Sociologist William Sims Bainbridge has shifted his focus from religious cults to virtual societies:
Each well-designed virtual world is based on a coherent theory of human society, history, and our options for the future. Thus, this is like an entirely new field of literature or a laboratory that develops and tests social theories with actual human beings, somewhere between philosophy and social science but also with utopian qualities.For example: Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720 and reflects a general view of society often called political economy.
A Tale in the Desert, set in a kind of utopian ancient Egypt, illustrates principles of industrial supply chains, and fits theories of technology as ritual originally proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
Star Trek Online (which opened only two days ago) is based on the cultural relativist principle Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
Tabula Rasa expressed a well-developed ideology of space exploration, and our avatars were actually taken up to the International Space Station.
Of course The Matrix Online was built on European theories of false consciousness.
In the 1960s I started studying utopian communes and religious movements, because I saw them as valid if risky experiments on new directions for humanity. That’s what virtual worlds are today.