Emergent Cultural Differences in Online Communities’ Norms of Fairness

Abstract

Unpredictable social dynamics can dominate social outcomes even in carefully designed societies like online multiplayer games. According to theories from economic game theory and evolutionary anthropology, communities that are otherwise identical can spontaneously develop emergent cultural differences. We demonstrate the emergence of norm diversity in comparable populations distributed across identical copies of a single multiplayer game world. We use 2006 data from several servers of World of Warcraft to analyze how social contracts about resource distribution converge within independent communities, while varying across them. We find wide-ranging diversity in the norms that communities consider standard, fair, and common, even where these norms are unenforcable and players face large incentives to deviate from them. By documenting how designed societies come to differ in undesigned ways, we present emergent cultural diversity as a distinguishing feature of human sociality and a major challenge for game designers.

The Ethics of Multiplayer Game Design and Community Management

“…These perspectives have thus emerged alongside more recent 'contextualist' analyses of multiplayer gameplay, in which the morality of in-game acts such as trash-talking [59] and player-killing [70] must be negotiated based on the particular context in which they occur, including the type of game being played and the consent of players involved [27,34]. At the same time, players themselves often disagree on the ethical status of in-game behaviours [19,37,80,84] and value different sorts of play [17,81]. These considerations shed light on the complicated context surrounding ethics and multiplayer game design.…”

"This Place Does What It Was Built For"

“…A whole literature has emerged around institutional analyses of the archetypal knowledge commons, Wikipedia [35,36,54,115], as well as peer production generally [9,104], with a later contribution by Hess and Ostrom analyzing online bioengineering databases [55]. Others have used the Workshop's resource management perspective to investigate loot distribution norms in the game World of Warcraft [99,107], self-hosted community servers [38], and online "dark institutions" like software pirate exchanges and hacker collectives [1,53]. There is growing interest in the potential of Workshop-style institutional analysis to serve digital institution design [26,[92][93][94], but explicitly design-oriented work is rare, and even less research has focused on the role of constitution-level rulemaking in digital institutional design.…”

Ludic Ethics: The Ethical Negotiations of Players in Online Multiplayer Games

“…Furthermore, there is an increasing awareness of the long-standing debates and ongoing 'boundary work' among players about what counts as acceptable behaviour in multiplayer games (Carter, Gibbs, & Arnold, 2015;Gibbs, Carter, Arnold, & Nansen, 2013), which have been described as 'moral economies' in which players value different kinds of play (Carter, 2020). Players can display a wide range of 'cultural norms' among different groups of players, even within a single game (Strimling & Frey, 2018).…”