Parlaying Value: Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds

Important terms / concepts:

- Cultural (or social) capital: is, specifically, a "resource for action." It provides the means for taking a particular action, but always implies the "potential" for action. Where as traditional capital (i.e. currency) is always traded in a physical sense, cultural capital is applied or invoked, but not always traded.

- Synthetic worlds: Alternative term for "virtual" worlds, used because it highlights that the worlds are built by humans, and because the term "virtual" implies that the worlds are entirely virtual - without blurry lines between the real and the virtual.

Summary

Thomas Malaby proposes the concept of cultural captial as a model for understanding material, social and cultural importance, weight and power. Using the concept of cultural captial in the context of virtual worlds allows us to investigate how people utilize it in its various forms within the worlds, as well as between virtual and real worlds.

Malaby uses cultural artifact from Second Life from the game Tringo, which is a trading card game. Through example, he demonstrates how the trading card, which is a completely virtual and artifical object, "aspires to be valued" and how its value changes over time due to its flow through social networks, the "capital" attached to it through its creator and those who have interacted with it in the past.

His central argument about the existence and importance of cultural capital rests on the idea that all persistent worlds generate "things" that are of value to their participants. While these goods aren't necessarily of any material form, they are created through the effort of people over great amounts of time, and they develop shared meanings and importance. He makes this even more clear and relevant by noting through example how all forms of capital, even physical capital, "are then the product of human effort over time."

Malaby notes that, "Cultural capital is the resource that participants develop and acquire in the form of competencies and credentials and that they also invest in valued cultural objects, or artifacts." Cultural capital can be leveraged to cultivate market capital (currency, goods), and vice versa. Cultural capital is generated through the idea of reciprocity, "the moral relationship created through the mututal exchange of gifts and acts." The acts that generate cultural capital through reciprocity - learning, teaching, etiquette, criticism - are all forms of exchange that are "nearly invisible to the [traditional] market." Cultural capital is conferred formally by institutions through licenses, degrees and other "official" credentials that turn this intangible capital into an object.

The author tries to counter the belief that people misplace value on virtual goods by pointing out that currency, a long-held human creation, is built almost entirely on a tenuous notion: a shared sense of trust. This ends up being not too far away from the basis of the value we, in turn, place on virtual goods. Currency, in a sense, is already a virtual good.

Cultural capital comes in three forms:

- Embodied: "The competencies embodied in individuals as a result of their learning form a basic resource for action."

- Objectified: "Artifacts are objects that draw a significant amount of their value from their status as repositories of cultural capital. Invested within them are meanings from a given context, and examples include antiques, art, baseball cards, and books."

- Institutionalized: "Institutionalized cultural capital appears when capacities are formalized into offices and licenses, when an institution with a purview over a certain arena gives its imprimatur to an individual or group as authorized to carry out certain kinds of activities. Thus, it is capacity removed from the body of an individual and reified as a credential, and a credentialed individual may or may not have all of the competencies thereby implied."

Discussion questions

1. Are you skeptical of the value of virtual goods? Would an understanding of the human effort required to produce a virtual good make you more willing to pay for it if you felt was over valued?

2. Many virtual worlds, particularly games, impose "artificial" scarcity on goods. Is this scarcity really always artificial? How do you feel, for example, about the imposed scarcity of high-end armor in World of Warcraft? Would it be better if we all had the best armor possible? In turn, would it be better if we all had the best real-world car possible?

3. Have you seen the boundaries between a virtual world object and the real world become blurry?