In their continued quest to plumb the mysterious depths of human interactions, some sociologists have stopped watching people—and started watching their avatars. And the US government is paying them to do it.

While playing World of Warcraft and traipsing through Second Life might not sound like traditional academic disciplines, they are increasingly important for research into virtual communities. This burgeoning subdiscipline even has its own publication, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, edited by Jeremiah Spence.

What gets studied? Gold farming, "goon culture," griefing, entrepreneurial activity, intimacy, even "The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life," which appeared in the most recent issue of the journal.

That last piece, by Professor Shaowen Bardzell of Indiana University, relied on "two years of ethnographic observation, interviews, and artifact analysis" to suggest that "BDSM fantasy in Second Life is far more than a sexual pastime... I am more than ever convinced that all subcultures have the capacity to incubate innovation in a user-created content, and BDSM is successful particularly because of its combination of a potent visual language and the intense personal desires it stirs."

Bardzell spent many hours analyzing "hundreds of virtual photos taken from the public profiles of Second Life's BDSM practitioners" to learn more about how people presented themselves publicly.

In a paper presented last month at an Association of Computing Machinery conference, a team from Indiana University that included Bardzell conducted in-game World of Warcraft interviews to learn more about how real intimacy develops in virtual worlds—and how that world blends with the physical world. The result was "The Rogue in the Lovely Black Dress: Intimacy in World of Warcraft."

The paper found that many real-world patterns of intimacy formation are recreated on the virtual stage. One interviewee recounted, "I and a guy I liked spent a lot of time flirting in game. One evening we discovered an abandoned hut near Ironforge [a major city in WoW] and spent the whole evening with our avatars cuddling on the bed just touching. I really felt close to him and didn't notice time passing."

But virtual worlds also create novel situations. "Originally, the guy... was talking to me a lot," wrote one man, "but I didn't realize that he was a guy, cause his avatar was a girl... It's a big joke with us really, because his girlfriend/fiancée thought I was hitting on him, and the whole time I thought he was a girl. Anyway, we all reconciled the situation, and we are still, what I like to call, friends to this day."

Observing the wang ba

This is the new face of sociology and anthropology, and it's more mainstream than you might think. In 2008, for instance, the University of California's Bonnie Nardi received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to study American WoW players and their use of game mods, after having already performed similar research in China (PDF).

Bonnie Nardi

In 2007, Nardi and several other professors went to China to study virtual worlds (Intel was a sponsor), and "for six weeks we interviewed and observed gamers in their favorite play locations including Internet cafés, student dormitories, and homes."

They found that even virtual worlds had a strong real-world component; many Chinese WoW players prefer to play the game in Internet cafes where they might see friends or guild members, rather than at home, even when they have ample computing equipment.

"Gaming in the wang ba [Internet café] was experienced in a hybrid ecology in which the digital space of the game blended with the physical space of the café," wrote the team. "Players commented on important aspects of the physicality of the wang ba, remarking that they enjoyed the provision of food, soft drinks, cigarettes, and air conditioning which afforded relief from the summer heat. Sometimes odd or humorous juxtapositions of the physical and virtual occurred as at one Internet café at the train station in Hanghzou, which offered foot massage and Internet access right next to each other."

Such research also aimed to get at the different ways that Chinese and American users played the game. For instance, a Chinese player named Chenguang told the team, "My guild members and I play combat and then we rest and look at the area together. We explore the graphics and wander through different areas. To get equipment is a lot of work. It is very tiring. Looking at the scenery is recreational."

When you realize that WoW has twice as many worldwide subscribers as Scotland has people, it suddenly makes more sense to spend resources trying to understand a group this large—and the federal government has been doing exactly that.

Don't tell Tom Coburn



The National Science Foundation has been riding the virtual worlds train for years. Since 2007, it has passed out $378,644 to a Carnegie Mellon University prof who wanted to look at why virtual communities so often fail—and why big successes like Wikipedia and WoW persist.

"Because online groups have high failure rates," said the grant proposal, "knowledge about the factors that underlie their effectiveness is critical for designers and managers."

The NSF gave a University of Nevada-Reno professor $90,000 to develop a prototype Second Life client accessible to the blind (yes, really). According to the pitch, "The prototype client will initially allow blind players to navigate the environment using voice commands alone; it will then be enhanced and extended, as time and resources allow, so as to enable these players to interact in meaningful ways with other players."

The project was designed to have implications for not only WoW, but also for games in general. "Voice navigation can make first person shooters or 3D adventure games accessible to physically disabled players," says the grant. "The PI [Primary Investigator] will take advantage of his experiences in this project to contribute to the formulation of accessibility guidelines for games, similar in spirit to those developed by the W3C for websites, which will enable future games to be developed in an inclusive way for the benefit of all members of society."

And a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team picked up $350,000 (courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) to investigate "research ethics for Internet based studies."

Most academic research work involving human subjects has to pass muster by an Institutional Review Board at each school to make sure people are not being mistreated, but how do existing standards for research translate into "participant observation of virtual worlds," in-game chat interviews, and the use of "profiles from social networking sites to analyze behavior and communication patterns"?

(An explanation of the Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) reference: Coburn has been pushing to strip "wasteful" funding from the NSF grant process, and last year he went after the entire field of political science [PDF]. If he didn't like $50,000 going to a conference on how YouTube affected the 2008 Presidential campaign, he sure won't be pleased to see an anthropology of WoW. His amendment to strip the funding was defeated.)

Plenty to say

The results of all this work can be seen in more than academic papers and conferences; increasingly, they are turning into books from top academic publishers. 2008 brought us Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press).

That same year, MIT Press put out Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader. According to the book's description, "The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design...

"The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world—exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a 'capitalist fairytale' and the game's construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; [and] aspects of play, including 'deviant strategies' perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers."

Contributors come from fields like "game studies, textual analysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies."

2009 gave us World of Warcraft and Philosophy, a book that asks questions like, "Does the Corrupted Blood epidemic warn us of future public health catastrophes? What are the dangers when real life is invaded by events in the game? What can our own world learn from Azeroth’s blend of primitivism and high-tech?"

In March of this year, MIT published The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World, a book in which sociologist William Sims Bainbridge argues that "WoW can be seen not only as an allegory of today but also as a virtual prototype of tomorrow, of a real human future in which tribe-like groups will engage in combat over declining natural resources, build temporary alliances on the basis of mutual self-interest, and seek a set of values that transcend the need for war." Who knew that the world of tomorrow would look so much like Azeroth?

And coming in June, Bonnie Nardi will distill her WoW work into a book from the University of Michigan Press called My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft.

So if you're one of those WoW veterans who has put entirely too much time into Blizzard's virtual world, take heart—enter a grad program and you can chalk all that time up to "dissertation research."