34.9	243.4
Tactics	574	106.5	101.4	33.4	241.3
Animal lore	565	111.6	25.7	106.3	243.6
Focus	469	80.3	35.6	76.4	192.3
Archery	328	104.6	100.8	38.5	243.9
Parry	308	109.7	93.6	42.1	245.4
Animal taming	292	110.0	26.2	102.2	238.4

The user interface for Ultima Online gives players the option to set a control determining whether a statistic will stay at its current level, increase if additional points become available, or decrease as some other skill increases. Thus, players can gradually change their specialization through a combination of setting controls and doing work. As with stats, skills have a combined maximum, which is 720 rather than 260. Interface controls select which skills should be increased by practice.²⁰ There also exist many NPC skill trainers and other aspects to the skill development system. It is not obvious how these complexities may model further realities in distributed manufacturing, but there may be an analogy to the formal process of gaining accreditation or licensing to practice a skill. Governments and professional societies will need to develop new norms for the technical occupations of the future, especially if artificial intelligence and other innovations render work more part-time or combine subspecialties in dynamic ways.

Skill Structures Within Voluntary Organizations

The fact that MMOs differ greatly in the kinds and structures of data publicly available presents not only challenges for researchers, but also opportunities. This section will examine the very different leaderboards of Black Desert Online and Dark Age of Camelot, to get a sense of this variety. Wikipedia says Black Desert Online is “a sandbox-oriented massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Korean video game developer Pearl Abyss” that “takes place in a high fantasy setting and revolves around the conflict between two rival nations, the Republic of Calpheon and the Kingdom of Valencia. Calpheon is very materialistic whereas Valencia is very spiritual.”²¹

One of the Pearl Abyss websites notes the complex social structure that exists around this virtual world, listing seven different publishers who managed this MMO and its servers in different parts of the world: Kakao Games (Korea, North America, part of Europe, Oceania), GameOn (Japan), GameNet (Russia), Pearl Abyss Taiwan (Taiwan), Red Fox Games (South America), Pearl Abyss MEA (Turkey and MEA [Middle East Asia]), and Pearl Abyss SEA (Thai and SEA [South East Asia]).²² However, Wikipedia also notes the instability of some of these corporate relationships:

In October 2015, Black Desert Online was published and localized in Russia by Cypriot publisher GameNet. This contract expired on October 12, 2018 without an agreement as to account information, including character data. Pearl Abyss has apologized to Russian players and announced they would self-publish in ­Russia when their own localization efforts were completed.

Again, we can conceptualize the game companies as simulations of the information technology companies that will support distributed manufacturing through licensing software and supporting data archives. Although GameNet is usually called a publisher, it apparently was responsible for localization, which basically means translating all the text of the software and game story into Russian, and it also managed the Internet servers. Thus, GameNet held all the data about the players’ avatars, most importantly their current status in Black Desert Online, the virtual goods and money the avatars possessed, and even their social relationships represented by friendship ties to other avatars and guild memberships. The generally reliable Massively Overpowered news blogsite reported in September 2018 that negotiations had not been completed between GameNet and Pearl Abyss, and for several weeks it seemed possible that all the player data would be lost and Pearl Abyss would need to create a Russian version of Black Desert Online from scratch.²³

I explored the North American version of Black Desert Online in the spring of 2018, focusing on crafting. Although the high levels of the game emphasize PvP conflict, at low and medium levels there are relatively safe territories. Whereas World of Warcraft had three quite separate harvesting professions—herbalism, mining, and skinning—Black Desert Online combines them with several others in a single gathering profession, requiring different tools for each form of harvesting. For example, an axe is required to chop wood from trees, and a pickaxe to extract minerals from mining nodes. WoW’s skinning profession becomes two aspects of gathering in BDO, using a tanning knife to take fur from an animal that has been killed or a butchering knife to get its meat.²⁴

Inside the game, an information display can be accessed that includes leaderboards for guilds, giving the names and point scores of groups rather than individual avatars. On May 5, 2018, I took screenshots of the rankings of 573 guilds on the 4 harvesting and 4 crafting skills, then manually copied the data into a spreadsheet for analysis. For each skill the top 400 guilds were listed, and forum discussions of players seem to agree that the rankings are based directly upon the total number of skill points the members had achieved.²⁵ Data of this kind in this form pose problems for researchers, and we would prefer the actual point scores for all the guilds, not just those in the top 400 for each of the variables. An obvious issue is that if the ranks are point score totals they reflect the variable sizes of the guilds, which range from 20 to 100 with a mean of 62 members. Table 5.7 lists the correlations between the 4 harvesting skills and all 8 of the manufacturing-related skills, plus the 8 correlations with the size of the guild membership, which average –0.67, a negative correlation because the top guilds have low ranks. The population bias is illustrated by the fact that 2 guilds are ranked 1 for 3 of the skills each; 1 other is ranked 1 for 2 skills, and their memberships are 97, 98, and 100. The coefficients in the table are Pearson’s r, which can converge on Spearman’s rho when rank scores do not contain duplicates, but a technically more sophisticated analysis would attempt to control for the factor of guild membership, although that might not be easy.

Table 5.7 Correlations between guild rankings for harvesting and crafting skills

	Gathering	Fishing	Hunting	Farming	Members
Gathering	1.00	0.92	0.75	0.85	–0.70
Fishing	0.92	1.00	0.73	0.81	–0.75
Hunting	0.75	0.73	1.00	0.71	–0.57
Farming	0.85	0.81	0.71	1.00	–0.66
Cooking	0.93	0.92	0.72	0.79	–0.69
Alchemy	0.89	0.84	0.72	0.83	–0.62
Processing	0.94	0.93	0.70	0.81	–0.67
Trade	0.93	0.95	0.72	0.83	–0.69

The correlations are all very high, which undoubtedly reflects the contaminating effect of guild size. The one obvious finding is that hunting has lower correlations, both with the other harvesting or crafting skills and with guild size. To be sure, it is impossible to explore this virtual world without killing many beasts, but hunting is more specialized, as a player-authored guide reports:

Hunting has always been the odd child out of the Life Skills. Many people trash the skill and avoid it in general, but few ever stop to question “maybe it’s just misunderstood?” Hunting is about finding creatures that can’t be killed with regular weapons and shooting them with a gun. If nothing else hunting is a fun activity, but it also rewards the player with materials and rare ingredients.²⁶

Thus the lower correlations for hunting do not reflect the fact that all avatars need to kill animals, but rather that special effort invested in certain locations is required, rendered somewhat uninteresting because of all the other killing of simulated animals all players must experience.

The system of Black Desert Online leaderboards is interesting for the way it rewards groups for the accomplishments of their members, rather than assigning status only to individual avatars. But because decisions about investing in harvesting and crafting are chiefly made by individuals, this means that statistical research on the relationships between these activities is not very productive. The situation in Dark Age of Camelot is very different. MMORPG.com classifies both BDO and DAoC as fantasy games, but I prefer to classify Dark Age of Camelot as historical, because it is set in the European Dark Ages and includes representations of several real locations I have studied in the field, notably Stonehenge and the Roman Wall in Britain. Two versions of DAoC exist, represented by different servers or server clusters. The Gaheris server minimizes conflict between players, emphasizing missions to explore this simulation of ancient history and allowing all avatars to communicate and cooperate. Most players operate on the Ywain cluster, which organizes PvP combat on a very large scale, involving sieges of castles as well as small battles in the field. DAoC’s main website explains the system thus:

There are three distinct Realms in Dark Age of Camelot—Albion, Midgard and Hibernia. Think of these three Realms as foreign countries with well defended borders and different languages. An integral part of Dark Age of Camelot is the concept of Realms. Realms are entirely independent worlds that exist within the larger world of the game. Although there are some exceptions to this, the primary principle is that each of the Realms is at war with each of the others, and that they cannot even communicate with each other. Realm vs. Realm combat (known as RvR) occurs in special level-specific battlegrounds and in the New Frontiers. There are battlegrounds available for characters level 1 to 49. Battlegrounds are smaller RvR areas and entry into each is limited by level. The first battleground is level 1–4, the next is 5–9, the third is 10–14, and so forth, ending at level 49. The battlegrounds are a good place to learn how to use your RvR skills before venturing out into the main RvR zones in New Frontiers.²⁷

While set in days or yore, Dark Age of Camelot is a marvelous simulation of large-scale social interaction, much of it involving preparation for war through training of individual skills and manufacture of equipment, even of large siege machinery. Over a period of weeks ending in mid-­October 2018, I collected data from the extensive dataset of avatars available from Camelot Herald, in which one page of information exists for every avatar, including what guild it may belong to.²⁸ Black Desert Online may limit the membership of each guild to 100 avatars because that encourages development of cohesive social groups in which a significant fraction of the members may be important. Dark Age of Camelot does not set such low limits, and one guild I found had 5,033 avatars belonging to 1,530 player accounts. As many as 21 guilds can form an alliance, sharing access to their many facilities, including guild halls.²⁹ I searched for comparable alliances across the three factions in the Ywain server complex, finding one in the Albion faction to which 15,342 avatars belonged, one in Hibernia with 13,047 avatars, and one in Midgard with 14,886. Each guild had a home page in Camelot Herald from which its full ­membership list could be accessed, but it also had a leaderboard listing the top 10 members in 6 manufacturing skills. Table 5.8 summarizes the tradeskill levels of the 1,882 high-status avatars listed in all the leaderboards, 603 in Albion, 630 in Hibernia, and 649 in Midgard.

Table 5.8 Tradeskills in the Ywain simulation of Dark Ages of western Europe

Manufacturing skill	Skill level achieved		Correlation
	Maximum	Mean	Alchemy	Armorcraft	Fletching	Siegecraft
Spellcrafting	1,104	353	0.39	0.17	0.01	0.12
Alchemy	1,151	390	1.00	0.12	0.03	0.20
Armorcraft	1,167	350	0.12	1.00	0.25	0.26
Fletching	1,150	210	0.03	0.25	1.00	0.27
Tailoring	1,167	332	0.10	0.35	0.30	0.19
Weaponcraft	1,150	307	0.15	0.38	0.28	0.28
Siegecraft	1,050	200	0.20	0.26	0.27	1.00

Siegecraft did not have a leaderboard, but it was easy to copy the statistic in this manufacturing craft for any avatar listed as superior in any of the six leaderboards. The total number of guilds was 62, so we might expect the total number of avatars in Table 5.8 to be 62 × 6 × 10 = 3,720, rather than the 1,882 that were found, but in fact some ambitious players had achieved high leaderboard status in more than one tradeskill, and some of the smallest guilds lack avatars that were skilled in some fields. Another comparison worth noting is that only 1,882 of a total 43,275, or 4.3 percent, had reached high status in any of the 6 leaderboard tradeskills, whereas those 1,882 had done so in an average of about 2 of these manufacturing skills. This demonstrates that each manufacturing category was a rare specialization, just as we might expect them to be in the real communities of the future that incorporate significant local manufacturing.

The correlation coefficients in Table 5.8 look much more reasonable than those in Table 5.7, rather like those we get with opinion items in public polls. The four tradeskills chosen to define columns of the table were those that most efficiently illustrated the structure of the entire correlation matrix. Here is how the pages in the Dark Age of Camelot wiki describe all seven tradeskills:

Spellcrafting gives players the ability to craft magical gems that imbue their armor and weapons with enhancements to various skills and attributes suited to one’s character.³⁰

Alchemy gives players the ability to craft potions, poisons, dyes, and tinctures. Poisons are primarily used by the assassin classes (Infiltrator, Shadowblade, and Nightshade) for dealing extra damage and negative effects on their targets. Potions are basically a bottled spell, which will cast itself upon the user when consumed. Dyes can be used on armors, shields, and cloaks to change their color. Tinctures are used to place special spells on other crafted items, in the form of charges, procs, and reactive procs.³¹

Armorcrafting is the tradeskill that uses the strongest materials available to produce heavier armors, such as chain or plate. An Armorcrafter’s final product may be magically enhanced through Spellcrafting.³²

Fletching focuses on the creation of bows, staves, and musical instruments. The archer classes (Scout, Hunter, and Ranger) may find this craft the most useful as they can craft bows to use as their ranged weapon of choice.³³

Tailoring produces lighter types of armor, such as Cloth and Leather. Tailors use various cloths and leathers to craft armor for casters, rogues, and other light tank classes. Much like Armorcrafting, the products of a Tailor may also be spellcrafted to become many times more powerful.³⁴

Weaponcrafting focuses on creating powerful weapons such as swords and spears. The weapons created by Weaponcrafters may also be spellcrafted to become more powerful.³⁵

Siegecrafting was completely revamped and fleshed out into a full tradeskill in version 1.90. Recipes now range from 5 to 1000 skill, covering everything from weak, makeshift devices to fully fortified engines of war.³⁶

It would be simplistic to say that spellcrafting and alchemy correlate more strongly with each other, at 0.39, because they are both “magical.” Actually, the fantasy quality of this historical simulation adds a legendary quality to the story, but these tradeskills are comparable to the manufacture of mechanical or electronic accessories, and chemicals, that enhance the performance of other technologies. Spellcrafting is actually highly technical, and its most serious practitioners use Kort’s Spellcrafting Calculator, a program that allows the user to figure the best alternatives for producing an enhancer for a particular weapon or piece of armor.³⁷ The descriptions for alchemy and fletching specify which classes of avatars can best use their products, and of course classes differ in whether they use protective equipment made from metal (armorcrafting) or cloth and leather (tailoring). The descriptions for armorcrafting, tailoring, and weaponcrafting mention that their products can be enhanced by spellcrafting. This is not true for fletching which has a zero correlation with spellcrafting.

Of course, one reason why an avatar may develop two particular tradeskills is that they may use similar raw materials, such as armorcrafting and weaponcrafting that both use metal and correlate at 0.38. At low levels, raw materials may be purchased from merchants, but at high levels some must be gathered or looted during adventures. Also, some crafts share manufacturing equipment. For example, both spellcrafters and alchemists use an alchemy table. The tradeskill system has gone through several changes during the long history of Dark Age of Camelot, and prior to 2008 each craft was restricted to certain adventure classes.³⁸ Siegecrafting was added and altered, notably in 2007 when an update announced: “No longer are unrelated tradeskills required to build these machines. All siege ingredient and apparatus recipes have been moved from the original, primary tradeskills into Siegecrafting.”³⁹

Conclusion

A general question in the sociology of social structures is the extent to which relationships are between living people or functional roles. In the virtual worlds considered here, each person may be represented by multiple avatars, and in a Dark Age of Camelot guild with 1,530 players, each one had roughly 3.3 avatars, not counting any they may have had in other guilds, factions, or games. Players tend to use the word avatar when the virtual being represents themselves personally, or character when it represents a prescripted role, so they are quite conscious of that sociological distinction. They are also quite aware that the large-scale social structures contain artificial people as well, such as the simulation of the real deceased scholar, Snorri Sturluson, who stands at the gate to Jordheim, the capital city of Midgard. The term NPC or non-player character is commonly used, but in the case of virtual Sturluson we could coin the new term, non-player avatar, given that it represents a real if deceased person. Without going that deep into philosophy, we should consider the roles played in social structures by simulated people.

¹ Bainbridge, W.S. 2000. Online Multiplayer Games, 68–73. San Rafael, ­California: Morgan and Claypool.

² lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Crafter_interdependence

³ lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Metalsmith

⁴ lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Scholar

⁵ Bainbridge, W.S. Computer Simulations of Space Societies, 223–30. Cham, ­Switzerland: Springer.

⁶www.ao-universe.com/index.php?id=14&site=AO-Universe%2FKnowledge%2F&pid=402&lang=en

⁷ people.anarchy-online.com

⁸www.ao-universe.com/index.php?id=14&site=AO-Universe%2FKnowledge%2F&mid=&pid=387

⁹ Lee, G.K., and R.E. Cole. 2003. “From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development.” Organization Science 14, pp. 633–49; Crowston, K., and I. Shamshurin. 2016. “Core-Periphery Communication and the Success of Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects.” In Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems, 45–56. Springer.

¹⁰ runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Skills

¹¹ runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Constitution

¹² services.runescape.com/m=clan-hiscores/c=TN64L9O2kLw/ranking

¹³ runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Skills

¹⁴ stratics.com

¹⁵ uo.com/myuo-2/#/search

¹⁶ uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/player/stats/skills-stats-and-attributes

¹⁷ www.uoguide.com/Stats

¹⁸ wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_Online_Skills

¹⁹ wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Magery

²⁰ www.uoguide.com/Skills

²¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Desert_Online

²² www.pearlabyss.com/games/BDO?lang=en

²³ Royce, B. 2018. “Black Desert’s Russian Servers will be Spared from Their Abrupt and Messy Closure after All.” Massively Overpowered, October 17. massivelyop.com/2018/10/17/black-desert-russian-fiasco-unfiascoed/

²⁴ blackdesertonline.wikia.com/wiki/Gathering

²⁵ www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/4hrn4l/guild_ranking/

²⁶ grumpygreen.cricket/bdo-hunting-guide-eminent.html

²⁷ darkageofcamelot.com/content/rvr-server-types

²⁸ search.camelotherald.com/#/search

²⁹ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Create_a_Guild_House

³⁰ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Spellcrafting

³¹ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Alchemy

³² camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Armorcraft

³³ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Fletching

³⁴ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Tailoring

³⁵ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Weaponcraft

³⁶ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Siegecraft

³⁷ kscraft.sourceforge.net/

³⁸ camelot.allakhazam.com/db/skills.html?cskill=176

³⁹ camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_Notes:_Version_1.90