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My Virtual Life: or, how people learn to live and to trust inside virtual worlds
1. My virtual life
or, how people learn to live and to trust
inside virtual worlds
Aleks Krotoski
Department of Psychology
University of Surrey
2. This talk
Richard spoke about an example of trust
in virtual worlds: RMT
I’ll be explaining how people live in virtual
worlds, how they interact in virtual worlds
and how they grow to trust one another in
virtual worlds
3. Before I get ahead of myself
The differences between online and
offline:
Anonymity
Physical appearance
Physical proximity
Greater transience (more weak ties)
Absence of social cues
So how can we expect community to grow?
5. …or they can look like this:
London Memorial in the virtual world Second Life
Between 12-1pm on 7 July 2005, over 150 Second Life
residents visited. It was open for 7 days and racked up
thousands of visitors
Fewer than 10% claimed any British ties
Maker’s motivations were altruistic and purely community-
driven
6. Online community I
In traditional definitions of “community”, there’d
be no such thing in cyberspace
Tied to place, experience and artifacts
To misquote AOL ads, how can you fall for someone
you’ve never met?
But we know that’s not true
Chatrooms, forums, MySpace, Craig’s List, London
Memorial
These virtual worlds are the places which the
online communities are tied to, and they all rely
upon trust heuristics
7. Online community II
Because of their immense size, communities emerge as
sub-groups (guilds) in the virtual world population – it’s
an explicit part of the design – people must rely upon
one another to survive and advance
Form for the same reasons offline communities do:
Make friends, provide motivation, offer support, meet like-
minded others
They’ve also got their own unique purposes:
Raid, hunt, gather, ensure safety, divide the bounty of efforts
Whatever role trust plays in offline communities, it plays
in online communities because these interactions are
human-bound
8. Trust in virtual communities I:
we’re all in it together
Returning to Anonymity
Perceived similarity (levelling the playing field)
No social cues, so lots of uncertainty
Expectations of openness and honesty engenders a
culture of mutual sharing
Relevant Social Psychological dimension of trust
Similarity of goals and values
Expectations of future interaction
9. Trust in virtual communities II:
Actions speak louder than words
You don’t go into virtual worlds to just
“be”
These are task-oriented environments, with
high levels of commitment required
In the goal-oriented spaces, everyone has a
role in the social fabric – ownership
Trust develops as a result of historical
experience. Which leads to…
10. Trust in virtual communities III:
Reputation, reputation, reputation
It’s the only real
currency in virtual
worlds
Reputation is the basis
for all relationships in
virtual worlds
Think eBay
Visual heuristics of
trust: players can tell
an avatar’s reputation
and affiliations just by
looking
11. Trust in virtual worlds III:
Reputation (continued)
Trust is based upon
past experience…
…which is either based upon functional goals or pre-existing
social relationships…
…or some kind of disinterested third party (e.g., Craig’s List or
MySpace)
And speaking of social networking applications,
the same principles work in-world too
Finally, you must comply:
A non-official policing force in a space where an
official police is absent
The emphasis is on friendship and dedication to the
group
12. Trust in virtual communities
III: Branding
RMT leads to business models based upon trust in a
brand
More important in social virtual worlds where RMT is the
game
13. In Sum
Virtual communities operate in very similar ways to
other communities – both on and offline
They bring together distributed individuals based on
common experience, motivations and reputation
This is particularly true for virtual world participants
because of the explicit social design of the software
There is a great potential for crossover between the
two spheres, BUT any new implementations should
be carefully integrated within the existing social
norms of these valuable virtual communities lest
trust be undermined.
14. Thank you
Aleks Krotoski
a.krotoski@surrey.ac.uk