Virtual World Anthropology as it Stands Today 

In this section I will conduct detailed examinations of a selection of major anthropological works that have examined virtual worlds through the medium of synthetic, digitally mediated, online environments (Dibbell, 1998; Castronova, 2005; Taylor, 2006, Boellstorff, 2008; Pearce, 2009; Malaby, 2012). This discussion will be supplemented with interventions from shorter form and multidisciplinary academic literature (De Landa, 1993; Hansen, 2001; Malaby, 2006; Bardzell, 2008; Yee et al., 2008; Coleman, 2010; Miller & Garcia, 2019; Bareither, 2023). The point of this section is not simply to review existing literature but to establish the crucial distinction between the concepts of ‘virtual’ and ‘synthetic’ as they apply to digitally mediated online environments. An environment may be synthetic without being virtual, and virtual without being synthetic, but these concepts are much more complementary than they are oppositional. Rather, this section will argue that the concept of ‘synthetic worlds’, which has already been introduced through previous literature, should be contrasted with ‘organic worlds’; worlds that come into existence without the strategic preconceptions of institutions. 

The architecture of synthetic worlds has the potential to facilitate virtuality in a co-constitutive manner, but the virtual is not bound to digital simulations, often an underlying assumption in contemporary technological discourse. In the following paragraphs I will argue that virtuality emerges in digitally mediated settings without the presence of a synthetic world. I will refer to this process as “organic emergence” which is distinct, but not fully separate from, “synthetic emergence”. While the primary focus will remain on the virtual worlds analyzed in the primary ethnographic works, it will also be interspersed with other conceptual elements, including discussion of The Backrooms based on preliminary field work experiences, interviews, and practical interactions. 

First, it is necessary to locate the concept of the “synthetic world” in the existing literature, starting with Manuel De Landa’s article “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason,” (1993) followed by Edward Castranova’s famous ethnography Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online games (2005) and Thomas Malaby’s article “Parlaying Value: Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds,” (2006) where this concept is most clearly and relevantly provided with definition. De Landa’s early intervention into the academic consideration of virtual environments as technological manifestations introduces the “synthetic approach.” De Landa advocates for an approach where simulated environments are created that allow researchers to observe the emergence of complex behaviors from the interaction of simple social elements. De Landa emphasizes the importance of nonlinear dynamics in understanding these emergent properties, highlighting the role of attractors, bifurcations, and deterministic chaos in shaping the behavior of systems. Although De Land asserts that the “key ingredient that allows these models to generate spontaneous oscillations is that they must be nonlinear and operate far-from-equilibrium, capturing the essence of dynamic stabilization” (De Landa, 811), the institutional interests that facilitate these synthetic environments and attempt to “make them virtual” in a laboratory setting, is resoundingly ignored. 

 The work of Castranova goes much deeper in addressing the multiple sites of negotiation and maneuvering that take place between powerful institutions and tactical actors that occurs int he context of virtual environments. For Castranova, synthetic worlds are “crafted places inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people,” who can engage socially with each other (Castranova, 4). There is also explicit recognition that synthetic worlds don’t just exist online and predate computer mediation by centuries, referencing social phenomenon ranging from the carnivals of the Middle Ages to contemporary ‘Kid Cities’ that emerged simultaneously with the widespread accessibility of personal computers and the internet. Synthetic, like virtual, is irreducible to digitally mediated technologies though, importantly, it denotes the presence of an identifiable creator, institutional or individual, that possesses ultimate institutional power in the world. While this power can and is tactically negotiated by social elements within the world, the initiative to decide what direction the world takes lie outside the social order of the world, embedded in intellectual property claims and technical hegemony of the creator entity.  

Malaby expands on Castranova’s concept of synthetic worlds, using the term to describe the rich, persistent, and graphically immersive environments of virtual worlds like Second Life. He highlights that virtual worlds are not exceptional, consequence-free realms but rather complex ecosystems where real-world economic laws and social norms are applicable (Malaby, 144–146). The pre-eminence of a regulating force with the ability to reach through the computer screen to regulate behavior and exchange is a crucial element of what makes a virtual world synthetic. As Castranova contents, because the institutions that set out to create synthetic worlds often do so as part of a profit-based strategic vision, there are a multitude of other apparatuses, based in the actual, that enact claims of power and legitimacy over their creation. In navigating through the rigid landscape of highly institutionalized synthetic worlds, particularly in potentially subversive ways, a user faces possible consequences that defy the boundary between virtual and actual. The recognition that synthetic worlds can act as sites for the practice of virtuality is not lost on Castranova or Malaby, but they are cautious about utopian claims that seek to endow all digitally mediated social environments with liberatory qualities. Given the institutional constraints present in synthetic worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, it is appropriate to take stock of the relationship between synthetic worlds and the concept of virtuality across several prominent examples. 

In My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World Julian Dibbell constructs an index of virtual desire through an experimental ethnography in LambdaMOO, a variation of a Multi-User Dimension (MUD) with an object-oriented program language that revolutionized the prospects for collective virtual world building in early cyberspace. In this virtual environment, desire is unleashed for the participants due to the perception that Virtual Reality (VR) actions do not affect the Real Life (RL) conditions of users. The famous chapter “A Rape in Cyberspace” details the Bungle Affair, exemplifying how the desire to commit acts of sexual violence, which have severe consequences in RL, is granted greater expressive potential in VR, because the long arm of the state does not yet reach that far into cyberspace. However, a distinct social order has formed in VR by virtue of it being populated by humans, demonstrating that VR and RL are intimately connected and difficult to separate into rigid dichotomies.  

Assertions of a colloquial and academic boundary between RL and VR can be misleading, even if it is established within the parlance or habitus of communities themselves. Gabriella Coleman, in her work on internet hacker communities, problematizes the idea that RL is more “real” than VR. Using the example of an in-person hacker conference she attended, Coleman argues that while such “gatherings serve as critical rituals that reinforce the social and cultural bonds among hackers,” (Coleman, 48) there is a simultaneous atmosphere of ‘unreality’ that pervades in-person proceedings between people that primarily interact with each other online. The ritual importance of these gatherings is not degraded, but in fact is enhanced by their strangeness, “engendering a profound appreciation and awareness of their labor, friendships, events, and objects that often go unnoticed due to their piecemeal and quotidian nature,” (Coleman, 50). Dibbell encounters complex social problems as well as deeper levels of interpersonal understanding as he encounters his digital familiars in a non-digital life world to which they seem not to belong. 

Text is the environment of LambdaMOO, the world being comprised of textual description, making it an extremely versatile site for the enactment of world building processes. Not only textual descriptions compose the VR since LambdaMOO also functioned as a multi-layered chatroom, which allowed for the formation of a complex, multi-faceted social environment.  This necessitated the creation and enforcement of a social order, inscribed on the community through rules written and enforced by moderators. This inspired another form of desire in users, the desire for social justice in VR; a particular form of justice that users felt was unobtainable in RL but should be obtainable amidst the potentialities inherent in virtual world building.  

 By virtue of its text-based affordance, LambdaMOO the inhabitants of this world have constructed multitudes of tiny nooks, hidden universes, and secluded localities that allow for private expressions of desire, particularly the desire to enact gender non-conformity during sexual encounters. Whether it is the desire to commit heinous acts, construct mechanisms of virtual justice to address these acts, or to privately copulate through a text-based interface with a partner whose RL orientation was often left unspoken, they stem from the desire for virtual realism, immersion into an environment which is not quite RL but which possesses the richness and creativity of RL and, while simultaneously making realizable all the possibilities that RL lacks.   

Dibbell alludes to the failure of neo-liberal subjectivity as increasingly large numbers of users entered LambdaMOO because they desired a virtual realism that allowed them to enact change upon the world that lay in front of them as text on a screen. The stifling hegemony of the neo-liberal world order, particularly in an epoch defined by the triumphal proclamation of the end of history, generated an appeal for virtual world building among many young people who championed an alternative hegemony. Dibbell, in his initial effort to establish a reason for being in the community, comes to the realization about the latent potentials of virtuality, feeling as if has just “stumbled upon a creative form more radically democratic than any I was familiar with...here, in this hothouse of simulation erected on the high frontier of late technological culture...” (Dibbell, 64).  A new mode of social life emerged in LambdaMOO, haunted by the prevailing RL social order, but imbued with the affective potential for the creation of something other than what was – an exit from RL and an entrance into a VR that is full of possibilities yet simultaneously constrained by the social imagination located within prevailing material reality.  

Dibbell's recognition of both the potentiality inherent to virtuality as well as the way it is constrained by the impositions of the RL past and present. The practice of virtuality is constantly at odds with itself, managing dialogues of the imaginary where RL both facilitates and acts as a constraint to imagining something other than what is, causing VR to be both familiar and strange simultaneously. This troubles the distinction between VR and RL and, by extension, troubles the distinction between ‘synthetic’ and ‘organic’ as well. The practical engagement with the construction and enforcement of a rules based social order could certainly be framed as organic; it was not imposed by the developer of the world or the corporate entity that maintained the server. It was the community itself that engaged in organic social action in the pursuit of the nebulous concept of justice. There is no such thing as a purely organic or purely synthetic virtual world.  

The expression of virtuality through digitally mediated environments are home to manifestations of the organic and the synthetic. However, I will maintain a distinction between worlds that are ultimately synthetic or ultimately virtual based on whence they emerged. LambdaMOO was created by Pavel Curtis, a software developer at Xerox, with the purpose of being a MUD style virtual community minus the usual recreational elements. While this element of differentiation from other MUDs was unique and could be considered an organic expression of agency by Curtis, LambdaMOO was ultimately created with the intention of hosting social interactions in a synthetically contrived, text-based environment with a particular set of technical affordances and associated potentialities and limitations. 

In Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Tom Boellstorff (2008) explores the virtual world Second Life, a project launched by the tech firm Linden Lab in 2003 and inhabited by millions of inhabitants at its peak. Boellstorff approaches Second Life not as a game or a digital space for diffuse subcultures, but as a cultural place, which is what, for him, makes it a virtual world, one that is real but necessarily differentiated from the “actual” world where our organic forms reside. Crucially, Boellstorff argues that humans have always been virtual beings by virtue of our ability to create ourselves through culture. However, he argues for the maintenance of a necessary and rigid distinction between RL and VR because the virtual must be distinguishable from the actual to remain virtual at all.  While virtual worlds are linked to and fundamentally premised on the actual world, Boellstorff concedes, virtuality transforms into illusion when the virtual and actual cannot be distinguished. Problems emerge here for Boellstorff as the distinction between virtual and actual comes to be based on which side of the screen you are on; are you in the virtual world or the actual world? The retention of this distinction seems to contradict many of Boellstorff’s other claims which demonstrate more flexibility in considering how the virtual and actual interact the mundane practices and cultural expressions of everyday life as it unfolds between worlds. 

The construction of a distinct culture of virtuality, in which virtual selfhood is predicated on the idea of the intentional construction of life-worlds, is called techne by Boellstorff as he frames these processes taking place within an “Age of Techne” and among virtual human subjects called “homo-cyber.” This approach rejects the concept of post-humanism and argues that virtual worlds make us even more human rather than an increasingly blurred line delineating human from non-human. Inherent to this approach is a rejection of utopian and dystopian narratives of the virtual human, that contemporary expressions of virtuality are neither our salvation nor our doom because humans have always been virtual, and virtual worlds are an advanced spatial expression of our culture facilitated by digital technology. Virtual worlds reference the actual world without becoming mere simulations of the actual. They have distinct cultural systems that are always based on the actual world but are kept distinct through techne which maintains the gap between virtual and actual, while simulations try to close this gap. It is the dialectic of logging on (presence) and logging off (absence), and the ability to go AFK (Away From Keyboard) or experience technical difficulties like lag, that allows for virtual worlds to be separate from the actual world, in which there is no true equivalent. However, virtual worlds are temporally bounded by the actual world because the actuality of earth-time informs and restrains social action in the virtual world. 

Considerations of historical context and contingency are lost in the methodological insistence on studying Second Life on its own terms. Boellstorff makes strong methodological claims by arguing that “Actual-world sociality cannot explain virtual-world sociality. The sociality of virtual worlds develops on its own terms; it references the actual world but is not simply derivative of it.” (Boellstorff, 63) In opposition to this assertion, I argue that the virtual and actual are engaged in a constantly unfolding process of complementary emergence, making it unlikely that digital interface acts as the ultimate boundary. Virtuality is not bound to the computer or any single synthetic world. You may log out of the game, turn off the computer, and go out into the world of your “first life” but you don’t stop being virtual. If Boellstorff’s contention that “humans have always been virtual” is to be taken seriously, then we cannot constrain virtuality by affixing it to the computer. The dialectic of online virtual presence and offline virtual absence cannot be maintained because, as Hayles (1999) has made clear, the presence/absence distinction is unsustainable if the concept of virtuality is to be taken seriously on its own terms rather than imprisoned by the infrastructures of digital computing technology. 

  Boellstorff introduces a layer of nuance through his analysis of “creationist capital” which captures an ideological aspect of contemporary neoliberalism that attempts to resolve the contradiction between the mode of production and the market for consumption by situating humans as the natural creators of their own commodities; capitalist production without alienation. Despite identifying the “historically specific character of ‘common sense,’ revealing it to be not ‘human nature’ but culture,” the context of these forces remains intentionally ambiguous amidst Boellstorff’s attempt to maintain the untenable virtual/actual distinction. Boellstorff’s approach to studying virtual worlds like Second Life on ‘their own terms’ initially appears to be valiant effort aimed at advancing digital ethnography beyond analytical models based assessing the difference and similarities between how people act online and in ‘real life’. While this is an important progression in the field of virtual world anthropology, the study of the inhabitants of Second Life on their own terms doesn’t necessitate total decontextualization, as Boellstorff seems to assume.  It is not enough to recognize the manner in which neoliberalism is imposed on manifestations of the virtual. It is an imperative necessity, in fact, a contextually detailed appraisal of the actual be recognized as a key constituent element of the virtual while avoiding the pitfalls of the difference/similarity dialectic and fixation on individual behavior rather than the complexities of virtual sociality. 

By insisting on the wedding of virtuality to the physical act of “logging out” of a world to “log in” to another world, Boellstorff imposes severe constraints and limitations on a concept that, according to Deleuze, is constantly present in the form of an affective atmosphere, a term coined by Anderson (2014) to describe the “spheres that surround people and spaces, emanating from material and affective elements within a particular context,” (Anderson, 142). Although I situate The Backrooms as a virtual world in my own work, I will not be study them ‘in their own terms’ in the same way Boellstorff does for Second Life; to ignore the way in which they are situated in a historical material context would be a disservice to determining the cultural meaning they hold for the inhabitants who create and traverse them. In-world, out-of-world distinctions, which Boellstorff emphasizes as crucial to maintaining the gap between virtual and actual, are messier than he frames them. Organic virtual worlds like The Backrooms expose this messiness because, unlike the synthetic world of Second Life there is no primary place where the world is situated or where an inhabitant is embodied through an avatar. There is no avatar, only the actual self, gazing into the virtual world, not from the proximal perspective of an uncanny simulacrum, but through one’s own actual-world eyes; through a point of view perspective that allows the user to be in them.  

Confronted with organically emergent virtual worlds, the idea that a boundary between virtual and actual is “constituted and reinforced by movements between them,” (Boellstorff, 112) falls apart. The Backrooms did not come into existence through an institutionalized process of software development like Second Life. Nobody set out to create a virtual world based on a creepy picture of some yellow rooms; yet The Backrooms possess the necessary components of worldness and social emergence. Virtuality is not replaced by illusion when it appears to be nearly indistinguishable from the actual; rather, this development represents a refined expression of virtual potentials to depict futures that are actualizable. The virtual is thus returned from the realm of the ‘other’ with a renewed agency and mandate to show us ‘what could actually be’. 

T.L Taylor’s book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture sets out to problematize the dichotomies that are often assumed to define the relationship between the virtual and the actual, through an ethnography of EverQuest, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). Taylor interrogates the major dichotomies that exist in EverQuest and other virtual environments, the idea that there is a way to distinguish between game or non-game, social or play centric, online or offline, user or developer, owner or thief, virtual or actual. Taylor traverses the magical domain of EverQuest, which is conceptually grounded in earlier MUD and MOO text-based virtual environments, and which draws stylistically and canonically from numerous fantasy RPGs, the fictional literature of JRR Tolkien and others, who in turn conceived their ideas from ancient European folklore. By framing EverQuest in this way, Taylor is not analyzing a single virtual world, but all preceding virtual worlds that are layered together, infused with diverse elements of cultural practice with a wide variety of origins. While EverQuest acted as the virtual field site for Taylor’s enculturation, a more expansive and intimately intertwined set of virtualities and the human social relationships with “technological objects” (Taylor, 152) they necessitate, are brought under analysis.  

Upon closer inspection, the increasingly complex virtual environments where vibrant cultures and social orders have emerged, boundaries cannot be easily drawn, rendering the traditional use of Huizinga’s “magic circle” as an obscuring and mystifying notion. Taylor has difficulty placing EverQuest squarely in the category of “game” because the embodied experience of traversing a socially complex virtual environment goes beyond what the concept of game or the associated feeling of “fun” can describe. EverQuest is advertised as a game and gaming is one of the key elements of experiencing the world, but the gaming experience itself does not occur in social or spatial isolation. This speaks to the difficulty of drawing boundaries around the virtual experience because, as the social processes of the game become more complex, the creative intuitions of the users necessarily eclipse the boundedness of the actual game world. Social organizations like guilds, third party websites and wikis dedicated to cataloging game experiences, forums and private chat groups, fanfiction, memes, and depictions serve to expand the virtual culture past the boundaries of developer control and raising the question of “whose game it is,” (Taylor, 127). This problematizes another dichotomy of ownership over synthetic virtual worlds which are co-created by developers, who establish the world, and players, who are embodied in the world and navigate it in ways that were not intended by the developers, and which are contingent upon their lived experiences and historical material context. 

Drawing on Dibbell, Taylor identifies the complex ways in which, by inhabiting a virtual world, the desires of players spill over into their experience and, in turn, their experiences in the game world spill over into their everyday lives. For example, the desires expressed by women players for agency in their presentation of self and sense of meaning are expressed by Taylor’s informants as major reasons why they play; such affordances may not be possible in their everyday lives due to modern systems of patriarchy. It is necessary to recognize the way that such patriarchal systems play a major role in how games are designed and marketed, taking place within a traditional gender dichotomy of boy games and girl games. While virtual worlds like EverQuest do create opportunities for women to express agency through power and leadership in ways that they may be prohibited from in their everyday experiences, we must reckon with the fact that they are not developed with women players in mind. This also raises problems of race, ethnicity, and the options that players are provided for how they are physically represented or embodied in the world. The limitations inscribed into avatars as they are provided to users based on a particular set of coded rules, generates oversexualized depictions of women and marginal roles for nationally oppressed people.   

This occurs because the creators, producers, and marketers of virtual worlds like EverQuest are largely white men who have been enculturated in a misogynistic and racist social order, allowing them to marginalize women and racial minorities in the synthetic worlds they create. The emergence of virtuality in synthetic worlds cannot be totally accounted for or suppressed by developers. Even highly mediated and constrained synthetic worlds like EverQuest do not purely belong to the developers despite their role in its creation and the legal claims to ownership that they can and have exercised. They are subject to the contingent and socially emergent acts of agency expressed through the development of a worldly social order. Studying virtual worlds on their own terms cannot be reduced to only analyzing what occurs inside the computer and must account for the negotiations, strategic plans, and tactical maneuvers that unfold between world inhabitants and world creators. By virtue of state recognized ownership of EverQuest, Second Life, or any other synthetic world, the historically situated structures of the actual become embedded in the practice of the virtual. This is a powerful suggestion by Taylor, demonstrating the fraught nature of a virtual and actual distinction based on whether one I logged into or out of a computer program. Instead, the actual and virtual bleed together, co-constitutive of an affective atmosphere that expresses a full range of virtual potentialities and historical constraints simultaneously. 

In his book Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009), Thomas Malaby conducts an ethnographic examination that is a mirror of Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life, examining the creators of the virtual world rather than its inhabitants.  Malaby demonstrates that the technical affordances of a virtual world, endowed by its creators, allow for the creation of culturally and historically specific systems for the circulation of economic, social, and cultural capital. In Second Life the terrestrial world itself is provided by the Lindens, meaning that the objects within the world, 99% of which are created by inhabitants rather than Lindens, have paramount importance. These objects are imbued with value derived from the social and cultural competencies of their creators and can enter the marketplace where their success or failure will be based on the effective employment of these competencies. The contingencies associated with the production of a commodity in Second Life, the possibility that it succeeds or fails to produce capital of any sort, are a byproduct of the affordances that structure the world and give rise to forms of social action that are consequential in Second Life and outside of it.   

While detailed structures could be built on the landscape that fundamentally shaped the way one navigated through the world, and a theoretically limitless number of unique objects could be made to populate the world, the existence of the world itself was prefigured by its developers; the intention behind its creation was to be a virtual world. In contrast, The Backrooms was not; it became a virtual world absent the explicit intentionality, a contingent possibility of any given social interaction, particularly those that happen in a digitally mediated environment with world building affordances. The Backrooms became a virtual world because the possibility for a world came to exist based on a single, anonymously posted image on 4Chan which resonated with a large constituency of people who would become its inhabitants. These inhabitants bring many of their cultural competencies from other digitally mediated world building projects, as well as their social competencies that facilitate digital communication through a variety of platforms. They also bring a diverse set of historically and culturally specific understandings of self in society that facilitate the creation of an informative virtuality contingent upon how creator-inhabitants of The Backrooms have chosen to express these understandings.  

 The creation of objects in Second Life is an example of what I will refer to as the practice of creating, or ‘rendering’, digital artifacts. While the digital artifacts created within the synthetic world building context of Second Life can only be encountered in their fully manifested form within the confines of this world’s code, the artifacts that give The Backrooms its sense of worldness can be created and shared through an unlimited array of digital mediums. The concept of “digital artifacts” permeates contemporary academic analysis of virtual worlds and must be addressed here to demonstrate the way in which The Backrooms are organically comprised of such artifacts, setting them apart from synthetic worlds. Shaowen Bardzell (2008) approaches what she calls “enchanted artifacts” within the context of Second Life, to examine how the relationships between artifacts and the broader environment shape how people interact and create meaning in virtual worlds. He argues that artifacts in these virtual spaces are not simply decorative but are dynamic elements that influence user behavior and identity, much like non-digitally mediated objects in material reality. Bardzell’s contention that “artifacts mediate [user] activity in virtual worlds...their deeper value lies in the ways that these artifacts collectively constitute a meaningful world” (Bardzell, 124).  

However, Bardzell imposes limitations on what can and cannot be an artifact within the context of a virtual world. Aesthetic elements that are non-interactive and which cannot be changed or collected by users are not artifacts in this configuration. Ultimately, Bardzell reduces artifacts to fragments of individual resonance, arguing that through the practice of “creating the spaces in which they live, people collect and dispose of artifacts and, in the process, construct an ‘ecology of artifacts’ meaningful only to them” (Bardzell, 132). The limitations imposed on the artifact by Bardzell are hurdled by other, including Christoph Bareither whose article "Content-as-Practice: Studying Digital Content with a Media Practice Approach,” (2023), who positions artifacts as any elements of a world that are produced through concerted practice, arguing that “instead of making a clear-cut distinction between digital content and its associated practices, we can understand digital content itself as practice,” (174). This approach broadens the reductive aspects of Bardzell’s considerations, determining that all forms of digital practice, regardless of the institutional context in which they take place, result in the creation of artifacts that are subject to various degree of contingent interactivity that varies from world to world. Any attempts to draw definite boundaries between what is an artifact and what is not in a virtual world is ultimately futile. Bareither argues that artifacts “should be analyzed as active, ongoing practices rather than static objects,” waiting to be sorted into contrived categories (Bareither, 175). 

Artifacts, however, must resonate as an addition to the virtual world which partially depends on the ability of the inhabitant to create something that aesthetically and practically fits into the world. This is a major source of contention in the Backrooms community; does the extension of world make sense contextually? Is the aesthetic, correct?  Does it possess the elusive quality of ‘originality’? Or the even more elusive quality of being referred to as ‘liminal’?  Malaby’s contention “that ‘creativity’ is the preeminent source of value in Second Life—it is the scarce commodity,” (Malaby, 30) is applicable to not just Second Life, but virtual worlds in general. Practices of world building reflect the cultural competencies, or capital, an inhabitant has developed in relation to the affordances of the virtual world in question.  

In the context of The Backrooms, the vast array of diffuse affordances de-emphasizes commodity forms that exchanged only in the context of an encoded synthetic environment. The objects created by Second Life users are made up of code specific to software on which Second Life runs; while they can be exchanged on marketplaces outside the world, like eBay. Malaby argues that virtual worlds are the mirror image of bureaucracy because they are “socially legitimate spaces for cultivating the unexpected,” cultivating an anti-bureaucratic institutionalism. (Malaby, 14-15) However, just as bureaucracies “do not perfectly realize the modern aim of eliminating the uncalled-for,” neither do virtual worlds cultivate a perfectly contingent, bureaucracy free environment for unbounded social action. Instead, they are signifiers of “the changing human relationship to institutions in the digital age.” (Malaby, 14)  

The economy that developed in Second Life, oriented around the creation of desirable objects and the scarcity of creativity, are a direct result of the affordances Linden Lab granted to the world as part of the process of producing contrived contingencies stemming ideologically from their commitment to technoliberalism. Linden Lab predates Second Life while The Backrooms it is the opposite; the world came to exist without the strategic intervention of a pre-established institution. Institutions were developed later to enforce constraints on the expansion of the world. A few of these institutions became bureaucratic nightmares where multiple bottlenecks and gatekeepers put significant constraints upon how quickly the world is expanded and which expansions are officially included as part of the world.  

This demonstrates the necessity for an expanded understanding of what constitutes a virtual world to account for further changes to human relationships to institutions and how we can come to understand virtual inhabitants' relationships to institutions of many sorts through their creation of worlds and corresponding institutions from the ground up, without the intention of building a virtual world at all. Virtuality can be generated through the contrivances of institutions like Linden Labs or it can be generated through the organic expression of a population of inhabitant-creators that created a virtual world without realizing it, beginning with the resonance of a single image among a generational cohort, and the subsequent commitment of tens of thousands of members of this generation to understand this resonance by making a world out of it. 

Whether the virtual world is brought into existence intentionally as a virtual world or becomes one through a collaborative practice of world building, institutions necessarily come to exist and are a formative element of virtual worlds. Linden Lab, the managing institution of Second Life, in seeking to create a virtual world that is self-perpetuating, found itself fundamentally altered through its “antibureaucratic commitment to unintended consequences,” institutionally embracing an ideology Malaby refers to as “technoliberalism.” This ideology relies on a resounding faith that open-ended social practice can lead to the production of social goods through the contrivance of contingency in a virtual setting.  Technoliberalism, for Malaby, is the institutional project of legitimacy emanating from Linden Labs in a mostly unidirectional and strategic manner, aimed at making Second Life an ideal type of virtual world; the espousal of a particular social ethos in the context of a digitally mediated synthetic setting. Although the institution of Linden Lab is not a purely strategic entity, also engaging in small-scale tactical maneuvers toward both its overarching vision of the world and toward the practical maintenance of everyday life, neither are the tactical inhabitants of the world, whose practices within the infrastructural affordances of the synthetic world create unanticipated and sometimes unintended consequences, frustrating the strategic institutional project which gave rise to it.   

There is no commensurate institutional presence in The Backrooms. There are certainly institutions that have come to be established within the world that exercise their strategic power over a corner of it; a set of social assets and digital artifacts that can be said to belong explicitly to one community or another. However, none of these institutions exercise anything close to the ultimate power over the world like Linden Lab does over Second Life. All virtual worlds, synthetic or organic, involve negotiations between different social elements that hold various positions on the cultural field. The terrain on which The Backrooms is negotiation does not have a hegemonic god-entity with the unassailable power to destroy the world and its inhabitants in a split second. Power can be seized, as it has on several occasions, within specific communities, but the organic nature of The Backrooms defies institutional control in a way that synthetic worlds like Second Life cannot. However, this raises the question of what would happen if the god-entity institutions that create and, to varying degrees, moderate the trajectory of the world, decided to enact virtual armagedon? What happens if they pull the plug on the synthetic aspect of a virtual world? Answering these questions provides the opportunity to fundamentally show the ways in which virtuality transcends synthetic worlds and the necessity for developing analytical tools that can account for virtual worlds that come to exist by virtue of organic processes that lack centralized institutional controls. 

Celia Pearce’s book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (2009) chronicles the development of a cultural diaspora of displaced resident players of the virtual world Uru, Ages Beyond Myst after the servers were shut down in February of 2004, effectively destroying the synthetic world. Pearce argues that it is not the synthetically rendered world itself that allows for the persistence of the virtual experience, but that communities of practice and play that form in virtual contexts and develop persistent cultural institutions independent of the profit-based institutional project of Ubisoft, the owner of the Myst franchise. Communities of play, like communities of practices, provide members with unique affordances for the construction of identity and meaning as part of a social collective that facilitates a positive sense of individuality and group identity simultaneously. In communities of play, the development of social connections and shared cultural practices is accelerated by a porous magic circle that allows for immersion and in-world embodiment to come into conversation with the development of deeply meaningful social bonds and sense of collective identity; a shared ethos toward play. Culture survives the destruction of synthetic worlds, and much like refugees fleeing their homelands in many parts of the actual world, the act of destruction codifies a collective identity around shared trauma and the conviction to return one day to a world that no longer exists and may not be able to be recreated.  

Emergence is a sensitizing concept for Pearce as she argues that the internet is an accelerating technology for emergent social processes, which primarily encapsulates the contingencies and unintended consequences of processes of cultural production in a particular social world. Emergence “describes how complex, often decentralized systems of self-organize in ways that cannot be predicted by their underlying structures or sets of rules,” (Pearce, 42) arising from and transcending the acts of individuals. Cultures emerge as part of a shared experience, and we see how this emergence is accelerated in the context of virtual communities of play. Pearce demonstrates that resident players who entered Uru for the first time accustomed to the single player, point-of-view oriented Myst game from which Uru is derived, quickly became part of the social milieu, and developed deep connections and attachments to other players, as well as their own representation of self, their avatar. Where the technical affordances for social interaction are made available alongside a concept with a requisite amount of “worldness,” an emergent virtual culture is primed to come into existence. The emergence that occurred in Uru also took place as a negotiation between the inhabitants of the virtual world and the designers/owners of the world. When these designers/owners decided to pull the plug on the world, the inhabitants were unable to negotiate their world’s salvation.   

The world, however, persisted in the form of the cultural diaspora, living in multiple sites at once. This is useful for my methodological purposes since The Backrooms is a multi-sited virtual world, existing between Discord servers, Fandom wikis, YouTube channels, subreddits, soundscapes, and independently designed games. While Uru became multi-sited through forceful displacement, The Backrooms is organically multi-sited in the sense that, even though we can identify a punctual moment when The Backrooms came into existence, the creator of the concept is anonymous and the world was created from the ground up by multitudes of writers, graphic artists, photographers, game designers, role-players, urban explorers, and sound designers who facilitated the extension of the world and corresponding emergence of a set of distinct cultures within it. 

 Unlike the Uru community, the diaspora of The Backrooms is fractured by sectarianism, canonical disagreement, affordances which allowed for individual opportunism, and the interpersonal conflict between neophytes in anti-structural spaces. Pearce provides the methodological tools that will allow me to conduct a multi-sited ethnography of a virtual world that exists across multitudes of digitally mediated spaces. Pearce also advocates for an ethnographic approach that recognizes and embraces the cultural impact of the community upon the ethnographer, and for the ethnographer herself to become part of the community of play, fully part of the culture and embedded within the social organization. This immersive approach combined with the potential expansiveness of a virtual diaspora means that significant attention must be devoted to the nuances of inter-sited social relationships and the way the maintenance of these relationships allows for the persistence of play communities in the face of instability and uncertainty.  

The demonstration of the persistence of a culture centered around a community of play is demonstrated through the Uru diaspora, which came to the mature realization that what allowed the community to persist was not the world itself but the other people in the world which really gave it “worldness.” To be sure, the setting and game-world interface also mattered when it came to the sense of “worldness,” which Pearce describes as being gauged in terms of the collective creation of belief (Pearce, 20). The unique cultural affordances available through the collective creation of belief allow for a robust intertwinement of the actual world with the virtual, a porous boundary between them rather than a punctuated threshold as Boellstorff argues. The imagined world is brought into unitary existence through persistent culture generated through continued social interaction. This can occur in virtual worlds other than the world in which the culture originated and can develop in multiple worlds simultaneously, or in the creation of new worlds. Uru refugees made their way into virtual worlds such as Second Life and There.com but what community members began to see as the ‘real virtual world’ was the communications server, Koalanet, where the fundamental social experience of the emergent world is located. These other virtual worlds, and the eventual recreation of Uru through reverse engineering, remained additional affordances for engaging in the community of play. The virtual world of Uru remained bound to Koalanet, where most of the refugees had gathered in the aftermath of its destruction as a virtual interface. The virtual world cannot be reduced to the interface itself and can go on existing through multiple other interfaces, remaining consistent despite the removal of some affordances and the additions of others.   

Like the virtual world Pearce encounters in Uru, The Backrooms cannot be reduced to a game, though there are games located within it. The most playful elements can be found in the negotiation of its creation from multiple sites and via multiple mediums. This can be combined with its penchant for creating an experience that is in dialectical opposition to the feeling of embodiment in an avatar. While most ethnographers of virtual worlds, Pearce included, assert that the avatar is a fundamental part of emerging as a member of a virtual community. This is a problem for my framing of The Backrooms as a virtual world because the avatar is not a primary form of embodiment in the world. Instead, The Backrooms are experienced mostly from a point of view perspective and through text-based communication in Discord servers and subreddits. While the servers are the primary spaces for social emergence, gazing into The Backrooms from the perspective of ‘the Cameraman,’ who in the lore of the world is “a theoretical entity... not a single entity, but rather a collective of entities...presumed to be responsible for capturing most of the currently known images of the Backrooms.” The Cameraman is the default, shared avatar for all those gazing into The Backrooms, which is a more solitary aspect of the virtual experience of the world. Some limited technical affordances for avatar-like embodiment are available via Discord as players can chose a unique server name and profile picture that allows them to distinguish oneself on the stage of the unfolding social drama.   

The avatar is not a primary aspect of interaction with The Backrooms because it is a world that emphasizes disembodiment over embodiment and, as Pearce shows, is more structured around the social relations avatars played a role in facilitating than the avatars themselves. While many residents of Uru became attached to their own avatars and the avatars of others, this is a phenomenon specific to virtual worlds that are more closely related to multiplayer games than to the virtual worldness that arises from digital folklore and experimental, digitally mediated storytelling. Pearce’s modelling of the avatar as secondary to the maintenance of virtuality but primary to the experience of virtual embodiment allows it to be a useful model as I analyze a world that privileges virtual disembodiment. Individual identity emerges within the context of a larger community of play that is in a collective state of emergence.  

Low-detail identity markers, associated with a mailable screen name and profile picture (and less mailable account name), can serve just as well as extremely detailed avatars in denoting the identity of an individual within the world. Yee, Ellis, and Ducheneaut (2008) identify the obsession with the virtual world avatar as constituting a “tyranny of embodiment” that is forcefully imposed on “virtual worlds [causing them] to look like physical worlds in form and function” where “users live in suburban houses and go shopping for Abercrombie and Fitch knockoffs,” (Yee, Ellis, and Ducheneaut, 89, 93). The tyrannical, normative embodiment that is pervasive in virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com is more pronounced in synthetic worlds and is a drag on the virtual potentials of these environments to be sites of intense practices and expressions of virtuality. While embodiment is possible in some areas of The Backrooms, it is neither a pre-figured necessity or cultural requirement to seek embodiment in an avatar, which Pearce and others seem to get hung up on. 

When the affordances of the world are altered, the community adjusts, just as the Uru diaspora did in Second Life and There.com. While the Uru diaspora began its process of emergence in a well-established imagined world built by a consolidated team of professionals, The Backrooms began as a solitary image with accompanying creepypasta text and became a world via dozens of diffuse nodes of creation, emerging organically, from the bottom up, based on a shared zeal for a digital depiction of an uncanny, eerily familiar Officescape and a resonance for images that are emblematic of what Mark Hansen (2001) refers to as “the crisis of photographic realism...postphotography,” (Hansen, 62). The overarching intention of this project is to examine how a virtual world emerged from a single, anonymously posted image and locate the various nodes of world building practice that have emerged from a specific generational and historical material context. ich I argue is constitutive of a virtual world.