Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds

Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users’ lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, the author proposes adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix and outlines a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other and how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds.

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