Lost in Runescape – Social Worth in Early Modern England

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LOST IN RUNESCAPE Laurie Taylor explores the practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities with Nic Crowe, and Dr Simon Bradford. They discuss their recent academic paper on the online game-world called Runescape, which explores how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. They explain how values of the real world are replicated in Runescape. SOCIAL WORTH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND In the fifteen and sixteenth centuries seven million people appeared as witnesses in church courts, and were asked a series of questions. One of which was; how much are you worth? Exploring the answers from gentlemen to servants, Economic historian Dr Alex Shepard, describes how his extensive research into this question uncovered a surprisingly material culture, where the value of your word was exactly analogous to the weight of your purse.