Abstract

This brief essay examines the culture of virtual worlds from the perspective of cultural anthropology. It reviews the linguistic and ethnographic artifacts of virtual world participants as a means of identifying its cultural identity.  This examination provides evidence of social responses to real life in several virtual worlds and expressed in the construction of an alter-culture within that space.  In response to this research, the essay asks whether the culture within virtual worlds reflects independent culture or subculture.

Keywords: Virtual world anthropology, linguistics, ethnography, game communities, alternate reality games (ARG)

In modern social sciences to examine virtual worlds as anything but culture is to invalidate the social spheres in which groups meets. It is more challenging, and perhaps more productive to try to ask whether or not such environments incubate a subculture or a culture in themselves.  If we take the standard anthropologic approach, there is an immediate dilemma.  For cultural anthropologists, virtual worlds are an enigma. The material remains do not lend themselves well to traditional archeological investigation. However,   anthropological study does find substantial opportunity in the assessment in the areas of linguistics and ethnography in virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are linguistically defined by creoles of art and technology. Its members have routinely fabricated their own language which applies to the specific situations within the environment.  Second Life participants, for example, have SLURS (Second Life URLS) and PRIMS (primitives). Such terms are borrowed, of course, from Computer Science uniform resource locators and digital art’s polygonal modeling systems. 

The lexicon in World of War Craft is far more rich, defining a few hundred acronyms and a variety of adjectives that refer to game-specific situations. These include Powerleveling, Proc, Leet, Nerf’d, or Hume. Unsurprisingly most of these worlds share the common term, RL. RL contrasts the virtual world with real life.

These linguistic distinctions in themselves are not enough to define the culture. In linguistic terms, the language of virtual worlds is a dialect at best.   It reflects a subset collection of terms and the social situation under which they are used.

Ethnographically the culture of virtual worlds is clearly not homogenous. Virtual world members span all the traditional demographics, sometimes even straddling them.  The one homogenous aspect of the largest virtual worlds is there relationship to computer science. These worlds are built upon technology and that skeleton peeks through in the subsumed social norms of log ins and chat.

Where the culture diverges from Computer Science is in its overt effort to return to something human and social.  Numerical ID’s are supplanted with call signs and nicknames.  Object instances are represented by anthropomorphized self.  There is a constant effort to emulate, and then to perfect. In this way these environments could be considered communal efforts of utopian construction.  They endeavor to build an ideal, often defined by the members of that world, or at least evolved by the members. In the classic MMO model, there is a kind of democratic push-pull where designers respond to the needs of their constituents constructing scenarios that entertain and engage. In less game-like worlds, the social members engage themselves in their own world building, creating social microcosms that meet their needs. In Second Life, for example, participants create art societies, emulate physical cities and even create sexual groups.  Are these ethnographic observations of a culture developing itself, or are they merely play emulation?

With such evidence, the virtual world may then be a kind of explorative cultural other. Where the terms of real life cultural participation is defined by a legacy of years, the terms of a virtual world are limited only by an individual’s capacity and efficacy in the world.  Interestingly, this efficacy is often greater than what one experiences outside the virtual environment.  In the virtual world, one enters with a fresh start.  To some extent, they may enter the society as a 3 year old boy or 80 year old woman.  They may declare and define themselves as a leader, follower, innovator, plebian, or king. The practical dilemmas of non-virtual worlds are discarded. 

If the virtual world does not respond well to the way your avatar looks, you can change that avatars look, create a new one, or relocate to a place where your virtual character fits. These are retreat-based solutions to larger social issues, but they offer solutions not terribly practicable in an increasingly pervasive, far-reaching, and culturally normalizing real world.  Beyond the idiosyncrasies of specific cultural bias, there are commonly criticized cross-cultural biases against people with disabilities for example. Yet, many of the disabilities that can be readily recognized in non-virtual worlds disappear behind the smoke and mirrors of avatar based systems.  Such ability hints at the utopian potential to both eliminate discrimination and provide efficacy to individuals who may lack it. Others may argue it is merely play, lacking real address or solution.

Regardless, it is this ability to role-play that affords significant cultural relevance to virtual worlds. They serve not as counter-culture, or subculture, but as alter-culture.  They are place of duplicity, where the non-virtual self supports the virtual self.  They are a more complete version of the alter-cultural activities that many people already play. These include the bawdy explorations of participating in Mardi-Gras or the once-year role play in Halloween.  The fundamental difference is that these alter-cultures are often open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This affords for a new place in the space of the every day, an always available alter-cultural space. 

Yet, when we discard such affect, we often fill it with another discriminator. In game worlds, for example, rank, which sometimes can be purchased, defines a social hierarchy that prescribes one’s abilities, relationships, and potential.  Where it might be argued that this is at least earned, instead of being inherited, it continues to be a purchasable advantage within the social structure.  Likewise early adopters of Second Life find the financial advantage of early investment similarly witnessed in the social history of the United States. 

Despite all of the potential to break with the traditional limitations of real life, the social relationships, the strata, even the anecdotal daily scenarios are familiar.  Even in the least technical virtual worlds of alternate reality games, there are artifact-replicas of real life.  

Are these affinities between real life and virtual life an artifact of the cross-cultural germination of the real and artificial? Or are they the result of a sub culture responding to the main stream culture?  Is it safe to assume that the real leads the artificial?  Are such artifacts waiting to be molted upon successive iterations?

 -Lindsay Grace

(from some of my writing  on games)