The meaning of virtual life

Virtual communities – associations that use the Internet as an organizational base – have developed into a mass phenomenon.

Facebook, not a single virtual community but rather a (commercial) platform for many different virtual networks, has almost 70 million active users across the world. Along with all the private friendship networks, Facebook also accommodates some 55,000 networks formed by communities in a region, profession, workplace or school. Nearly half of all Facebook users visit the site at least once a day.
Facebook’s revenues for 2007 were about USD 150 million, with an estimated profit of USD 30 million. Judging from Microsoft’s purchase of 1.6 percent of Facebook for USD 240 million in October 2007, the total value of the company was estimated, at least by Microsoft, at around USD 15 billion, or 500 times its annual profit.

Blizzard, the company behind the online game World of Warcraft (WoW), announced that it now had more than 10 million subscribers at the beginning of the year.

As with Facebook’s users, not all 10 million WoW players are a single community. There are a variety of smaller, stratified communities in which the end user, the player, is perhaps part of a circle of a dozen friends or a guild with up to about a hundred players. 

One important difference is that players in an online world like WoW have a number of shared reference points in the virtual world they inhabit – the world of games – compared to users of social platforms like Facebook or MySpace. It makes it easier for a player in an online game to switch to another community in the game (from one server to another or from one guild to another). That reduces what everyone in the industry pays attention to, the “churn rate” or attrition rate – the percentage of users/subscribers lost over a given period of time. 

It is not publically reported what revenues at Blizzard are from WoW, but a regular subscription to WoW costs USD 15 a month. Vivendi Games, a subsidiary of the Vivendi Group – for which Blizzard, which also produces other games, is the flagship – had revenues last year of over EUR 1 billion.

Spontaneous communities

Facebook and WoW are examples of gigantic commercial virtual communities that have managed to keep things small-scale for their users both in terms of organizational structure and in the experience of their end users. Of course, there are millions of virtual communities on this smaller scale that use different forms of social software like chat rooms, mailing lists, blogs, Internet forums, wikis et cetera. People from broadly different parts of the world are brought together because they have common interests. A few years ago, the science fiction writer David Brin introduced the term “hobby tribes” to describe them.

Furthest down on the scale are the totally non-commercial virtual communities, extremely small and very short-lived, many times almost spontaneously produced based on a special interest or a special issue.  Obviously, these kinds have always been around in real life. But the Internet sharply reduces the costs of information and organization necessary to get a community like this going, in part by eliminating the geographic restrictions and reducing the costs of communication – from places to spaces, as it was phrased when the “new economy” was first discussed a decade ago.

A Swedish example of one such semi-spontaneously organized community on a single issue is “Save Us from Street Violence”, which was created in the autumn of 2007 by fifteen-year-old Anton Abele, as a Facebook group, in fact. The backdrop to this was the deadly assault on a teenager in the Kungsholmen neighbourhood of Stockholm. The group had over 100,000 members within a short period of time. On the basis of this initiative, a week or so after the attack, some 10,000 people gathered for a rally in central Stockholm. And in February 2008, a combined rally/workshop meeting was held at the Stockholm City Hall on the same theme, with some 1,000 people, including Crown Princess Victoria and Minister for Justice Beatrice Ask, in attendance. This semi-spontaneous virtual community, organized by one driven activist, gradually grew into a more clearly coordinated and in some respects institutionalized community/organization in the real world. Today, significantly, Abele, is involved with the association Stop Street Violence and its website.

Norberg’s “rally rags”

The way it works many times is that there is a single person who takes the initiative, like Abele, who becomes the focus of the mobilization and sometimes overshadows the spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless force that can arise through different online channels on a single issue.

An example of this kind of mobilization – which, significantly, was also considered by the object of the attention to be organized in this way – was the controversy involving the writer Johan Norberg and the cultural editor of the news daily Dagens Nyheter, Maria Schottenius.

Schottenius refused to let Norberg respond to an article in which the writer of the article had clearly lied about Norberg’s views. She then received numerous e-mails from DN readers. Some one hundred bloggers took up the matter, protesting that Norberg did not have a chance to refute the lies in the same pages they had been published in. 

After this, Schottenius wrote in an article that she was the object of an “intensified, manic e-mail attack laden with invectives that seems to be inspired by splatter films”. She thought that Norberg’s political ideology, supported by his “rally rags”, was expressed “in language whose drift was that I should be hanged and shot and that blood should flow”.

The journalist Anders Mildner wrote in the daily Sydsvenskan’s blog that Schottenius’ original text in DN ten years ago “had the chance to be the final word in the discussion. Today it is easy to see that this rhetoric falls flat, totally regardless of where one stands on the issue. The role of the media is no longer to play the chairman of the meeting and set a limit on the debate.” Mildner gave as an example of the change that had taken place how a blogger, Joakim Lundblad, had started an open blog on his own initiative, “Open letters to DN Culture”.  Anyone who wanted to could add their e-mail correspondence with DN, the DN Culture section and Maria Schottenius, so that everyone could “make their own judgement”, as Mildner wrote.

Lundblad explained that the aim of the blog was “greater transparency in the social debate” and “not to show that Schottenius could not possibly have received threatening letters”. During the week the blog was open, some thirty e-mail exchanges with Schottenius and other DN colleagues on the treatment of Norberg were added.

Schottenius, however, was not convinced that the reactions to the treatment of Johan Norberg that she was responsible for had arisen spontaneously. In an interview, she argued that “it’s a gigantic lobby organization that’s bombing me with hate mail.” On the question of whether she saw this as an organized campaign, she answered, “Yes, absolutely, there’s far too much all at one time for it not to be”.

Spontaneously formed movements united on a given issue or aim, or spontaneously generated, often evolutionary, structures, are a phenomenon well known to social scientists and in political contexts. The lower transaction and information costs online mentioned earlier make it easier today than ever for these kinds of movements to arise, form a structure and act, and this happens with higher numbers of participants and with a greater impact than before. The Internet is shifting from a mass media to a mess media, as Kevin Kelly, the author of New Rules for the New Economy, wrote ten years ago.

However, Schottenius’ reaction, that there was a “gigantic lobby organization” behind it, and her support for this thesis – “there’s far too much all at one time for it not to be” –  suggest that she has not realized the multifaceted power that spontaneous events in the virtual world can assume through the tools provided by the Internet.

Success and setback

Commercial “community” projects like WoW and Facebook are success stories, and semi-spontaneous and spontaneous communities are continually forming online to address increasingly focused issues.  At the same time, one can see how many once financially successful or promising projects have come to a standstill or are losing ground – not because they are administratively or financially mismanaged but because they are not able to keep their users.

Thus, in March 2008, it was revealed that an average of one out of four users had abandoned Swedish community sites like Lunarstorm, Hamsterpaj, Playahead and Bubblare since 2007. The loss for Lunarstorm was about 60 percent, for Bubblare (which is owned by Eniro) 50 percent and for Playahead close to 30 percent. The current owner has to date invested close to SEK 400 million in  Lunarstorm, which was up for sale when these lines were written. In early 2007, MTG acquired Playahead for roughly SEK 100 million. The reason for the losses for these community websites seems to lie in the growing competition from, indeed, international players like Facebook and Myspace.

But the choice of forum for a virtual social community from more of a fashion or trend perspective is also important. In early 2008, figures came out for the first time that showed that not even Facebook was immune to attrition. Between December 2007 and January 2008, the share of Facebook users in Britain, the website’s second largest market after the US, fell by 400,000 people, from 8.9 to 8.5 million. One explanation, from Nic Howell at the magazine New Media Age, concerned brand erosion, that the site was not as popular among its core of younger users:
“Social networking is as much about who isn’t on the site as who is – when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives.”

The online world Second Life, which has attracted so much attention from the media, is another virtual community that has encountered the same kind of brand erosion. In the virtual and commercial world that is Second Life, users can convert real money into virtual money, Linden dollars, and buy and sell land and other assets. The money is sold by the company in charge of this world, Linden Research. Initially, the media carried enthusiastic reports about people who not only made their living this way but could also become fairly wealthy. 

To be sure, Second Life by its own account has 13 million users, but there are no reliable figures on how many of these are active. However, statistics show that there are an average of about 40,000 users logged on at any single moment and that there are some 200,000 active users who devote more than one week a year of their existence to Second Life.

A large number of people in the real world have set up companies and organizations, and recently government authorities and states have established representation offices on the website. Sweden has a virtual embassy that is said to have about 300 visitors a day, which in this context should be considered a healthy number.

But the majority of all the spaces in the virtual world are completely void of people and, significantly, as recently as a year ago not one single legitimate company in the real world had made a net profit on its activities on Second Life. Still, this in itself is not a completely fair criterion for success, because some companies use their virtual offices and their virtual presence for purposes other than revenues like brand exposure or for internal activities. Regarding the Swedish embassy on Second Life, the Swedish Institute could also note that the installation and inauguration of the embassy by Foreign Minister Carl Bildt (represented by his avatar) generated a good deal of attention abroad as well.

The activities in Second Life that have generated profits are the sale of parcels of land, the production of avatar features, to some extent, and various forms of virtual sex services, as well as, of course, different kinds of fraud, especially via the private bank and exchange activities linked to real money/Linden dollars. As a result, Linden Research announced in January of this year that all banks in Second Life would be closed if they could not provide evidence that they were licensed to conduct banking activities in the real world as well. Prior to that, the company had prohibited the organizing of games of chance on Second Life.

In two online articles that generated considerable attention, the analyst and economist Randolph Harrison maintained that the economy in Second Life was a zero-sum game (all virtual money in the game had its origin in real money, and Linden Research is continuously adding its own money to Second Life). Harrison thought that Second Life was like a pyramid game or, more precisely, a high yield investment programme, HYIP, somewhat inaccurately described as a Ponzi scheme, after the American swindler active in the 1920s.
Harrison has extrapolated that Linden Research had to register close to 45 million unique visitors by year-end 2008 in order to sustain the current money economy in Second Life.

The alternative was to radically restructure it, for instance by devaluing the value of the virtual currency. Harrison subsequently proposed the name “Sad Life” for this virtual world. But it is most likely not the muddled economy and the disappointment over unmet expectations of virtually generated real wealth that are Second Life’s most serious problems. Nor is the main problem, by today’s measures, the inferior graphics and organic objects, which are immobile and slightly cubist (which is in part justified by the desire to reach as many users as possible who do not have access to high-speed broadband). Nor is the worst thing the complicated interface – acknowledged by even enthusiastic users – used to make virtual objects.

No, the main problem for Second Life is rather that there is nothing to do in this virtual world.
One can travel around and visit various places that have attracted coverage (like the Swedish embassy, which is vouched as one of the more advanced constructions in Second Life), see a large number of empty offices and buildings, end up at a few noteworthy dance clubs and turn down proposals for typical and atypical sexual services. (However, Linden Research has prohibited the practise of virtual rapes and virtual paedophilia as well as the transmission of real child pornography.) After that, in the best case scenario, one can find a group of avatars sitting around discussing something, but not doing much else.

Still, one clear advantage of Second Life is the many educational opportunities or seminars on offer – but at the same time, it should be noted that even private instructors who try to get paid for their services can barely support themselves with this. Second Life, and other virtual worlds like it, work best as gathering places for different kinds of events – seminars, organization or company meetings or performances announced in the real world that can be held online and where avatars can “see each other face to face” instead of communicating via a telephone conference call, in a chat room or via an expensive video conference.

But the fact is nonetheless that Second Life is a very desolate and thus uninteresting world – typically, the churn rate for Second Life is over 90 percent; that is, only ten percent of the people who have signed up use the site more than a couple of times.

The meaning of virtual life

Second Life’s underlying idea was to have participants create their own meaning in their virtual existence. So the challenge to commercial companies is to make activities that create meaning as widespread as possible so that they can make money off of them. 

For most people, meaning in life is created by overcoming challenges and doing so together with other like-minded people in relatively small groups – in a common destiny with people they know and like. From this perspective, virtual game worlds – which continuously provide players different types of tasks to carry out and challenges to overcome, which often cannot be successfully completed without the cooperation of others – are far more successful in creating meaning on a large, and financially exploitable, scale.

Games like World of Warcraft are structured so that players start at the beginner level, without skills, money or equipment, and gradually advance through the different levels. At the same time, given the way the game is set up, players are required to specialize both in their game roles and in other skills (for instance, the profession they choose to develop). Moving up through the different levels becomes a personal journey from rags to riches, and is best done in collaboration with other players. And the higher players go, the more difficult the challenges they can take on together with their fellow players.

There are groups, organizations and forums that build communities at a number of different levels in WoW. The simplest is often a group formed temporarily, a PUG (“pick up group”) of two to five people needed to complete a “quest” or to clear a confined area, an “instance” – that is, a game site that only the group in question can access.

There are also instances for groups of ten, twenty-five or forty players, known as “raid groups”. Because such large groups require clear leadership and coordination, they are formed by players who are part of a guild who knew each other previously and have also helped out in other contexts such as making items like weapons and equipment or special abilities associated with these items, “enchantments”.

Guilds, whose membership can range from ten to two hundred players, are hierarchical organizations, run by dedicated members who manage everything from job sharing to websites. They run the guilds as enlightened despots. A guild can be anything from a socially focused community to what are called “raid guilds”, with hardcore players who meet most days of the week with great discipline to play together for hours at a time. Guilds are thus not democratic structures with membership fees – although there are guilds that take fees for communal activities and purchases – or decision-making bodies. But if a despot becomes excessively capricious, the guild will quickly lose members. 

Most guilds are short-lived but some last for years. Some are limited in their recruitment of members to a special language area or region/country, whereas those consisting of older members often have an international recruitment base, and also seem to have more staying power. In many guilds, members meet once a year or so in the real world in different organized contexts. One of the international guilds for online gaming that I have belonged to had annual barbeques in the summer with subsequent overnight stays in various European countries, and anyone who could not or did not want to make it could eventually find out about the outings through reports and pictures, even videos, on the guild’s website.

In addition to “instances”, the game offers “arenas” and “battlegrounds” for the players to cooperate in. Arena teams are fixed constellations while battleground teams are players randomly brought together who have to work together against opponents, who in turn are randomly gathered into groups of ten to forty people.
For technical reasons, players in WoW are divided into several hundred servers of up to 20,000 players per server, and recently Blizzard also introduced game challenges that require the whole server to complete a number of quests in order to make new battlefields and arenas available. Nowadays, some players on a server also keep track of how their macro-community is doing in carrying out an extensive task related to other servers.

And everything is framed in a sweeping continuing story of a struggle between two alliances, “the Horde” and “the Alliance”, which in turn consist of four different “races” working together on each side – a story, true, that relatively few players follow in detail but one in which the contracting parties have clear identification marks, such as players from the Horde and the Alliance cannot communicate with one another in writing. (However, by using commands that convey emotions – “emotes” – which can convey anything from gratitude to disdain – a player indicates which opponent is his target and writes a command, like “/chicken”, upon which the person’s character runs around the opponent’s avatar with his hands on his hips and his elbows out, arms flexed, making clucking sounds.) 

Because WoW has expanded so rapidly in the past two years, Blizzard has introduced another way to retain new players. Advancement through the levels and even up to the highest level now goes much faster than before. Levels and areas that were previously hard to get to have been made easier to access. At the same time, in order not to lose experienced core players, new and more difficult areas have been introduced. Blizzard has thus been successful in taking great pains to facilitate – indeed, even force into existence – communities of players at various different levels and also make the game almost teleological, with constantly new goals that players can (will want to) try to achieve.

The economist Edward Castronova has written convincingly how virtual gaming worlds like WoW reintroduce play/games as an element of our existence, following Jean Piaget’s thesis that play is a critical aspect of our development. Castronova notes that the attractiveness of games is based on their providing a meaning in our virtual existence, completing tasks in cooperation with others. It is ironic that people who play these kinds of games are described as social misfits, Castronova writes.

That seems to be the recipe for success. What characterizes successful virtual communities online, from Facebook groups to spontaneous protest movements to guilds in gigantic role plays, is their ability to provide participants meaning with their social community – regardless of whether this creation of meaning lasts for a short or long time, regardless of whether it involves an organized or spontaneous activity, regardless of whether the aim is commercial or not, regardless of whether it involves fighting injustice and bringing about improvements in the real world or killing monsters and playing war in the virtual world. 
Not surprisingly, these are the same mechanisms that create meaning in the virtual world as in the real one – working together with like-minded people for a common purpose.