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In this first section, this article will outline the current research that is conducted in synthetic worlds. As it shows, many of them are situated in the frame of socio-cultural sciences. The presented works does not include all works in this field, but are examples of research areas in synthetic worlds.

Psychology
Scholars of psychology were early interested in the media “internet” generally, in virtual worlds especially. The main question was how this media type affects the player. Several works deals with the identity of players (e.g. Turkle 1997; Duchenaut and Moore 2004; Nakamura 2000; Taylor 2003).
Nick Yee (2007) asked for effects of digital representations on the player’s behaviour (but see also Bailenson and Blascovich 2003).
Many other studies tried to find relations between video games of all sort (including massive multi-player online role playing games, or MMORPG) and some types of behavior (Anderson and Bushman 2001; Douse and McManus 1993; e.g.).

Cognitive Sciences
Learning, especially eLearning, is traditionally tied with internet and actually with synthetic worlds too. Steinkuehler (2004) discusses learning in a MMORPG environment, and Gee (2003) is interested in the same question, but for a wider area: video games.
Many others research the potential of MMORPGs as a new classroom (e.g. Delwiche 2006; Foreman 2001; Garris, Ahlers and Driskell 2002, Hofstede and Pedersen 1999).

Sociology
Sociology was always very interested in social activities in virtual worlds. One area of research are computer-mediated forms of teamwork (Axelsson and others 1999; Flanagin and others 2002; Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1998; ) and gender-related issues (Postmes and Spears 2002).
Communication between people is also a sociological topic: how dating and sexuality issues changed in virtual worlds (Hancock, Toma and Ellison 2007; Consalvo 2003), how social identity is influenced by the avatar’s appearance (Merola, Penas and Hancock 2006) and by the media itself (Taylor and Kolko 2003), as well as how norms are formed (Postmes, Spears and Lea 2000; Dibble 1998).
A central question is how online communities develop (Scott and Johnson 2005; Steinkuehler and Williams 2005; Rheingold 1993) and how gaming is a social act in synthetic worlds (Duchenaut and others 2006).

Avatar theory
There are also several works that try to describe and define what avatars are (Bailenson and Blascovich 2004), their characteristics as well as their social (e.g. Schroeder 2002), legal (Lastowka and Hunter 2003; Bradley and Froomkin 2003: Crawford 2003) and economical (Castranova 2003 and 2006; Malabi 2006; Ondrejka 2004; Maier 2003) implications.

Media / Video Games Theory
Another field of research is, generally spoken, media theory and media design. From a MMORPG perspective, questions like “Why are certain games successful and others not?” arise. Vorderder and Bryant ask about the player’s motives (Vorderder and Bryant 2006) as well as Jacobson (1999), Yee (2006); Chou and Ting (2003).
Hancock and Dunham (2001) research about impressions in computer-mediated communication, and Iyengar about experimental design effects for political communication (Iyengar 2002).

Part 2: Ethnography in Synthetic Worlds - continue here…