CHAPTER 2

The Universe of Online Virtual Worlds

In virtual worlds of all the kinds described in this book, people may work together to achieve goals, doing so through their computers and across Internet. In nearly all cases they are represented on their computer screens by avatars or characters, which are user-controlled virtual representations of humans. Enduring groups of players, typically called guilds, share private communication systems and often private virtual territory, thus simulating corporations or neighborhoods in our so-called real world. In several MMOs, guilds may set up their own crafting stations, comparable to small factories, and collectively produce virtual products of value to their avatars, such as weapons and armor, but in some cases furniture for their virtual headquarters or personal residences.

The background for considering how MMOs can be used as theoretical explorations or pilot studies for designing the local communities of the future will be presented in four parts. First, a sense of the “reality” of virtual worlds will be offered through observations and data gathered at the 2014 annual Weatherstock music festival in Lord of the Rings Online, which was attended by 487 people. Second, an overview of how research on the socioeconomic structures of MMOs can be done stays within the same virtual world but spans 10 different instances of it using 11 avatars as field observers. Third, a comprehensive overview of the first two decades of realistic online virtual worlds introduces the 30 MMOs explored in this research. Fourth, consideration of two high-popularity examples, World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2, introduces the division of labor within such worlds and the extensive online communication about them that takes place in social media.

An Example of Serious Social Simulation

In selecting an example with which to begin our exploration, Lord of the Rings Online seemed the ideal choice, being of high quality, extreme complexity, and great cultural significance. It is based on the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, that are often described as high fantasy.¹ Wikipedia defines this term:

High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional (“secondary”) world, rather than “the real,” or “primary” world. The secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or “real” world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of ­magical elements.²

Although superficially accurate, I believe the label “high fantasy” is simplistic.

Tolkien was a respected academic, specializing in historical linguistics and the culture of ancient Britain.³ He belonged to an ancient tradition, anchored in the works of Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) whose Prose Edda was based on pre-Christian legends that he believed had a basis in reality, even though they had been exaggerated in retelling over the years.⁴ One interpretation of Tolkien’s works is that they are attempts to imagine what the Prose Edda of England would have been, if the legends had not been entirely forgotten, which would imply they would have connected to real preliterate history. A second interpretation is that Lord of the Rings is a reflection of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, a set of four similarly structured German operas based on Teutonic legends, seeking to balance the aesthetic–historic cultures between England and Germany. A third interpretation is that Lord of the Rings was a reaction to the horrors of the world wars of the early 20^th century, by imagining four very different races of people uniting against pure evil. A fourth interpretation is that the ring in Lord of the Rings represents evil modern technology, comparable to but not limited to the atom bomb, and that the climax requires its destruction. This is not the place to consider the alternate interpretations in any depth, but much evidence suggests that all four are correct.

Fantasy games are not frivolous, even though some of their content is not found in exactly the same form in our real world. In high-quality fantasy and the legends of previous centuries, exotic humanoids such as Elves and Dwarves represent archetypes of human personality. In Tolkien’s literary works, Orcs represent mindless brutes, thus people who do not reflect upon the meaning of life, and none of his main characters were Orcs. The Fellowship combined Elves, Dwarves, Humans, and Hobbits. Elves clearly represented scholars who loved history but tended to withdraw from mundane conflicts, but in European folklore Elves have long represented aloof kinds of people.⁵ Dwarves were engineers who tried to invent technical solutions for problems. Humans were explorers but highly diverse in the behavior caused by their search for new alternatives that were neither scholarly nor technical. Hobbits apparently represented ordinary people who had minds but focused them on their immediate surroundings in their traditional provincial manner. Thus, some aspects of fantasy games are metaphoric, but metaphors can be defined as literary simulations of reality, having a somewhat abstract quality.

Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) is a truly vast virtual world, consisting of many regions possessing different natural environments and social challenges. At the core are the home regions of the four humanoid races that collaborated in Tolkien’s literature. The Hobbits live in the Shire, which contains forests, fields, streams, farms, and five towns: Hobbiton, Needlehole, Stock, Brockenborings, and Michel Delving. Each town has a stable master, a nonplayer character who will rent to the player’s avatar a steed that can be ridden to one of the other towns. To start with, the alternative mode of travel is walking, which can take a long time, although soon in an avatar’s development it can take riding lessons and purchase a horse. The public facilities available in the towns vary, and only Michel Delving has a full set of manufacturing resources, including farmland where plants can be grown, machinery and ovens for manufacturing, plus a bank and an auction house where players may buy and sell virtual goods they have collected or produced.

West of the Shire is a region called Ered Luin where the Dwarves and Elves dwell, and east of the Shire is Bree-land, the home of Men (what Tolkien called humans) who have a very big city named Bree. As of July 2018, there were stable masters at 179 locations, most of them in other regions chiefly southeast of Bree. Like most MMO games, LotRO requires avatars to ascend a ladder of experience, which determines various characteristics of the avatar, and only the very starting location is suitable for anyone below level 5. At that point in time the top level was 115, but occasionally this level cap is increased as new and more difficult regions are added to the world. For example, the level cap was raised to 120 in October 2018, as more territory was added to the far northeast area of Middle Earth. Nearing level 20, it is safe for a new avatar to enter the region just east of Bree, Lone-lands, and reach the Forsaken Inn, the starting point for a marvelous annual festival named Weatherstock in homage to the 1969 Woodstock music and art festival that was held in our real world, with initial activities at the inn and the main music performances on a nearby mountain named Weathertop.

Weatherstock is a marvelous example of how virtual worlds can simulate real human social activities. Several players can form a long-lasting group called a kinship rather than the usual guild, and the musical bands two of my own avatars played with had set up kinships and invested in a headquarters where they could do many things, including operate their own manufacturing machinery to craft musical instruments and have a small stage where they could rehearse performances. Lord of the Rings Online uses the ABC notation system to control a music synthesizer, whereas an add-on program called Songbook manages ­communications so that an orchestra with many parts could play in a coordinated manner.⁶ Using ABC, it is technically easy to compose new music as well as orchestrate traditional tunes and even quartets.⁷ Online performance by musicians at different locations is generally very difficult, because the latency of the network will differ from one place to the next, but in LotRO the synthesis takes place on the computer of the individual member of the audience, so this is not a problem. The 10th annual Weatherstock was held July 21, 2018, and over the years many participants have posted music videos of these events on both Twitch and YouTube. Here are YouTube video descriptions of the two previous festivals:

Weatherstock VIII (2016)—Lord of the Rings Online: Weatherstock is LOTRO’s largest annual player-run event! This music ­festival and competition takes place on Landroval. More information can be found at http://weatherstock.guildlaunch.com/ THANK YOU Eldalleth for your tireless efforts to stream the entirety of the event! (uploaded July 28, 2016, video duration eight hours 50 minutes)⁸

Weatherstock IX—2017 Full Broadcast: Here is the full archive of this year’s livestreamed broadcast of Weatherstock on Twitch.tv/LOTROstream. Thanks to Eldalleth, StinePlays, Druidsfire, and everyone else who volunteered to help out on Twitch, and all of the bands and organizers in-game who put this massive event together. Also, thanks to everyone who stopped by either in-game or on Twitch! (uploaded July 24, 2017, video duration: eight hours 59 minutes)⁹

The phrase “takes place on Landroval” refers to the fact that 10 different versions of LotRO existed, operating in parallel but off separate Internet server systems, and Landroval is the name of one of them. Five of the 10 “worlds” serve North America. The other five serve Europe, two in English, two in German, and one in French, although users can individually decide which of these languages their interface text should be in. In November 2018 two more servers were added, called “legendary” because they were limited to the territories included when LotRO launched in 2007, and to experience levels 1 to 50, with plans to add the other areas and levels in the same sequence that had been followed over the subsequent decade.

I created an avatar specifically to attend the 2014 Weatherstock, naming him Ogburn in honor of the technological determinist sociologist William F. Ogburn. In LotRO and many other popular MMOs, each avatar must be permanently assigned to a class of adventurers, so he was a minstrel that would harmonize with a music festival. Optionally, avatars may learn professional skills, and in LotRO they are clustered in trios called vocations. Ogburn became a woodsman, which combined these more specialized professions: woodworker, forester, farmer. A woodworker could make musical instruments, and a forester could gather the necessary wood from the forests. The farmer profession was incidental, and another vocation called armsman had woodworker as its incidental profession, because an armsman cannot gather wood but must obtain it from other avatars who possess the forester profession.

Table 2.1 shows statistics on the participants at Weatherstock 2014, based on the 334 avatars who participated in the informal part of the festival, playing or listening to music just outside the Forsaken Inn, and the 487 who attended the main part up on Weathertop. For online virtual gatherings in 2014, these numbers are remarkably high. Each avatar represented a person and wore distinctive clothing. The graphic display did tend to lag as people moved around, and only at smaller music events are members of the audience encouraged to dance. But the synthesized music itself was not affected. The table shows the distribution of avatar classes, offering a brief standard description of each and arranging them in descending order of popularity among the 487, who include the vast majority of the 334. This census was taken with a portion of the user interface that lets players see who is currently online, especially in the vicinity, in order to team up for missions that individuals cannot ­accomplish solo.

Table 2.1 Census of avatars by class in Weatherstock 2014

Class	Forsaken	Weathertop	Description of class
Minstrel	32.6%	34.7%	Heart of a fellowship, herald of hope, inspiration, renewal
Hunter	20.7%	20.1%	Master of field and forest
Burglar	8.4%	7.4%	Master of stealth and misdirection
Champion	6.0%	7.4%	Consummate warrior, unrelenting in battle
Guardian	7.5%	7.0%	Protector of the weak and defender of those in need
Lore-master	8.1%	7.0%	Seeker of knowledge and a guardian of wisdom
Warden	4.8%	6.2%	Mobile melee combatant
Captain	6.6%	5.3%	Masterful leader, commanding ­presence, strengthens allies
Rune-keeper	5.4%	4.9%	Mystical linguist and master of true names
Total	100.0%	100.0%
	334	487

Not surprisingly, minstrels were the most common class in attendance, although any of the classes could play a musical instrument if they received training from a minstrel. Given J.R.R. Tolkien’s opposition to magic, LotRO’s designers were forced to find ways of offering players magical abilities, but interpreting them in nonmagical terms. A minstrel plays music during battle, with various kinds of tune affecting the outcome just as varied magical spells might do. Having run a lore-master up to the maximum experience level of 115, I have seen how that complex class exercises naturalistic magic, and the same is true for rune-keepers. For example, a lore-master can acquire and train animal companions, and mine primarily used a bear who became very strong and eventually did nearly all the fighting, having become nearly invincible over hundreds of hours of action.

One might guess that hunters are numerous in the Weatherstock 2014 census because they are good solo characters, and many players with their main avatars on other servers might have created a hunter on Landroval specifically to attend Weatherstock, which does require getting at least a short distance up the experience ladder without help from a kinship. However, several censuses I have carried out across all the servers found that in general about 20 percent of the avatars are hunters, while minstrels tend to constitute about 12 percent, suggesting how collection of statistical data in virtual worlds can be used to test as well as to frame hypotheses. The overwhelming majority of the 487 avatars present at the peak of the festival were audience rather than performers. It is common for players to have multiple characters, although one would need multiple accounts and computers to operate more than one at any given time, what is called multiboxing and not common in role-playing games.

The example of Weatherstock uses the primary research methodologies employed in this book. One cannot study a culturally complex cultural world without performing extensive observational research, what cultural anthropologists call ethnography and what sociologists call ­participant observation. But comprehensive study must go beyond the energetic development of personal experience, in three ways. First, as Table 2.1 illustrates, data about large social groups and populations must also be collected, often in quantitative form. Second, connections must be made to immediately relevant information outside the virtual world, such as reading Tolkien’s books and viewing YouTube videos. Third, whether done by an individual researcher or a community of researchers, any virtual world must be compared with others, ideally developing some form of classification scheme as well as comparing details of their technical features.

Open-Ended Exploration of Middle-Earth

Although the goals of this book primarily concern drawing abstract lessons that might apply to specific real-world systems that the games only simulated, the precondition is direct experience. For purposes of reasonably comprehensive research, I created 11 characters, tried all races, classes, and vocations, as well as collected quantitative data on all 10 servers of Lord of the Rings Online. Table 2.2 lists these virtual research assistants, thereby providing a more comprehensive perspective on the diversity of avatars and the choices open to players. The research was done in several phases, beginning August 9, 2009, and ending July 4, 2018. While operating an avatar, one can enter into the text chat “/played” and get information on the total time that particular avatar was played. The total for the 11 was 1,351 hours. With the exception of World of Warcraft which I explored for over 3,000 hours, most other examples referred to in this book took less time, the 1,187 hours in Star Wars: The Old Republic and 618 hours in Star Wars Galaxies being among the highest. Dedicated players invest similar fractions of their lives in these virtual worlds.

Table 2.2 Eleven research avatars in one virtual world

Name	World	Hours	Level	Gender	Race	Class	Vocation
Rumilisoun	Gladden	791	115	Female	Elf	Lore-master	Historian
Ogburn	Landroval	174	108	Male	Dwarf	Minstrel	Woodsman
Andraeda	Laurelin	88	25	Female	Man	Minstrel	Tinker
Angusmcintosh	Crickhollow	63	25	Male	Hobbit	Burglar	Historian
Aeleven	Brandywine	60	35	Male	Elf	Hunter	Armourer
Andraeda	Belagaer	42	25	Female	Man	Minstrel	Yeoman
Fitchperkins	Arkenstone	41	25	Female	Man	Captain	Tinker
Catullus	Gwaihir	37	25	Male	High Elf	Rune-keeper	Armsman
Meglivorn	Sirannon	21	25	Male	Beorning	Beorning	Explorer
Gimloing	Landroval	20	5	Male	Dwarf	Champion	Tinker
Bolivianita	Evernight	14	50	Female	Hobbit	Hunter	Explorer

The 11 avatars vary significantly in the number of hours each was played and the experience level they achieved up a status ladder from 1 to 115, a reflection in part of the different roles they played in a series of research projects. Recently, LotRO added to the four Tolkien “races” the High Elf variant of Elves and the Beorning variant of Man, the latter of which could temporarily take the form of fierce bears. The lore-master class and historian vocation were selected for the main avatar, ­Rumilisoun, as her chief task was documentation of the cultures of Middle-earth, and a leading computer science publication printed her avatarish personal views on that important topic.¹⁰

Originally, there were two research avatars, Rumilisoun and Angusmcintosh, who were both on the Gladden world, a North American server, tasked with performing general ethnography of the fictional culture. The two avatars named Andraeda were added later, to serve as assistants to Angusmcintosh in a linguistics study on two European servers, Laurelin which used the English language and Belagaer which used the German. Angusmcintosh was named after the real-world student of J.R.R. ­Tolkien who established what is now known as the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.¹¹ Ogburn was added to study the musicology of LotRO, and the English-language variant of Andraeda also performed this function. In order to collect more extensive data for the present project, Angusmcintosh was moved from the Gladden server to the Crickhollow server, for a modest transfer payment, and the other avatars were created.

The Gimloing avatar was added near the end of this research, for a specific experiment on manufacturing, in which Gimloing would stay all the time at a manufacturing facility, and Ogburn would collect raw materials and ship them to Gimloing, thereby illustrating the smallest possible economy. Gimloing was given the tinker vocation, which is the only one that includes the jeweler profession. Ogburn then switched from woodsman to explorer vocation, which preserved his forester skills but required him to learn prospecting (gathering metal and gemstones) and tailoring. For clarity, here are the professions in their vocations: tinker (jeweler, prospector, cook), explorer (tailor, forester, prospector).

A prospector can gain general experience from gathering raw materials but not professional skill which requires processing them, notably going to a public forge like one on the west side of Bree and melting metal into ingots. This meant that Ogburn needed to do not only enough prospecting to level both of them up in this skill, but also collect the raw materials needed for Gimloing’s jeweler profession. Ogburn could level up his forester skill by killing animals and processing their hides, and level his tailor profession by making things from those hides. Neither could acquire the raw materials needed for Gimloing’s cook profession, so they were bought from the player auction house with money primarily gathered by Ogburn, but also earned when Gimloing sold his products in the auction house or to nonplayer vendors. The 20 hours invested in ­Gimloing allowed him to complete learning the most advanced of 11 ­levels of all of his professional skills, but Ogburn’s labor investment accomplishing the same goal was rather greater.

A key purpose of the Ogburn–Gimloing partnership was to highlight the geographically fixed nature of manufacture, in contrast to the roaming nature of resource collection. To collect all the resources needed to make the highest-rated products in the prospecting and jeweler professions, Ogburn needed to travel all over Middle-earth, which required him to have reached the adventuring experience level of 105, exactly 100 steps higher up the status ladder than Gimloing was allowed to achieve. The only traveling required of Gimloing was walking back and forth, between three rooms of Thorin’s Hall, the main castle of the Dwarves. One held the forges that could melt ore into metal ingots, which advanced the prospector profession. Another provided an oven for cooking and a workbench for jewelry. The third room offered access to the auction system through which Gimloing could purchase the raw ingredients for cooking sold by other players who did farming. Ogburn and Gimloing never met, because Ogburn had two ways to ship the raw materials he collected to Gimloing. If he happened to be in a town that had a bank, they shared a bank account where he could deposit items that Gimloing could withdraw from a banker in Thorin’s Hall. But at a much larger number of locations, Ogburn could at low cost mail materials to Gimloing. Note the rather complex division of functions in this example—resource gathering, transportation, and manufacture—which only hint at the full complexity of Lord of the Rings Online.

This somewhat ornate and limited experiment highlights more general principles. First, in LotRO, but not in many other gameworlds, performing professions earns general experience, although it does so efficiently only at low levels of experience. Yet the table reports that ­Gimloing never got above experience level 5. One other avatar, Andraeda of Belagaer, earned half of her 25 levels of general experience by practicing the yeoman vocation which combines these professions: farmer, cook, tailor. Farming a field on the outskirts of Michel Delving, she grew many of the ingredients for cooking, which she performed at a nearby public oven. Gimloing could have achieved level 25 of experience, rather than just 5, by doing his manufacturing, so why did he not?

In LotRO, it is possible to buy experience, or to buy a relic that can halt gains in experience. In an online store accessed within the game, one may buy a special currency called LotRO Points, in various deals, from 600 points for $7.99 (75 per dollar) to 23,000 points for $199.99 (115 per dollar). For 100 points, a relic called Stone of the Tortoise was purchased and placed in Gimloing’s pocket, halting his experience progress so long as it was there. Ogburn’s case was practically the opposite. He reached level 48 by the usual arduous effort, but then jumped to 105 by using Aria of the Valar, which cost 6,695 points. He wandered for a while, getting used to his exaggerated status, ascending just to level 106, and then collaborating with Gimloing took him only to level 108. Bolivianita leapt from level 6 to level 50, using Gift of the Valar, which cost 3,995 points, and most of her mere 14 hours of work were invested simply in collecting quantitative data for a vocation-related study that required data from all 10 worlds. All the other avatars earned their status “honestly.”

This example connects to two questions regarding online games, neither of which has been answered definitely: First, how can the companies that produce the game earn decent profits? Second, what forms of sociotechnological system fairly reward people for their skills and efforts?¹² Ordinary solo-player games, over the years, have been sold outright to each customer, which seems straightforward enough, although one continuing issue concerns what might prevent the owner of a game from loaning it to friends, as one can do with a printed novel. The classic “cost recovery” method, exemplified by World of Warcraft and many of its competitors around the time of its launch in 2004, was to sell the game, but require a monthly subscription to access it online after a brief initial period.

Once the highly competitive market for online games was well developed, many games became free to play, earning profits by selling virtual items through the game, using virtual currencies like LotRO points. In the worst cases, games became pay to win, allowing rich players called whales to buy armor, weapons, vehicles, and other power-enhancing virtual goods. This complex economic situation cannot be fully explored here, but does sometimes affect player manufacture of virtual goods, because they may become stuck in an implicit competition with the game company. LotRO and other culturally sophisticated games face a quandary, needing to make money but wanting to avoid competing against players, so they tend to sell luxury goods, such as more beautiful clothing, or items that do not duplicate the ones players can create.

Two Decades of Virtual Gameworlds

At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that several sports, such as baseball and football, consolidated in the 19th century. The history of computer games is complex, but unless one goes wild with metaphors, this field emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is still undergoing unpredictable development today. I owned my first computer game in 1956, and it was a Geniac, designed as a computer science educational tool by Edmund C. Berkeley, cofounder of the Association for Computing Machinery.¹³ Setting aside electric pinball games and their turn-taking ilk, arguably the first multiplayer computer game was Spacewar! dating from 1962.¹⁴ The earliest online example studied for this project was the fantasy game Ultima Online dating from 1997.

Whatever exact terminology we wish to apply to Lord of the Rings Online and Ultima Online, both are considered fantasy games, the genre that dominated the field for most of its first two decades. LotRO launched in 2007, coincidentally one decade after UO, and even in 2004 World of Warcraft was able to offer much better graphics than UO, which used oblique projection that viewed the world from a set point overhead and lacked perspective, whereas the WoW viewpoint could be adjusted and displayed objects on the horizon as small as they would appear in the real world. Both share with LotRO the goals of depicting adventures in an imaginary world that has some similarity with the European Middle Ages, yet adds some explicitly magical features. The oldest science fiction game considered here is Anarchy Online which dates from 2001, the same year the historical World War II Online launched. Table 2.3 lists the 30 virtual worlds that were studied for this project.

Table 2.3 A universe of 30 online virtual worlds

MMO name	Launch year	Wikipedia views	Wiki articles	Subreddit subscribers	MMORPG category
Ultima Online	1997	378,841	2,992	3,548	Fantasy
EverQuest	1999	617,621	1,509	7,780	Fantasy
Anarchy Online	2001	104,433	800	1,394	Sci-Fi
Dark Age of Camelot	2001	179,424	1,860	1,635	Fantasy
RuneScape	2001	1,182,555	43,949	136,390	Fantasy
World War II Online	2001	102,038	Many	310	Historical
A Tale in the Desert	2003	22,420	Many	112	Historical
Entropia Universe	2003	366,379	1,624	612	Sci-Fi
EVE Online	2003	1,002,775	1,880	101,089	Sci-Fi
Star Wars Galaxies	2003	444,972	9,680	3,087	Sci-Fi
City of Heroes	2004	497,123	5,645	2,850	Super-Hero
EverQuest II	2004	169,396	181,533	2,601	Fantasy
World of Warcraft	2004	3,776,547	182,467	839,010	Fantasy
Guild Wars	2005	269,497	21,728	12,615	Fantasy
Lord of the Rings Online	2007	318,376	84,201	16,408	Fantasy
Tabula Rasa	2007	135,025	2,825	None	Sci-Fi
Age of Conan	2008	144,018	7,091	356	Fantasy
Pirates of the Burning Sea	2008	66,515	5,904	80	Historical
Fallen Earth	2009	40,866	22,252	220	Sci-Fi
Star Trek Online	2010	502,617	14,779	19,650	Sci-Fi
Gods and Heroes	2011	19,302	64	12	Historical
Star Wars: The Old Republic	2011	2,098,397	33,338	79,648	Sci-Fi
Xsyon: Prelude	2011	7,959	64	29	Sci-Fi
Guild Wars 2	2012	694,776	79,983	188,599	Fantasy
Defiance	2013	239,054	341	5,174	Sci-Fi
Wildstar	2014	271,742	5,627	26,990	Sci-Fi
Elder Scrolls Online	2015	1,744,247	61,313	164,462	Fantasy
Black Desert Online	2016	738,030	861	85,410	Fantasy
Conan Exiles	2018	395,633	4,278	27,441	Fantasy
Shroud of the Avatar	2018	191,625	8,842	336	Fantasy

All 30 MMOs have Wikipedia articles, and the most popular have many secondary pages linked from the main page, such as a page for each expansion of the virtual territory over the years. From the “view history” tab of a Wikipedia page, one may access statistics, like the number of times the page was viewed in the period from July 1, 2015 until “today” which was October 7, 2018, for the Wikipedia views column of Table 2.3. All 30 cases have their own wikis, in some cases more than one, often at the fansite Wikia.com, and the wiki articles column lists the number of articles on the biggest wiki, acknowledging that the wikis use very different criteria to report their size, which two chose not to do at all. It is difficult to compare the popularity of MMOs, because they do not report their number of players, but a website called mmo-population.com suggests that a proxy measure would be the number of subscribers to the game’s subreddit on the forum site reddit.com. A very active online blogsite, MMORPG.com, discusses all of these 30 extensively and classifies most of them as fantasy, sci-fi, and historical.¹⁵ As of the date for these data, four of the MMOs had shut down: Tabula Rasa (in 2009), Star Wars Galaxies (2011), City of Heroes (2012), and Gods and Heroes (2012). Two others were scheduled to be shut down before the end of 2018: Pirates of the Burning Sea and Wildstar.

There are many serious approaches to the analysis of these human–technical systems, and one obvious example is game theory, proposed in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern back in 1944.¹⁶ An alternative school of thought, largely founded by Johan Huizinga and Donald Winnicott, considers play to be an essential component of culture and of individual psychological development.¹⁷ In sociology, a vast diversity of literature exists concerning role-playing, and these games are all social role-playing systems.¹⁸ Yet the most important theorists in this field are not academics, but the designers of the games themselves, who function within a highly sophisticated culture, having its own perspectives on human behavior, as well as considerable technical expertise.¹⁹ Therefore, this book will primarily follow the strictures of grounded theory, seeking to extract insights from the cases under study, rather than imposing a pre-existing theoretical structure on the data.²⁰

The classic example is a game—and indeed an entire genre of games—called Kriegspiel, which is German for war game. As Wikipedia reports, it

was a system used for training officers in the Prussian and ­German armies. The first set of rules was created in 1812 and named Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame. It was originally produced and developed further by Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz of the Prussian Army.²¹

A 2009 article in the German news magazine Der Spiegel noted: “Die Regeln, nach denen Reiswitz’ Spielleiter den Spielverlauf zu berechnen hatte, sind konstruiert, um in der Spielwelt eine Realität so glaubwürdig wie möglich zu simulieren. Reiswitz’ Vorgehen dabei erinnert an heutige Rollenspiele.”²² Google Translate renders this into English as: “The rules by which Reiswitz’s game master had to calculate the gameplay are designed to simulate a reality in the game world as believably as possible. Reiswitz’s approach is reminiscent of today’s role-playing games.” The technical term Spielleiter is correctly translated as game master, equivalent to a game designer who sets up the initial conditions and may also judge the performance of the players.

Role-playing games, and games involving economic properties, were common throughout the 20th century. Especially noteworthy was the predecessor of the popular board game, Monopoly, called The Landlord Game and patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie, who created it as an educational tool:

She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.²³

Less didactic and more role-oriented were two sleuth and psychological mid-century board games, Mr. Ree! and Clue or Cluedo. Mr. Ree! dates from 1937 and a gamesite describes its dynamic nature:

Each player assumes the part of one of the Characters in Aunt Cora’s red brick house, and by his actions and positions in the house-hold follows thru with his likes and dislikes of the various persons with whom fate has placed him. The player, represented on the board by a hollow token, roams about inside and outside the house, choosing and concealing weapons with which to commit a crime. The strong arm of the law, in the person of Mr. Ree, is ever present patrolling the grounds surrounding the house.²⁴

The 1949 board game Clue requires players

to determine who murdered the game’s victim… where the crime took place, and which weapon was used. Each player assumes the role of one of the six suspects, and attempts to deduce the correct answer by strategically moving around a game board representing the rooms of a mansion and collecting clues about the circumstances of the murder from the other players.²⁵

A revolutionary development was the emergence of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in 1974, a tabletop role-playing game that allowed players to invent their own stories or follow an increasing number of partially prewritten scripts, usually within a fantasy environment that was frankly influenced by Lord of the Rings, but avoided copyright infringement by calling Hobbits halflings instead.²⁶ Another one of the many influences was jetan, a chesslike game devised by Edgar Rice Burroughs for Chessmen of Mars, one of a series of novels that also influenced the Star Wars mythos and that embedded the gameplay in the fictional history of competing alien ethnicities.²⁷ Wikipedia summarizes this complex cultural system:

D&D departs from traditional wargaming and assigns each player a specific character to play instead of a military formation. These characters embark upon imaginary adventures within a fantasy setting. A Dungeon Master serves as the game’s referee and storyteller while maintaining the setting in which the adventures occur, and playing the role of the inhabitants. The characters form a party that interacts with the setting’s inhabitants, and each other. Together they solve dilemmas, engage in battles, and gather treasure and knowledge. In the process the characters earn experience points in order to rise in levels, and become increasingly powerful over a series of sessions.²⁸

A variant of D&D, Neverwinter Nights, is said to have been “the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.”²⁹

The most influential MMO of these decades was World of Warcraft (WoW), which clearly was influenced by D&D, but that was the fourth in a series of games. In 1994, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans launched, a real-time strategy computer game, not a role-playing game, in which two players controlled competing armies as in chess, or one person played against the computer. It connected to Lord of the Rings through the fact that one of the two opposing factions was Orcs, and it had some of the same overarching narrative structure as jetan. Warcraft II was released in 1996, and Warcraft III in 2002, both also being two-player strategy games that expanded upon the narrative in an increasingly complete technical context. In 2004, World of Warcraft employed the same mythos and expanded it further, in the massively multiplayer role-playing genre. At that point in the history of the genre, EverQuest dating from 1999 was already well established, with a fantasy mythos not very different from WoW, and EverQuest II was launching almost simultaneously. WoW quickly became the most popular MMO and was widely perceived to be more pleasant, more coherent, and less difficult than the EverQuest games.

Game designers are also game players, and individuals often move from one company to another. Reportedly, the team that created Guild Wars included veterans from the Warcraft series. The original Guild Wars was a series of three separately purchased but connected games that did not require a monthly subscription fee. Guild Wars II is quite different, offering a more integrated virtual world, and like WoW was based on its own mythos that was similar to Lord of the Rings but not derived from any specific earlier stories.³⁰ Because of these similarities and differences, these are good examples with which to conclude this chapter.

Two Vast Worlds

Given its great popularity, World of Warcraft has been the focus of considerable scholarly research.³¹ It draws part of its mythos from Lord of the Rings, for example, allowing avatars to be Dwarves or Elves, and even Orcs. Many sources of statistical data are available, including an official online database called Battle.Net where the roster of current members of the Science guild I founded a decade ago can be seen.³² Of the 173 current members, here are the numbers for the available races in this particular guild as of August 30, 2018: 55 Blood Elves, 19 Goblins, 10 Orcs, 13 Pandarens, 34 Taurens, 20 Trolls, and 22 Undeads. Clearly this is a fantasy world, but it has connections to three real-world cultures: ­Chinese (Pandarens), Native Americans of western North America (Taurens), and Afro-Caribbeans (Trolls). We see no characters in this guild who are called Humans, because it belongs to the Horde, one of two competing factions, and Humans dominate the other faction, the Alliance. Realm Pop, an extensive but unofficial online WoW dataset, offered data on fully 80,502,616 characters on December 12, 2017.³³ Table 2.4 illustrates how it is possible to analyze such data in meaningful ways, with census information about two kinds of Elves in World of Warcraft.

Table 2.4 An Elven census in World of Warcraft

Class of avatar	Race		Gender		Region
	Night Elf	Blood Elf	Male	Female	America	Europe
Death knight	7.4%	11.3%	11.1%	8.4%	9.8%	9.4%
Demon hunter	15.8%	12.6%	16.3%	11.9%	13.4%	14.5%
Druid	33.1%	0.0%	13.5%	14.9%	13.6%	15.1%
Hunter	15.6%	9.9%	11.6%	13.0%	12.7%	12.0%
Mage	4.1%	10.5%	6.8%	8.5%	7.9%	7.5%
Monk	3.1%	4.7%	3.5%	4.5%	4.1%	3.9%
Paladin	0.0%	20.7%	13.7%	10.1%	11.7%	11.8%
Priest	6.4%	10.4%	5.8%	11.1%	8.6%	8.7%
Rogue	8.8%	7.7%	7.9%	8.4%	8.3%	8.0%
Warlock	0.0%	7.7%	3.8%	4.8%	4.7%	4.0%
Warrior	5.8%	4.6%	6.0%	4.3%	5.1%	5.1%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
Cases	9,428,227	12,396,407	9,986,374	11,838,260	11,591,818	10,232,816

In the WoW mythos, centuries ago an advanced culture of High Elves had flourished, rather similar to the Elves in Tolkien’s mythos. But they played with advanced technology, causing a geological catastrophe and disintegration of their civilization. Today, they are split into two opposing cultures. The Night Elves are environmentalists who formed the Alliance with Humans, worshipping the moon goddess Elune and devoted to the preservation of Nature.³⁴ The Blood Elves have responded in the opposite way to the ancient catastrophe, becoming intense secularists who seek to gain absolute power over technology and thus over Nature. The most popular of 14 races was Humans with 16.8 percent, but Blood Elves were a close second at 15.4 percent, and Night Elves were in third place with 11.7 percent. Table 2.4 lists the 11 classes of characters, for example, priests whose main job is healing allies during battle, and warriors who engage in hand-to-hand melee fighting, among the Elves. Note that nearly a third of Night Elves are druids, a quasi-religious group devoted to Nature, whereas absolutely none of the Blood Elves belong to this class, simply because the game software prohibits this sacrilege. In contrast, Night Elves are not allowed to become paladins, who are warrior priests, or warlocks.

The gender columns in the table refer to the gender of the characters, not that of their players. Across all races tallied in the dataset, the percent of avatars that were female was 39.4. The percent female of avatars varied significantly across the Tolkien races in the Realm Pop data: 42.4 percent among Humans, 56.5 percent among Blood Elves, 56.3 percent among Night Elves, only 14.5 percent among Dwarves, and 21.1 percent among Orcs. Note that the percent of healing priests is higher among female characters, 11.1 percent versus 5.8 percent for males, whereas males are overrepresented in the more violent classes: death knight, demon hunter, paladin, and warrior. The two concluding columns of the table compare characters whose players are in North America with those in Europe, showing very small differences but illustrating how external variables can sometimes be brought into this kind of analysis.

Nonviolent gathering and crafting skills are significant in World of Warcraft, although not quite matching their prominence in Lord of the Rings Online. Guild Wars 2 has a comparably complex manufacturing system in which crafting contributes significantly to advancement in general experience, as does peaceful exploration of the world’s geography. In Guild Wars 2, I was able to take four characters to that game’s experience cap of 80 and explore rather thoroughly in 384 hours, one of the characters completely avoiding any of the violent adventures and primarily advancing by doing crafting with natural resources and money gathered by one of the other characters. A website similar to Realm Pop, but called GW2Armory, reports that fully 54 percent of the registered characters are female, demographic evidence that GW2’s style is different from that of WoW, even though they have many structural and technical similarities.³⁵

Whereas much of the focus of this book will be inside the virtual worlds, it is important to realize that they have external dimensions as well, what I have called the penumbra, a shadow cast by a virtual world on the real world. For example, Table 2.5 lists the 27 Guild Wars 2 groups found in Facebook on August 25, 2018, that had at least 500 members. Real-world crafting of the future may often be organized in cooperative guilds—as was true centuries ago and today in virtual worlds—and also communicate semiformally through tomorrow’s social media. As their names suggest, two of the groups emphasize PvP play, in which player-­versus-player combat is emphasized, but Guild Wars 2 primarily emphasizes the more cooperative PvE, or player-versus-environment, kind of activity in which enemies are non-player characters.

Table 2.5 Large social media groups oriented toward Guild Wars 2

Facebook ID	Name	Type	Members	Language
GuildWars2andXPs	Guild Wars 2 and Expansions	Closed	18,407	English
GW2Gamers	Guild Wars 2	Closed	15,541	English
news.guildwars2	Guild Wars 2 ­Germany	Closed	9,696	German
179753682096794	Guild Wars 2—Brasil	Closed	7,275	Portuguese
GW2Latino	Guild Wars 2 Latino [NA]	Closed	6,599	Spanish
393356807431335	Thai Guild Wars2	Closed	5,075	Thai
guildwars2girls	Guild Wars 2 Girls	Closed	5,062	English
124335194248044	Guild Wars 2! Il gruppoitaliano!	Closed	4,872	Italian
464931967031760	Guild wars 2 Comunidad Latina Original	Closed	3,717	Spanish
GW2Casuals	Guild Wars 2 Casuals	Closed	3,004	English
guildwars2philippines	Guild Wars 2 Philippines—Buy and Sell	Closed	2,710	English+
guildwars2polska	Guild Wars 2 Polska	Closed	2,588	Polish
1529725287286963	Guild Wars 2—France	Closed	2,078	French
GuildWars2Thailand	Guild Wars 2 ­Thailand	Closed	1,600	Thai
124439867574775	Guild Wars 2 Hungary	Public	1,597	Hungarian
GuildWars2PvP	Guild Wars 2 PvP	Closed	1,568	English
gw2ph	Guild Wars 2 Philippines	Public	1,543	Filipino
gw2mex	Guild Wars 2 México [MEX]	Closed	1,467	Spanish
openguildwarsbrasil	Guild Wars 2 Brasil	Public	1,195	Portuguese
vietnamesevodka	Guild Wars 2—Vietnamese Vodka	Closed	1,114	Vietnamese
gw2comprayventa	Guild Wars 2 Compra y venta	Closed	1,050	Spanish
spvpbrasil	[sPvP] Comunidadebrasileira → Guild Wars 2	Closed	1,039	Portuguese
sanctumofrall	Guild Wars 2: ­Sanctum of Rall	Public	956	English
guildwars2turkiye	Guild Wars 2 Türkiye	Closed	898	Turkish
Baruchbay	Guild Wars 2 Bahía de Baruch	Closed	662	Spanish
guildwars2ph	Guild Wars 2 PH	Closed	530	Unknown
220297651315407	Guild Wars 2 [Malta]	Public	514	English

As an example of how people worldwide help each other, following are excerpts from a discussion that took place early August 2018 in the biggest group, Guild Wars 2 and Expansions. A player in Myanmar sought advice on how to increase an unspecified crafting skill, using the standard abbreviation “lvl” for “level.” Although crafting builds regular experience on a scale of 1 to 80 levels, abbreviated in the following as “exp,” the normal levels for each production craft go from 1 to 400, after which progress roughly doubles in difficulty up to the cap at level 500, at which the avatar earns “grandmaster” status.³⁶ The terms “legendary” and “ascended” refer to the highest quality items.³⁷ Other terms will be explained as follows:

Player in Myanmar: Whats the fastest way to lvl up crafting? My lvl is too low to craft some materials.

Player in California: I use gw2crafts.net

Player in Australia: I use it as well. Make sure you use your api key so you don’t buy excess if you dont need to.

Player in Greece: Gw2crafts you will need to spend some gold however.

Player in Indonesia: Calm down and level your character first. Crafting does not really come into play unless you craft legendary or ascended. Gather and deposit materials as you level up your character as future investments or sell them for quick money.

Player in Romania: To lvl craft while you lvl character.

Player in Myanmar: I’m already lvl 80 but I didn’t lvl up crafting.

Player in Romania: hahaha delete character and start again.

Player in Canada: Your guild hall should have a buff for crafting bonus and use a booster that gives craft exp bonus and then just craft.

Player in England: Discover new recipes.

Player in unknown location: I found it best to do it all in one sitting if you can. Get the guild buff and any booster buffs and then level it all at once. Should only take two to three hours to max level if you are following a guide and have the funds to purchase materials you don’t have.

The references to “gw2crafts.net” concern an online assistance service that functions like an add-on program. The “api key” is a code that identifies the particular avatar and allows the system to access data such as the resources and virtual money in the avatar’s inventory.³⁸ The Guild Wars 2 wiki defines it thus: “An API key is a code players can generate in their account settings that can allow third-party apps to access certain account data via use of the API.”³⁹ Belonging to a well-developed guild of players confers a statistical advantage, called a buff, and some items in the game also improve crafting speed or quality of results.

The participants in the discussion suggest very different strategies for advancing a crafting skill. The player in Indonesia argues that the benefit to the character of crafted products is most significant at the highest quality levels, so there is no point crafting early on. The player in Romania apparently feels differently, perhaps considering crafting to be valuable in its own right, whether as a fun activity or for the levels of regular experience it can provide. The player whose location could not be determined suggests assembling all the needed materials, and a good deal of virtual money with which to buy more, then concentrating on the crafting until it has been completed, rather than doing it piecemeal. Similar alternatives may exist for local manufacture in the future real world, and different people may follow personally attractive strategies.

Conclusion

The 30 examples of MMOs were selected largely because they cover the two decades of this new online social form and because they exhibit much variation in social structure and the ways in which manufacturing is simulated. As reported in other research studies, I have explored about 25 more MMOs that were of interest for other reasons and will not be mentioned here. As the statistics in Table 2.3 indicate, the popularity as well as age of these 30 MMOs varies considerably, but that does not mean that old and unpopular cases deserve less attention. Often the least popular games were more experimental, thus offering interesting ideas that might be valuable in real-world distributed manufacturing, although not as exciting for action-oriented game players. For example, at their peaks World of Warcraft had about 10,000 times as many players as A Tale in the Desert, yet Tale has a vastly more complex and cooperation-oriented manufacturing system. Before considering overarching issues like communication and social structure, we need to understand the practical details of making things in virtual worlds.

¹ Tolkien, J.R.R. 1965. The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King. New York, NY: Ballantine.

² en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy

³ Bainbridge, W.S. 2016. Virtual Sociocultural Convergence, 141–64. London: Springer.

⁴ Sturluson, S. 1916. The Prose Edda. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

⁵ Poor, N. 2012.“Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgement and Avoidance.” Games and Culture 7, no. 5, pp. 375–96.

⁶ Bainbridge, W.S. 2014. An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion: The Veneration of Deceased Family Members in Online Games, 120–33. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

⁷ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation

⁸ www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7KYNZIeLWQ&t=83s

⁹ www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qWl53NOD4

¹⁰ Rumilisoun. 2010. “Rebirth of Worlds.” Communications of the ACM 53, no. 12, p. 128.

¹¹ www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk

¹² Castronova, E. 2005. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

¹³ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniac

¹⁴ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!

¹⁵ www.mmorpg.com/games-list

16 von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. 1944. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

¹⁷ Huizinga, J. 1938. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. ­London: Routledge and Paul, K. 1971. Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

¹⁸ Mead, G.H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York, NY: Doubleday.

¹⁹ Paul, C.A. 2011.“Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes Gameplay and Design.” Game Studies 11, no. 2, pp. 1–14.

²⁰ Glaser, B.G., and A.L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine.

²¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)

²² Lischka, K. 2009. “Wie PreußischeMilitärs den Rollenspiel-AhnenErfanden.” Spiegel Online, www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/spielzeug/kriegsspiel-wie-preussische-militaers-den-rollenspiel-ahnen-erfanden-a-625745.html

²³en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

²⁴ boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2924/mr-ree-fireside-detective

²⁵ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo

²⁶ Gygax, G. 1979. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide. New York, NY: TSR/Random House.

²⁷ Burroughs, E.R. 1922. Chessmen of Mars. Chicago: A.C. McClurg.

²⁸ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

²⁹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(1991_video_game)

³⁰ Lummis, M., P. Kathleen, K. Edwin, and R. Kurt. 2012. Guild Wars 2. ­Indianapolis, Indiana: BradyGames.

³¹ Bainbridge, W.S. 2010. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

³² us.battle.net/wow/en/guild/earthen-ring/Science/roster?sort=lvl&dir=a

³³ realmpop.com

³⁴ Nardi, B. 2010. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

³⁵ gw2armory.com/statistics

³⁶ wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting#Skill_level

³⁷ wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item#Quality

³⁸ gw2crafts.net/cooking.html

³⁹ wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:API_key