I began to think about how “real” the virtual world1 six months ago, when I read a paper by Lehdonvirta, with the startling title, “Virtual Worlds Don’t Exist: Questioning the Dichotomous Approach in MMO studies”. I thought, of course they exist! I play in them! But when I dug into it, I found that much of what she said seemed to be obvious to me: that online gaming literature tends to be based on a real/virtual dichotomy; that this hasn’t been questioned; and that it is a false dichotomy.
This is not to say that utilizing the model of a dichotomy wasn’t initially necessary. In order to apply theories from the offline world to online communities, you need to prove that they function the same way; you make that proof best through comparisons and repeating your studies online.
However, after those initial process/general principle questions have been established, it becomes clear that simply porting theories over is inadequate. There’s a whole legion of other factors that (you’d know even through simple observation) impacts those online communities. And these impacts come from outside online. Carrying over offline theories and simply applying they gives you an incomplete picture. What you need is some way to allow that overlap between worlds. So I agree with:
other social worlds, such as families and workplaces, penetrate the site of the MMO and are permanently tangled with the player’s world. Research programs that approach MMOs as independent mini-societies are therefore flawed.
Thank you for making the argument for me, so I wouldn’t have to argue this in my paper.
Now what I would like to find is a way to adequately describe this multiple-social-planar interaction, and ideally it would already have been done.