[Literature] On virtual economies

On Virtual Economies by Castronova in 2003 points at the growing importance of VW on real-life society. Similarly to real-life, people live, consume and generate profit in VW. However, the software nature of VW means controlling the market is much more efficient for the regulating authorities. In cyberspace, the coding authority does indeed have the power to create and destroy any amount of any good, at virtually zero cost. What are the possible evolutions for these VW economies? How do VW economies influence RL economies?

Establishing an economic model of VW

Economists are forced to recognize that VW are not only mere entertainment, they also have a RL impact on people. Indeed, economists do not make any difference between real and virtual items or properties: if people are willing to incur large time and money costs to live in a virtual world, economists will judge that location to be lucrative real estate, regardless of the fact that it exists only in cyberspace. For economists, our behaviors follow constraints: we cannot have everything we want. The tighter these constraints are, the less choice we have. Presumably, people feel happier when they are less constrained. However, a MMOG providing too little challenge is not constraining enough, and people get bored quickly. Example/comparison: people prefer a 100-piece puzzle than a 2-piece puzzle. Castronova deduces a function regulating hours of game time for gamers based on the 3 following assumptions:

• People do things that make them feel happier
• confronting and overcoming challenges makes people happy
• higher rewards is preferred, holding challenge levels equal

This function shows several particularities. Gamer can be willing to pay for tougher constraints. Rich people can play because they can afford it. Poor people can play because they are not sacrificing very much income to do so. However, those not rich nor poor may be very sensitive to the impact of gaming time. Some people make money from their virtual activities: there is a substitution between Earth work and game time that depends, to some extent, on the financial rewards available in each. The economic phenomenon emerging is: Game time is a substitute for other consumption goods, and it is also a substitute for work time.

Many actors in the VW market of the future

The development of VW companies of the future can be classified in three domains: connections (Internet, wireless), interfaces (voice chat, body-motion detection) and content (media delivery services, game retailers). A monopoly may emerge because our time in virtual worlds is more valuable if everyone we know is in the same world [see Facebook...] and the more players a VW has, the more attractive it is. However, several reasons limit the possibility of a monopoly:

• People have different tastes, and they go in VW that fulfill their needs. A VW so big it would satisfy everyone would be too expensive to build and maintain.
• Congestion in a VW limits its number of simultaneous users
• It seems players get attached to their avatars as they get stronger and build their stories. However, incentives could be given to switch from a VW to another: in Ultima, you can directly buy your levels; in Camelot, you can start a new avatar at level 20 if you have already gotten one to level 50.
• the star phenomenon widespread in artistic markets: If a company designs a better game, it will attract players

The impact of VW on RL societies

The fact that labour hours that were once producing automobiles are now producing avatars does not mean anything about the level of wealth in society. Online economies do not belong to any country. Hence if economic activities move from RL to VW, countries would seem to be in recessions or depressions because state taxes would not bring as much as they did, and people would still use public infrastructures (roads, social welfare). Poor people may find VW attractive because they could earn more money in them than IRL. It would cost nothing to rich people to travel between RL and VW. New statistics and economic management policies may have to be developed

Who regulates VW economies? At the moment, game companies are not taken as legally responsible by RL law for what happens in their worlds - video games are speech. The EULA and ToS restrict users' rights, and profits drive the company. Hence, some players complain (more or less uselessly) on forum boards after patches and updates. RMT is another governance issue in which companies are the only ones to decide. Buying avatars or items from other players with real money frustrates the players who do not spend money in RMT. But players are not serfs. They have both voice and exit as options for resistance.

Bonus: differences between RL and VW economies

Unlike IRL, in VW ...

• It may make sense to control some prices.
• Players must have something to do or they will be bored: Work is good.
• increases in per-capita wealth [...] will lower the challenge level of the game: Growth can be bad.
• Avatars' abilities can change a lot over time and the number of connected avatars fluctuates.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 3/3

This post is the last of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in the second part and this last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Discussion

Most of the time, the two marketers have strongly different strategies. But it happens that they agree on particular domains such as niche markets or lay offs. Their opinions also often differ about general topics such as respect or misunderstanding.

Image and communication

(Data)
Unlike Godin the RL marketer, Gevlon the VW marketer does not rely on his image to sell his products. This is particularly obvious when looking at the "Celebrity", "Offering Gifts" or "Donations" quotes, and when observing how they have decided to manage their increasing number of blog followers. At a certain point, managing their community has started to consume them a lot of (their precious) time. On the one hand, Seth Godin, careful with his image, disabled the comments on his blog so that he does not have to moderate or answer them. On the other hand, Gevlon stated he would stay quite involved in the moderation of his blog comments (I delete troll comments) and skim through his followers' mails (I'll have a very effective and anti-social mail policy [...] I know that I'll lose some readers because of that. But my own time is more important than reader count (especially when readers are in pretty large supply).). While Seth Godin keeps thanking his readers, Gevlon admitted that Most of my readers are not idiots and lot of them don't like me at all, they come here to bitterly argue and troll.

Moreover, while Godin promotes respect, tolerance and sharing knowledge, Gevlon pretends that business tricks are kept secret and he does not care about treating someone an idiot (see the "Sharing strategies" and "Respect" quotes). But actually, Gevlon shares if not all at least some of his strategies with his readers. So I think that both Gevlon and Godin have the same goal (keeping the blog followers), but they achieve it through different communication strategies (inspirational, pleasant and agreeable versus selfish, meritocrat and cynical).

Anonymous strategies

(Data)
Back to marketer strategies, a successful WoW marketer does not own a loyal customer base. When they need a particular item, Auction House buyers take the cheapest and do not really care for the vendor's name. This particularity echoes the unique rules in WoW economy mentioned by Gevlon: WoW has no second-hand economy mostly because of soulbound items, and no cartels are dictating prices because avatars' needs are not matter of actual life and death. Consequently, I could only find basic "anonymous" economic strategies shared between the two marketers.

First, niches are considered as successful economic strategies for both RL and VW marketers. Niches are small by definition, but small is larger than tiny, and potentially pays more. Both marketers agree that even though they pay less than mainstream marketing, niches are free from competition and easier markets because the customer base relies on the (most of the time) single vendor's products.

Second, choosing to sell in markets where the supply does not meet the demand is another strategy shared between the two. Gevlon explains it very simply at the end of a post. Let us say one vendor has a monopoly and sells overpriced items. The possible reasons for monopolies detailed by the two marketers are very similar. The main difference between RL and VW concerning monopolies is that in VW, monopolists can be pushed out of market. In WoW, a smart marketer simply enters a market in flooding it with lower-than-monopolist's but still high-priced items. This flood forces the former monopolist to buy all his/her concurrent's items to keep the monopoly. This means, the newcomer is selling to the former monopolist, hereby making profit! Seth Godin explains that for "nice" RL items or services (eg luxury hotels), customers are ready to pay the intrinsic "extra" for the "nice", but vendors can still make huge benefits. This does not seem to apply in WoW: any marketer can jump in the gap between the median/normal price and the current higher price and make profit, ruining other marketers profits. This strategy and undercutting make it usually rare for marketers to gain on mainstream "nice" virtual goods (eg glyphs).

Third, both marketers recognize that the customer is king. It is useless to try to sell unappropriate products to your customers. It is even more difficult to sell to people who do not want to buy your products, more particularly in VW where drinking water is not a matter of life and death...

Limitations

This study examined only two marketers. Even though each of them was supposed to be a somewhat representative sample of his respective marketer population, the samples' very small size raise obvious external validity issues. However, given the short time allocated to this study, I could only do with these small samples. I recognize that some WoW marketers disagreed with some of Gevlon's strategies, and Gevlon adressed some of them. While Gevlon does not hide his fight against "socials", Markco, a rival WoW marketer of Gevlon, claims his social side loud and clear: Don't Be Anti-Social says the left-wing panel of his blog. But at the same time, Markco wrote a book about how to make gold in WoW, and he certainly wants people to buy it. Yet another marketing blog used to effectively get customers ...

Still about external validity threats, I do not think this study relied on "perishable" materials (ie quotes that are not valid anymore). A few quotes from Seth Godin date from several years ago (2005) but I do not think that RL marketers change their opinion so quickly about efficient marketing strategies. As for VW marketer strategies, it is very possible that they change very often: one can use patches to make profit (buying in mass when cheap and selling after a patch when it becomes more interesting) and above all, one has to permanently come up with new strategies (because A single guy being aware of the trick can ruin it for you). However, all Gevlon's quotes but one are dated 2009 or 2010, so I think the collected quotes are still relevant today.

On his blog, Seth Godin has been talking about marketing for years, but he has also been effectively marketing (if not his company's products, at least his image). Gevlon has rejected advertising on his blog several times because he presumably simply wants to spread the goblinish widsom: Spreading goblinish ideas is a very selfish move: I convince people not to waste gold and time to M&S in the game. [...] "I want my hard-earned money to be mine. I don't want to support complete strangers just because they are poor." If enough people will say that, the world will be a much better place. As seen in the mapping framework, the motivations of the observed samples matter a lot. Indeed, keeping in mind throughout this study that the two marketers had somewhat different motivations helped me be particularly cautious when picking quotes, especially when dealing with the image and communication strategies.

The line was sometimes blurred between marketer strategies (the study interest), effectively marketing (eg "get my new book!") and blog followers management (eg "morons of the week"). This is a relatively small threat to reliability as I have been following these two blogs for over 6 months, and I have learned to detect when each of them looks for what. For instance, I realized that 2002 articles from Godin contain more links to/comments about external sources than nowadays's articles, and Gevlon's September 2008 articles had a less cynical tone and nearly each of them contained WoW everyday life screenshots. Even some of Gevlon's rants about bad groups were softer (well OK, World of Retardcraft was a particularly harsh post...). I guess people tend to speak more about themselves when they multiply by 100 their number of readers.

One can argue that me picking up myself particular post quotes to make my point introduces a severe bias. I think it was not: if we take a blog as a long and recurrent interview about various topics, quoting particular article lines was no different from selecting excerpts from traditional interviews. At the first glance, I found analyzing blog articles was a methodology that gave even more freedom to the analyzed individuals than unstructured interviews. Indeed, these bloggers have been writing spontaneously about what they want. I was definitely not obtrusive and there was no possible Hawthorne effect. However, there was no control of the data materials.

Finally, I have only considered the anonymous and somewhat basic Auction House trade chanel as it was the only one mentioned by Gevlon. I did not look at other possible trade chanels (friends, guild ...). I might be wrong, but I do not think that VW marketers can massively use other chanels than the one specifically designed for trading by the game designers, ie the Auction House for WoW. I agree that for Second Life, where people sell goods they created themselves to each other, one should not only take into account the B2C trade chanels, but also the C2C ones.

Conclusion

I have tried to keep in mind the mapping principle framework suggested by Williams throughout the study. Although the methodology of this short comparison of RL and WoW marketer strategies could largely be improved, I have found interesting mapping and non-mapping results in the direcionality VW to RL. Cutomer relationships do not exist in WoW because the current trade system was designed so that consumers can buy the cheapest item from any one at any time, independently of their previous purchase. However, some WoW strategies mentioned by Gevlon such as niches marketing seem to map to the RL strategies mentioned by Godin.

I do not pretend having done any top-research-quality work with this short study. Although I have tried not to spend too much time on this post, I have also tried to be as critical as possible, particularly concerning the methodology. Collecting quotes from blog posts was much more difficult than collecting data from interviews. Google Search mastery and Google Reader sometimes helped finding relevant posts, but this study took very VERY much time and did not bring that many satisfying results.

In the end, I think the mapping framework helped keeping in mind particular issues (eg motivations), but I do not think it should be taken as an article template to follow blindly.

Edit: Tobold, a WoW player, found in January 2010 that current posts from Gevlon contradict the ones Gevlon posted a year ago.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 2/3

This post is the second of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. The first part deals with the methodology, I put the data in this post, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

I have found for each topic one quote from each of the observed marketers. These topics can be considered as my dependent variables, my independent variable being RL versus VW. I have divided topics into two broader areas: "Image and Communication" and "Anonymous strategies". I will refer to these areas later in the discussion section.

Image and communication

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Offering Gifts	The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. [...] Plus, giving a gift feels good. in The hidden power of a gift	In best case, giving gifts is just as good for the group as not giving. In the average case it produces some waste. In worst case: wastes all value. in Presents!
Donations	I want to send you a copy of Linchpin (at my expense) three weeks before anyone else can buy one. [...] The first 3,000 people who make a donation to the Acumen Fund (at least $30) get one in Get a review copy of my new book	all of the guys giving him [Kungen, a famous WoW guild leader,] gold are not premiere raiders wanted to get some tips [...] They were morons. in Celebrity
Celebrity	Most marketers are opening acts. [...] Some marketers are rock stars. [...] I just went to see Keller Williams in concert. Without a doubt, he's a genius and a rock star. [...] If he was selling something, I'd buy it. in Opening acts and rockstars	The celebrity followers are a masterpieces of stupidity. What does a goblin do if he sees a stupid? Takes his money! [...] The celebrity industry is a great indicator of human stupidity. in Celebrity
Sharing strategies	Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you. from How to get traffic for your blog	no one will teach you the recent business tricks, partly because you would use it against them, and also because they are usually immoral from Surgeons and goblins
Respect	it doesn't matter who's "right". What matters is that giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them with respect is not only more fun, it works better too. from You can always be mean later (respect works)	I have no problem telling someone that "you are a useless dead weight and I want you out of my instance, idiot" from Women and hearts
Customer service	Call your customers. Or write to them. [...] You'll end up doing a lot for your customers. Which is a wonderful privilege. Even for those that don't reciprocate. in Easiest cheap way to dramatically increase sales	Standard M&S letter with the standard answer by Nicciter of Smolderthorn-US. Someone could make an addon to answer this automatically from Morons of the week
Misunderstanding	It's almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time. So misunderstandings occur. [...] If we're engaged with a stranger or someone we don't trust, we assume the worst. The challenge, then, is to earn the benefit of the doubt. in Benefit of the doubt	he [another WoW marketer] offered a shady virus-ad [about WoW gold techniques], and when I declined that, he claimed that he's just been "misunderstood" [...] While this trick seems lame, I guarantee that it's not. Social people find it very hard to look someone's eyes and say: "you are lying!". They usually accept that "misunderstanding" happened. in No means no

Anonymous strategies

Topic	Godin says	Goblin says
Choosing a niche	The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there's less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it's cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they're choosing to pay attention. from The long tail and the dip	The best things about niche markets is that no one cares for them. You mostly run without any competition. So you can list lot of items at once without fear for undercutting. [...] If you find a niche, go for it. It's all yours. from Niche markets
Niche size	It's entirely possible that you will choose a niche that's too small. It's much more likely you'll shoot for something too big and become overwhelmed. When in doubt, overwhelm a small niche. from Make the world smaller	If you need a better item, you may find a niche producer who sells a high-end product. Unfortunately they are extremely expensive, exactly because they have to make profit from a smaller customer base. from Premium products for valued customers
Monopolies	There are three things that led to the monopolies we now enjoy: 1. The FCC limited the number of TV and radio stations in every market [...] 2. Copyright ensures that we can charge a lot [...] 3. The limited number of physical distribution outlets [...] guarantees that distributors with clout get more shelf space. from Monopolies seven years later	There are some cases when the monopoly works. * [...] If you are the only one on the server who have the recipe [...] * The market is about to shift, usually because of a patch. This case the "monopolist price" is actually the "new market price". [...] * Market of the fools: you can be a monopolist if your buyers are plain idiots. from Monopoly
Unanswered demand	if all I want, the only extra, is for someone to be nice to me when I visit your business, how much extra does that cost? [...] I think there's a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing). Smells like an opportunity. from How much extra for nice?	most of my profit comes from "top-scanning": seeking items that are mostly overpriced. If the auctions of item X are listed between 150% and 999%, then it's an item with increased demand. I find a way to supply to this increased demand. I find a way to craft the item in need and sell it in this boosting market. from Invisible Hand
Forcing consumers	People don't adapt to what you make, they adopt it. They can't be forced to adapt, so they won't. from Five common cliches (done wrong)	We must keep in mind that we are not needed. So we can't dictate prices. Our items may be wanted by players, but they can live without it. from Unique rules in WoW economy

You can read the discussion, limitations and conclusion here.

Mapping Marketers: Godin versus Goblin - 1/3

This post is the first of a series of three in which I am trying to map WoW marketer strategies to RL ones based on two marketer blogs. This first part deals with the methodology, the second part contains the data, and the last part contains the discussion, limitations and conclusion.

Methodology

Following my last post about the Mapping principle, I tried to use, throughout this entire post (and the next one), the framework suggested by Williams to map marketers' behaviors. A few obvious questions came to my mind very quickly. Could a successful RL marketer be also successful in VW? What about the opposite? If there is no direct mapping, are there similarities between the two? These questions are too wide to be magically answered in one blog article. In fact, trying to answer these big broad questions require a minimum of expert RL economists, VW social scientists, VW economists and a few years of journal publications. I do not pretend being able to play all these roles, particularly for a single blog post. So I decided to simply look at what RL and VW marketers say about their business. No better place than blogs!

Crawling all possible blogs from RL and VW marketers to collect data would have taken really much time. Also, I planed to write a post and not a whole 10-page research paper, so I have looked for one representative marketer of each kind. I have chosen to follow Seth Godin's blog for the RL marketer, and Greedy Goblin for the VW marketer. I have been following both of these blogs for at least six months. Both are intense bloggers - they post every day - which means they provide a lot of data to analyze.

To be more explicit about the directionality of this study, I tried to detect if VW marketer strategies map RL ones. That is to say, if the real impacts the virtual (direction is offline to online). To my mind, it is very unlikely that VW economic strategies have been mapped to RL strategies. However, there might be a very interesting bi-directional connection between some RL and VW consumer behaviors (eg impulse purchase or conspicuous consumption), but this might be the topic of another post!

In VW, and more particularly in WoW, a marketer (also called gold maker in WoW) has to react to other marketers' actions and price fluctuations at the Auction House (a server-wide Wall Street). Consequently, even though he/she has to care for other players, a VW marketer is the only one who chooses which strategy to follow. Hence I consider VW marketers can be treated as individual entities. As for the RL side, I have only taken into account the RL marketer's opinion as an individual, not as a company spokesperson or a member of a group of RL marketers. However, I think it could be very interesting to compare RL marketer teams to VW cartels.

I should also explain how I compared topics between the two marketers. From their blogs, I have randomly read articles of the past 6 months - this was done easily in Google Reader. When I found a relevant article on one of them, I searched the other blog for an article about the same topic. I also thought about traditional economic principles such as monopoly or niche markets.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a New-York marketer. He is considered as a celebrity/guru and as of February 22nd, 2010, his website is the 127th most influential according to Technocrati and has the first ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs in the world (as of February 22nd, 2010, and out of 1092). Roughly 15k people visit his website every day. Many other famous marketers, if they do not agree with Seth Godin, at least they talk about him and his marketing strategies. After the publication in January 2010 of his last book, Linchpin, Godin talked with dozens of marketers and economists. Godin has been regularly mentioning other marketers in his posts. Hence, even though I am certainly not an expert marketer, I found Seth Godin's blog to be quite representative of RL marketers.

In a January 2010 article entitled The 2.0 media tour, he wrote:

You know by now that I haven't gone to any traditional media for the launch of my new book - no pitches to newspapers, magazines, or television. Instead, I went directly to my readers and the many intelligent voices online. I sent review copies by request to my readers - who were generous and creative in their reviews, and now we'll hear from the bloggers and other online denizens.
-- Seth Godin, January 2010

Seth Godin has not only been using his blog to talk about marketing, but also as an effectively marketing place. His target population is his readers. This seems like the first reliability issue. Even though in Death of the personal blog? (2008), he explains that a blog's point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking, he has disabled the comments on his blog since 2006, so they will not be taken into account in this study. Intriguingly, even though comments are impossible on his blog, a large number of people keep following it anyway.

Gevlon the Greedy Goblin

Gevlon is the pseudonym of a Hungarian WoW player born in 1977 - he uses freemail.hu and mentioned Hungary a few times. His blog about making gold and soloing instances in WoW, and bashing altruists and other idiots, has reached more than 4k readers in February 2010. In the last 7 months, he has doubled his number of readers. Interestingly, this particularly misanthropic character stands as one of the most recognized WoW marketers: many other WoW marketers or players keep mentioning him. His prowess as a skilled player were even mentioned at wow.com. Being well-connected in the WoW marketing blogosphere, Gevlon's blog list suggests he follows many other WoW player/VW marketer blogs. I guess if Gevlon was a charlatan, he would not be so followed and cited in the WoW blogosphere.

Like Seth Godin's, Gevlon's articles mix personal opinions and business strategies: making gold, soloing instances and bashing altruists and other idiots is the motto written on his blog banner as of February 2010. As his blog has been growing older, Gevlon has been talking more and more about RL economic issues such as National Debt Crisis or Underwater loans, or about more trivial issues such as how stupid he found a recent comment on his blog. Same threat to validity as Godin's articles.

But unlike Godin, Gevlon's motivation is to share his ideas to have them improved by his readers' comments. That is maybe why he sometimes answer comments.

Data

You can read the data here.

[Literature] The mapping principle and a research framework for virtual worlds

This paper was written by Dmitri Williams in 2008 (no date is written in the white paper, but this post at Terra Nova is dated from November 2008. Quotes and [comments].

Academic research has taken two distinct approaches to virtual worlds. [Academic research in sociology only! CS/SWeng, humanities, law or psychology academics follow other approaches] The first is understanding the virtual worlds populations and behaviors, and confronting them with traditional computer-mediated communiation. Examples are determining who play and why, how people perceive each other, how they collaborate, etc. The second consists of using situations that happen in VW to understand RL behaviors. For instance, virtual economies or the spreadth of a virtual epidemy are of particular interest. In this second approach, researchers can use VW as a petri-dish to conduct controlled experiments. Mapping is the extent to which human behaviors occur in virtual spaces in the same way they occur in real spaces. But no one knows whether these behaviors map or not. One of the reasons to be suspicious about mapping is that game risks and rewards (eg pain and death) really often do not map to reality.

Validity and generalizability are two key necessary conditions to establish mapping. Validity is the extent ot which an instrument measures what it is intended to measure, the instrument being here VW. Face validity is whether the measure appears to measure the phenomenon in question For instance, a violent MMO [such as 2Moons which is presumably violent] is better than Club Penguin to study violence in video games. Concurrent validity is whether the current measures are coherent with other measures of the same phenomenon. In the virtual case, this presents a new challenge: the virtual wold is often self-contained and therefore using a measure of the VW GDP to detect inflation might not apply very well. [Whether the GDP of Everquest can be compared to Russia's is a different question...] Predictive validity tests whether a measure relates to other measures. Its meaning is close to external validity: a result found within a virtual world that does not exist outside of it is nonsense. For instance, virtual inflation may not have the same consequence for players than RL inflation to consumers, and players' behaviors can not be mapped to consumers'. The key to external validity would be whether the people involved perceived the risks and costs to be as powerful as those experienced offline.. The biggest challenge for generalizability is Contextual and social architecture factors (see table below). [Nate Combs wrote in a terranova article, Virus!, that player behaviors in VW can be totally different (sometimes even the opposite of what is expected IRL) than their RL behaviors: when can you trust the players in a game? After all, to some of those spreading the virus the plague turned out to be much-about-fun and without real consequence those on the receiving end could shrug if off]

The framework, resting within the tradition of computer mediated communication (CMC) research, aims at answering the mapping issues. The framework relies on the four tables below.

Group size
Individual	Dyads	Small groups	Large groups	Communities	Societies

Traditional controls and independent variables
Psychological profile	Motivations	Demographics	Communications medium	Network-level variables

Contextual and social architecture factors
World size	Persistence	Competitive vs. Collaborative	Role play	Sandbox vs. linear	Representation	Interaction affordances	Costs of a behavior

Directionality
Online to offline	Offline to online	Endogenous

A case study for the framework is provided as an example: The Proteus Effect series of studies conducted by Yee et al. Shortly, the studies report that some RL behaviors such as social distance, eye contact or the fact that the respect you give to your interlocutor is linked to his/her height are imported inside VW. Because the mapping of the results is not automatically applicable to any population in any context, this study is considered as an important baseline, or starting point.

• The studies focused on dyads, but it is not sure that the results can apply to larger groups. Also, the studies involved both human- and computer-based agents, which is different than a total human-to-human environment.
• As for controls and independent variables, the tests were not focused on the profiles of the users because the intent of the experiments was to establish the presence of the phenomenon, not to explore the nuances right away. Only gender was examined, but the authors could have looked at personality-based differences, whether the use of voice would change the outcomes or the position of avatars within some social hierarchy.
• The Proteus studies were conducted between human-looking avatars. The results might have been different between penguins avatars in Club Penguin, between Orcs and Taurens [, between two gunmen in a MMOFPS such as Global Agenda, or even between two spaceships in EVE Online!]. The presence of game-based tasks (hunting a dragon or chating in a virtual bar) performed during the study may influence the results as well.
• The directionality was only real to virtual.

Other considerations
Studies of different scale rely on different methods and suffer typical methodological issues.

	Large-scale studies	Small-scale studies
Rely on	estimates, surveys or sampling	controlled experiment, participant observation or ethnography
Typically lack	internal validity - the possibility to determine relationships	external validity - the possibility to generalize results

In many MMOG, players choose a realm to play in - most of the time, there are a few thousands of players per realm. Williams remarked that there may be no totally independent draws from server to server [even if these servers are both PvP or PvE or PvPvE or ...].
Non-obstrusive logging methods [like the ones used by Ducheneaut] avoid any Hawthorne effects (subjects being aware of the researcher). However, the researcher has little chance to have an opportunity of control because VW are controlled by companies. As written in page 8, researchers can address validity issues if they can make the virtual world as similar to the real one as possible with regards to the phenomenon in question. [But are developers going to accept that? No, the game should be fun, not realistic!]
Even if the target populations happen to be virtual, researchers should keep the same level of ethics in their VW studies as in RL studies.
Finally, it is the norm that results from new methodologies will be ignored or attacked, especially if these results challenge some existing theory. Researchers have the responsibility to tackle flaws in methodology (with this framework, for instance) and be conservative with their results, otherwise journalists or novice researchers may make large and irresponsible claims to a public which may not know better.