Ethics in the Design of Virtual Worlds: An Ethnographic Examination of the Digital Hand at Work

University Of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee WI

Investigators

Abstract

Some of the largest and most viable online communities to date are currently emerging on the Internet landscape. Approximately 8 million people worldwide participate in them regularly, and the numbers are rising. These persistent, open-ended, graphically-intensive, and three- dimensional online games known as MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) have effectively become virtual worlds, rich and immersive enough to be platforms for the players' pursuit of social ties, romance, professional interests, and commerce. These pursuits, while tolerated and even encouraged by the worlds' makers (who obviously benefit from their customers' increased playing time), reach beyond the games' objectives, yet are nonetheless deeply shaped by an environment originally (or at least chiefly) designed to be just a game. The ethical implications are significant: If people are forging real and consequential social ties online within these worlds, then how is the design of the environments implicitly structuring these actions? Furthermore, how are the designers themselves situated in social processes, and what values and ethics characterize them? This project will employ ethnographic research techniques to follow the development of a major game title from conception to release. It will focus on this process of virtual world production with the primary objective of demonstrating the ways in which the process and its final product, the game code, evince social values. A Midwestern major game development company has agreed to participate in this research, but proprietary concerns prevent its identification at this stage of the proposal. Interest in the transformation of society through the advent of Internet connectivity is wide- ranging, being a subject of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others, primarily through the related interdisciplinary fields of the sociology of scientific knowledge and science and technology studies. This project will advance this understanding by inquiring into the designed nature of online worlds themselves. That is, rather than focusing on the experience of participants in these communities, this project will look at their production, and thereby reveal the key moments of contestation, decision-making, and computing practice that have heretofore been largely hidden from the view of scholars of online communities. Ethnographic methods are particularly suitable to capturing how ethics and values are (often implicitly) inscribed in the discourse and practices of social groups, and how they can change and emerge in the midst of pragmatic concerns, such as the collective task of creating a virtual world. This project will generate a book-length manuscript and a number of articles in peer-reviewed publications, as well as presentations at disciplinary and interdisciplinary conferences. But beyond the conventional venues this research will be disseminated in other ways, including through a website to accompany the book and in my ongoing contributions to a high-profile internet forum on virtual worlds. The programming process itself creates the opportunity for a new kind of archive, one which will contain each successive version of the game code. This will provide a lasting resource for further analysis, as well as be a resource for teaching in computer science courses on computer game design, three-dimensional design, texture mapping, and networking. In the social sciences, it would be a useful resource for graduate-level courses on collective decision-making and the production of technology.