The Proteus Paradox

by Nick Yee

  It is easy to underestimate the power of subtle manipulations because they are both so pervasive and so difficult to detect. But consider that the simple ordering of names on a presidential election ballot changes the vote outcome. In California’s eighty assembly districts, the order of candidates on a ballot is randomly assigned. In 1994, Bill Clinton received 4 percent more votes in the districts in which he was listed first. In 2000, George W. Bush received 9 percent more votes when he was listed first. Even in high-profile elections in which voters presumably have thought about their preferences before arriving at the voting booth, the simple ordering of candidate names matters.2

  This influence can be wielded for both good and bad. As we’ve seen, avatars can help people plan for their retirement. Ian Bogost, a game designer and media philosopher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has used video games explicitly as social commentary. In one game that satirizes airport security procedures, players must quickly react to the capricious nature of the rules at the screening checkpoints. And game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal has created games that help people engage with pressing global issues, such as the reliance on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the reality of our time is that major content creators need to care more about attracting large audiences than about generating highbrow social commentary. The programming shift on the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and the Discovery Channel—including attempts to gain broader market share via sensationalist coverage of aliens, a family with nineteen kids, and child pageants—stems from this market dynamic. And I have a hard time believing that advertisers will care more about social well-being than their bottom line.

  Reimagining Reality

  Virtual worlds hold infinite possibilities, but so far we’ve explored only a sliver of those potentials. Yet we’ve seen that sliver replicated and superficially modified so often that it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’ve covered a great deal of ground. Instead of replicating reality, virtual worlds could allow us to imagine new ones. Early textual virtual worlds allowed users to invent their own gender, but contemporary virtual worlds often provide just two options. Would leaving our bodies behind or creating novel forms of embodiment allow us to imagine new forms of work, play, and interaction? This issue is particularly relevant for business applications. Avatars don’t inherently make work more efficient or more fun, but they certainly make people more distracted by their virtual hair and clothes. Certainly, some of the alternatives I’ve mentioned in the previous chapter may seem impractical, but I didn’t think that the goal of virtual worlds was to be practical.

  Sadly, it’s not clear that we would embrace this freedom even if it were handed to us. We gravitate toward the familiar; bodies in virtual worlds may function as McDonald’s does when we’re looking for food in foreign countries. They are a necessary psychological anchor in a sea of uncertainty. And perhaps we replicate the darker parts of our offline lives in virtual worlds—work, stereotypes, and conflict—because they are nevertheless comforting and help moor us to the only reality we know. Research in early textual virtual worlds highlights this resistance to change. In these worlds, users were not constrained by graphical representations; avatars were created via textual descriptions alone. And yet, users often created avatars that leveraged racial tropes and stereotypes. As digital media researcher Lisa Nakamura has documented, many Asian-appearing avatars in Lambda-MOO borrowed heavily from martial arts or samurai movies. Perhaps the hypermaterialism of Second Life isn’t caused by the presence of avatars. Perhaps it’s just human nature.3

  How Do We Get There?

  These three trajectories are all somewhat double-edged, but even if it were clear that we need to try harder to use virtual worlds to re-imagine reality, I’m not sure gamers or laypeople could do much to influence the shift. This is primarily due to the significant costs in creating and maintaining virtual worlds. World of Warcraft took over $60 million to create, and that doesn’t take into account the continuous operating costs. Only large corporations and game developers have the capital to create virtual worlds. Not only does this limit the ability of laypeople and even academic researchers to create their own virtual worlds, but it restricts the kinds of online games created due to risk adversity (and understandably so, given the entry fee).

  Of course, there is also funding for virtual worlds from federal agencies, but here, too, the tendency is to create virtual worlds that replicate reality with ever higher fidelity. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the cross-cultural military training simulation developed by the Institute of Creative Technologies. That effort was made possible by a $45 million grant from the US Army. The institute collaborates with film studios and video game designers with the understanding that any new techniques developed are free to be used in video games and movies. There are also similar virtual simulations for training in other areas and to help soldiers overcome posttraumatic stress disorder. Replicating reality is a key goal of the military’s interest in virtual worlds because the training context needs to match the actual context, and this has a trickle-down effect in terms of the technologies and graphical assets that are then available for commercial use.4

  And there’s the rub. Experimentation in virtual worlds is expensive and resource-intensive, requiring very specialized skills in 3D graphics, server optimization, game design, storytelling, community management, and so forth. It’s difficult for gamers or even techsavvy folks to put together a prototype. But we have seen the democratization of technology occur in other areas. Blogging software gave everyone the ability to create their own website without needing to learn a single HTML tag. And Picasa allowed everyone to manage, edit, and share their digital photos without needing to learn a complex photo-editing package or understand photography concepts such as white balance. Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, began development of a software platform called Metaplace that would have allowed anyone to create his or her own virtual world with a low barrier of entry. If you wanted a kingdom of fluffy cloud animals, you could build that. If you wanted a storytelling game set at Downton Abbey, you could build that, too. Unfortunately, the Metaplace platform closed in 2010, but I strongly believe that we need something like Metaplace to move us along our experimentation with virtual worlds. Since the boom days of World of War-craft and Second Life, there has been a strange, stagnant lull in terms of virtual worlds. I think gamers and academics have kept wondering what would come next in either the online gaming or social virtual worlds spaces, but nothing has transpired to shift the attention from these two existing worlds. Yet in the same way that blogging software has allowed everyone to become comfortable with digital publishing and sharing (which helped to pave the way for social networking sites), it is only by lowering the entry cost of virtual world creation that we can understand the full potential of virtual worlds. Instead of being content to visit virtual worlds, we need to ask ourselves what new worlds we would create if we had the chance.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Homer Odyssey 4.446–448, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 77.

  2. To avoid these unwieldy labels, I refer to games in this genre as simply “online games” in this book. “12 million” reported in Blizzard press release; see http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=2847881. Estimates of active online gaming subscriptions and peak concurrent usage come from MMOData.net, v. 3.8, retrieved on January 10, 2012. For online games forecast in China, see John Gaudiosi, “Booming Chinese MMO Games Market Forecast to Generate $6.1 Billion in 2012,” Forbes, June 6, 2012. For statistics of Club Penguin, see Brooks Barnes, “Disney Acquires Web Site for Children,” New York Times, August 2, 2007. It is difficult to get an accurate estimate of worldwide MMO gamers because subscription numbers are often closely guarded by game companies, different metrics are used for free-to-play games than for subscription-based games, and marketing companies count different kinds of games as “online ga
mes”—for example, some reports will include nonpersistent games (such as World of Tanks or League of Legends) as an MMO. The boom of casual web and smart phone games that are played online confuses these estimates even more.

  3. Olga Kazan, “Lost in an Online Fantasy World,” Washington Post, August 18, 2006; Vicki Haddock, “Online Danger Zone,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 2006; Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76.

  4. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 263–264; Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 7.

  5. A more detailed methodology description of the Daedalus Project can be found in Nick Yee, “The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments,” Presence 15 (2006): 309–329.

  Chapter One. The New World

  1. Kriegsspiel is described in Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex,” in Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne—Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Jan Lazardig, Helmar Schramm, and Ludger Scharte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). The full text of H. G. Wells’s Little Wars is available at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3691.

  2. Scott Lynch, “Industry Insights: The RPGNet Interviews: Interview with Gary Gygax,” RPGNet (2001), available at: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/lynch01may01.html.

  3. Interview with TheOneRing.net, available at: http://archives.theonering.net/features/interviews/gary_gygax.html. See also Gygax’s interview with Game Spy in 2004, available at: http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538817p3.html.

  4. For the history of the PLATO system, see Stanley G. Smith and Bruce Arne Sherwood, “Educational Uses of the PLATO Computer System,” Science 23 (1976): 344–352. For the history of Maze War, see Anthony Steed and Manuel Fradinho Oliveira, Networked Graphics: Building Networked Games and Virtual Environments (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010), 23.

  5. Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and Kentucky,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2007), available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html.

  6. Richard Bartle, “Early MUD History,” available at: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/mudhist.htm. See also Richard Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2004), 4–7. For ARPANet and MUD, see Koster’s timeline of virtual worlds in Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky, Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2003), also available online at: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/mudtimeline.shtml.

  7. See Koster’s timeline.

  8. See Damion Schubert’s postmortem of Meridian 59 in Mulligan and Patrovsky, Developing Online Games.

  9. Subscriber estimates of EverQuest and Ultima Online are drawn from MMO-Data.net, specifically the historical charts for 150,000 to 1 million subscribers. See also Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds, 20–29, on how Ultima Online and EverQuest changed the field.

  10. Subscription numbers of World of Warcraft drawn from MMO-Data.net. The original Blizzard press release announcing breaking the one million subscriber mark in Europe was posted on January 19, 2006, but is no longer available on Blizzard’s website. A copy of the press release is available at: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/news/

  gameID/15/showArticle/4427.

  11. As Bartle explains, “mobile” originally referred, not to movement per se, but to the moving sculptures, “because creatures moving in a controlled but unpredictable way are like the kind of ‘mobiles’ that hang from the ceiling” (Designing Virtual Worlds, 102).

  12. “Nothing to do”: ibid., 5. In Hans-Henrik Starfeldt’s original 1990 alt.mud post calling for developers on his new MUD, he wrote that “we think the preatent [sic] games has lost some of the D&D spirit (with all respect!).” Koster’s “Simultaneously and independently” and “removed more features”: Koster blog post on MUD influence on online games: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/06/27/mud-influence/. Bartle’s “grew in a particular way”: Metanomics interview in Second Life: http://www.metanomics.net/show/archive031008/.

  13. The first game in the city-building genre to introduce a limited multiplayer mode was Sierra’s Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom in 2002. Monte Cristo’s Cities XL had a massively multiplayer mode when it launched in 2009, but Monte Cristo closed this multiplayer option after five months. I consider the shallow and asynchronous multiplayer options in city-building games on Facebook and mobile devices to be different beasts altogether.

  Chapter Two. Who Plays and Why

  1. For a historical perspective on gaming, see Dmitri Williams, “A Brief Social History of Video Games,” in Playing Computer Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences, ed. Peter Vorderer and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), 229–247. For Williams’s news media analysis, see Dmitri Williams, “The Video Game Lightning Rod: Constructions of a New Media Technology,” Information, Communication and Society 6 (2003): 523–550.

  2. For recurrence of moral panics, see Ellen Wartella and Byron Reeves, “Historical Trends in Research on Children and the Media: 1900–1960,” Journal of Communication 35 (2006): 118–133. For historical overview of the comic book moral panic, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Angela McRobbie, “The Moral Panic in the Age of the Postmodern Mass Media,” in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 192–213.

  3. Jimmy Kimmel interview with Mila Kunis, Jimmy Kimmel Live! October 17, 2008.

  4. For studies that provide demographic data on online gamers over the past decade, see Mark D. Griffiths, Mark N. O. Davies, and Darren Chappell, “Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 6 (2003): 81–91; Nick Yee, “The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15 (2006): 309–329; Dmitri Williams, Nick Yee, and Scott E. Caplan, “Who Plays, How Much, and Why? Debunking the Stereotypical Gamer Profile,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008): 993–1018; and Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mike Yao, and Les Nelson, “Do Men Heal More When in Drag? Conflicting Identity Cues between User and Avatar,” Proceedings of CHI 2011 (2011): 773–776. For estimates of online gamers who are teenagers, Griffiths, Davies, and Chappel, “Breaking the Stereotype,” found 40%; Yee, “Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences,” found 25%; and Williams, Yee, and Caplan, “Who Plays,” found roughly 10%. The average of these numbers is 25%.

  5. On the percentage of female players, Williams, Yee, and Caplan, “Who Plays,” report 19.2%, and Yee, “Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences,” reports 15%. In a Daedalus Project sample of 1,109 World of Warcraft players in 2005, I found 16%, but in a more recent study of World of Warcraft gamers reported in 2011, my colleagues and I found 26%; Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Les Nelson, and Peter Likarish, “Introverted Elves and Conscientious Gnomes: The Expression of Personality in World of Warcraft,” Proceedings of CHI 2011 (2011): 753–762. The 20% reported in the text is a rough average of these figures. Younger players are more likely to enjoy leadership positions in online games. Whereas younger players are more likely to start a guild, older players tend to assume the leadership role at some point down the line. See Nick Yee, “Being a Leader,” The Daedalus Project (2005): http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001467.php; and Nick Yee, “The Origin of Guild Leaders,” The Daedalus Project (2006): http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001517.php.

  6. Part of this cross-cultural data has been reported in papers focusing on different aspects of gameplay. See, e.g., Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Les Nelson, “Online
Gaming Motivations Scale: Development and Validation,” Proceedings of CHI 2012 (2012): 2803–2806. But the full cross-cultural data from the entire study have never been reported, so I mention the new data here: the average age of online gamers in the United States was 34.2 (SD = 10.7, n = 876); in the European Union, 32.6 (SD = 8.6, n = 279); and in mainland China, 22.3 (SD = 3.6, n = 640). Owing to institutional review board restrictions at the federal research level, we were unable to collect data from minors, so these data points are skewed higher than the true averages.

  7. In terms of average hours of play each week, Yee, “Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences,” reported a mean of 22.7 hours and a median of 20 hours per week. Williams, Yee, and Caplan, “Who Plays,” reported a mean of 25.7 hours per week. Yee found no significant correlation between age and hours played; Williams, Yee, and Caplan found a significant positive correlation. For average TV watching in the United States, see Nielsen, “Report: How Americans Are Spending Their Media Time . . . and Money,” www.nielsenwire.com, February 9, 2012, available at: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online-mobile/report-how-americans-are-spending-their-media-time-and-money/.

  8. Frequency of playing together with people outside the game has been reported in multiple papers, but often grouped in different ways. In Yee, “Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences,” 16% of male players and 60% of female players regularly played with a romantic partner; 26% of male players and 40% of female players did so with family members. In Helena Cole and Mark D. Griffiths, “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 575–583, 26% played with family and friends. The data reported in the text come from Nick Yee, “Playing with Someone,” The Daedalus Project (2005): available at http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001468.php, which lists the percentages by category and then the summed overlap across the categories.