Everyone remembers the Ironforge Plague, back when Zul’Gurub was new and some enterprising raiders brought the Curse of Corrupted Blood back from fighting Hakkar, and in doing so turned the Undercity and Ironforge into a scene from a charnel house. You remember it: Skeletons lining the hallways of every urban locale, the plaintive cries of the newbies as they died matched in intensity only by the laughter of the high-end hunters who brought the curse back with them by stashing their infected pets in ZG and then releasing them in IF. At the time I recall hearing that the Centers for Disease Control were excited by this story as a way of using virtual worlds as a way of understanding the spread of disease. And a couple of months ago Elizabeth alerted me to the article in Nature in which a couple of epidemiologists discussed exactly this idea in some detail.

Ok, so let’s begin with the Problem with Hakkar’s Blood. This is just another way of saying that we have to be careful about draw real world conclusions from the actions of players in virtual worlds. The milieu of all virtual worlds is different from the real world, the stakes are different, the player base is unrepresentative of real world societies, etc etc. So it’s a mistake to conclude from the Ironforge Plague that people find it amusing in the real world to infect others with a fatal disease. Coz, you know, they don’t. The natures of the conclusions we can draw from any study of the virtual world are radically circumscribed. We can certainly conclude that, e.g. “Some people playing WoW find it funny to watch noobies of their own faction die in the hallways as a result of an overly-strong debuff.”

Which leads onto the issue of “computational social science,” and the questions I have of you. I think that Dmitri “Catass” Williams was the first person to suggest that we should create two virtual worlds where all-but-one of the starting conditions are the same. This would mean that we could examine player behavior under controlled conditions, and could generate useful conclusions about the significance of the “dependent variable”, i.e. the only one which differs between the two worlds. So we might have two worlds, one where certain types of communication were possible, and the other one lacking it. We could start both worlds, and then see how they differed as a result of this one difference. I think I was the first person to call this “computational social science” [fn3] because it seemed to me to be roughly analogous to the development of computational physics, which added a brand new methodology to the previously exclusive duo of theoretical and experimental physics.

One obvious—but unsatisfactory answer—is only to ask questions where the significance of the answer is confined to the virtual world (or even more constrained, only the specific virtual worlds under study). So we could create two virtual worlds where, say, the only difference was the presence or absence of an auction house, or real estate, or soul bound items, and then examine relative user enjoyment of each world, or retention rates, user churn, etc etc. While the answers here might be of interest to the developers, it doesn’t tell us anything interesting about human behavior in general (i.e. in the “real world”). The more difficult approach is to do what Lofgren and Fefferman are on about, and what I take Robert to be investigating in his work.

Although inevitably it was a journalist who interviewed me, used the expression, and then failed to even mention that he had spoken with me. I love the hours and hours that I’ve spent giving “deep background” to journalists in this area, only to fail to be quoted. Truly, I don’t miss those wasted hours at all. Although the recent announcements of Metaspace, Croquet, Sun, etc etc do provide some indication that this might become easier over time. Rodgers and Hammerstein's popular portrayal of the 19th century American mid-west depicted strain amongst rural countrymen. The Farmer and the Cowman seems prescient of intra-alliance strains in an online game called Eve-Online in the 21st century: One man likes to push a plough, the other likes to chase a cow, but that's no reason why they can't be friends. Noting the tensions separating friends is useful for two reasons.

Consider then the house they have built together. Let us call the cowman the professional (Player-versus-Player) PvPer. She is the combat jock who will volunteer for a gang for a four to eight hour stint on weekend nights chasing cows until her horse is shot out from under her. She protects the alliance borders, conducts raids to harass enemies and volunteers for foreign expeditions to assist other alliances in sometimes far away places - thereby earning "diplomatic capital" for her tribe. In other words, she likes "pew pew" (2nd definition) and spends a great deal of time doing it and is good at it. All alliances dread not having enough of her stuff around. Then there are the farmers, the builders and the users of the machinery of the alliance system. They are the miners, the manufacturers, the logisticians who feed and run and maintain POS (Player Owned Stations).

They can be composed of many "corporations" - which are analogs to "guilds" in other MMORPGs. In the NBSI discussion we started to look at alliance security from the perspective of group relationships and how that translated into rules-of-engagement dilemmas for individuals. In Scarcely rare we started to parse the economics and security underpinnings of the alliance system resource game. Both of these posts depict the alliance system as an adaptation to a stressful PvP (Player-versus-Player) environment wrought by game design. Alliances have many different types of players pursuing different game interests that can come into conflict under stress. From the perspective of an alliance, the diversity of types of players is vital to its success. Yet, the challenge is then how to manage cohesion given diversity exposed to stress. A reader of the earlier discussions will note that alliances employ multiple layers of defense to protect their territory:

In Eve-Online a "carebear" is mildly derogatory term used to describe a player who is seen as forsaking in-game PvP (combat) for the more sedentary arts - such as PvE (Player-verus-Environment, see fn2.), mining, manufacturing, research, station logistics, or the trade-craft. In NBSI I focused on mining as the primary economic activity of alliances. It is foundational, but it is not the only building block of economic power: manufacturing is as important, research (blueprints) is a critical enabler for many alliances, and so too is trade. It might have been more accurate to have said instead: "The bread and butter of these alliances is the territory they control: ...From territory comes the space and resources to empower carebears to drive economic systems that can build ships to fight wars."

In preparation, and to participating in long-winded operations (that can run many hours), as well as a fluency with tactics and equipment. This can, I think, discourage casual dalliance. Command positions are an exaggerated example of PvP specialization. Within any alliance there seems to be a small circle of players who share/rotate the "FCs" (Field Commander) positions. Selection of members of the circle is merit-based: they tend to be good at it. So critical are FCs (and as illustration of how non-fungible they are as a resource), to my experience it is not uncommon for an alliance to retreat from an engagement if qualified FC's are not available in-game rather than trying to work with a less experience player and risking a fleet. This decision process can be as much bottom-up as top-down: when trying to get players to "gang up" (in the terminology) for supporting missions, the absence of experienced/qualified leadership can discourage volunteers.

Small alliances - or those without a lot of PvP expertise under their belt - seem more likely to risk over-working a small experienced PvP pool. This leaves them more vulnerable to not having the right players available at critical moments. It also encourages - in my opinion - a strategy pitfall, to overreach. An easy win when the entire team is online is vulnerable to loss when they log-off and there isn't a talent pool to back their gains. Large alliances would appear to have a considerable advantage with their larger pool of PvP players. In addition a larger alliance is often more able to strategically recruit corporations with players from across the (real world) globe to insure a more even distribution of players online.