The Proteus Paradox

by Nick Yee

  When I was playing EverQuest years ago, there were websites with game info out there, but they were always incomplete. Unlike with World of Warcraft today, I couldn’t always find out what I needed to know. . . . But now, you’d be hard-pressed to find any aspect of World of Warcraft that isn’t well-documented online somewhere, complete with video footage and everything. [World of Warcraft, female, 33]

  Making information accessible might be expected to provide benefits to a community, but by providing a unified information source, databases like Thottbot removed the primary method of gathering information before—by interacting with other human players.

  Personally I think the older games did a better job of forming communities. There wasn’t places on line you could go to get all the answers, you had to ask other players. There was a lot more give and take. [World of Warcraft, male, 29]

  I much preferred the early days of MMOs when all the information you ever needed wasn’t available on a website. It meant players actually worked together, spoke and chatted lots in the general channels about things directly related to the game and helped each other with quests. [Pirates of the Burning Sea, female, 38]

  In the earlier games, asking someone for help actually benefited both players. The following player narrative is particularly insightful in articulating how the responder also gained something out of the transaction.

  Players were more inclined to help each other, I think, because most of the game knowledge resided in the heads of the gamers themselves rather than being documented somewhere. So it was somewhat a source of pride to be *able* to answer someone’s obscure question. It proved you were a seasoned player and made you seem like a nice guy. [World of Warcraft, female, 33, describing experience in EverQuest]

  With the availability of information, the calculus of asking for help changed. There was no longer a need to ask for information, and no need to provide information. Publicly asking for help with a quest or a location became anachronistic and a mark of ignorance.

  I have seen many players getting told to look up simple quest directions on thottbot.com and at the same time being insulted for being a “noob.” [World of Warcraft, male, 29]

  Standard responses to questions in the general channels online are “look it up” or “check thottbot.” [World of Warcraft, male, 33]

  Of course, this also changes the social fabric of the community. The fewer people you talk to and interact with, the fewer relationships that form. It bears repeating that you can easily play World of Warcraft and level up to the maximum level without ever talking to anyone. Indeed, my PARC colleagues and I have found that until players reach the maximum level, they spend most of their time playing alone.4

  These online resources do affect the number of relationships formed in-game. Without them, the player offering help will probably have to explain things to the one asking for it, but with it he’ll just give a link. [Tabula Rasa, male, 20]

  If people were more willing to answer questions, it would be a great conversation starter and there would be more friendships forming. [World of Warcraft, female, 26]

  These third-party databases and add-ons not only provide access to information outside of the game, but some add-ons even provide dynamic, in-game assistance. QuestHelper is a good example of this. This add-on analyzes all the active quests that a player has and calculates the most efficient path to minimize completion time. Questrelated items and monsters are marked on the map to guide the player along. By removing all the unknowns, all the imprecise information, and all the mystery, these information sources also gradually removed the sense of adventure in more recent online games.

  Maps, databases, etc. have taken the mystery out of playing. While it saves time and minimizes frustration, I think in doing so, they’ve also killed a big part of what makes the games exciting. Yes, it’s nice to see what the quest reward is going to be, but it removes any surprises you might have had. Adventuring, finding things out for yourself, discovering things, etc. is a huge part of what makes games fun and interesting. It saddens me that to really enjoy a game, you have to make a conscious effort to avoid or ignore all the tips and info available. [Lord of the Rings Online, female, 40]

  I think Thottbott has created more of a Task-oriented game world. I have a quest, look up where to go and what to do, complete, get a new quest. As a result the “discovery” aspect of the game has lessened significantly. [World of Warcraft, male, 42]

  Instead of a fantasy world where players experience adventures, the game becomes a task list—a graphical, action-packed task list, but one requiring fewer problem-solving skills and less creativity. The game is no longer about unraveling mysteries, exploring, or meeting fellow adventurers but about completing assignments efficiently. As described in chapter 4, the game becomes a work platform. And in this quest to complete tasks as efficiently as possible, other people become irrelevant distractions.

  If you met someone in a mid-level zone while questing, chances are you’d pass them by. You’re on a quest and your mission is to get it done, probably ASAP. They’re probably thinking the same thing and you’ll pass right by. Who knows what interesting conversations you could’ve had. If you happen to meet doing the same quest, you’ll probably join up for a while, slaughter a few minions together, then part ways. I could swear that about 75 percent of people you meet randomly like this will be so intent on completing a quest and moving on to get the next quest are so incredibly focused on it, barely a word will be exchanged between you. There’s such an incredibly selfish behaviour when it comes to questing to GET IT DONE that it becomes bigger than anything else. [World of Warcraft, male, 20]

  Even when you need a group to kill a quest monster, the group finishes and disbands almost as soon as it forms. These games turn “friends” into fungible, disposable resources. It really doesn’t matter who that somebody is as long as there is some body there. The “massively multiplayer” description of these games is a surprising misnomer. Certainly guilds provide social stability, but guilds become a necessity only when players reach the higher levels. MIT’s Sherry Turkle has seen this same pattern play out in our fast-paced, gadgetembracing lives. In her book Alone Together, she writes, “We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone; in intimacy, new solitudes.” The machines and systems that offer to help us often take something away when we’re not looking.5

  The Give and Take

  There are of course many other mechanisms in online games that might influence the communities and social norms that form, but the three we’ve explored in this chapter show that the mechanisms in any particular game are but one set out of a wide range of possible designs. What is more, game mechanics not only change how we play the game but also change how we treat other players. At first glance, the rules of death, independence, and the accessibility of information should have nothing to do with altruism and relationship formation, but it turns out they do. They influence how likely players are to ask for help and whether help is offered. They influence whether we see other players as valuable allies or disposable resources. We tend to think of traits like altruism as individual traits, but altruism can be part of the social architecture of virtual worlds. Whether the city guard gives us directions in a game isn’t something we would have expected to alter how we treat each other. As with face-morphing and doppelgängers, the sources of change in the Proteus Paradox are often unintuitive and beyond our control.

  Life in EverQuest was certainly not all campfire kumbayas. The severe death penalties and pervasive risks created both heroes and cowards. There were always strangers who were willing to help you, but strangers ready to take advantage of you as well.

  We had a group of 5 in one of the Gnoll dungeons. A caster (I believe it was a wizard) asked if he could join us. Since we were full & he was a good 10 levels higher than us we politely declined. He then complained for a bit & went invisible. We forgot about him & proceeded to start fighting. We ended up having a large number of adds & most of us w
ere very close to dying so we were running for the zone line. I was a couple steps from the zone when the wizard decided to cast an area effect spell & kill almost all of us. It was an extremely rude & childish thing to do just because we wouldn’t let him group with us. [EverQuest, female, 27]

  Clearly not all EverQuest strangers were helpful. If anything, what Ever-Quest guaranteed was an emotional rollercoaster. There were indelible peaks and gut-wrenching lows. In contrast, more recent online games like World of Warcraft offer a stable, mild buzz. If EverQuest were a suspenseful postapocalyptic survival horror movie, then World of War-craft would be a predictable romantic comedy. But while EverQuest never promised that everyone you met would be kind, it did promise that everyone would walk away with memorable stories and that many would find friendships that outlived the game itself.

  Of course, none of this makes World of Warcraft a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. World of Warcraft has outsold EverQuest more than twenty times over—having 12 million players versus 450,000 at their respective peaks. By implementing mechanisms that favored a more solo, casual play style, World of Warcraft dramatically increased the market size of the genre. But as I’ve described in this chapter, these mechanisms likely also dramatically changed the communities and social norms that formed. The mechanisms that make the game easier to get into probably also make the game easier to leave. Independence cuts both ways.

  I often find myself reflecting on my online gaming experiences. The salient memories I have tend to come from earlier games—trekking cross-continent in EverQuest or selling pharmaceutical supplies in Star Wars Galaxies, whereas memories from the more recent games tend to be hazy. I’m sure I suffer from some nostalgic rosetinting, but as fond as my memories are of the dangerous worlds of earlier online games, I doubt I would be able to stomach them now; the accepted tedium of the past would feel like torture after the casual independence of more recent online games. And I think that once gamers become habituated to the rubber-padding, it becomes difficult to wean them off of it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. In this sense, the games we have played limit the games that can be made. It’s like feeding children ice cream and then hoping they will then want carrots. But this race to casualness has resulted in online games sharing a certain amount of interchangeable blandness. In online games, when death is meaningless, so too is life. I’m not suggesting that we want virtual worlds to be filled with harsh tedium, but I’m not sure lonely antagonism is where we want to be either. The question is whether gamers are too habituated to casual online games for us to reach a middle ground.

  CHAPTER 11 THE HIDDEN LOGIC OF AVATARS

  In chapter 8, I cataloged the many ways in which our avatars can unexpectedly change how we think and behave. But the influence of avatars in fact starts at a much more fundamental level. As a final example of the Proteus Paradox, I describe in this chapter how avatars change how we think about virtual worlds and the worlds we end up creating.

  In the media and pop culture, the phrases “virtual world” and “virtual reality” are sometimes used interchangeably, but in the field of computer science, “virtual reality” has a specific meaning. Research in virtual reality is about creating immersive, digital environments that are sufficiently realistic to make you feel as if you were really in a different physical place. Not just a computer screen with a keyboard and mouse, but an actual digital world you can physically walk around in and interact with—the Star Trek holodeck made real. Helmets with position tracking, goggles with tiny display screens, and gloves with tactile feedback are innovations from this line of research. Ivan Sutherland developed the first virtual reality system in the 1960s, and these tools became commercially available (though prohibitively expensive for mass market adoption) in the mid-1980s when Jaron Lanier founded the virtual reality gear seller VPL Research.1

  John Perry Barlow, one of the founding members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, documented his first experience in one of Lanier’s early virtual reality systems: “Suddenly I don’t have a body anymore. . . . The closest analog to Virtual Reality in my experience is psychedelic, and, in fact, cyberspace is already crawling with delighted acid heads. . . . Nothing could be more disembodied or insensate than the experience of cyberspace. It’s like having had your everything amputated.” Barlow titled this article “Being in Nothingness.” The connection between hippies and virtual reality is not intuitive, but the counterculture movement was fascinated with using technology to create immersive experiences of shared, disembodied consciousness. This is the common denominator behind the counterculture’s embrace of LSD, strobe lights, Day-Glo paint, and the nascent virtual reality systems; they are all tools with which to transcend the physical limitations of the human body. To Barlow, what was unique and revelatory about cyberspace was that you didn’t need to have a body.2

  Neither virtual worlds nor virtual reality has taken this path. Much of the current research in the field of virtual reality focuses on creating experiences that replicate the physical world as faithfully as possible—simulating physical bodies in physical places with voice actors and high-resolution graphics. For example, the Institute of Creative Technologies creates immersive military training simulations. In one of these exercises, a trainee is immersed in a 3D virtual simulation in the streets of Bosnia where his Humvee has just accidentally injured a young boy. The boy’s mother is angrily confronting the trainee in a foreign language. The goal of the exercise is to train soldiers for cross-cultural interactions. And of course, before you can actually play an online game you first have to create your own avatar. If anything, we are obsessed with our virtual bodies. As I noted in chapter 8, there are more than 150 sliders to customize your avatar in Second Life.3

  In 2003, Byron Reeves and Leighton Read chatted at a swim meet—both their daughters swam competitively in high school. Reeves was a professor at Stanford University in the department of communication, and Read was a partner at a Palo Alto venture capital firm. “Poolside discussions quickly led to exciting brainstorming sessions with colleagues we cajoled into helping. Eventually, a small group hatched a first project—a conference about games and work.” This quickly led to the creation of a startup named Seriosity. In a nutshell, their mission was to figure out how to harness the appeal of games to make corporate work more fun. To their credit, this was years before the word gamification—now used to describe this application of game design in serious work—came into popular usage.4

  In early 2004, they brought me onboard as a game consultant, and we quickly hired gamers from Stanford University to help us explore this space. We ran through many team exercises to map out the possibilities—the gamer students showed us how raiding worked in World of Warcraft, Reeves and Read set up business case competitions, and we experimented with prototypes in Second Life. In one particularly disastrous and memorable exercise, we held a business meeting in Second Life. Unlike online games, Second Life is a virtual sandbox with no game goals. Every user can create new content in the world—for example, a custom-designed virtual mansion with guests greeted by a scripted, virtual robot.

  And so we found ourselves in a virtual meeting room that we had paid a Second Life designer to create for us. There were virtual chairs around a virtual table in front of a virtual screen, where we would display doubly virtual PowerPoint slides. As we navigated toward the chairs and sat down, some of us noticed that the avatar heads in front of us blocked our views of the screens. Unlike the real world, there was no easy way to tilt your head. And because the virtual chairs were bolted to particular spots on the ground, there was also no way to move around once you were seated. Now, Second Life does allow you to control your camera independent of your avatar’s position, but this was too confusing for people who were using Second Life for the first time. And so we spent about fifteen minutes trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem that we solve spontaneously and immediately in the physical world. Some team members ended up not using the virtual chairs and had their
avatars stand on the side of the room during the entire slide presentation. I remember sitting in my virtual chair, silently pondering the elephant in the room: If our virtual bodies never get tired from standing up, why do we need virtual chairs in the first place?

  Once you have bodies, social norms from the physical world come into play. Avatar bodies need to be clothed, their hair styled. It would be distracting to have a business meeting with bald and naked colleagues. Clothing invites additional social norms. In the same way that appearances matter in the physical world, they matter in the digital world. Few want to wear a potato sack when others have fashionable and form-fitting ensembles, especially when those stylish clothes might be bought for mere pennies. In Second Life, hundreds of stores popped up that sold brand-name clothing knockoffs, dramatic hairstyles, and even impossibly sculpted, athletic bodies. Given the affordability of this decadence, virtual worlds can encourage a meticulous scrutiny and obsessive fascination with our virtual bodies.

  The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, has reflected on this “sum of all our dreams”:

  It’s a world that is what they wanted and it’s a world of everyone’s aspirations. . . . It’s a world that has bathrooms, because we value bathrooms. It’s a world that has Ferraris and Rolexes. . . . What we all want is a sort of Frank-Lloyd-Wright cantilevered house on that cliff [in] Los Angeles. There’s some palm trees, and below there’s a dock where we have a little powered boat, and we watch the sunset from the deck. That is in some sense the statistical average of our dreams, and so I think that’s really interesting that the more plastic we make [Second Life], the more it resembles whatever it is we want.