5: We Play

The Allure of Social Games, Synthetic Worlds, and Second Lives

Video games are a great social connector, and allow for making friends.

—Chase, twenty-one-year-old college student

When Nielsen Media Research released its prime-time viewing data for the new fall season in 2003, the major television networks were reminded, once again, of their most vexing challenge: delivering young male viewers to their advertisers. That fall, Nielsen reported that prime-time viewing among young men was dropping precipitously. Compared to the year before, viewing among men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four fell 12 percent. Even more alarming was the decline among younger men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—20 percent fewer of them were watching television during the prime-time hours. The television industry found itself caught in the middle of a real-life mystery as Nielsen’s data left it scrambling to figure out what the press began calling the “missing young men story.”

Throughout TV land, the idea that young men, a lucrative and heavily sought-after demographic, were abandoning television in droves caused a major stir. A New York Times article likened Nielsen’s viewer ratings to “a nuclear strike, a smallpox outbreak and a bad hair day all rolled into one.” Total disbelief was the primary response from television industry executives. “Frankly what we’re seeing strains credulity,” said Alan Wurtzel, the president of research at NBC. David F. Poltrack, executive vice president for research at CBS, explained that while the claim that young men’s television viewing was on the decline was defensible, the trend, in his view, “should have been seen gradually over time,” and not “all of a sudden.” Wurtzel was even more forceful in his criticism of Nielsen. “You never see these kinds of unanticipated declines,” Wurtzel said. “It’s like saying that all of a sudden all these guys have completely turned off the use of TV. It does a huge disservice to the entire TV industry.” A Nielsen twelve-year trend line showing a consistently downward slope in the television viewing behaviors of young adults suggested that the decline was not nearly as sudden as it appeared.

In reality, the television industry was coming face-to-face with the aftershocks of the rising number of broadband homes and young people’s move to digital. Still, the industry men’s disbelief was understandable. Ordinarily, behavior as habitual as television viewing did not change so profoundly so quickly. But the digital age is no ordinary time. By 2003 television viewing as the industry had known it for more than fifty years was a relic, a thing of the past. Young people still watch television but, as pop culture critic Douglas Rushkoff notes, in ways that are strikingly different than previous generations. They watched online or while they were doing other things, like Facebooking, downloading music, uploading pictures, or sending instant messages.

The “missing young men story” was interesting, but Nielsen’s television viewer data only told part of the tale—more intriguing is the question, what are young men abandoning television for?

Peter Daboll, president of comScore Media Metrix, an Internet audience measurement service, stated that, “The fact that more than 75 percent of 18–34 year-old men in the U.S. are using the Internet seems to take at least some of the mystery out of the decline in TV viewing among this prized demographic.” In short, all you had to do to find young men was go online. Some of comScore’s key findings on Internet use that September (2003), the month that the networks began rolling out their fall line-up of new shows, is revealing. The roughly 27 million eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old males who used the Internet in September averaged about thirty-two hours per person online. That was 17 percent more than the twenty-seven hours the average Internet user spent online during the month. After reporting that young men viewed, on average, in excess of seven hundred more pages than the average Internet user, comScore called them voracious consumers of online content.

Young men have consistently been among the early adopters, explorers, and users of new communication technologies. No demographic has taken greater advantage of the on-demand capabilities of the new media environment than young males, the most wired segment in America. In our survey, young men downloaded music significantly more than young women. They also consumed more online video content than any other group. In a 2007 report titled Online Video, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that young men were more likely than any other group to report a preference for both professional and amateur online video content. But one technology rises above all others when it comes to grabbing young men’s attention—games.

Nielsen explained that young men, ages eighteen to thirty-four, were spending 33 percent more time playing games compared to a year earlier. In homes across America, interactive entertainment is on the rise. The growth of the games industry is verification of that. Between 2004 and 2006 there was an 18.5 percent expansion of U.S. households—38.6 million to 45.7 million—with televisions that also have video-game consoles. The sales of games remain solid even as other entertainment industries—music, television, and film—struggle to reinvent themselves in the digital age. According to the Entertainment Software Association, “U.S. computer and video game software sales grew six percent in 2007 to $9.5 billion—more than tripling industry software sales since 1996.”

A study by Nielsen Entertainment found that active gamers—persons who spend at least one hour a week playing games—spend a considerable portion of their money and time on gaming-related activities. Active gamers spend about $58 a month on entertainment. Roughly 28 percent, or $16, of that is devoted to games. Equally significant is the amount of their leisure time devoted to games. About a quarter of active gamers’ weekly leisure time is spent on games, or 13 out of 55.3 hours. Michael Dowling, general manager at Nielsen Interactive Entertainment, believes that “as games continue to increase its share of entertainment leisure time, it’s quite possible playing video games will assume a significant role as a common cultural experience, in the way that movies and television do today.” This is no longer a possibility; it is a reality.

A growing number of young men are turning to interactive entertainment like games rather than television and movies as their first source for leisure and a desired choice for social interaction with their friends. Still, to fully comprehend why games are stealing away young male eyeballs from TV land, you have to look beyond game stats or the revenue the industry generates to the kinds of experiences it facilitates.

In our discussions with young men, the allure of games is indisputable. We asked users of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), “Which do you prefer, an evening playing games or an evening watching television?” The answers we received from a group favorably predisposed to games were not surprising. Predictably, nearly everyone we spoke to chose games. Still, their reasons for doing so offer insight into the changing media behaviors and attitudes of young men. Whereas a few of them acknowledge that sports programming and DVDs can be entertaining, most indicated that television was simply too boring and in their view too passive.

“Games and television,” twenty-two-year-old Nelson told us, “are totally different. With television, you sit there, you watch. With games you are playing. You are doing things.” Another gaming enthusiast, Lee, expressed a similar sentiment. “I feel like I’m wasting more time if I’m watching TV with all of the commercials and such.” Lee added, “With games I feel like I’m accomplishing a goal. With Ventrillo [a voice technology that allows real-time chat while game playing] I feel like I am just hanging out and talking with friends.” Comments like these underscore the immense challenge television faces, as well as why games are so perfectly suited for a generation of young people who prefer doing rather than watching when it comes to their media use.

Sit and talk with young people today about media and communication technology and a fascinating generational ethos comes into clear view: the idea that they are not simply consumers of media but also creators and participants in media. Peter, a twenty-one-year-old college student, described games this way: “It’s more than just sitting in front of a screen just having stuff thrown at you. You are interacting in a story. I find that there’s more in a game than in television.” John, a nineteen-year-old student speaking about the allure of games, said: “Instead of sitting back and watching a plot happen, you actually get to participate in the action.”

In the rich and textured three-dimensional worlds common today you can go anywhere and be anybody. Ultimately, no matter if it is the promise of virtual wealth, the temptations of self re-creation, or some other innovation, games embody what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman call “culturally transformative play,” a feature that renders television old, inactive, and increasingly irrelevant.

Equally troubling for the television industry is the fact that games offer a totally immersive experience. Intense game play demands a kind of focus and attention that is increasingly rare in today’s new media environment. Unlike other social media activities such as social-network sites or IMing, games are much more resistant to the multitasking ways so common in today’s media environment. When most people play games they are rarely, if ever, downloading music, streaming online video, Facebooking, or watching television. The fact, too, that some of the more popular games are incredibly social also explains their rise above television as a preferred leisure activity among the young and the digital.

In its third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study, released in 2006, Nielsen Entertainment announced that the social elements of video games are becoming an increasingly important part of the overall gaming experience. Active Gamers, the study reports, spend upwards of five hours a week playing games socially. Teenagers, according to the study, are socially involved in gaming about seven hours a week. What is social gaming? Social gaming occurs in various styles and subgenres of games but refers primarily to those games in which social interaction with others is a key component of the gaming experience. Many MMORPGs are designed to be social, insofar as they encourage interaction between players, often in the form of collaboration and teamwork. Users of MMORPGs are drawn to the platforms precisely because they afford the opportunity to engage other users in real time.

Among the four-pack, another aspect of social gaming is more evident—getting together with friends, face-to-face, to play games together. For young men like Derrick, Chase, Trevor, and Brad, games are more than a leisure activity; they are, quite simply, a social activity. This particular use of games is emblematic of the constantly evolving role that social and interactive media occupy in the lifestyles of young people.

Chase’s media journal is quite candid about how his use of games has changed in recent years, going from a primarily single-player experience to a multiplayer experience. “When I initially started,” Chase wrote, “I played games because they provided me a way to fill time.” Throughout his school-age years, Chase played games often, but he generally played them alone. During his final year of high school, he logged in about twenty to thirty hours a week playing games. Though he played soccer and hung out with his friends, he said “there would be a lot of time during the week that I would have multiple hours with nothing to do, so I just played video games.” It was around this time that Chase began playing World of Warcraft (WoW).

In MMORPGs, completing a single mission could take as much as one to two hours. Addressing the open-ended structure of MMROPGs, Chase recalled, “There is always something else to do and achieve so you never come to an actual end to the game.” Playing these games meant that Chase was also spending greater amounts of time in front of his computer. He enjoyed meeting other players online, but in retrospect, believes the use of massive online games reduced the time he spent with his physical-world friends.

One of the things that we noticed in our work with nineteen- to twenty-six-year-olds is that their media behaviors change in some striking ways, as was the case when Chase began college. He watched less television, and while games were still his primary outlet for leisure and entertainment, he did not have nearly as much idle time on his hands. Moreover, the style of games he played changed, as did his reasons for playing. During the five months that I spent getting to know Chase, he was playing games like Halo 3 and Guitar Hero III. Rather than play games to fill time, a largely individual endeavor, Chase said he plays to spend time with his friends, a largely social endeavor. In his journal, Chase wrote, “These games [Halo 3 and Guitar Hero III] provide a community aspect and a way to connect to people.”

Chase’s desire for social gaming experiences is, of course, consistent with the transformations that are reshaping the culture of gaming. During our next one-on-one conversation, I made sure to follow up on his revealing journal entries. Chase told me that he is beginning to appreciate games for a whole different set of reasons. “Video games are a great social connector, and allow for making friends,” he told me while we were sitting and talking one day in an outdoor courtyard. Chase and the other members of the four-pack began their journals right around the time the much-anticipated Halo 3 was released. To ensure they would receive copies of the game, they stood in line at midnight on the evening Halo 3 went on sale. When they arrived home at about two o’clock that morning, they played the game until sunrise.

Over the next four days Chase and his friends played Halo 3 almost nonstop. “We played against people that we knew and then against other people online who we did not know,” Chase remembered. Halo 3, he explained, also became a bridge for meeting other people in his dorm. “You could be walking down the hall and pass a room full of guys playing Halo and before you knew it you had been invited in to join a group that may have included guys you never met before.” During the first few days of playing Halo 3, Chase bounced from one group to the next. In addition to nourishing previously established friendships, he planted the seeds for a few new acquaintances.

Curious to know if it was the game or the social interactions it facilitates, I asked Chase, “What is the main appeal of a game like Halo 3?”

“Part of it is the game itself,” Chase acknowledged.

Many of the guys had played and knew the two previous versions well. With Halo 3 came the pleasure in Chase’s words “of re-learning a game that you already knew.” There was the excitement of mastering new maps and discovering where weapons and other game-related items were located.

“But another part,” Chase added, “is the fact that you meet people through it.” The three-on-three and four-on-four matches make for great fun and social interaction, online and off-line. During the five months I was with the four-pack, the games that they mentioned frequently such as Halo 3 and Guitar Hero III had one thing in common: a strong social dimension. Nine of the ten top-selling games in 2007 were games that had multiplayer capabilities. In many of these games, the fun is as much in the social interaction and camaraderie as it is in the game itself.

Another big hit in the dorm the four-pack called home was Nintendo’s Wii gaming system. Much more than its chief competitors, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, the Wii is synonymous with social gaming.

Shortly before resigning from his position as president of Sony’s worldwide game studios, Phil Harrison discussed the impact of social gaming in his industry. At a private lunch hosted by game developer David Perry during the 2008 Gamed Developer Conference in San Francisco, Harrison acknowledged that Sony’s development of PlayStation 3 was a serious strategic mistake: “It’s a very interesting and frustrating thing for me to experience because I have been banging the drum about social gaming for a long time,” Harrison said. “And our Japanese colleagues said that there is no such thing as social gaming in Japan: ‘People do not play games on the same sofa together in each other’s homes. It will never happen.’ And then out comes the Wii.”

In the run up to the 2006–07 next-generation console war, Sony and Microsoft bet on big graphics and big power with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, respectively. Sony billed the PlayStation 3 as the world’s most sophisticated gaming system. And virtually everyone agrees. The console has many of the leading technical benchmarks—high-definition graphics, unsurpassed processing power, and a Blu-ray Disc player—that made it the most powerful gaming system ever made. Early on, though, analysts wondered if the console was over-engineered in such a way that only hard-core gamers could appreciate. One review wrote that the system “feels like a brawny but somewhat recalcitrant specialized computer.” And in Japan, Sony’s home turf, an analyst for Nomura Securities explained that the PlayStation 3, “for many consumers, it’s still just too much, too much machine for too much money.”

With PlayStation 3, Sony produced a console that delivered an intense but not necessarily social gaming experience. By contrast, Nintendo’s Wii console delivered a more modest machine—in terms of price, power, and graphics—but one that also appeals to what the industry characterizes as casual and social gamers.

Many of the earliest reviews of the Wii raved that the console encourages people to play along with friends, family, or in groups, thus creating an atmosphere that is as much about gathering as it is gaming. Like other kinds of home-based media and entertainment devices, most notably the television, video games have generally been viewed as a solitary form of entertainment. The image of a socially isolated, sedentary, blurry-eyed teenage male furiously working a joystick has been the dominant caricature of gamers. It is easy to forget that early on in the gaming console’s rise as a source for home entertainment that families actually played together. Throughout the 1990s, however, games grew more challenging, youth obsessed, and male centered. In his perceptive review of the console, Seth Schiesel, a New York Times games reporter, writes that “the Wii is meant to broaden the gaming audience yet again and turn on that broad swath of the population that got turned off by video games over the last two decades.”

Analysts and even Nintendo officials proclaim that the Wii’s greatest influence is making gaming fun and accessible for a wide cross-section of people—young and old, male and female, casual and serious. When my seven-year-old daughter received a Wii as a gift, her sixty-plus-year-old grandfather, a man who had not picked up a game control in nearly twenty years, was drawn to the action. The console and the innovative remote make gaming fun, inclusive, and intuitive rather than serious, exclusive, and intimidating.

The selling of the Wii is also instructive. According to Schiesel, “In an entirely counterintuitive, brilliant move, most of Nintendo’s ads are now shot from the perspective of the television back out at the audience, showing families and groups of friends having fun together.” Schiesel maintains that Nintendo “realized that emphasizing the communal experience of sharing interactive entertainment can be more captivating than the image of some monster, gangster or footballer on the screen.” Nintendo’s move was crafty and timely. Social gaming, you see, is illustrative of a broader cultural transformation: the rise of social media experiences as the hallmark feature of how we use communication technologies in our everyday lives.

In their own unique way, each member of the four-pack talked a lot about games as both a social lubricant and a social glue. The former refers to how games can make it easier to strike up conversations with new acquaintances, while the latter is a reference to how games give established friends a fun way to grow closer to each other. It is, in the end, the social aspects of gaming, more than anything else, that make games the most preferred source of leisure for the four-pack. Games are an integral part of their social life and social networks. Throughout the week they are constantly getting together with friends and acquaintances to play games. I asked the four-pack how close they were to their off-line circle of gaming partners.

“Oh, some of these guys,” Derrick explained, “will be my friends for life.” Trevor explained how their affinity for each other reaches beyond games. “We go out and get food a lot. We go to concerts together and play intramural sports too.”

Notably, the four-pack are not slaves to their consoles and PCs. Still, games for the young men I got to know are the basis for forming a social network made up of both relatively strong and weak ties. As Chase told me during one of our conversations, “The relationships are being formed by the games, but strengthened by all of the different activities we do together.”

Social gaming for young men like those of the four-pack primarily involves getting together with friends and acquaintances, face-to-face, and playing games. But for millions of others around the world, social gaming comes in a very different form: logging into a massive 3-D computer-generated world to play, interact, and occasionally bond with people they, in all likelihood, will never meet face-to-face.

With an estimated 10 million subscribers (at the time this book went to press) World of Warcraft (WoW) is planet Earth’s most populous MMORPG. Launched in 2004, WoW ascended rapidly as a destination of choice for gamers drawn to the epic scope and anything-is-possible atmosphere common in what games scholar Edward Castronova calls synthetic worlds—“crafted places,” he writes, “inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people.” We spoke with several users of WoW. In our conversations we focused less on game-play machinations and metrics—how much gear they owned, what they do to enhance the reputation or level of their avatar, or the details of a raid they joined. Our goal instead was to learn more about gaming as a particular dimension of the social- and mobile-media lifestyle. Gaming in massively multiplayer online role-playing worlds has interesting consequences for life outside the virtual world.

Among the synthetic-world users that we spoke with, none was more forthcoming than twenty-one-year-old Curtis. Over the course of a four-month period, we learned a lot about Curtis and how his migration to digital is most evident in his insatiable appetite for games, especially WoW. Games are Curtis’s most prominent source of leisure and a lifeline to others and the world around him. Most of the WoW users we spoke with are extremely active, spending, on average, between fourteen and twenty-eight hours a week playing the game. In a 2005 large-scale survey of MMORPG users, it was reported that the average user spends nearly twenty-three hours a week in their chosen game. That same survey found that 61 percent of “respondents had spent at least 10 hours continuously in an MMORPG.” Eight percent of users spend what amounts to a forty-hour workweek in massive games.

I asked Curtis how many hours a day he plays WoW.

“Oh my, too many,” he said sheepishly, before answering, “I’d say on an average day, eight to ten hours.”

Around seven o’clock each evening, Curtis powers up his computer, grabs an energy drink, and logs into WoW. By the time Curtis usually logs out, it is close to two or three o’clock in the morning. His first experience with a massively multiplayer online role-playing game was Counterstrike, one of the first successful online multiplayer games. “I started playing that when I was sixteen,” he said. His dad worked on computers all of the time and his mom played games. “She was an absolute wizard at Tetris,” Curtis said proudly. He and his mom constantly played games together. When we met Curtis, he had been playing WoW for two years.

Like most WoW enthusiasts, Curtis thoroughly enjoys the social aspects of the game. “I have a lot of friends in WoW and it’s fun to interact with them,” he told me during our initial conversation. Indeed, the best virtual worlds are lively and social—places where people from all over the world visit and interact with others on a regular basis. Curtis described himself as a bit shy but believes WoW “promotes a lot of social interaction.”

Another aspect of Curtis’s fascination with WoW is attributable to the fact that the virtual world is characteristic of a recurring but relatively recent development in game design—open-ended or free-form gaming. In synthetic worlds like WoW the design elements and rules of play are extremely open and flexible—qualities that enable participants to create a more distinct and personalized experience. If you do not feel like slaying a monster today and would rather chat with some of your gaming comrades—no problem. Want to be super competitive and increase your avatar’s level, power, and reputation? You can do that too. WoW, as Nicolas Ducheneaut and his research associates argue, is “two games in one.” While some players pursue a leisurely, individual, and single-player experience, others pursue a more intense, social, and multiplayer experience.

Some game scholars compare “free-form” or open-ended gaming to playing in a sandbox. What does this mean? Visualize a kid playing in a sandbox. Because she is not bound by any established set of rules, her playtime is free, open, and enormously creative. Conditions like these permit her to make wonderful creations, discoveries, and, yes, even mistakes. It is this particular aspect of open-ended games—exploration—that leads some scholars to characterize them as excellent learning environments. It is the idea that you learn in games not by being told what to do but rather by doing. Trial and error encourages discovery. Learning in games is a hands-on experience. Kurt Squire, a games scholar, refers to open-ended games as “possibility spaces”—that is, spaces that invite users to imagine, create, and build new identities and worlds. Curtis underscored this aspect of WoW when he said, “It is fun in that you can do things that you would normally never be able to do.”

Logging in to WoW, Curtis believes, is analogous to reading a fascinating book. “The storyline is so gripping, it can carry you away,” he said. Like a number of fantasy-based games, the story in WoW is constantly evolving. According to game scholars Edward Schneider, Annie Lang, Mija Shin, and Samuel Bradley, story in video games matters. “Story,” the authors write, “is something that video game players enjoy; it helps involve them in the game play, makes them feel more immersed in the virtual environment, and keeps them aroused.” In addition to the lore and published novels manufactured by Blizzard are the elaborate narratives that WoW users write and post online.

WoW is the quintessential participatory platform, a model of the interactive media franchise that is poised to thrive among a generation of young men and women who prefer using Web-based tools and applications to create their own content and build their own world. It represents what scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture.” Social-media platforms—MMORPGs, wikis, blogs, and social-network sites—have triumphed over television because they offer participants the opportunity to tell their own stories. In the days when old media regimes like print, movies, and television were dominant, the media content we consumed was typically limited to the stories and content created by professionals. In the new media regime, users expect to be able to create and control their own content and increasingly create their own stories.

Despite the “cult of the amateur” criticisms by some, today’s young media users will have it no other way. As a participant in a good role-playing game, you are not simply watching the story unfold; you help determine the outcome of the story. You are not simply pulling for the hero; you are the hero. You are, all at once, the writer, director, actor, and audience. It is an absolute reinvention of what it means to be a media consumer and one of the truly revolutionary aspects of the migration to digital.

Another fascinating aspect of life in the virtual world is the creation of an avatar, a digital self-representation that users maintain and present to others. Think of an avatar as the character, the virtual persona and embodiment of a desired or re-imagined self. Avatar-mediated play is the medium through which users not only fashion a second self but a second life too. As one twenty-one-year-old synthetic world user says about MMORPGs and the maintenance of her avatar, “I like that I can be somebody else for a couple of hours.”

Curtis absolutely enjoys the identity creation aspects of WoW. During our conversations with Curtis he was managing three avatars in WoW but has played as many as nine characters with varying degrees of interest. At the time of our conversations he was especially enamored with Anna. His inspiration for the avatar came from a popular science-fiction television series based on a crew that survived losing a civil war and then found themselves as pioneers in a new galaxy. Curtis had even created an elaborate backstory for Anna. “She has now become an elf who was raised in human lands,” he explained. There are a number of synthetic-world users who travel to great creative lengths to construct and enliven their avatars. In addition to designing the look of their avatar, synthetic-world users also create elaborate backgrounds, identities, and role-playing repertoires for their digital self-representations.

Curtis’s decision to create a female virtual self is actually quite common in fantasy-based computer-generated worlds. Researchers call this gender swapping, or to use the words of MIT professor Sherry Turkle, “virtually cross-dressing.” There is a long history of playing around with identity, especially gender, in online worlds. Men present as women, and, similarly, women present as men. Men and women gender swap for complex and often distinct social and psychological reasons. For some women, presenting themselves as men in a synthetic world can license them to exercise more power and authority. Frustrated with never being taken seriously as a woman in EverQuest, Becky, a petite Asian American woman, swapped gender and race. “I became the biggest black guy I could find,” she said. “When I play this big guy, everybody listens to me.” The male avatar was a new and invigorating source of power. “Nobody argues with me. If there’s a group of people standing around, I say, ‘Okay, everybody follow me!’ And they do. No questions asked.”

Men present themselves as women for a variety of reasons too. In her discussion of men who practiced gender swapping in some of the first computer-generated virtual worlds, multiuser dungeons (MUDs), Turkle explains that for some men, becoming a woman in a virtual world was a powerful and evocative experience. Some of the men Turkle met presented themselves as women because MUDs afforded an opportunity to break away from the rigid roles and cultural expectations of masculinity. One man she profiled, twenty-eight-year-old Garrett, explained his decision to role-play as a woman this way: “I wanted to know more about women’s experiences . . . I wanted to see what the difference felt like. I wanted to experiment with the other side.” Dissatisfied with conventional gender norms, Garrett said, “As a man I was brought up to be territorial and competitive. I wanted to try something new.”

For Turkle, gender swapping holds the promise of social transformation. She compares virtual cross-dressing to what anthropologists call dépaysement—which means to immerse oneself in a different culture, indeed, a different world. Upon returning to your culture, you see the world through a different lens. So, by identifying with women in virtual environments, men might begin to see the world and the challenges they face from a different perspective. Still, others dispute this observation, claiming instead that gender swapping is rarely if ever transformational. In most cases, critics point out, cross-dressing in the synthetic world reinforces gender stereotyping and thus redraws rather than erases gender boundaries. This is especially true among men who create supersexual creatures and body types—with large breasts and impossibly slim waistlines—that many heterosexual men find attractive, but also submissive. Rather than engage alternative notions of femininity in the virtual world, men tend to embrace the established gender norms and conventions that reduce women to a marginal status and sex objects.

When I asked him about his decision to gender swap, Curtis explained it this way. “The males [in WoW] look like complete idiots . . . the females look a lot cooler.”

Curtis described Anna this way: “She is very nice, very upbeat, very cheerful, very helpful, and more than willing to lend a hand.” He went on to say, “She is also very respectful of those who are of higher rank or more experience than her.” Anna, according to Curtis, was a soldier practically all of her life, so he tends to play her as very respectful, helpful, and dedicated to the welfare of everybody.

During one of our conversations I asked Curtis if there is a difference between him and the avatar he maintains with such great care and imagination.

“Yes, there is a definite difference,” Curtis said. Then, he immediately added, “Actually, a lot of me does tend to come out in the character, I personally see myself as very upbeat and respectful, very kind and willing to help other people out.”

“Curtis,” I inquired, “do you use your avatar to express things or parts of yourself that you may not feel comfortable expressing in the real world?”

“I don’t doubt that I use her to express some of my more feminine qualities that I’m typically not comfortable with or are a little less acceptable to express in the real world.”

“Can you give me a specific example?” I asked.

“Caring about how she looks, dressing her up, and having little nice outfits, which aren’t exactly strong masculine qualities.”

Curtis also confessed that Anna is more confident than he is. She is, in his words, “someone who knows what she wants and is very determined to achieve it.”

Synthetic-world users like Curtis take their avatars seriously. Outside observers might say too seriously. But maintaining a virtual persona is more common than we realize. The truth is, more and more of us manage a virtual or computer-mediated persona of some sort. In some cases it may be in the form of a personal profile on a social-network site—think Facebook or LinkedIn. The pictures and videos we upload, the friends we accept, and the personal data and commentary we post tell interesting stories about either who we are or who we want to be. Also, some individuals maintain a virtual persona in chat rooms—anonymous online spaces that allow us to disclose personal details with few, if any, risks. Bloggers fashion a distinct digital persona based on the content they produce for their readers. And then there are the avatar-mediated forms of identity creation that take place in the virtual world.

The rules for making digital identities vary significantly across different platforms. Maintaining a digital self in Facebook, for instance, is very different than maintaining a digital self in WoW. Whereas users of Facebook engage in identity management and self-representation, users of synthetic worlds engage in identity play and self-experimentation. In most Facebook networks there is an expectation that the person you present closely approximates the person you are in the physical world. Identity making in that platform is about managing and presenting a self that off-line friends and acquaintances know and see. By contrast, there is little to no expectation that the person you present in a role-playing game will resemble the person you are in the physical world. For that reason, building an avatar for the virtual world is much more explicitly playful and experimental—it is a license to build what some refer to as an alternative, imagined, or second self.

As the number of computer-mediated personas rise, the research on the social lives of avatars grows more fascinating. In their examination of life in the virtual world, researchers Nicholas Yee and Jeremy Bailenson set out to test the validity of a theory Yee calls the “Proteus Effect.” Essentially, the theory maintains that the avatar—how it looks and how it is perceived by the user—will influence the user’s behavior. Proteus, a sea god in Greek mythology, is known for his ability to change form. The word Proteus is the root for the adjective protean, which means versatile, mutable, and flexible. These, of course, are traits closely associated with identity in the digital age.

Yee and Bailenson conducted two experiments. In both experiments the participants were shown a mirror image of their avatar for roughly sixty to seventy-five seconds, just before they interacted with other avatars in a Collaborative Virtual Environment. In the first study, some study participants were assigned attractive avatars. The other set of participants received unattractive avatars. Participants were then asked to interact with an avatar of the opposite sex in a virtual environment. What did Yee and Bailenson learn from this experiment? Among other things, they noticed that participants who were assigned more attractive avatars moved significantly closer to the opposite sex. Also, when the confederate avatars asked the study participants to “tell me a little bit about yourself,” followed by “tell me a little more,” Yee and Bailenson noticed something interesting. The attractive avatars were much more willing to disclose information about themselves than the participants who were assigned less attractive avatars.

Assessing the results, Yee and Bailenson conclude, “The attractiveness of their avatars impacted how intimate participants were willing to be with a stranger.” Most important, the attractive avatars exuded more self-confidence than their less attractive counterparts.

Intrigued by the results of the first experiment, the Stanford researchers conducted a second study. One group of participants received tall avatars while another group received shorter avatars. The behavior they measured in this experiment was based on a negotiation task called “the ultimate game.” In this game, two individuals participate by taking turns deciding how a pool of money will be split between them both. After one person suggests a split, the other person can accept or reject the offer. If the participant accepts the split, the money is shared accordingly. In the case of a rejection, neither participant gets a share of the money.

Yee and Bailenson asked the participants to split $100. Once again, they found support for the “Proteus Effect.” Participants assigned taller avatars were more willing to make unfair splits than those who had shorter avatars. Participants with taller avatars were also more likely to reject unfair offers than their shorter counterparts. Like the previous experiment, participants assigned taller avatars displayed more confidence and greater self-esteem in the game than those assigned shorter avatars. “These two studies,” Yee and Bailenson write, “show the dramatic effect that avatars have on behavior in the digital world.” According to Yee and Bailenson, the self-representations chosen by synthetic-world users has a decisive influence on how they behave in the virtual world. Their behavior mutates in relation to how their avatars look and consequently how they perceive themselves in the virtual world.

Most people intuitively grasp how an individual’s qualities in the physical world might influence their decisions and behaviors in the virtual world. A short and bashful male, curious about experiencing the world as a strong masculine creature, self-presents as tall and powerful in a virtual world. A person who feels unattractive in the off-line world creates a dazzling-looking avatar. A recluse, eager to live life as a dynamic socialite, becomes a hip club owner in the 3-D virtual world Second Life. You get the idea. But contemplating the opposite—how our decisions in the virtual world shape our behavior in the physical world—is much more difficult to grasp. Is it possible that the person we create in the virtual world can influence the person we are in the physical world? Given the widespread adoption of virtual personas, it is an issue that, in all likelihood, will become increasingly debated as we grapple with the consequences of “being digital” as a way of everyday living.

Currently, some researchers point to the formation of guilds, those player associations that form in massive online games, as a sign of the virtual world influencing the physical world. Guilds, as we learned in our interviews, can be made up of several members committed to executing extremely challenging tasks. Managing these kinds of player associations—both the mission and the members—requires delicate coordination and detailed communication. Skills, some argue, that are transferable beyond virtual-world borders. Yee reports that “10% of [MMORPG] users felt they had learned a lot about mediating group conflicts, motivating team members, persuading others, and becoming a better leader in general.” Yee goes on to note that 40 percent of users believed they had learned a little about these skills. Elsewhere, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas contend that “the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership.” It remains to be seen if humans will deliberately use the virtual world as a place to test skills, talents, and behaviors intended for the physical world.

Becoming someone else in the online world can force virtual-world users to confront the person they are in the off-line world. But even then there are no guarantees that the physical-world person will be transformed in some dramatic way.

“Sometimes,” Curtis told me, “I find myself doing things with Anna because I personally want to do it, or I’ll sometimes find that I’m thinking as Anna [in the online world] would think, so I really get into it.”

Earlier in our conversation I recalled how Curtis mentioned that Anna is much more confident than he is. “Does that make you more confident?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” he replied. “Anna is a more confident and courageous person than I am.”

Thinking out loud, Curtis added, “Maybe one day, I’ll be as confident as Anna, but that day has not arrived yet. In the real world I know that I am not Anna; I know that she can do things that I can’t.”

Along with producing and managing online identities, users of synthetic worlds also find themselves participating in online communities. The best virtual worlds are vital worlds. Places, in other words, that provide constant opportunity to meet, interact, and build relationships with others. Not all online places, however, offer the same kinds of opportunities for community. Take, for example, the kinds of community one is likely to find in Facebook versus World of Warcraft.

A frequent user of Facebook logs on several times a day to stay connected to people she knows or sees regularly. By contrast, a user of WoW tends to draw excitement from interacting with people he may only know in the online universe. The Facebook user goes online not to escape her off-line life but rather to engage and enrich her off-line life. Every so often the WoW user visits the virtual planet in order to gain momentary relief from his off-line life, seeking, instead, to enrich his online life.

Talk to synthetic-world users and most will tell you that they are drawn to the virtual because of the chance to meet and interact with other people. In the past, critics of computer-mediated communication generally dismissed the idea that it was possible to bond with strangers in a virtual environment. Even today, many find it difficult to believe that a meaningful relationship can form online between two people who have never met face-to-face. But humans have been connecting and bonding in virtual environments for almost three decades. The real issue is not that massive online games are not social. Many of them absolutely are. While you can explore planet Azeroth, the fictional universal setting in WoW, in a single-player mode, the users who stick with the game, eventually, tend to favor the multiplayer mode that encourages social interaction and collaborative forms of play. Unlike single-player games, you advance through the upper levels of WoW not by individual mastery of the game but rather by cooperating effectively with others, often through player associations called guilds.

The more interesting question is not whether or not the virtual bonds and relationships formed in places like WoW are real, but rather, what is their value to the millions of people that build, experience, and maintain them?

Erase the computer-mediated aspects of virtual bonds and you could make a credible case that they parallel the traditional strong and weak tie relationships that I discuss in chapter 3. Similar to face-to-face relationships, virtual bonds are extremely complex social networks that come in varying degrees of intensity. Some may find it difficult to classify the social interactions in a MMORPG as classic “strong ties” because, admittedly, building intimate connections in a fantasy-based, role-playing environment is challenging. It is not necessarily a question of whether or not synthetic-world users are bonding but rather with whom they are bonding—each other, their avatars, or something in between. Still, some of the connections established in the virtual world certainly qualify as more than weak ties, which often imply infrequent or dispassionate interaction. Yes, the interactions in virtual worlds are computer mediated, but they can also be frequent, extraordinarily detailed, and at times emotionally intense.

Virtual-world users speak fondly and frequently about the friends they make in synthetic worlds. Similar to the ties that we build with family members or close friends, comrades in the virtual world can spend a great deal of time with each other. The significant interactions in spaces like WoW can even lead to connections so powerful that people develop strong emotional attachments. Curtis explained that he has met people in WoW who show definite signs of attachment to the game and the people they meet.

“They are logged in all of the time and always expect you to be available in the game. They even express frustration when you logout,” Curtis said. Stories about participation in fantasy-based virtual worlds leading to intimate contact is more common than you might think. Two people who grow fond of each other in a virtual world start exchanging e-mail. This may soon lead to telephone conversations, eventually a face-to-face meeting, and in some instances a serious emotional connection.

Similar to physical-world ties, virtual-world bonds are often temporary. Participation in guilds, for example, are typically fluid, with some users moving in and out of these task-oriented player associations. Curtis explained that he tends to stick with guilds for a certain period of time. When he believes a guild’s value has been maximized, that usually means it is time to move on to another guild, another set of challenges, and, importantly, another set of relationships. Speaking about his decision to leave his last guild, Curtis said, “It was quite sad to part with them because it was a lot of fun and they were such good friends.” Curtis played with these friends for many hours a day, came to know or trust some of them, but may likely never interact with them again. I call these kinds of virtual-world connections “temporary ties.” As long as they last, virtual relationships can involve notable degrees of trust, reciprocity, and interaction.

My point is straightforward. Virtual-world connections are complex social relationships made up of strong, weak, and temporary ties. On the one hand, these affiliations can be strong enough to help synthetic-world users accomplish challenging game-world tasks or, as I discuss below, get through a turbulent period in their lives. Weak ties, on the other hand, may involve infrequent interaction or a brief alliance between synthetic-world users.

Over the course of the social Web’s relatively short history, people have developed ties in virtual worlds that they consider just as strong and valid as the relationships they maintain in the physical world. In his study of relationships in MMORPGs, Yee reports that 39 percent of males and 53 percent of females believe that their in-game friends are comparable or better than their physical-world friends. Among the gamers we spoke with, we found similar attitudes.

“You play with these guys for hours every day, so yeah, you develop a bond with them,” said Mike, a twenty-four-year-old morning radio intern.

These sentiments will only deepen as the design and technology supporting the use of virtual worlds becomes more advanced. A recent example of this is the arrival of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology that allows synthetic-world users to talk to each other in real time while playing together.

For the last year and a half, Keith, a twenty-two-year-old gaming enthusiast, has logged into WoW just about every day of the week seeking fun and company with his online friends. Keith told us that he has met hundreds of people through his involvement in online games. “I don’t think there is any doubt that these guys are my friends,” he said. When we met Keith he had recently started using a headset and, like a number of people, credits the device for adding a whole new dimension to his gaming experience. Keith loves the fact that he and his online gaming partners can talk in real time with each other. The voice feature makes navigating the synthetic world more efficient and more enticing.

As you might expect, Curtis also uses voice technology. Like other virtual-world users, Curtis is serious about his reputation and the people he interacts with in WoW. Gaming among users like Curtis is more than leisure; it is a very serious endeavor that requires forming strategic alliances and relationships. In cases like these, play actually becomes work. At the time of our conversations with Curtis, he was in a raiding guild that was focused on conquering some high-end content.

“I like this guild because it gives me the chance to gain some very valuable items I would never be able to get to on my own,” he said. This team of players required elaborate strategizing, the assignment of specific roles, and flawless communication.

Speaking about guilds and the use of VoIP, Curtis told me that “battles are often complex and require a lot of timing and strategy. You don’t have a lot of time to move your eyes down for a little text box to read what everyone is saying.” Voice, Curtis maintains, makes it much easier to communicate and execute your mission. “Suppose you have a lot of people working together for a common goal,” Curtis said. “Let’s say there is a big boss that you have to work together to kill.”

The ability to communicate in real time makes developing a strategy more manageable. But VoIP technology has more than a strategic value. Many gamers believe that the ability to talk with others in-world has a social value too, namely, the ability to strike a more intimate connection with other gamers. Keith believes that the use of the headset makes it possible to not only communicate more effectively, but also to bond more genuinely with those he plays online games with. “I talk to people from France, England, Canada, and Mexico every day when I play Halo or Gears of War,” Keith said with assurance.

According to a 2007 study published in the journal Human Communication Research, the shift from text-based communication to voice-based communication is transforming gaming—both the way gamers play and how they interact with each other. Drawing their insights from the results of a controlled field experiment, the authors of the study, Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan, and Li Xiong, found that the use of voice in virtual worlds leads to increase liking and trust among users. Additionally, they found that voice was much more effective than text in dealing with disputes and disruptions among guild members. “Voice,” the authors maintain, “was superior for joint task coordination, problem solving, and dealing collectively with dynamic situations.” Support for the study’s findings surface in our conversations with gamers.

Curtis has met scores of people over the course of his time in WoW. We talked at great length with him about the social aspects of WoW, the impact of voice, and the kinds of relationships he has developed during his time in the game.

“How many people would you estimate you have met in WoW?” I asked.

After pausing for a few seconds to think, Curtis replied, “Maybe around fifty people that I could actually tell you something about.”

He interacts with several others through different guilds and estimates that he knows the real-life names of about ten players. These are also individuals that he has collected a bit more personal data about. It is interesting to note that about half of these individuals he met through the game; the other half he knew before interacting with them in WoW. His online-only contacts come from all over the world, including Australia and Europe. Bringing off-line contacts and networks into virtual gaming spaces, at the time this book went to press, represented a relatively small percentage of the activity that takes place in virtual worlds. But this is changing and will likely become increasingly common as more people begin to spend greater amounts of time in computer-mediated social places with off-line friends and acquaintances.

In our survey and interviews with young people, they absolutely rejected the idea that the social Web is a place to hang out with their friends. Instead, they consistently expressed a desire to spend time with their friends in off-line third places—bars, coffee shops, and clubs—rather than online third places. Virtual-world enthusiasts, however, are much more likely to view the computer-mediated world as a third place—a location, that is, to gather and hang out with other people. Virtual-world users look forward to going online to experience camaraderie and community typically with people they may never see in the off-line world. Rather than visit a local hang out with friends in the off-line world, heavy users of synthetic worlds are just as likely to visit a computer-generated environment. One WoW user we spoke with likened his experience in the game to frequenting that classic third place—a good bar. “You jump into WoW and people are already here,” he told us. “They aren’t always going to be the same people. You just expect people to be there.”

Curtis told me that there are days when he logs into WoW just to hang out with others. “If I don’t feel like doing work in the game, I’ll just get together with some friends and we’ll go down to the park and sit around and chat.” Even in these mostly casual adventures, Curtis and his virtual friends usually stay within character; they continue to wear their role-playing masks.

“What do you talk about?” I asked.

Curtis replied, “Oh, a variety of things. We talk about WoW, WoW lore, or how people’s days have been going.”

There is bound to be a certain degree of slippage in moments like these. Consequently, the lines between the online and off-line selves begin to blur.

“I try to keep the two worlds separate,” Curtis said.

And yet, he also acknowledged that it is not always easy. Curtis believes his connection to some of the people he talks to regularly via voice has led to greater familiarity and intimacy. He has learned their real names and more about them personally. In his words, “I feel like I can trust them more.” Trust, of course, is a hallmark feature of community. Writing about what he calls “social trust”—that is, the feelings of trust humans show toward each other—Robert Putnam observes that “social trust is a valuable community asset.” Communities filled with people who trust each other are more efficient, more cooperative, and more engaged with others. Putnam reminds us that “honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.” This is true in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Trust, honesty, and reciprocity are crucial to the making of successful guilds. Like many users of WoW, Curtis appreciates the hard work and dedication that goes into building a good, high-end guild. By the time the most skilled players in WoW advance to the higher levels, the game becomes less about individual achievement and more about relationships and collaborative play. Given the complexity of some of the raiding guilds he has been a part of, Curtis has learned to trust people he will likely never meet face-to-face—a crucial element of his success. Occasionally, his devotion to WoW tests his allegiance to the off-line social networks to which he belongs.

Take the time that Curtis was preparing to participate in a raid that required twenty-five people and such organization that it had to be set up two weeks in advance. He took me back to that particular moment.

“That night I knew at seven o’ clock that I was going to log on and get together with twenty-four other people. We were planning on going to this dungeon.” He continued, “It was a very complicated raid and we were all relying on each other to carry out their role.”

According to Curtis, it is not unusual for the off-line world to intervene and sometimes disrupt even the best-made plans arranged in the virtual world. Balancing allegiances between the physical and virtual worlds can be difficult. That same night a group of his friends invited Curtis to the movies. “Spur of the moment plans,” Curtis complained, “are the worst.” Looking straight at me, he wondered out loud, “Do I go with the game that I signed up for two weeks in advance [with] people [who] are expecting me to be there? Or, do I go with what I deem to be the better social and better thing to do?” For many virtual-world users like Curtis, the choice is not an easy one to make. In the end, however, they usually chose the game.

Curtis spends more time with his online guild mates than his off-line friends. In his case the virtual social capital he has accumulated is just as viable, if not more so, than the social capital he has accumulated with his off-line friends. This troubled Curtis. Toward the end of one of our conversation he acknowledged that maybe he plays too much. “To tell you the truth, I’m a bit embarrassed by how much I play WoW.” Most excessive gamers recognize, at some point in their lives, what everyone else does—that heavy use of a virtual world takes you away from the physical world and your off-line friends. When I asked Curtis what the downsides were to his use of WoW, he did not hesitate to respond. “I would say the lack of physical activity and interaction with your real-world friends.”

Synthetic worlds are so enticing in part because they effectively provide what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “spiritual tonic,” a place people visit in order to lift their mood and feel good about themselves and the world around them. Similar to the social ties and bonds that are formed in the physical world, virtual-world ties can and often do help synthetic-world users get through the day. And this is a significant feature of what Oldenburg calls “the great good place.”

In its 2006 Person of the Year issue, Time magazine celebrated “YOU!” In that issue, Time proclaimed that Web-based platforms like Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube point to a new generation of collaboration and content producers that are “wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” Time also hailed virtual worlds as a sign of the changing times. No virtual world generated more buzz than Second Life. In 2007 Billboard magazine listed Second Life among the “best bets” that were poised to usher in a new era in media and entertainment. In a reference to Second Life, Bill Werde writes, “The entertainment business has begun to take serious notice, and 2007 should be a breakout year for the virtual world.” But the hype about the human migration to 3-D social virtual worlds may be just that—hype.

Overwhelming majorities of the young people we spoke with have never used Second Life. While we have not formally surveyed young people about Second Life, I get the distinct impression that many of them have very little interest in the 3-D world. Second Life is rarely if ever mentioned in our interviews or open-ended survey questions. According to Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life, the median age of its users is thirty-one. Why are most young twenty-somethings not experimenting more frequently with Second Life? It comes down to one simple reason. Second Life is not a reliably social world.

In a 2008 interview with VentureBeat, Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, noted that 15 million registered users have signed up for Second Life. And yet, only a fraction of that figure actually uses the 3-D world. Visit it, and one thing is strikingly clear: nobody is there. Second Life, it turns out, is not a very sticky world. People sign up, but they tend not to come back.

Unlike WoW, Second Life is not a game. There are no raids or battles, points to be earned, specific missions to be accomplished, or efforts to attain a higher skill level. Rather, it is a computer-generated world that people simply inhabit much like they would the physical world. People go to Second Life to make all sorts of things—friends, love, money, elaborate islands, and, most important, a second life. Chase, like a number of young people we spoke with, is simply not that impressed with Second Life.

“The name says it all,” he said. “All you are really doing is living a life that is not your own.” Discussing how his life and the migration to digital—social gaming, Facebooking, and keeping up with his friends—is just about all he can handle, Chase aptly summed up a common view many young people express about Second Life: “I already don’t have enough time for my own life. I know I don’t have time for two lives.”

Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) users consistently list meeting other people as a favorite activity. But at the time this book went to press, virtual worlds, in general, are seldom places you would visit to experience the kinds of things the young people we met tend to prefer, such as engagement with their off-line lives, interests, and friends. And this is the second factor that limits young people’s interest in platforms like Second Life. Most of the social interaction in MMOGs takes place between people who often have little, if any, connection to each other in the off-line world. This feature violates the main reasons young people go online—to share their lives with people they know, trust, and care about.

As I explain in chapter 3, young adults consistently reject the idea of the Web as a “third place,” a scene for meeting new people. Furthermore, the typical young person we met consistently rejected the idea that online-only relationships are just as fulfilling as off-line relationships. Nearly seven in ten, or 68 percent, of our survey respondents disagreed with the idea that you can get to know someone better online than off-line. Heavy users of virtual worlds differ in this respect. Unlike the majority of young people who spend the bulk of their time online on social sites like Facebook, synthetic-world users are much more likely to believe that online relationships can be just as fulfilling as off-line relationships.

As of now, we simply do not see any evidence that young twenty-somethings are lining up to participate in virtual worlds that function, primarily, as gathering places rather than gaming spaces. At its core, virtual worlds designed for hanging out rather than participating in more collaborative forms of play are simply not the kinds of spaces that draw young people. So, for all the talk about the digital natives, young people’s lukewarm response to computer-generated fantasy worlds underscores a key point about their migration to the digital world: their enthusiasm for the social Web is less about the technology and more about connecting to the people that they know, love, and trust. For the majority of young people, the computer-mediated world is about being with real people rather than virtual personas, friends rather than strangers.