entropy, rebellion & griefing in the wild west. . .

I keep trying to grasp the advent, depth and nature of the massive multi-player on line roal playing games (mmorpg), such as World of Warcraft, and in many ways Second Life. In trying to do so I tend to see at the hart of these games, as virtual worlds, more or less defined by the rules and conditions of the game. Now this is not a ground breaking realisation but, its the seeded conditions of these games, the rules (if only very loose), technical limitations, objectives ex-cetera, that lead me to think of the games as social experiments. Perhaps with these kinds of systems, we can start to reveal how humans behave, interact, and analyse what players try to achieve as a result of the rules and limitations of the game. Far from a Newtonian universe these games often lead to  surprising, unpredictable behaviour –– such as Chinese firms hiring players to mine and resell for a profit, virtual gold, the currency of the game World of Warcraft.