July 6, 2007

Virtual Worlds as Social-Science Labs

How one professor uses online games as petri dishes of human behavior

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Edward Castronova has been a wizard, a clergyman, and lately, a monster-slaying blonde, all inside virtual worlds. Scholars may consider time spent immersed in digital fantasy worlds to be frivolous — but it has sent Mr. Castronova's academic career soaring.

Back in 2001, when he was plodding away as a tenure-track professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton, he decided to try out the fantasy game Everquest for relaxation. In the thriving economy of Norrath, the Everquest world, thousands of gamers traded digital items using virtual currency, which could be exchanged for real dollars. In some ways, Mr. Castronova concluded, Norrath's per-capita economy rivaled China's.

He documented it in a paper, and, as a lark, posted the paper online. More than a few scholars took it seriously. By the summer of 2002, it was among the top 10 articles downloaded from the Social Science Research Network database. Mr. Castronova became a star among virtual-world aficionados. Consulting jobs and speaking invitations followed. He began writing a book to explain online multiplayer games to the uninitiated.

Three years ago, Indiana University at Bloomington recruited him to focus exclusively on the study of virtual worlds. Walter Gantz, chairman of Indiana's telecommunications department, says he and other faculty members went after Mr. Castronova because "he seemed to be at the forefront" of the emerging discipline of virtual-worlds research.

Now a tenured associate professor of telecommunications, Mr. Castronova is overseeing an ambitious effort to create a multiplayer world modeled on the settings and characters in Shakespeare's plays.

The professor himself marvels at the blossoming of his academic career. Had he not written the Everquest paper, he jokes, he would be living with his wife's parents in upstate New York, stocking the shelves of a grocery store or playing Mr. Mom to his two sons.

Shakespeare Goes Online

Mr. Castronova, 44, has been playing games of all kinds since he was a teenager. By the time he graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1991, he had gained not only a doctorate in economics but also a "deep mastery" of stealth-fighter tactics, urban planning, and global domination from playing video games, he wrote in his 2005 book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (University of Chicago Press).

He taps into those skills as he devises Arden, the three-dimensional world that draws upon Shakespeare's works. (The forest of Arden is the setting of the comedy As You Like It.) The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided $240,000 for the project; Mr. Castronova has asked the foundation for millions of dollars more to complete the endeavor. He has been encouraged by correspondence from foundation officials, he says, and expects to get a final response by August.

One recent afternoon near Mr. Castronova's office, a student works intently at a computer to bring Arden's landscape to digital life. Near the student are a map of the English countryside and a chart showing Elizabethan goods that players will be able to buy and sell using gold, Arden's currency. Mr. Castronova says Arden's design will try to show how the playwright might have envisioned a game with thousands of players.

The project lets Mr. Castronova tap into his love of Shakespeare — he has acted in a Shakespearean troupe — and historic Britain. An 18th-century map of the sceptred isle hangs above his desk. His original surname, Bird, is of British origin, but he adopted the more melodious name of his wife, Nina Castronova.

"If I could, I'd spend my time going around Great Britain exploring Neolithic stone circles," the professor says, glancing up at the map.

Testing in Virtual Worlds

Arden's purpose is to expose students to Shakespeare and, more significantly, to serve as a laboratory for social-science experiments, Mr. Castronova says.

He sees Arden as the first virtual environment among many at Indiana that will serve as a "petri dish" for large-scale social-science experiments. He has established a research center, the Synthetic Worlds Initiative, on the campus, where students can learn how to build virtual worlds in which they can conduct their own studies.

Experiments could involve testing basic economic principles, setting up different political systems, communist or capitalist, and comparing how the communities evolve, or doing an ethnographic study that contrasts people from different parts of the world. He won't give details on the Arden tests, the first of which is to run in August, since he doesn't want players to modify their activity based on prior knowledge.

Such tests could help inform economists, policy makers, anthropologists, and others in search of data to support one theory or refute another, he says.

He has already conducted a study in Everquest that looked at whether the market for avatars — players' digital alter egos — showed any gender bias. Female avatars, he found, fetched 10 percent less than did male avatars, even with the same powers and skills. He believes the price disparity reflects real-world mistreatment of women.

If Mr. Castronova's idea for using virtual worlds as science laboratories sounds unorthodox, consider that some economists at the University of Chicago — known for its conservative economics department — are planning similar experiments in the freewheeling virtual world Second Life.

This summer John List, an economics professor, and David S. Abrams, an economist who lectures at Chicago's law school, will observe whether people behave differently in a virtual environment than they do in a real laboratory.

In one study, subjects will be asked to voluntarily contribute some of their assets to a public fund in exchange for an undisclosed reward, which may or may not be worth the contribution. This standard test in economics, called the public-goods game, is designed to assess people's altruistic tendencies.

Mr. List, who often runs field experiments in microeconomics, says that if he sees people in some tests behaving the same in real-world and virtual environments, he will consider doing more studies in virtual worlds, because they are more cost-effective.

"For certain types of games, like bidding and auctions, I think that will generalize quite easily across the virtual world to the lab," he says.

Other studies, though, may work only in face-to-face laboratories. "Behaviors are influenced by whether people can link your identity to your behavior," says Mr. List. "In the virtual world, I think, you're virtually free of these reputational concerns, so you might get people acting in a more self-interested way."

Reality and Fantasy

Using virtual environments as laboratories is part of what Mr. Castronova and other scholars of electronic games see as the increasing blurriness of the line between the real and the virtual. In cramped offices in China, they note, workers earn their livings playing games like World of Warcraft for as long as 12 hours a day, amassing virtual gold that their bosses exchange for real money.

Companies have established a presence in Second Life to market real products. Players have appealed to real-world courts and police officers to deal with what they perceive as theft of property or sexual assault inside the games.

Mr. Castronova likens the process to the gradual integration of American and British customs in North America. British settlers would occasionally travel back to the old country, bringing with them ideas that took root there.

"The very simple model of human migration predicts that the kind of societies that grow up in video games will start to have an influence on the way we do things in the real world," says the professor.

He sees the merging of the two worlds in his own life. For example, to keep in touch with friends who have moved away, Mr. Castronova and his wife socialize with them inside the Lord of the Rings Online. There he plays the role of an erudite Irish monk or a curvaceous heroine who kills monsters with multiple weapons. "I get to be the arrogant girl I remember being rejected by," says Mr. Castronova.

Mr. Castronova has also started an unusual academic conference that tries to replicate the enthusiasm and hubbub that people experience playing competitive online games. Ludium II, the second annual meeting, was held this month, attracting about 30 academics and business leaders who showed up — in person — on the Bloomington campus to create public policies for virtual worlds.

Attendees were asked to assume the roles of delegates to a political convention; each delegate represented a region of a fantasy world made up for the purposes of the conference. Delegates vied with each other to have their ideas included in the eventual platform. The topics included whether commerce in virtual worlds should be taxed; who should own the rights to digital items; how violence against avatars should be treated; and what to do about some players' addiction to the games — a growing problem, say mental-health professionals.

At the convention's conclusion, the group came up with 10 policies for virtual worlds that they decided to send to Congressional and presidential candidates in the 2008 elections. One policy asserts that game developers "shall not be liable for the actions taken by players." Thomas M. Malaby, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was chosen as spokesman for the group's platform.

On the blog Terra Nova, Mr. Castronova and his colleagues in academe and industry regularly sound off on many of the same issues debated at Ludium II. Mr. Castronova helped found the blog, in 2003, in order to build on the idea that virtual worlds can be more than mindless fun.

"Ted has added a lot of legitimacy to the study of virtual spaces," says Sarah B. Robbins, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition at Ball State University, who studies pedagogy in virtual worlds and teaches a composition class in Second Life.

At the conference, she asked Mr. Castronova to respond to critics of virtual worlds who say that people who immerse themselves in such environments breed indifference toward the real world.

"I'm certainly not advocating that everyone should spend all their time in a virtual world," he replied. "What I'm saying is that things in the virtual world are going to become a mirror by which we will see ourselves more clearly."