CHAPTER 3

Principles of Virtual Manufacturing

The 30 MMOs studied for this project differ in how detailed the process of manufacturing is, how much effort is required, and how advantageous it is to work in partnership with other players. None can perfectly simulate real-world work, for example, the hand motions required to tie a string on an archer’s bow, but that may not be a significant disadvantage because few local workshops of the future will be producing bows and arrows. It is the general principles that may possibly transfer from these online simulations to real-world applications, whether directly or by stimulating thought in new directions. One interesting abstraction is the issue of proportionality, a word that had mathematical as well as sociolegal meanings. What fraction of the total population will engage in local manufacture? What fraction of their time will be devoted to this activity and will receive what fraction of the total rewards?

We shall gain a sense of the practical experience of virtual crafting by looking closely at examples clustered in three sections. First, comparison of two games based on the same mythos from literature and the movies will consider the historical development of human industry from the dawn of time: Conan Exiles and Age of Conan. Second, a sense of the nature of production-centered virtual worlds is gained by considering a fantasy game that replicates medieval European society, Shroud of the Avatar, and two explicitly historical virtual worlds, A Tale in the Desert and Pirates of the Burning Sea. Third, EverQuest II will demonstrate how complex a virtual production system can become.

Two Simulations of Technologies from the Human Past

A pair of multiplayer online games based on the action fantasy fiction of Robert E. Howard (1906–36), Conan Exiles and Age of Conan, provides excellent environments in which to consider the historic development of human manufacturing technologies. Launched in 2018, Conan Exiles is a survival game, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of action video games set in a hostile, intense, open-world environment, where players generally begin with minimal equipment and are required to collect resources, craft tools, weapons, and shelter, and survive as long as possible.”¹ Social life and economic exchange are constrained by the fact that the players are distributed across hundreds of servers, each with a population limited to 10 to 50 players, depending on how it was set and whether it is a public or private server, a structure that some other very recent games have experimented with, each world being geographically rather small. Launched a decade earlier in 2008, Age of Conan is a classic massively multiplayer role-playing game, comparable to Lord of the Rings Online. Both technology and social structure are very primitive in Conan Exiles but advanced in Age of Conan where a rather big city named Tarantia is at least as large as and more complex than Bree in Lord of the Rings Online.

Robert E. Howard was a member of a loosely connected group of horror and fantasy writers that included H.P. Lovecraft and Abraham Merritt, perhaps the least academic of that trio but equally fascinated by the mysteries of the human past as reflected by ancient history and archaeology.² His main fantasy character, Conan the Cimmerian, was popularized to later generations through a pair of motion pictures in which the future governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, played the title character: Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984.³ Both Conan games were created by the Norwegian game company, Funcom, which back in 2001 had launched the extremely innovative Anarchy Online, which Wikipedia says “was the first in the genre to include a science-fiction setting, dynamic quests, instancing, free trials, and in-game advertising.”⁴ Elsewhere I have argued that Anarchy Online was also remarkable for its juxtaposition of competing ideologies about the future of humanity, in the context of what might be described as a war between capitalism and tribalism.⁵ In adopting the popular Conan mythos, Funcom sought to gain greater popularity while retaining some commitment to intellectual sophistication.

Exploring the first 25 experience levels of Conan Exiles offline in a solo option allowed focusing on the technology of creating products. In a barren desert, one’s avatar has been crucified and left to die, but Conan wanders past and frees it. The avatar must swiftly create protective clothing plus weapons and hand tools, then find water and food before dying of thirst and hunger. If one survives, the next goal is to find a good location to build a cabin and various equipment to produce the needed tools, weapons, and armor. At the time I explored Conan Exiles 2 months after its launch, a player’s online post had suggested a location that proved ideal for the cabin, near a wide range of resources and seldom directly visited by wandering beasts.

Given that this was a survival game, the avatar could die of thirst. There were lakes near the homesite, but the avatar needed to be very careful about drinking from them, because alligators and hyenas were nearby. More slowly, the avatar could starve to death, and the first available food was insects gathered from nearby bushes, not the most delicious of foods. With care, eggs could be stolen from dinosaur nests. The chief food available was the meat of slaughtered animals, but the avatar begins the game without any kind of weapon, or even much clothing. Crude clothing that provided some degree of protection could be woven from plant fiber taken from the same bushes as the insects, but making tools required gathering the necessary raw materials and carefully crafting with them.

This is a standard feature of construction in computer games: Raw materials must be gathered before any goods can be produced. The ground around the homesite was strewn here and there with groups of stones and small tree branches, which could be picked up by standing near them and pressing the E key on the keyboard. The branches all looked identical, but the stones varied greatly. Pressing the I key would open the avatar’s inventory, where the stones and branches would pile up in two separate squares of the storage space, with the number in each pile clearly displayed. A section of the interface gave the user some currently available construction tasks, and selecting one for which the necessary raw materials were already in the inventory would allow making the product quickly, regardless of where the avatar happened to be at the moment. Combining five branches with five stones would produce a stone hatchet, capable of chopping trees and providing a little defense against animals, as indicated at the top of Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Raw materials for initial tools that can be manufactured in a survival simulation

Tool	Application	Branch	Stone	Twine	Wood	Bark	Brick	Iron
Stone hatchet	Chopping	5	5
Stone pick	Mining	5	5
Stone club	Defense, hunting	5	20
Campfire	Cooking, keeping warm	5	12
Fish trap	Fish	10		5
Wooden box	Storing items			12	100
Artisan’s worktable	Miscellaneous creations				40
Armorer’s bench	Crafting armor		240	20	160
Tannery	Hides into leather		240	20	160	38
Carpenter’s bench	Carpentry		150		400
Furnace	Smelting metals, stone		540
Cauldron	Mixing concoctions			20				50
Blacksmith’s bench	Shaping metal						50	100
Iron hatchet	Chopping wood	5						20
Iron pick	Mining	5						20
Iron mace	Defense, hunting							20

A better weapon is the stone club, which requires 20 stones rather than the 5 for the hatchet. Using these tools wears them out rather quickly, so the avatar must constantly collect more branches and stones, but putting too many heavy items in the inventory made it impossible to walk around. Thus, a key production item was a wooden storage box, which required twine made from the plant fibers and fully 100 pieces of wood chopped from nearby trees, a job that tended to wear out hatchets quickly. The campfire required 5 branches and 12 stones to build, but it burned wood, which required more tree chopping. Raw animal meat sickened the avatar, but it could be made safe by cooking. Almost every battle with a beast injured the avatar, and eating good food was the reliable way to regain perfect health.

One use for the wooden box was storing stones, wood, plant fiber, and twine that were needed in great quantities to build a cabin, which would provide safety from the occasional sandstorms and wandering alligators, as well as a place to begin manufacturing more complex things. For example, a wooden door used 5 pieces of twine (each of which was manually produced from 3 units of plant fiber) and 25 pieces of wood, whereas a sandstone doorframe required 3 pieces of wood and 18 stones. Once the cabin had been assembled, the next priority was the armorer’s bench which could use animal hides to manufacture much better clothing than the plant fibers. The artisan’s worktable seemed like a luxury, for example, used in taxidermy to prepare the head of an animal for display on the wall of the cabin, but it could also manufacture furniture once the avatar had invested in the proper training and had expanded the cabin. The tannery could improve the hides for even better clothing, and the carpenter’s bench was especially useful for producing bows and arrows.

Here we have examples of manufacturing equipment that transforms raw materials into products, starting with the simple campfire: raw meat + wood = food. The most complex example in Table 3.1 is the blacksmith’s bench, because making one requires 50 bricks and 100 iron bars, none of which can be gathered directly from the environment. First, a furnace must be made, at a cost of 540 stones, which require great effort to collect. Like the campfire it burns wood. The raw materials for each brick are 10 stones. Each iron bar requires only two ironstones, but none of them were available in the vicinity of the cabin. The avatar needed to explore, at great peril, eventually finding a good quarry for ironstones a significant distance to the northwest. Harvesting them required smashing big gray stones with a pick, which wore out quickly. Several trips were required to bring back enough ironstone not only to build the blacksmith’s bench, but also to produce valuable products that were in every way stronger than similar items crafted at the top of Table 3.1: hatchet, pick, and club or mace. Completing the blacksmith’s bench to manufacture metal weapons was like a local industrial revolution, opening a new phase of technological development for the player of Conan Exiles.

I originally explored Age of Conan rather thoroughly back in 2009, running four avatars that had different ethnicities and skills; then I returned in 2014 with one avatar to examine the changes that had been made since launch and to do an initial observation of the significance of guild cities.⁶ In 2018, I ran an additional avatar for 165 hours in a highly promoted temporary instance of Age of Conan called Saga of Zath that operated only from January 24 until May 15, after which all the avatars migrated to the main server, named Crom. Like many of the most popular role-playing games, Age of Conan promotes cooperation by limiting the range of skills possessed by any one avatar. Focusing specifically on the sociotechnical processes to build a guild city, I selected architecture and weaponsmithing as the two crafting skills this avatar should develop, the other choices being alchemy, armorsmithing, and gemcutting. I joined a small guild, with roughly two dozen members, just big enough to have a serious city, but not so big as to rush to a quick completion.

The Conan mythos imagines an alternative past history in which lost civilizations and magical forces interacted with cultures similar to those the world really possessed a few thousand years ago. An avatar in Age of Conan washes ashore from a wrecked ship on which he or she was chained like a slave, on a jungle-framed beach not far from a city named Tortage which serves both to introduce the fictional world to the player and to provide a tutorial.⁷ Unless the player uses a secret trick to escape at experience level 16, newcomers leave at level 20 of the 80 currently possible in this game and go to one of three ethnic regions. Conan himself was a Cimmerian, a Celtic tribe that qualifies him literally as a barbarian. However, he winds up ruling the capital city of Aquilonia, which resembles ancient Rome or perhaps Athens. The third original ethnic region was Stygia, essentially ancient Egypt. After the game’s launch, a fourth ethnicity was added, named Khitan after an actual ancient nomadic Asian people, but apparently an amalgam of Chinese and Korean cultures. The ethnicities are not generally at war, and in ascending to the maximum experience level of 80 an avatar is likely to spend considerable time in lands belonging to each of the three original ethnicities.

The raw materials for manufacturing are primarily harvested from animals in the case of hides, and human enemies in the case of fabrics other than the most simple one, cotton, which can be harvested from a plant, and from trees and minable outcroppings of stone and metal. The guild my avatar initially joined built its city on the west edge of a region belonging to Aquilonia, named Poitain, that contained a full set of natural resources. Table 3.2 shows the system by which an architect could gather and transform the necessary raw materials into components that would be assembled in large numbers to create the city. Only after reaching experience level 20 could my avatar begin gathering the raw materials in tier 1 and complete a set of tasks to be ready to gather the tier 2 materials at level 50 and tier 3 at level 70. The crafting skills could not be learned until level 40, and similarly developed through stages. Weaponsmithing employed materials from three of the same gathering skills as architecture, not requiring stonecutting.

Table 3.2 The increasing difficulty of manufacturing more valuable architecture

	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3
Gathering available at tier level
Mining	Copper	Iron	Duskmetal
Prospecting	Silver	Electrum	Gold
Stonecutting	Sandstone	Granite	Basalt
Woodcutting	Ash	Yew	Oak
Crafting available at tier level
Architecture	Ordinary	Advanced	Superior
A building plan	Parchment	Papyrus	Vellum
Component from mining	Brace	Lintel	Girder
Component from prospecting	Plain facade	Ornate facade	Grand facade
Component from stonecutting	Brick	Block	Slab
Component from woodcutting	Joist	Beam	Frame
Gathering actions required for architect workshop
Mining	30	400	7,000
Prospecting	10	100	1,300
Stonecutting	50	1,200	15,000
Woodcutting	40	500	6,000
Gathering actions required for all city buildings (not counting walls, towers, gates)
Mining	440	5,800	106,000
Prospecting	210	2,100	25,100
Stonecutting	800	15,200	188,000
Woodcutting	630	7,500	92,000

For example, to make bricks one must gather sandstone from an appropriate node or outcropping that can be seen on the computer interface map of Poitain. The avatar takes 3 whacks with a mining pick to get 1 unit of sandstone, and 10 units of stone are required to make 1 unit of brick. Note that “1 unit of brick” should not be conceptualized as merely “1 brick,” but perhaps a crate full of bricks, and a rather large architect workshop requires just 5 of them in its most primitive form, the “50” in the table being the number of times the avatar must do 3 whacks on resource nodes. Two somewhat unpredictable events may occur after taking such an action. First, one may discover that the node has been exhausted, and no more sandstone is available there. Over time, the node will become fruitful again, but often the node one visits has already been harvested by another player, and little or none of the resource is available. Second, one’s mining may be interrupted by an attack from a nonplayer enemy, who must be killed, gaining some reward in experience which the harvesting and crafting actions do not themselves earn.

When each of the many buildings in the guild city is first built, it functions at tier 1, and adding materials can take it to tier 2 and eventually tier 3. The small guild in the Saga of Zath server did construct all the buildings, leaving my avatar mainly to build the city walls, but did not invest the herculean effort required to take more than a couple of buildings above tier 1. When Saga of Zath was shut down, and the avatars moved to the Crom server, mine joined a well-established guild that already had 1,115 members and that owned a city in which all the buildings had reached tier 3. As Table 3.2 suggests, building an entire virtual city requires resource gathering by a large number of people operating avatars, thus somewhat realistic as a simulation of actual construction, at least as measured by the variable of human effort.

The crafting system in Age of Conan evolved over the years, but at present does not require that crafting be done while the avatar is standing at any particular facility. However, high-level products cannot be made unless the avatar belongs to a guild that has a workshop at the right tier in these professions: alchemist, architect, armorsmith, and weaponsmith. A city’s tradepost does not automatically give the avatar new abilities, but it is a very useful center of commerce, with access to a bank, the player auction system, and various nonplayer vendor characters.

The center of the city is the keep, which Wikipedia defines thus:

a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars have debated the scope of the word keep, but usually consider it to refer to large towers in castles that were fortified residences, used as a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an adversary.⁸

A tier 1 keep increases the health of the avatar by 15 points, a tier 2 keep by 30, and a tier 3 keep by 60. These benefits do not require the avatar to be inside the keep, so the system expands the metaphor that keeps protect high-status people, perhaps implying that physical resources have indirect influence on members of the society. Similarly, the city’s barracks, library, temple, and thieves’ guild increase the variables that define the avatar’s defensive and offensive abilities. This system illustrates how a simulation may be implicit on the large scale of gaining benefits from a guild city, but explicit on the small scale of chopping a tree or banging a pickaxe on an outcropping of metal ore.

Three Engineered Virtual Worlds

A perspective on some key issues in virtual manufacturing design can be gained by brief consideration of three diverse gameworlds: one recent fantasy, Shroud of the Avatar, and two unusual but illuminating historical simulations, A Tale in the Desert and Pirates of the Burning Sea. Bearing some similarity to the Conan games, Shroud of the Avatar is set in a quasi-medieval world, unusual in that it gives explicitly equal priority to manufacturing and warfare. In addition to making armor and weapons, players create or purchase glorious decorations to place in their virtual homes and castles. Advanced players and guilds can sell to others through nonplayer merchants of their own, which stand in some town’s marketplace, rather than selling through a centralized, abstract marketplace as in most other MMOs.

At entry to Shroud, each avatar already possesses a few metal tools, which degrade only slowly in use. New ones can be bought, and kits can be purchased to repair old tools. Thus, a functioning technological economy exists from the very start, and it is based on a universal gold coin currency. The manufacturing skills are divided into three rough categories: gathering, refining, and production. Three of the five gathering activities involve the use of a specific tool on a natural resource: mining (a pickaxe on a metal node), forestry (an axe on a maple or pine tree, but not other trees), foraging (a sickle on one or another rare plant). Two others involve animals: field dressing (a skinning knife to remove the hide of a land animal after killing it) and fishing (a pole baited with a worm collected earlier). One of the six refining occupations, agriculture, requires costly land ownership, but the other five take the resources from one of the gathering professions and prepare them for a production activity:

1. Mining to smelting to blacksmithing
2. Forestry to milling to carpentry
3. Foraging to textiles to tailoring
4. Field dressing to tanning to tailoring
5. Fishing to butchery to cooking

In addition, blacksmithing, carpentry, and tailoring can salvage materials from some products either manufactured by the player or looted from defeated opponents. Note that tailoring appears twice among the production activities, using both cloth prepared by textiles and leather prepared by tanning. Table 3.3 shows how multiple forms of production combine to make some of the weaker forms of fortified clothing or armor, which provide at least a little reduction of damage during combat. Bolts of cloth are manufactured with a loom shuttle tool at a textile station, whereas the two leather components are made with a tanning knife at a tanning station, and metal bindings are produced by a smithing hammer at a blacksmithing station. Wax can be bought from many local vendors, whereas bone needles are rare and require a long trip to purchase.

Table 3.3 Materials required for tailoring three qualities of light armor

Item	Bolts of Cloth	Leather Straps	Yards of Leather	Metal Bindings	Wax	Bone Needles
Cloth armor
Helm	3	1			2
Gloves	2	1			2
Boots	2				2
Augmented cloth armor
Helm	4				3	1
Chest armor	9	2		2	4	1
Gloves	2			2	3	1
Leggings	6	1		2	4	1
Boots	2			1	3	1
Leather armor
Helm			4		2
Chest armor		2	7	2	3
Gloves		3	1		2
Leggings		3	5		3
Boots			2		2

Another production activity, alchemy, which is a romanticized form of chemistry, uses materials that do not require processing, but can be difficult to obtain. The two alchemy recipes my own avatar actually used often were health potion, which can be lifesaving during battle, and recall scroll, which can teleport the avatar home from a great distance. To create both, the avatar must be standing at an alchemy station, which looks like a chemistry bench, and have equipped a mortar and pestle. The ingredients for health potion included wax taken from corpses and garlic either found in the field while foraging or purchased from a local vendor, as well as empty flasks to contain the product which could be purchased from more distant vendors. In order to make recall scrolls, a recipe had to be purchased then “learned” (simply activating it in the avatar’s inventory), as is the case for most advanced products. Prices for recipes vary, but a common price from nonplayer vendors operated by the game itself is 250 gold coins each, which was what the recall scroll recipe for alchemy cost. However, it cost my avatar 700 gold coins to obtain the recipe to smelt gold ore, purchasing from the simulated salesman for a real-life player.

Among the most admirable and least popular gameworlds is A Tale in the Desert, which can also be described as one of the most socially desirable because it stresses cooperation among players, and does not permit violence. The “desert” in the title refers to the ancient Egyptian landscape, including Sinai and all the territory we currently call Egypt. True, the dimensions are smaller than the real lands, but still quite extensive, requiring hours to walk entirely around. Players can vote to open various chariot routes between specified distant points, providing swift travel, but at the beginning none of these exist. The fundamental concept is that starting essentially from scratch, the players must construct homes, production facilities, and eventually pyramids, creating ancient Egypt all over again, then ending the particular “telling” of the tale after a couple of years with ceremonies of mutual respect. The first telling began on ­February 15, 2003, and the eighth telling on March 2, 2018.

There are no real dangers in this virtual Egypt, so selecting a location for one’s home is shaped only by the need to be near water and near a potential transportation hub such as a chariot stop or a crossing point of the Nile River. Walking along the shore, one may collect sand and mud, plus an occasional piece of slate. Skillfully banging two pieces of slate together can make a stone blade. Four pieces of slate plus one stone blade are sufficient to build a wood plane, but in use the blade must periodically be replaced, so it is good to have a supply from gathering much slate along the shore. Wood can be gathered from trees, then transformed into boards using the plane. Four boards can be assembled to make a brick rack, which requires three units of mud, two of straw, and one of sand to make six bricks. The straw comes from gathering grass and leaving it in bunches to dry in the hot Egyptian sun. Learning how to construct a compound, which can be a home or more often a building housing production machinery and supplies, requires learning this skill at an architecture school, after paying the tuition of 100 boards and 200 bricks.

Construction of a multipurpose building called a compound renders the avatar an initiate in architecture, one of seven disciplines. Strewn across the Egyptian landscape are schools and universities for the separate disciplines, which serve not only to train individuals in specialized skills, but also to unlock technologies for all the inhabitants of the area in a process called research. For example, at the branch of the University of Architecture in the Avaris region, as of August 2, 2018, local people had already contributed 22,276 of the 27,912 bricks required to make it possible to build crystal obelisks, but only 3 of the 308 required eyelet cut gems, and none of some other materials that they probably were not yet able to manufacture. Thus, many of the valuable products required not only specific raw or manufactured materials, but also great cooperative effort metaphorically considered as research, to unlock the ability to build the product. Advancement in each of the seven disciplines requires both individual and collective effort, with both competitive and collaborative qualities. Table 3.4 shows how far the Egyptians had gotten by August 2, 5 months after the telling’s March 2 beginning.

Table 3.4 Progress of 684 Egyptian avatars across the seven disciplines

	Architecture	Art and Music	Harmony	Human Body	Leadership	Thought	Worship
None	6.9%	19.3%	16.8%	3.8%	16.8%	38.7%	42.8%
Initiate	62.1%	79.1%	59.2%	61.1%	76.5%	56.7%	35.2%
Student	17.8%	1.6%	12.7%	15.2%	5.4%	3.2%	15.9%
Prentice	8.5%	0.0%	6.7%	8.9%	0.7%	0.7%	4.4%
Journeyman	3.2%	0.0%	2.2%	4.7%	0.3%	0.6%	1.6%
Scribe	1.0%	0.0%	2.0%	3.7%	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%
Master	0.4%	0.0%	0.3%	1.6%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Sage	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.9%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Oracle	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%

The data were obtained from the public census records available at any University of Leadership, revealing first of all that the total population of virtual Egypt was only 684. There is little if any advantage to having multiple avatars in A Tale in the Desert because there are no limits on the combination of skills or property that one avatar can gain, such as those in Age of Conan. Table 3.4 reveals that only 6.9 percent of the 684 had failed to build a compound. The only discipline with fewer uninitiated Egyptians is discipline of the Human Body, for which initiation requires running around a fertile area identifying 35 different plants in 20 minutes, the first workout a player usually experiences after leaving a tutorial zone. After becoming an initiate in the discipline of the Human Body, the next rather fascinating task is learning and teaching acrobatic moves in exchange with other players, whereas the ranks in discipline of Architecture require building next an obelisk then increasingly more demanding structures, often in direct competition with other players. Like architecture, discipline of Art and Music required constructing physical objects, and many of the others include occasional manufacture. Construction materials become progressively more difficult to obtain, because mines and special manufacturing machinery are required, which renders many projects entirely dependent upon the cooperative groups called guilds.

An historical simulation of a more recent period is Pirates of the Burning Sea, which Wikipedia correctly says is “set in the Caribbean in an anachronistic 1720 and combines tactical ship battles and swashbuckling combat with a player-driven economy and open-ended gameplay. In the game, players can choose from 4 nations, Great Britain, Spain, France and the Pirates.”⁹ Anachronistic as some aspects may be, such as the display of a string quartet when that musical genre evolved only later in the 18th century, and the settlement of Bartica in Guyana over a century before it actually occurred, PotBS actually is rather authentic, and there is something glorious about building a sailing ship then cruising over to Port Royal to see the ruins from the “recent” 1692 earthquake.

Building a ship is not an easy business, vastly easier if one belongs to a prosperous guild that already possesses the necessary facilities. Many doubloons of money must be expended to operate a logging camp to provide the oak required for the ship’s hull, and a warehouse is required for storing the many raw materials and manufactured components. Sawing the oak keel for a relatively modest “Corsair” Xebec ship must be done in a lumber mill, spending 105 doubloons, 10 oak logs, 3 iron ship fittings, and 1 keg of nails. Some of the materials could be bought from a simulated auctioneer at Bartica, but other essential materials required a dangerous sea voyage to obtain elsewhere. An especially big part of the cost was constructing a shipyard, which required

210 doubloons

50 oak logs

30 building stones

20 frame timber

100 fir planks

6 window glass

20 loads of bricks

2 pieces of oak furniture

14 oak blocks

2 lignum vitae blocks

6 kegs of nails

1 shop provisions for the crew

1 set of iron tools

plus every 2 weeks:

420 doubloons

1 shop provisions for the crew

The 100 fir planks were purchased for 3,200 doubloons at Rosignol, not far from Bartica, but the 15 fir logs appropriate to build the ship’s mast required sailing 796 miles north of Bartica, to Orleans in the Antilles. The materials sold by the auctioneer had indeed been placed up for sale by other players, fellow guild members can be very helpful, and one must already be an experienced sea captain before contemplating getting into ship manufacture. The ships are simulated in great explicit detail, whereas the factories and warehouses are implicit and represented by windows in the user interface.

A Complex, Distributed System

Each virtual world’s manufacturing system is somewhat different from the others, but an excellent example of fundamental principles is EverQuest II. Launched in 2004, on the basis of 5 years of experience with the original EverQuest that launched in 1999, EQII has been refined and expanded over the years. The main character I have used to explore EQII’s exceedingly complex world called Norrath is a conjuror named Cleora, whose virtual life began on December 2, 2010, and by April 29, 2018, she had been operated actively for 327 hours. A second avatar, named ­Toynbee, added another 170 hours of exploration. At the end of her ­service, Cleora was primarily devoted to comparing the crafting professions in the public workshop immediately outside her simulated home in New Halas, the small city on Erollisi Island that serves as the social and economic hub of the archipelago in the Frostfang Sea. Both home and workshop are inside a cavern, entirely safe from the conflict raging outside, and near a tunnel that leads to oceanside docks where Cleora could quickly travel anywhere in Norrath.

Each EverQuest II character begins life in one player-selected adventure class in a system of 26, often described in terms of four archetypes: fighter, priest or healer, scout, and mage. As a conjurer, Cleora belonged to the summoner duo within the six-class mage archetype. Conjurors belong to the Good alignment, whereas the other summoner type, necromancers, belong to the Evil alignment, a cultural distinction derived from the original EverQuest game that will be described in Chapter 7. A conjuror can summon nonplayer allies that represent the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Note that fantasy gameworlds pretend to incorporate magic, but it merely means that poetic visual and verbal representations are used to communicate the actions of rigorous algorithms. Necromancers can summon zombie-like servants from beyond death, yet functionally that simply means these primary avatars can have secondary avatars exhibiting teamwork. All six classes of mages wear cloth armor, whereas scouts wear chain mail armor and the two other archetypes wear steel plate, leather, or chain mail depending upon their specific adventure class. This immediately suggests that classes will vary with respect to their interest in manufacturing armor of different types.

In addition to the adventure classes, there are tradeskill classes. These are learned after the avatar has begun gaining experience on adventures, and thus is able to begin harvesting raw materials from the dangerous environment, for example, the snowy wastes around New Halas that are populated with monsters as well as by an invading army of nonplayer characters. There are several steps in learning a tradeskill, as well as many tradeskill experience levels, comparable to the separate ladder of advancement that measures adventure experience. Over the years, both systems have evolved, most obviously raising the level caps that set the maximum for both kinds of experience. Avatars are not required to have tradeskills, and Cleora had not received her initial tutorial, learning how to make a simple candelabra, until she was already level 26 in adventuring. Given that her research task was exploring the fundamental principles of this virtual world, she gained adventure experience rather slowly, having reached level 88 in adventuring and only 30 in the sage tradeskill prior to the 2018 phase of the research.

Making a simple candelabra on December 11, 2010, required working at a forge, which could be found only in a few population centers where several manufacturing systems were also situated. One’s avatar required only level 1 of tradeskill experience, obtained by taking on the quest or assignment called Forging Ahead, that was the first step in a seven-stage crafting tutorial. Before one could make any product, one needed to have learned its recipe, in early stages by receiving a recipe book and clicking on it in one’s inventory to scribe it into memory. Also needed were raw materials, in the case of a simple candelabra consisting of two units of tin and one each of elm, root, and coal. The coal could be purchased from a nonplayer character called a fuel merchant, but the first three of these resources needed to be gathered out in the field from resource nodes of different kinds that were often situated in areas where one also needed to contend with dangerous beasts or other hazards. Prior to tradeskill training, an avatar would learn how to harvest, by gathering the following:

3 severed elm from logs

3 roots from clusters of roots

3 tin clusters from ore-containing rock

3 lead clusters from rock nodes

3 sunfish from schools of fish

3 jumjum from a garden or shrub node

3 rawhide leather pelts from animal dens

Whereas I took literally thousands of screenshot pictures while exploring inside the two versions of EverQuest, an equally useful source of information was the array of online instructions, walkthroughs, reviews, forums, and wiki encyclopedias. The tutorial shows how to operate the different devices used to manufacture products, which begins by selecting which recipe to follow, but is not merely a simple matter of loading the ingredients after that. Instead, one must watch the process carefully and be ready to perform the correct action to counteract different accidental errors that may occur, by swiftly clicking the correct icon or pressing the associated key. Here is how one of the preprogrammed crafting instructors explained this, as captured in one of my screenshots:

During the crafting process, you will sometimes see a warning icon appear in the area below the four progress bars. The warning icon will match one of your reaction art icons, and will have a name indicating the type of danger. The crafter can correct these problems by ensuring the next reaction art they use matches the icon of the warning. Successfully doing so will avoid bad things occurring (such as a loss of progress, or durability, or even injury to the crafter) and may also result in unusually good things ­happening (such as progress or durability gain, a skill bonus, or even the discovery of a rare harvest).

The tutorial requires making one product for each of the nine subskills, helping the player understand the division of labor and select the one subskill in which the avatar will specialize. They are classified as subskills, because from about skill level 10 to 20 the avatar will perform rather unspecialized manufacture within one of three skill categories, each of which leads to a choice among three subskills. For example, Cleora did the tutorial as an artisan, then the next 10 levels of tradeskill experience as a scholar, then chose sage as her specialty, rather than alchemist or jeweler that are also subskills within the scholar skill. At any time, an advanced crafter may change specializations, but that means dropping back to being a level 9 artisan, and losing all the skills above that very early level. Here are the seven steps of the tutorial that offer introductions to all nine subskills:

1. Tutorial: Forging Ahead
   • Craft a simple candelabra using your carpenter skills
2. Tutorial: Countering Problems
   • Craft a lead bracelet using your jeweler skills
3. Tutorial: Learning to Cook
   • Craft some jumjum cider using your provisioner skills
4. Tutorial: The Art of Weapons
   • Craft an elm greatstaff using your woodworker skills
   • Craft a tin hand axe using your weaponsmith skills
5. Tutorial: Scribing Scrolls
   • Craft a shackle (journeyman) scroll using your sage skills
6. Tutorial: Alchemical Experiments
   • Craft an essence of intercept (journeyman) using your ­alchemist skills
7. Tutorial: Essential Outfitting
   • Craft a tin chainmail coat using your armorer skills
   • Craft a rawhide leather backpack using your tailor skills

As is the case for many popular MMOs, an online service exists that allows one to look up individual EverQuest II characters one may have encountered, or guilds one may be contemplating joining, and that also serves to publicize one’s own accomplishments. Called EQ2U and located at u.eq2wire.com it displays an amazing amount of information about each avatar, for example, whether or not the avatar had visited each of 1,008 points of interest in 44 geographic regions of Norrath. As of April 28, 2018, data about 3,029,131 avatars could be accessed, and with moderate manual effort I was able to assemble a dataset of their distribution across adventure classes and tradeskill subclasses, summarized for the total population and 5 illustrative adventure classes in Table 3.5. The method did not allow me to tabulate the number of artisans or early-career crafters who had not yet selected a subclass, but they are not significant in the distributed manufacturing system, and thus not of interest here. Fully 81.3 percent of the 3,029,131 had not yet learned a subskill, but this may realistically suggest what portion of a real-world local population would engage in professional crafting, approaching 1 in 5, keeping in mind that in EverQuest II this is part-time work, even though requiring semiprofessional experience.

Table 3.5 Distribution of avatars across tradeskill classes in EverQuest II

Tradeskill Classes		Selected Adventure Classes
Class	Subclass	All	Shadowknight	Monk	Fury	Wizard	Ranger
Craftsman	Carpenter	2.0%	1.8%	3.3%	4.4%	1.3%	1.9%
	Provisioner	2.4%	1.8%	3.7%	5.6%	1.6%	1.5%
	Woodworker	1.9%	1.3%	2.4%	2.4%	0.7%	8.4%
Outfitter	Armorer	2.3%	5.9%	1.0%	1.1%	0.3%	1.3%
	Tailor	2.3%	0.7%	6.7%	7.4%	2.5%	1.1%
	Weaponsmith	1.6%	2.9%	2.0%	1.6%	0.3%	1.1%
Scholar	Alchemist	2.1%	3.3%	4.1%	2.2%	1.1%	1.5%
	Jeweler	1.9%	0.9%	1.6%	3.0%	1.3%	2.2%
	Sage	2.3%	0.4%	0.7%	5.3%	3.8%	0.3%
Unknown	None	81.3%	81.0%	74.4%	66.9%	87.3%	80.7%
	Total	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%
	Avatars	3,029,131	199,840	95,471	80,383	267,142	164,335
	Category		Fighters	Fighters	Priests	Mages	Scouts
	Armor		Metal plate	Leather	Leather	Cloth	Chain

For the population as a whole, the specialties are not hugely different in popularity, ranging from a low of 1.6 percent of the population for weaponsmith to a high of 2.4 percent for provisioner. MMOs vary in the extent to which an individual avatar would benefit directly from a particular manufacturing skill, in part because valuables such as weapons can be looted from defeated nonplayer enemies thus undercutting the value of manufacturing them instead from raw materials. A complex interplay of factors including luck will determine whether weaponsmiths can make better weapons than they can loot, their relative adventure experience versus tradeskill experience being an obvious determinant in EverQuest II. Some of the adventure classes have little or no use of weapons, whereas they all can benefit from the products made by provisioners. Thus, conditions in the marketplace can influence the popularity of a trade, as they naturally do in real-world economies.

The first two specific adventure classes in Table 3.5 are both fighters, but they differ greatly in popularity, so the 199,840 shadowknights would have greater influence on the economy than the 95,471 monks. Shadowknights use metal plate armor, which is produced by armorers, so that is their most popular tradeskill, 5.9 percent of them compared with only 0.7 percent for tailors who can make leather armor. The opposite is true for monks because they wear leather armor, only 1.0 percent being armorers compared with 6.7 percent tailors. This difference suggests that one very real motive for selecting a tradeskill is to make products useful to the particular avatar. Another motive is that using the product from a tradeskill gives information about the value of alternative designs, thus supporting marketability through more sophisticated expertise. Players often have two or more avatars, and they can freely exchange goods so long as their avatars are on the same Internet server, of which EverQuest II currently has 10, but 2 of them are testing servers not intended for regular use and 2 are intended primarily for European users. More significantly, most serious players belong to guilds, and they may avoid selecting a tradeskill already practiced by several fellow members, given that many guilds are cooperative sharing organizations.

The third adventure class in Table 3.5, fury, belongs to the somewhat ambiguous archetype called either healers or priests. Healing specialties are best adapted for team combat, in which the healer stands back while other team members engage the enemy, and prepares to reduce the damage suffered either by the entire team or by specific members that have drawn the enemy fire. But often avatars undertake solo missions and must have abilities that do not depend upon help from other players. Note that furies are more likely to have tradeskills than do the four others, distributed across specialties that can enhance the abilities of the avatar, including 7.4 percent tailors making leather armor and 5.6 provisioners, but also 5.3 percent sages who craft scrolls giving temporary combat abilities. Mages also slightly prefer the sage tradeskill, 3.8 percent of them choosing it, but they are less interested in tradeskills at all, 87.3 percent of them having no subskill.

Rangers prefer becoming woodworkers, 8.4 percent of them selecting this skill, for the simple reason that they needed to make arrows to shoot from their bows. However, the system changed over the years, as described well by a forum-poster, back in January 2014 in response to a question about which tradeskill a ranger should learn:

Up until a few months ago I would have instantly recommended woodworker as rangers went through loads and loads of arrows. They still do but it’s been toned down to a single arrow per attack consumed so the consumption rate is dramatically reduced. It is still (as Feldon said in EQ2Talk) a bit like flinging coins at the monsters. However today the answer isn’t quite so clearcut due to the arrow rate reduction and the advent of mass production. Depending on your server, I believe you can now pick up arrows at less than fuel cost compared to you doing a batch of 1 stack versus someone else doing a mass batch of 100 stacks which they then flood the broker with. If it’s your only toon [avatar], I would still probably be inclined to do woodworker. Failing that provisioner as you’ll always need food and drink.¹⁰

The reference to mass production deserves explanation. On November 12, 2012, an EverQuest II expansion named Chains of Eternity raised the level caps for both adventuring and tradeskills to 95, and apparently to encourage crafters to keep working made it possible above level 90 to earn Prestige Points that can be invested across three separate lines of advancement, one of which was mass production. It greatly reduced the time and effort producing up to 100 units of some product, but the avatar still needed to harvest or buy the necessary raw materials. In several other MMOs, as in EverQuest II, guilds can set up the equivalent of factories inside their private headquarters, and share among their members huge supplies of raw materials. This section will conclude with a description of the virtual layout of a public crafting area.

The workshop area in New Halas is somewhat more concentrated than some of the others in EverQuest II, because all the equipment and helpful nonplayer characters are near each other and not separated by trade in different buildings as they are in the large city named Qeynos. The equipment is arranged along a wall, from left to right: a chemistry table (for use by alchemists), two engraved desks (sages), a second chemistry table, a work bench (jewelers), a sewing table (tailors), a second work bench, two forges (weaponsmiths and armorers), a stove ­(provisioners), a woodworking table (carpenters and woodworkers), and a second sewing table.

Most of the raw materials need to have been collected from a wide territory and brought by the avatar to the workshop, but a variety of fuels can be bought on-site from Morag McMarrin, a nonplayer merchant. Every time an avatar gains a tradeskill experience level, Jalfa Eiskairn, the crafting trainer, is ready to sell the new level’s book of recipes, for a moderate price. A few steps from her, Sana Strongbellow is ready to provide work orders that increase the rate of experience gain but require turning in the products rather than selling them. Not very much farther away stand Catherine Bowne, the banker, and Vald Jerngard, the broker. Bankers provide access to one of the avatar’s storage facilities and, if the avatar’s standing with a guild is sufficiently high, to the guild vault as well. Each avatar has a set of inventory bags that can be accessed anywhere, but the bank and a vault in the avatar’s home can contain a far greater number of resources. The broker provides access to a player-to-player auction system, where not only raw materials but also advanced crafting recipes can be purchased. Each of these simulated human beings represents a different function and accesses a different part of the universal database, and they indeed represent roles real human beings would play in real-world distributed manufacturing.

Conclusion

The significance of gathering professions in the MMO economic systems may seem irrelevant to their suitability as simulations of real-world local manufacturing, yet it can be taken as implicit modeling of the fact that much manufacture requires assembling components from specialized sources, such as the metal hinges on the wooden door of a house or the buttons on a locally woven piece of clothing. More abstractly, we can predict that truly distributed manufacturing is not merely dispersed geographically, but also in terms of a flexible and fragmented division of labor. As greater fractions of the population enter the gig economy, many will combine multiple specializations, emphasizing different ones over time. This implies that their social networks and communication channels will also be dynamic and differentiated. The following ­chapter will show how online communications associated with MMOs can ­suggest the forms such future real-world communications may take.

¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_game

² De Camp, L.S., C.C. de Camp, and J.W. Griffin. 1983. Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard. New York, NY: Bluejay.

³ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian

⁴ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_Online

⁵ Bainbridge, W.S. 2011. The Virtual Future, 55–72. London: Springer.

⁶ Bainbridge, W.S. 2013. eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2016. Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer, Games, 60–64. London: Springer.

⁷ Ellingsen, E., G. Swan, and S.M. Halvorsen. 2011. Age of Conan Manual. Oslo, Norway: Funcom.

⁸ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep

⁹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Burning_Sea

¹⁰forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/best-profession-for-noob-ranger.544895