Ethnography in the Metaverse

Majd Bitar, Jean-Philippe Rivière, Rebecca Fribourg, Jean-Marie Normand,
Yannick Prié

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Majd Bitar, Jean-Philippe Rivière, Rebecca Fribourg, Jean-Marie Normand, Yannick Prié. Ethnography in the Metaverse. 2025 - II International Congress: Metaverse for the Good, Part I - II EMRN Conference: “Exploring the Intersection of AI and the Metaverse.”, Jun 2025, Alicante, Spain. pp.1-5. hal-05109443

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# Ethnography in the Metaverse

Majd Bitar *, Jean-Philippe Rivière, Rebecca Fribourg,

Jean-Marie Normand, Yannick Prié

LS2N, Nantes Université, École Centrale Nantes, CNRS, Nantes, France

Correspondence*:
majd.bitar@univ-nantes.fr

## ABSTRACT

As Metaverse platforms evolve, they offer new opportunities to study social behavior. We explore some aspects of conducting ethnographic studies in the Metaverse, highlighting both potential and limitations, while proposing key considerations for future research.

Keywords: Metaverse, Ethnography, Social VR, Virtual Reality, HCI

## 1 INTRODUCTION

The study of social behavior and user experience in virtual environments have always been of interest in various disciplinary fields. With the recent technological advancements in XR, immersive virtual social worlds are emerging giving a new shape to what is defined as the *Metaverse*. These platforms open up new possibilities for social and behavioral studies inside virtual environments. Although many anthropological methods can be utilized for such studies, potential improvements and discussion points come up when considering details regarding these methods and how we can adapt them in the Metaverse.

In this work we look upon ethnographic methods utilized to document behaviors directly "in the wild", where it happens, as opposed for instance to observe them in a controlled lab experiments. Conducting ethnography in the Metaverse could be useful to understand the social and cultural behavior of its users. However, various obstacles are to be addressed to enable such studies. In this paper, we discuss the conduct of ethnographic studies inside social VR platforms, shedding light on the promising potential while highlighting possible emerging conflicts.

## 2 RELATED WORK

The term *Metaverse* was first introduced in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in the novel "Snow Crash", to describe a 3D space where people are represented by avatars and can interact with each other through these avatars. Different definitions of the Metaverse have emerged in relation to both the advancements in immersive technology and the development of commercial actors. In our work, we consider the Metaverse as mainly based on eXtended Reality (XR, regrouping AR and VR technologies) and avatars, in persistent online 3D worlds, as proposed in a recent review Park and Kim (2022).

### 2.1 Ethnography in virtual worlds

Anthropological work in virtual worlds can be traced back to the late 1990s, when definitions of *Virtual Ethnography* (Hine, 2000), and *Netnography* (Kozinets, 1998) were introduced, both defining methods to study and observe the behavior of users, communities and cultures present in virtual spaces. These methods were then utilized by anthropologists to study social behavior on various platforms that allowed users to
interact with each others and with the world using their own avatar, as well as to possess their own virtual spaces (e.g., a virtual environment that represented their house) and objects. *World of Warcraft* (Ducheneaut and Moore, 2004; Ducheneaut et al., 2006; Nardi, 2010) or *Second Life* (Boellstorff, 2015) are examples of such platforms. Ethnographic studies relied on the observation of members of these virtual worlds, looking into the their daily activities, their interactions, their communication. Ethnographers joined the users, participated with them in what they did in order to better understand their culture.

## 2.2 Ethnography in the Metaverse

In its current state, the Metaverse can be defined as a set of persistent platforms such as *VRChat*, *RecRooms*, *Meta Horizon Worlds*, *BanterVR* and many others. These platforms allow users to communicate, interact, and engage in various activities while embodying avatars of their choice. They are available for free to a wide range of users of different background, age, gender or culture, and many integrate accessibility features that allow the participation of users with different impairments, enabling them to interact with others with minimum obstacles. They also allow their users to build their own worlds and allow others to join in, which serves as a motivation to create worlds related to things they are passionate about, attracting other users that share the same passion. As a consequence, various various communities have daily activities on social VR platforms.

Users in the Metaverse are engaging in collaborative and social interactions that both differ from real-world interactions, and have far more richness and depth than what could be observed within previous platforms such as second life. For instance, immersive interactions between avatars and with the environment are embodied, potentially leading to new and complex social behaviors. Studying these behaviors is of interest for social and human-computer interaction researchers, who could clearly get a better understanding of how these users and groups function and interact by conducting their studies "from within", like for any human group and activities. Yet, in opposition to what happened for non-immersive platforms (Netnography), ethnographic studies in the Metaverse are still scarce, even if some early proposals can be found. For instance, (Maloney and Freeman, 2020) explored the social activities that users found meaningful and valuable in the social VR; (Williamson et al., 2021) focused on studying proxemics during social interactions inside Mozilla Hub, and (Kolesnichenko et al., 2019) conducted interviews inside social VR platforms with designers and professionals of the Metaverse, identifying affordances that enhanced embodiment of the users.

# 3 CARRYING-OUT ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE METAVERSE

Ethnography in the Metaverse is still limited, and in this section we discuss several requirements associated to data collection and legal issues. An important remark is that despite the fact that many current social VR platforms also allow their users to join with traditional 2D screens and input methods such as mouse and keyboard, our focus is on *ethnographers being in immersive VR*, who can study VR and non-VR users alike.

## 3.1 Data collection

First, let us consider data collection, which is critical in ethnographic studies, and can take several forms and aims, such as general observations about the surrounding environment or population, descriptions of specific events, experiences recollected by participants, personal notes of the ethnographer, etc.
### 3.1.1 Recording Data

Recording can serve to document something a participant said during an interview, a gesture they did, the way an action was carried out, a routine of a certain community, etc. There is a lot of flexibility with what to record and how to record it. For instance, the ethnographer can record their first person point-of-view (POV), but also place several virtual cameras or microphones inside the environment to capture other POVs. We can even imagine drone-like cameras following participants as they move around. However, questions remain about how to analyze these recordings. For example, how to find specific moments of interest for the study, and how tools can be built to help the researchers. Such tools can be available on Metaverse platforms that facilitate recording data and synchronizing several viewpoints or data sources to analyze it more easily later on. These artifacts can be controlled by the platform itself, but also by the researchers. Most importantly, these tools should be compatible across platforms to provide a unified method of acquiring the data. Another type of data that could be recorded are logs of the actions of chosen participants, or the state of all, or part of, the environment at certain moments, not as video but as structured data. The use of virtual logging tools to capture events, interactions and the state of the environment will provide more information over the course of the study. This could allow to identify the action or activity done by the participants, and will provide more information about the environment surrounding the participant, such as count and position other participants or virtual objects.

### 3.1.2 Taking notes

Note taking is a central component of ethnographic studies, and immersive technologies may enable various ways to take notes, some of which may improve on more traditional methods but still have their limitations. Voice recording can be used to verbally record observations or interpretations in real-time. Taking written notes may be difficult in VR, as virtual writing is complicated if one does not have access to a real keyboard, or to a dedicated pen and a surface to write on in reality. Selecting among predefined observation categories may be something that is more easy to do in VR. A particularity of VR is that notes could be placed around the virtual environment to connect the observations and the virtual spaces where they occurred, allowing to revisit them later. Notes could also be combined with other recordings. For example, having the notes synchronized based on timestamps with a video recording would facilitates revisiting specific moments and recalling observations from it. Moreover, collaborative notes are possible for studies that involve several ethnographers, which could be synchronized between the researchers, or passed virtually between for easier collaboration.

## 3.2 Legal issues

Second, some legal considerations have to be taken into account.

### 3.2.1 User data privacy and applicable laws

Since ethnographic studies in the Metaverse may involve users from different countries, each subjected to varying data protection laws, then a question quickly arises: which legal framework should apply? Should it be based on the researcher's location, the user's, the platform's, or even that of the virtual world itself? Would there exist something as French soil in the Metaverse? Moreover, every Metaverse platform has its own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, but it is now unclear if they define what kind of data can be collected by researchers, how user behavior can be observed, and whether research activities like interviews, recordings, or behavioral tracking are allowed.
### 3.2.2 Participant consent

Ethical and legal reasons make it mandatory to get the consent of the participants in a study, but another issue is the way the consent can be obtained. If we imagine a scenario where the experimenter has to ask for participants' consent to collect data in the Metaverse —e.g., to record an interview— there are many possibilities regarding how to request and obtain it. For example, the experimenter can orally communicate the necessary information and ask for the participant's consent. The experimenter could also have access to a virtual object such as a screen or a tablet that displays the consent form for the participant to read. Obtaining effective consent from the user can also take various forms. A simple oral consent could be video recorded, or virtual objects could be used, for instance a virtual pen to sign a form, or an object that is interacted with to confirm and record a signature. All these methods may depend not only on the platform but also on ethical obligations related to research and laws but also on specific virtual environments within a given platform, introducing variability in the way consent is obtained from different participants to the same study.

## 4 CONCLUSION

Ethnography in virtual worlds has always existed in some form, but the emergence of the Metaverse opens new possibilities for studying social behavior and emerging cultures within social immersive virtual environments. In this paper, we proposed several key topics related to aspects of ethnographic studies, that are up for discussion.

Knowing these challenges, we aim to use ethnography to deepen our understanding of how users navigate the Metaverse in groups. However, we are continuously evaluating our methods from the perspective of regulations and policies when it comes to users' data. We aim to observe groups explore environments and interact with them, during which we will try to apply some of the approaches we discussed above, especially to what data we will collect and how.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partly supported by a French government grant managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche as part of the France 2030 program, reference ANR-22-EXEN-0002 (PEPR eNSEMBLE / CATS).

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