The Proteus Paradox

by Nick Yee

  9. Positive and negative experiences data points are drawn from Yee, “Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences,” as is the friendship comparability issue. Cole and Griffiths, “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” report a similar finding on friendship comparability, 46%.

  10. For Bartle’s player types, see Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS” (1996), available at: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm. Factor analysis was used to identify these motivation clusters. See Nick Yee, “Motivations for Play in Online Games,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 9 (2006): 772–775; and the validation of the scale in Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Les Nelson, “Online Gaming Motivations Scale: Development and Validation,” Proceedings of CHI 2012 (2012): 2803–2806.

  11. The research in problematic Internet usage has tended to dovetail with research in problematic gaming, suggesting that both depression and social anxiety are significant contributors. See Marcantonio M. Spada, Benjamin Langston, Ana V. Nikčević, and Giovanni B. Moneta, “The Role of Metacognitions in Problematic Internet Usage,” Computers in Human Behavior 24 (2008): 2325–2335; Robert LaRose, Carolyn A. Lin, and Matthew S. Eastin, “Unregulated Internet Usage: Addiction, Habit, or Deficient Self-Regulation?” Media Psychology 5 (2003): 225–253; and Scott E. Caplan, Dmitri Williams, and Nick Yee, “Problematic Internet Use and Psychosocial Well-Being among MMO Players,” Computers in Human Behavior 25 (2009): 1312–1319. For the study on family members playing together, see Cuihua Shen and Dmitri Williams, “Unpacking Time Online: Connecting Internet and MMO Use with Psychosocial Well-Being,” Communication Research 38 (2011): 123–149.

  12. Andrew J. Grundstein et al., “A Retrospective Analysis of American Football Hyperthermia Deaths in the United States,” International Journal of Biometeorology 56 (2010): 11.

  Chapter Three. Superstitions

  1. B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938).

  2. B. F. Skinner, “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–172.

  3. Alfred Bruner and Samuel H. Revusky, “Collateral Behavior in Humans,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 4 (1961): 349–350.

  4. Heather Sinclair discusses some of these superstitions in a comment to a blog post on Terra Nova: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/10/superstition.

  html#c25369047.

  5. Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Televisions, and New Media Like Real People and Places (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  6. See Michael Argyle and Janet Dean, “Eye-Contact, Distance and Affiliation,” Sociometry 28 (1965): 289–304; and Nick Yee et al., “The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments,” Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 115–121.

  7. There are many other examples of these cognitive shortcuts. See, e.g., Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974): 1124–1131.

  8. For examples of known effects of moon phases in Final Fantasy XI, see this wiki page: http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/MoonePhase. Note how the unproven effects of moon phases are explicitly marked.

  9. The player behind Wi describes the early dismissal of his digital torment on this guild post: http://www.gamerdna.com/GuildHome.php?guildid=5849&page=2. Turbine’s initial denial and subsequent discovery of the bug were originally released at: http://www.zone.com/asheronscall/news/ASHEletter0702.asp. That link is no longer available, but the letter has been archived and is available at: http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag.

  Chapter Four. The Labor of Fun

  1. In game studies, the philosophical distinction between play and nonplay usually centers on debates around the concept of the “magic circle”—the special space created by a game that marks it off from reality—originally coined by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1938). It is a highly abstract and theoretical discussion, and I refer interested readers to a recent review of the literature: Jaakko Stenros, “In Defence of a Magic Circle: The Social and Mental Boundaries of Play,” Proceedings of 2012 DiGRA Nordic (2012), http://www.digra.org/dl/db/12168.43543.pdf. See also Bonnie A. Nardi, “Work, Play, and the Magic Circle,” in My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 94–122.

  2. One of many equations from the “SWG Profession Guide—Doctor”: http://forum.galaxiesreborn.com/star-wars-galaxies-profession-guides/swg-profession-guide-doctor-t3208.html.

  3. Excerpted from: www.hadean.org in 2005.

  4. Excerpted from: http://eve-search.com/thread/622081/page/1.

  5. Full interview available at: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001334.php.

  6. Here, “classism” refers to the periodic preferences and non-preferences for certain classes in the game owing to changes in game balancing. Classes that are perceived as nonoptimal may be shunned by other players when forming raids and dungeon groups.

  7. John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2004).

  8. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011); Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2009).

  9. “Gartner Says by 2014, 80 Percent of Current Gamified Applications Will Fail to Meet Business Objectives Primarily Due to Poor Design,” Gartner Newsroom, November 27, 2012, www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2251015.

  10. See Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 63 (2000): 33–58. For more on free labor, see Trebor Scholz, ed., Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2012). For news coverage of the protein folding game, see Michael J. Coren and Fast Company, “Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme within 3 Weeks,” Scientific American, September 20, 2011. For more on how gamification can be exploitative, see Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Gamasutra, May 3, 2011, available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games

  _exploitationware.php.

  Chapter Five. Yi-Shan-Guan

  1. These player-made videos first reported in Constance Steinkuehler, “The Mangle of Play,” Games and Culture 1 (2006): 199–213.

  2. Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1 (2006): 281–317.

  3. Julian Dibbell, “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer,” New York Times, June 17, 2007.

  4. Richard Heeks, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for Virtual Economies of Online Games,” Development Informatics Working Paper Series (2008), retrieved from: http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/

  wp/di/di_wp32.htm.

  5. Danny Vincent, “China Used Prisoners in Lucrative Internet Gaming Work,” Guardian, May 25, 2011.

  6. In games like World of Warcraft, PvP on most servers is meant to be a mutually consensual activity. Players can toggle their PvP status. When toggled off, no other player can attack them. When toggled on, they can attack other PvP-flagged players. If a non-PvP-flagged Player A attacks a PvP-flagged Player B, Player A’s PvP-flag is toggled on. Gold farmers sometimes try to trick normal players by first toggling on their PvP-flag and then step into monsters the player is attacking, hoping that the player clicks on them instead of the monster and accidentally causing them to become PvP-flagged. When this happens, the gold farmer can attack and attempt to kill the player via PvP. In resource-rich areas, there are often multiple gold
farmers. Thus, when normal players are tricked to becoming PvP-flagged, they may be set upon by multiple gold farmers.

  7. Heeks, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda,” 11–12.

  8. Thread now defunct but originally available at: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-mage&T=283346.

  9. Thread now defunct but originally available at: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-general&T=4007590.

  10. Lisa Nakamura, “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (2009): 128–144.

  11. Dean Chan, “Being Played: Games Culture and Asian American Dis/Identifications,” Refractory 16 (2009): 1.

  12. See http://web.archive.org/web/20060708212246/http://www.hellomonster.net/2006/04/18/blizzards-patriot-act/.

  13. Yi-shan-guan was a euphemism that implied a tailoring or clothing emporium, without any direct reference to washing or laundry. Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 48–49, 169.

  14. Ibid., 119, 132.

  15. Edward Castronova, “Is Inflation Fun?” Terra Nova, http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/08/iseinflationefu.html.

  16. Heeks, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda,” 23.

  17. Nate Combs, “Why Are In-Game Economies so Hard to Get Right?” TerraNova, http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/02/whyeare_ingamee.html.

  18. This finding on lynching was first reported in C. Hovland and R. Sears, “Minor Studies of Aggression: Correlation of Lynchings with Economic Indices,” Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 9 (1940): 301–310. A reanalysis revealed some statistical flaws, but the corrected analysis still showed the same correlations at a lower magnitude: Alexander Mintz, “A Re-Examination of Correlations between Lynchings and Economic Indices,” Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 41 (1946): 154–160. A definitive reanalysis using time series analysis has confirmed that the correlations are real and not simply artifacts of incorrect statistics: E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynchings of Blacks,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 526–539. The study of ethnic stereotypes in the European Union is reported in Edwin Poppe, “Effects of Changes in GNP and Perceived Group Characteristics on National and Ethnic Stereotypes in Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 31 (2006): 1689–1708.

  Chapter Six. The Locker Room Utopia

  1. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Statistics of gender ratio across all video games can be found in Entertainment Software Association, “2012 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry,” http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2012.pdf. The ratio of female gamers is reported as 26% in a study of World of Warcraft players in Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Han-Tai Shiao, and Les Nelson, “Through the Azerothian Looking Glass: Mapping In-Game Preferences to Real World Demographics,” Proceedings of CHI 2012 1 (2012): 2811–2814; as 19.7% women in a study of EverQuest II players in Dmitri Williams, Mia Consalvo, Scott Caplan, and Nick Yee, “Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors among Online Gamers,” Journal of Communication 59 (2009): 700–725; and as 15% women in an earlier study across multiple online games in Nick Yee, “The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments,” Presence 15 (2006): 309–329.

  2. Torben Grodal, “Video Games and the Pleasure of Control,” in Media Entertainment: The Psychology of Its Appeal, ed. Dolf Zillman and Peter Vorderer (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 197–213; Kristen Lucas and John L. Sherry, “Sex Differences in Video Game Play: A Communication-Based Explanation,” Communication Research 31 (2004): 499–523; Chris Crawford, “Women in Games,” Escapist 17 (2005): 3–9.

  3. T. L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 113.

  4. Holin Lin, “Body, Space, and Gendered Gaming Experiences: A Cultural Geography of Homes, Cybercafés and Dormitories,” Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Computer Games, ed. Yasmin B. Kafai et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 54–67.

  5. Parenting differences in arcade access reported in Desmond Ellis, “Video Arcades, Youth, and Trouble,” Youth and Society 16 (1984): 47–65. For Williams’s studies of women in gaming, see Dmitri Williams, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory, “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games,” New Media and Society 11 (2009): 815–834; and 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.

  6. David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); T. Camp, “Women in Computer Studies: Reversing the Trend,” Syllabus 24 (2001): 24–26; Computing Research Association, “Computing Degree and Enrollment Trends,” http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_

  and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf.

  7. Yee, “Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences.”

  8. Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, “Her Own Boss: Gender and the Pursuit of Incompetent Play” (Paper presented at DiGRA 2005).

  9. In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently employed by Ubisoft, but since I had previously recounted this story with Romine in a book chapter long before I was employed by Ubisoft, I felt it was acceptable to reproduce it here without seeming too biased.

  10. See http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001557.php.

  11. Sheri Graner Ray, Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market (Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2004), 104.

  12. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5968887243.

  13. Here are three studies that report very consistent gender differences in gaming: T. Hartmann and C. Klimmt, “Gender and Computer Games: Exploring Females’ Dislikes,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2006): 910–931; Lucas and Sherry, “Sex Differences in Video Game Play”; and Williams, Consalvo, Caplan, and Yee, “Looking for Gender.” In addition to the last source cited, I’ve also reported this in a different data set: Nick Yee, “Motivations for Play in Online Games,” Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior 9 (2006): 772–775.

  14. Nick Yee, “WoW Alliance vs. Horde,” The Daedalus Project, available at: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001366.php.

  15. The overlap percentage U between two samples can be calculated based on the effect size d, as described in: J. Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (Mahwah, NH: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988). For the data here, I used the effect sizes from the data in Yee, “Motivations for Play in Online Games.” The effect size for the Mechanics motivation was r = .24. The average effect size across all 10 motivations was r = .12. These convert to effect size d as .49 and .25, respectively. The distribution overlap percentages were then estimated based on these effect size metrics. For the data from Williams, see Consalvo, Caplan, and Yee, “Looking for Gender.” The effect size d can be calculated based on the means and standard deviations reported in table 1, resulting in d = .44. Hyde’s argument can be found in Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 581–592.

  16. This analysis uses data reported in Yee, “Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences.” Variance explained can be estimated by squaring the effect size metric r. The effect size r for gender in the Achievement motivation is .26, while effect size for age is .33. The resulting variances explained are .07 and .11, respectively.

  17. This phenomenon is incredibly consistent across time and games. For early data from EverQuest players, see http://nickyee.com/eqt/genderbend.html. For recent data from World of Warcraft players, see 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 2012 1 (2012): 773–776. This phenomenon was also reported in early text-based virtual worlds: Amy S. Bruckman, “Gender Swapping on the Internet,” Proceedings of INET (Reston, VA: Internet Society, 1993). For the post on the Daedalus Project, see: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001369.php. When the gender disparity of gender-bending is brought up, it is often framed from the male perspective: Why do men gender-bend so much? This perspective assumes that veridicality is the norm and that men are somehow breaking this norm. It bears pointing out that this may be the less fruitful of the two options. From a feminist perspective, there would, on the surface, seem to be good reasons for women to gender-bend—to reject the objectification of female bodies. On the other hand, the need to reject your own biological sex to feel comfortable in a social space highlights a core problem in these online games for women. In either case, the question we should be asking might be: Why is gender-bending among women so uncommon in online games?

  18. Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Les Nelson, and Peter Likarish, “Introverted Elves and Conscientious Gnomes: The Expression of Personality in World of War-craft,” Proceedings of CHI 2011 (2011): 753–762.

  19. Jesse Fox and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “Virtual Virgins and Vamps: The Effects of Exposure to Female Characters’ Sexualized Appearance and Gaze in an Immersive Virtual Environment,” Sex Roles 61 (2009): 147–157.

  20. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–22.

  21. See Marybeth J. Mattingly and Suzanne M. Bianchi, “Gender Differences in Quantity and Quality of Free Time: The U.S. Experience,” Social Forces 81 (2003): 999–1030; and Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan, “Parental Leisure Time: A Gender Comparison in Five Countries,” Social Politics (2013), doi: 10.1093/sp/jxt002. For examples of how guilt is used in advertising directed at women, see Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).