Questing for Knowledge—Virtual Worlds as Dynamic Processes of Social Interaction

In this chapter I will discuss the nature of social interaction and game-play in the massively multi-player online game Everquest. Based on my studies of this particular type of virtual world, I will address the question of how the experience of participating in virtual worlds changes over the course of time and the implications of this on how we conceive virtual worlds from a design perspective. In parallel, I will also address some methodological implications of performing ethnographic studies in an environment where new levels of interacting with the world and its participants continuously reveal themselves— like new levels in a platform game. For social interaction to exist within a virtual environment there have to be social actors in it. This book as well as its predecessor [1] covers a wide range of cases of social interaction from separate individuals all the way up to large groups of people. In this volume, yet another dimension is added as this and Nick Yee’s (chapter 9) look at a fully three-dimensional graphical environment that attracts and supports participants on a massive scale averaging several thousands of participants in the same virtual world. In a previous essay (in [1]) I argued for the importance of an inside view in order to grasp the unique properties of the social environments of virtual worlds. In this chapter my focus is on the vantage point of a participant embedded in the world. I will describe the game from four different points in the process of progressing through the game as a player and through the empirical study as a researcher. These discrete reference points will then be connected in an attempt to reveal a richer picture of the processual qualities of virtual worlds in terms of understanding the object of study as well as the process of studying it.