William Sims Bainbridge

NEW WORLD

NEW WORLD TIMELINE

1964:  Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

1994:  Jspeff Bezos founded Amazon, initially as an online bookstore.

2000:  Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, a company to develop spaceflight technologies.

2016:  The Amazon corporation announced it was developing New World, a massively multiplayer online game set in a “cursed” land, along with two small-team combat online games named Breakaway and Crucible.

2018:  Breakaway was cancelled before completion.

2020:  Crucible was launched and then rather quickly cancelled.

2021 (September 28):  New World launched worldwide, with huge publicity and gaining far more than 1,000,000 paid players.

2022 (February 11):  Amazon published Lost Ark, an adapted version of a 2019 Korean game.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The New World massively multiplayer online (MMO) game depicts colonization of a mythical America four hundred years ago, in which the fictional Covenant religion plays a significant role. This work of dramatic art may represent what the massive corporation founded by ideologue Jeff Bezos hopes our real America is becoming: A technocratic civilization dominated by economics in which religion still exists but has become marginalized, rather like just one more subset of customers buying a narrow genre of books being sold by Amazon. Or, as Carolyn Chen (2022) reports in her study of Silicon Valley high-tech companies, a new form of religion may be emerging from secular companies, often drawing upon Buddhist traditions of meditation or mindfulness. Founded far north of Silicon Valley, near Seattle, we may imagine Amazon was not named after a vast river, as usually reported, but after the aggressive daughters of war god Ares and the sacred nymph Harmonia, called Amazons in Greek myth.

New World illustrates the possible future High Secularism, in which religion has no special public honor at all, while a few religious minorities struggle for power against other factions that totally lack any faith in supernatural beings. Magic seems to be real in New World, but unconnected to religion, and thus merely a form of technology in a virtual world dominated by invisible computer algorithms. Over the past quarter century, many MMOs have blended imaginary religions into their virtual cultures (Bainbridge 2013), and New World serves as a capstone beyond which fictional faith may be difficult.

Jeff Bezos has been described as a revolutionary (Khan 2017; Williams 2020; O’Connell 2021), and his radical values may have shaped the virtual culture, even as his ownership of the Washington Post newspaper may have influenced politics. To be sure, Amazon’s main goal with New World was to become a dominant profiteer in the computer game business, and we have very little information about the thinking of the game designers and the extent to which Bezos or his assistants participated in the development (Royce 2016). Yet New World was clearly intended to revolutionize massively multiplayer games, and the peak number of players online at the same moment in its first week was a spectacular 913,027, according to the Steam online store that sold copies for forty dollars each.

Each avatar of a player was a colonist invading Aeternum Island, which represented America, but the avatars were not specifically European, nor were the indigenous populations “American Indian.” This was part of the revolutionary character of New World within the wide gaming culture that often assigned avatars to races, like the Elves, Dwarves and Humans in both World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. In New World, the avatar that represents a player is not created within a specific racial or ethnic group, nor locked within a specific functional class. Rather, each avatar begins simply as an individual person, who later voluntarily acquires roles in the economic system and usually joins one of three directly competing player factions, Marauders, Syndicate, or the cultic Covenant. Beginning factionless, a player’s avatar is encouraged to join one of the factions after a few hours of gaining experience, but is not required to do so.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

All three player factions often use magic, explore the same mysterious territories, and undertake nearly identical missions. Each is identified by its ideology, as described on the special wiki, newworld.fandom.com:

Marauders: “a ruthless military force bent on establishing a free nation where anyone with the strength to do so can prosper and profit.”
Syndicate: “a secretive organization of boundless guile and intellect in search of forbidden knowledge to usher in a new age of enlightenment.”
Covenant: “a fanatical order that has charged itself with cleansing the land of heretics and defilers so that its true holy nature can flourish and justice can be restored.”

Their three ideologies are military, academic, and religious, but all very selfish and probably deceptive. There is no hint of altruism, although there is a mention of enlightenment. The Covenant may be treated as sacred by its members, but it does not promote ethical values. Some towns have churches in which leaders of the Covenant give missions, but God seems to be absent. [Image at right] Thus, at least as predicted in New World, the High Secularism perspective on religion is that its faith is merely self-serving rhetoric, on the same level as competing factions that use non-religious rhetoric. The sum of the three factions may reflect the values of Amazon and Bezos, which could be described as competitive, intellectual and spiritual.

New World also includes four main factions of non-player characters, against whom the players fight, each of which has supernatural qualities. Most prominent are the aggressive Corrupted who occasionally attack towns held by one or another of the player factions. Comparable to zombies, many of them are dead colonists brought back to life by an evil spirit, violent and aggressive. The other three non-player factions are more passive, defending their own territories against the players, described as follows in the special wiki:

Lost: “soulless wretches, the ghouls of New World. The Lost are humanoids or creatures who have eternal life but without a soul. They’re stuck in a half-death state because they died in a horrific way or sailors who have crash landed on the island.”
Ancients: “previous residents of Aeternum, depicted in the large, four-armed statues with split heads in Ancient Ruins. They can no longer be found in the world, but they created the Ancient Guardians that serve as protectors of the ruins.”
Angry Earth: “the pure, natural power of the island in the New World fighting back against the people who’ve come to corrupt it.”

Of these, the Ancients and the Angry Earth have strong religious qualities, as well as being the indigenous populations. Statues of deities can be found in the ruins of the Ancients, a civilization that fell long before the new colonists arrived, apparently because the Ancients misused a magical mineral named “azoth.” Player avatars gain supplies of azoth, and one prominent use is energizing a spirit shrine at one location in order to teleport magically to a distant shrine. Much of the lore of New World is communicated to players through fragments of writings like scraps of parchment, found across a local territory. For example, one of the historical field notes of non-player character William Heron, titled “Center of the Stars,” can be found in Shattered Obelisk of the Ancients, but it also suggests the meaning of Angry Earth:

We all know that the earth is the center of the planets and universe, and it is only fitting that the jewel of our planetary system is the one with such a fantastical island like Aeternum on it. If our planet is the center of the heavens then Aeternum must be the center of the planet, located so closely to the equator and imbued with power as it is. Azoth, the substance found here and nowhere else, is further proof that is the primordial Eden of which the scriptures spoke, the place from which all life sprang. I am honored and humbled to be standing at the center of everything, and must know what the Ancients thought of this phenomenon.

The fragments of written lore found across the landscape of Aeternum remind one of the books for sale at Amazon, which serves as an archive of all human culture. Once upon a time, people would obtain books at local shrines called bookstores, often receiving guidance from their clergy, the booksellers. The scriptures available in a traditional bookstore were quite limited, which is not the case for Amazon, where the sacred role of booksellers was taken over by computers. Thus New World is an expression of Amazon’s complex culture, in which many human traditions are housed but perhaps also diminished.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Each of the three player factions is run by a set of non-player characters, including several that give out sacred quests, missions that the player’s avatar must complete to earn material rewards and improved reputation with the faction. These missions are of two kinds: (1) PvE or Player versus Environment that may merely require the player to catch some fish, could require stealing relics from a nearby Ancients shrine, or looting goods from a farm tended by the Lost. [Image at right] (2) PvP or Player versus Player that may involve directly fighting players who belong to one of the other two factions.

The status structures of the three player factions are identical, but use different terminology and have special initiation rituals for their status levels. For example, upon joining the Covenant, a player gains “initiate” status, while the beginner term is “soldier” in the Marauders, and “adept” in the Syndicate. It is worth noting that some real-world religious movements have systems of rank for all their members, not just for clergy, inspired by the hierarchies in the fraternal organizations that were influential in society long ago, and perhaps by the status ranks in academia, from freshman to full professor (Jolicoeur and Knowles 1978; Bainbridge 1985). However, the organizational structure of player groups in New World is really not based upon this status symbolism. The benefit of being at a higher level is that a player may buy increasingly more effective weapons, armor, and other goods from non-player faction vendors, using virtual currency that can be earned in-game at great effort or purchased for real-world money. Indeed, many of the design aspects of New World are intended to earn for Amazon far more than the initial forty dollar cost.

After earning 3,000 reputation points in the Covenant, players may accept a mission called Trial of the Templar for their avatars. This quest seeks to find a missing initiate named Bremen Luca, and further information must be obtained at the church in the town of Brightwood, from non-player Covenant templar Beatris Roose. She demands: “Find the Apostate and bring him back here. We will purge these ideas from his mind, one way or another.” What ideas exactly? In a ruined village the avatar finds a page titled “A Question of Faith,” torn from the personal journal of Bremen Luca:

The Spark… perhaps we are not worthy of it, after all. I view the Lost, as they go about their days in perfect harmony… no concerns, no worries, no need for conflict or violence save for those that wish to do them harm. Is this what we are meant to learn from Aeternum? To become Lost is the way to find the true path? I shall meditate on this, and seek guidance.

The Spark is the nearest thing to a god which the Covenant recognizes, yet it is impersonal. [Image at right] Indeed, a spark is electronic, like the basis of computers, and may represent the souls of leaders in the Covenant, all of which are non-player characters, and thus unhuman, operated by simple artificial intelligence. Here is their godless theology, as summarized in a Covenant pamphlet titled “Keep Faith:”

Shall we rejoice? Humankind’s oldest enemy is gone: Death is dead. We have reached the promised land… yet there are some who call it a false promise. ‘This land seeks our ruin’, they cry, but even more dangerous are the enemies within: moral weakness blinds us to the truth. Those who live in the dark can never recognize Paradise. But where eyes fail, faith sees. The Covenant carries the Spark. In our time of need, the Spark carries us. Its clarity is our greatest gift. We bring the light of the Spark to the darkest corners. We keep it shining, at any cost, against any foe. And one day, it will shine bright enough to reveal Paradise itself.

After dealing with the apostate, Bremen Luca, an avatar is elevated to Templar rank in the Covenant, and can begin earning higher reputation to undertake additional initiation quests to rise upward: “excubitor” then “lumen” then “adjudicator.” In this context, the phrase “false promise” has many meanings. The trial to become an excubitor requires invading three Lost communities and killing ten innocent ghouls in each of them. The trial to become lumen is strangely distorted, placing the avatar under the command of Livia Luca, mother of the apostate, perhaps continuing to hold her position in the Covenant because of her remote location in the snowy north. She orders the avatar to kill many corrupted templars to collect their prayer beads, as evidence that a high official of the Covenant, adjudicator Zuzanna Maras, was really responsible for the unnecessary execution of her beloved son and many other evil deeds. The final trial quest is assigned by Zuzanna Maras herself, obviously to kill Livia Luca. Once becoming adjudicators themselves, the player avatars do not seem to get a quest to gather evidence about who was really evil, Livia Luca or Zuzanna Maras, but that would require the assumption that good and evil are valid opposites in New World.

A very different kind of quasi-religious ritual, experienced equally by the three player factions, is attacks on towns and other locations by the Corrupted, which are typically announced ahead of time so players can sign up to be defenders and schedule their active hours. On March 19, 2020, a year and a half before the actual launch, Amazon posted on its newworld.com website a prophecy, titled “March to Battle: Corrupted Breaches:”

Aeternum is a land of immense beauty and endless wonder that The Corrupted seek to stain and dominate with their vile presence. Taking what was once serene and peaceful and twisting it to their will. They do this by ripping open the ground and flooding the area with corrupted creatures and structures. The very air turns to a thick black smoke and all is illuminated by an evil red glow, pulsating with an unearthly light. These are known as Corrupted Breaches. As you establish a safe haven in a Settlement or Fort, the Corrupted ake notice. Corrupted Breaches will begin to emerge in your territory, making travel and resource gathering more difficult the longer these Breaches go unaddressed. Guarding these Breaches are the Zuzana Acolytes of Corruption. Like their lesser brethren the Cultists, they channel the dark, forbidden forces of Corruption to summon forth and sustain the dread portals and monoliths that form the heart of Corrupted Breaches.

Factional trials are like initiation rituals for individuals, although teams of players in one faction may complete them together if they prefer, which can be advantageous for the difficult killing of Livia Luca. Battles against the Corrupted often involve temporarily assembled teams, and battles between avatars in different factions must usually be pre-arranged and held in special battlefields. In both cases, religious ritual is violent, rather like the proverbial human sacrifice of so-called primitive tribes. The other key factor in more secular social organization is economic commerce.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

As is the case for other popular massively multiplayer online games, many versions of New World exist (literally called “worlds”) comparable to separate Internet servers, each capable of supporting about 2,000 players simultaneously. Globally, they are divided into five geographic regions: North America East, North America West, Brazil, Europe, and Australia. Each avatar is registered to one of these worlds, and opportunities to move from one to another are severely limited. The territories of the worlds are identical, most prominently holding eleven towns, each dominating a region of the island, plus some northern territories intended for highly experienced avatars.

Towns are centers for production, commerce, and mission recruitment, operated by non-player avatars who are recent colonists but do not belong to a faction. As players gain experience, wealth as measured by a virtual currency, and for social status, they can form durable voluntary groups, called “companies.” This term is standard in military social structures as well as commercial business, and the companies of New World serve both functions. Notably, a prosperous company can buy a town and collect taxes in order to pay the costs of governing as well as to gain personal profit. Each company belongs to one of the three player factions, and may form an alliance with other companies of the same faction to take over other regions either financially or violently.

Individual avatars of one faction are usually greeted peacefully in towns dominated by other factions. One reason is that many avatars, but by no means all, rent homes from the town government, and decorate them with artifacts and trophies for personal status display, major components of the town’s economy. Game journalist Chris Neal (2022) reported the results of a contest to identify the three most beautiful homes, and other players posted pictures and descriptions of their own: “I built a small pharmacy in Cutlass. On the second floor is a study room with a small hidden entrance to an even smaller bedroom 😀 and yes: I like Plants.” “I built a tree house in the back yard of my Monarch’s Bluff abode. It’s a nice place to nap in the sun. Drop by for a visit if you want to try it out.” “My Everfall home features a play style of vibrant colours. Here I walk you through a red Chinese-theme front yard into the greens from fine jade furniture as well as a purplish romantic section away from Aeternum’s corruption.” “My shrine and prayer room in Ebonscale.”

Each well-functioning town has a variety of facilities such as a metal forge, essential for manufacture of weapons and heavy armor, but also for components of the furniture an avatar can place in a rented home, which also requires wooden components from a sawmill and workshop. The town government may decide to upgrade the forge, for production of higher-quality output, and finance this by posting some quests on the Town Project Board. This raises the question of whether player companies are at all democratic, or give huge wealth and power to their top executives, which Amazon did as a company in our real world. Using the standard gamer term “guild” for player group, rather than “company.” Chris Neal (2021) offered this example, expanding upon a debate in the Reddit online forums, in which OP stands for the “original poster” who in this case expressed outrage over what happened:

“The leader of a Covenant guild by the name of Jade reportedly took several steps to make the faction lose the territory of Mourningdale, including replacing the territory’s previous tier three siege equipment with nothing but horns, encouraging participants and members of his guild to go into the war without armor, and ignoring a full standby list of level 60 players who came to defend the territory, letting low level characters into the war instead. Several replies to the OP corroborate the events, with one Redditor sharing personal accounts of conversations with Jade and another poster providing a video of the war. Why do all of this? Because evidently Jade was going to transfer servers and so he wanted to burn the Covenant down with him.”

The spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, was apparently named in a metaphor for our own planet, which is blue because of its vast oceans, and the origin of humans who wish to migrate to new worlds. New World may therefore be a computer simulation of our own world in the context of High Secularism. Gods have vanished, so “good” is defined as whatever powerful people desire. Religion has been transformed in two ways. Magic, including the extreme spell conferring immortality, has separated from religion and combined with technocracy. The physics symbolism of the Spark has allowed a religious movement to consolidate, calling itself the Covenant, but indistinguishable in function from social movements having military or academic ideologies.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Like Amazon itself, New World placed a heavy emphasis on management of a complex economy via Internet-connected computers. Every town had a trading post where avatars could place items for sale, that they had either gathered or produced, and other avatars could buy them. [Image at right] The market prices were quite dynamic, and the economic system had depth, for example the connection between the price for a particular kind of item and the prices for the raw materials needed to make it. A versatile text chat communication system allowed direct trading of items and a diversity of other actions. Soon after launch, flaws in the system were exploited by players who might be called “hackers,” leading to several periods in which major parts of the economic system were shut down until repairs could be completed (Marshall 2021; Orland 2021; Yang 2021; Gonzalez 2022).

Very early, advanced features of the text chat built into the game’s user interface were removed, because some players used them to disrupt the performance of other player’s computers. One widely publicized hack was rendering one’s avatar nearly invulnerable by constantly moving the display image around on the computer’s screen. Then a whole series of “duping” hacks were discovered by clever players. That means duplicating virtual money or valuable items at no cost, typically by moving them from one storage location or player to another in a way that interfered with the complex transfer algorithm. Simply put: Moving an item from box A to box B goes in two steps, adding to B and subtracting from A, but interruption of the process in the middle can wind up with two copies of the item, one in each box. Other problems arose in some of the processes by which players used virtual resources to manufacture products.

By mid-November 2021, the accounts of over 1,200 players apparently guilty of duping were cancelled (Stanton 2021). Rather chaotically, duplicated or falsely enhanced items were erased from other players’ inventories. In online forums, players complained they had been punished but were innocent. It was possible that players might benefit from a bug in the software without being aware of its nature and not intending to violate the rules. This whole situation raises a philosophical issue: If a culture is unethical in ways that benefit it, how can it claim the behavior that harms it is unethical? If members of the Covenant are serene about performing dozens of quests to steal from the Lost, how can they argue that stealing from members of the Covenant is criminal?

Given the heavy publicity that drew many players into New World when it launched, it was not surprising that the peak number of simultaneous players reported by Steam for each month declined: October = 913,027, November = 357,188, December = 145,038, January = 117,042, February = 67,943. By early 2022, any really active player would have been able to explore all of Aeternum and experience many special events and PvP battles. As with real-world religious movements, developing social bonds with other players might prevent defection to some other virtual world, but New World’s event recruitment system and the heavily economic aspects of companies may have discouraged such bonds from forming with many avatars.

Then on February 11, 2022, Amazon published another violent multi-player online game, Lost Ark, based on an apparently religious story described thus on its playlostark.com website: “The god Regulus brings order and light to balance the darkness of chaos and creates worlds to embody each: Arkesia and Petrania. The order of the light is powered by the Ark, split seven ways for seven gods and spread across Arkesia.

When the two worlds nearly destroy each other the Guardians are created to restore peace.” [Image at right] But Amazon had not created Lost Ark, merely publishing a westernized version of a Korean game three years after its original launch, and polytheistic lore is standard in Korean games. Steam reported that at launch New Ark leapt to a maximum current players of 1,324,761. In March the maximum player count for New World dropped to 34,098, while New Ark was at 907,696.

We do not currently have good data on the dollar earnings of New World, its total number of avatars, or the hours invested by players. We may estimate that 1,000,000 avatars reached the initial experience cap of sixty, which required investment of about 100 hours of player time. So even if New World dies quickly, its human significance is great, comparable to many new religious movements in the real world, few of which reach 100,000,000 hours of member involvement. There is certainly room to debate whether High Secularism is a valid concept, or Amazon represents it properly. Such questions may not be fully answered for a century, yet examination of a diversity of examples like Amazon’s New World may help us understand the future that approaches.

IMAGES

Image #1: A church of the Covenant; note that worship services are never held here, but the priestess standing on the box in front of the banner of the Spark offers quests to members.
Image #2: A colonist, confronting one of the Lost who seeks to defend his farm from invaders.
Image #3: A non-player evangelist for the Covenant proclaiming the sacred Spark to several avatars of players.
Image #4: Two high-level player avatars who belong to the Covenant, making products at a work bench primarily for sale and increasing their manufacturing skills.
Image #5: A member of the Syndicate battling a Guardian of the Ancients, seeing to gain entrance to sacred ruins that contained valuable artifacts.

REFERENCES

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2013. eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 1985. “Cultural Genetics.” Pp. 157-98 in Religious Movements, edited by Rodney Stark. New York: Paragon.

Chen, Carolyn.  2022.  Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Gonzalez, Christina. 2022. “New World Bans Over 500 Players and Removes Substantial Number of Items Duped in Glitch.” Accessed from https://www.mmorpg.com/news/new-world-bans-over-500-players-and-removes-substantial-number-of-items-duped-in-glitch on 4 June 2022.

Jolicoeur, Pamela M., and Louis L. Knowles. 1978. “Fraternal Associations and Civil Religion: Scottish Rite Freemasonry.” Review of Religious Research 20:3-22.

Khan, Lina M. 2017. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” The Yale Law Journal 126:710-805.

Marshall, Cass. 2021. “Players Are Gleefully Breaking New World with Gold Duping, Chat Exploits.” Accessed from https://www.polygon.com/22760062/new-world-post-launch-bugs-exploits-chat-gold-duping on 4 June 2022.

Neal, Chris. 2021. “New World’s Faction Pvp Is Rife with Guild Drama over ‘Throwing’.” Accessed from https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/21/new-worlds-faction-pvp-is-rife-with-guild-drama-over-throwing on 4 June 2022.

Neal, Chris. 2022. “Look at the Cool Things New World Players Are Doing with Their In-Game Houses.” Accessed from https://massivelyop.com/2022/05/03/look-at-the-cool-things-new-world-players-are-doing-with-their-in-game-houses on 4 June 2022.

O’Connell, Mark. 2021. “‘A Managerial Mephistopheles’: Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos.” Accessed from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezos-and-the-world-amazon-made on 4 June 2022.

Orland, Kyle. 2021. “New World Disables Wealth Transfers as Item Dupes Ruin In-Game Economy Second Shutdown this Month Has Players Despairing for the State of the Young MMO.” Accessed from https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/new-world-shuts-its-economy-again-amid-widespread-item-duplication-glitch on 4 June 2022.

Royce, Bree. 2016. “So One Of Amazon’s New Games Is an MMORPG Sandbox, and It’s Called New World. ” Accessed from https://massivelyop.com/2016/09/29/so-one-of-amazons-new-games-is-an-mmorpg-sandbox-and-its-called-new-world on 4 June 2022.

Stanton, Rich. 2021. “New World Permabans Over 1200 Accounts for Duping Exploits.” Accessed from https://www.pcgamer.com/new-world-permabans-over-1200-accounts-for-duping-exploits on 4 June 2022.

Williams, Dana M. 2020. “Power Accrues to the Powerful: Amazon’s Market Share, Customer

Surveillance, and Internet Dominance.” Pp. 35-49 in The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese. London: Pluto Press.

Yang, George. 2021. “New World Is Having a Problem With Gold Duplication – Again.” Accessed from https://www.ign.com/articles/new-world-gold-duplication on 4 June 2022.

Publication Date:
18 June 2022

 

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