My virtual life
or, how people learn to live and to trust
inside virtual worlds
Aleks Krotoski
Department of Psychology
University of Surrey

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

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?

Social groups can look like
this…

…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

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

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

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

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…

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

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


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

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.

Thank you
Aleks Krotoski
a.krotoski@surrey.ac.uk