The Daedalus Project

Slideshow #6

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I'm looking to gather some more visual data points of all the interesting social phenomema happening in MMOs. If you have any screenshots that fall into the following categories, please consider submitting them. Any images you submit will be credited to you if they are ever displayed on The Daedalus Project.

In particular, I am looking for the following kinds of images:

- Emergent Behavior: Interesting social behavior that emerged in game, whether this is a vigil, a funeral, a wedding, or someone crashing your party.
- Strange Bugs: Like the recent WoW Plague.
- Funny Moments: Humorous moments in your MMO adventures.
- Others: any other screenshots that you think are interesting but don't fall into a category above.

Please send your screenshot as a JPG file. Screenshots that are well-composed and where the interface elements are hidden are much appreciated. Please note that there is a file size limit of 800k per image.

Likelihood of Quitting

We’ve looked at player fatigue and likelihood of quitting before. In this article, we’ll drill down a bit more and look at which demographic and play factors are most likely to drive quitting. These differences would also hint at how a game population changes as a game matures, in terms of which kinds of player are most likely to stay in or leave the population.

One stable finding we’ve seen before is that female players are less likely to quit an MMO. In the question below, players were asked to rate the likelihood that they would quit in the next 3 months on a 5-point scale (1 = Very Unlikely, 5 = Very Likely). The graph also shows an age trend. Older players are less likely to quit compared with younger players. Or more accurately, male players are less likely to quit as they get older. Female players across all age groups are just as likely to quit. Once past the age of 35, male and female players seem to have converged on the same likelihood of quitting.

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A multiple regression would let us tease apart the relative importance of these demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, hours played per week) as well as include motivations of play factors (i.e., achievement, social, and immersion) on the likelihood of quitting. The model that emerged showed that the relative importance of the factors goes like this:

1) Hours (b = -.17): Not surprisingly, the more a player currently plays, the less likely they will quit.
2) Social Motivation (b = -.10): What was surprising was how much the social motivations were related to likelihood of quitting. The more a player enjoyed socializing in an MMO, the less likely they will quit the game.
3) Age (b = -.08): Age comes next. As we’ve seen, older players are less likely to quit.
4) Achievement Motivation (b = .06): The result here is unintuitive at first. The more a player is achievement-oriented, the more likely they will quit the game. This may be due to grinding and “burning-out” factors, or that players who are goal-driven lose interest in the game once they reach their goals or if they perceive their goals to be not worth the effort.
5) Gender (b = .03): The somewhat striking gender difference in the graph above actually isn’t a good predictor of whether a player will quit compared with the other factors listed here.
6) Immersion Motivation (b = .008): And finally, how much a player enjoys role-playing or exploration has no impact on their likelihood of quitting.

This set of factors implies that as a game matures, and assuming that there isn’t a large constant influx of new players, the maturing player base will tend to be more socially-oriented, older, and less achievement-oriented. It’ll be interesting to see this in an actual game with longitudinal data.

The Demographics of Game Choices

Many MMOs allow players to choose sides or affinities. Sometimes, like in City of Heroes/Villains, players can choose between a clearly good or evil side. In other games, like World of Warcraft, the good/evil divide is a little less clear cut. Of course, these choices don’t always revolve around good and evil. For example, they may involve choosing a race, or choosing between technology and nature. Here I’ll present some data on different hypothetical choices that a game may ask a player to make when creating a character or during character development. What we’ll see over and over again is that whenever a game asks players to make a choice, players seldom evenly distribute themselves. Instead, other factors, such as age, tend to be correlated with those choices. This in turn creates demographic differences between sides/affinities in games.

For example, let’s start with the good and evil split. The graph below shows both an age and gender difference. Younger players prefer to be on the evil side, and this tendency decreases as age increases. There is also a relatively more mild gender difference in the mid-ranges where male players are more likely to be on the evil side than female players. What’s interesting here is that the distribution roughly matches the 2:1 Alliance-to-Horde ratio in WoW.

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Another choice that almost all MMOs ask players to make is to choose a race. To simplify matters, I choose 3 races - Elves, Humans, and Undead. Overall, there were almost no age differences, and the only striking difference that emerged was that female players were more likely to prefer playing Elves whereas male players tended to be more evenly distributed.

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Another kind of choice that has less often been made explicit in MMOs is choosing a source of power. For example, a pet could be magic-based (e.g., elemental), nature-based (e.g., wolf), or technology-based (e.g., mechanical droid). Demographic differences with these three hypothetical choices were interesting.

Male players were about 3 to 4 times more likely to prefer a technology source than female players, and female players were about twice as likely to prefer a nature source as male players. Preference for a magical was roughly comparable between male and female players. There was also an interesting age trend among the male players. Preference for technological sources decreased as a function of age.

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And finally, another functional divide in most MMOs is between dealing damage and healing damage. In this particular question, I focused on spell-casting and whether players would prefer a damage spell or a healing spell. Here, the gender difference is quite clear. Female players prefer healing spells over damage spells. There is also a mild age difference. Older players tend to prefer healing.

Added Note (03/25/2007): I wanted to add briefly how complicated these gender findings can be, and how they might be a reflection of other variables. For example, we also know that female players are more likely to be playing with their romantic partners. And it makes sense that a player's preferences might be shaped by their game-play history. Is it possible that men "encourage" their romantic partners to play healing/support classes to help their own playing styles? Or for example, women are more likely to be playing in the same room with someone else playing. Might this contextual difference lend itself to preferring more social modes of play? So I would caution against interpreting the graphs in this article as being purely driven by gender (i.e., women are biologically hard-wired to prefer passive, supporting roles), but rather, as the complicated outcome of gender, cultural, and contextual differences.

Additional Player Demographics

We’ve covered the basic demographics before - age, gender, hours played per week (which really haven’t changed much over time btw), so here we’ll look at other player demographics. I’ve never really asked about birth order before and the results were somewhat surprising. MMO players seem to be more likely to be the eldest in the family than would be expected from chance alone. This may be a confound with something else that I’m not thinking of, but I’m not sure what it might be. Post a comment if you have a guess why this might be.

I also asked players whether they were full-time students, full-time home-makers, or retired. Given that the average female MMO player is slightly older than the average male MMO player, the difference in the full-time student category makes sense. The data also showed that about 20% of female players and 5% of male players were full-time home-makers.

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I also looked into attitudes towards religion and social issues. As the graphs show below, religion tends to be fairly unimportant in the lives of most MMO players.

This trend is also reflected in the question about political leaning. Players were asked where they typically stood in terms of social issues, such as abortion, gay rights, and stem cell research. Most MMO players tended to be liberal-leaning, with female players describing themselves as more liberal than male players.

I also tried to see whether either of these two questions was related to class choice among World of Warcraft players. Differences only involved one particular class - Paladins. And while the difference was significant, it was also very small. Players who preferred to be play Paladins in WoW tended to be more conservative and religion tended to play a bigger role in their lives. Again, I want to emphasize that this was a significant, but small, difference.

Through the Looking Glass

In a recent survey, I asked players whether they had ever learned anything about themselves from their MMO experiences, or whether their experiences in an MMO had ever changed how they thought about themselves or their perspective of the world. About 400 MMO players responded to this particular question, revealing some interesting perspectives on what they have learned from their experiences in an MMO.

MMOs are interesting social spaces in several ways. First of all, there are almost no other social spaces in the physical world where people from such different demographic backgrounds and life experiences collaborate on a regular basis. The age range in most MMOs goes from 10 to 70. In a typical 5-person pick-up group, you may have a high-school student, a war veteran, a professional home-maker, a law professor, and a retired bank manager. In our education and work systems, we typically only get to talk and work with people who are incredibly similar to ourselves. This is actually seldom the case in MMOs. Another thing that bears pointing out that there are almost no social spaces in the physical world where teenagers routinely get to work with adults as equals. But not only does collaboration occur, teenagers routinely lead groups of adults, give them orders, and partly schedule their leisure time in MMOs. Learning how to work with and lead a diverse group of people is an important social skill, especially for teenagers.

Beyond the demographic landscape, MMOs also expose us to stressful group conflicts, leadership opportunities, and moral dilemmas, among other scenarios, that we may be less often exposed to in our day to day lives. Another interesting part of MMOs is the compressed time in several domains. While it may take decades to rise to the top of your profession in the real world, it is possible to reach max-level in some MMOs with just several months of casual playing. The rate at which guilds form, fragment, and dissolve may also allow some players to try out and understand how to lead and manage teams in ways that may take much much longer in an actual office. In short, MMOs may offer players experiences in roles and positions that they may not have access to in the physical world.

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Leadership and Management

Of all the things that players mentioned, one came up over and over again. Of the 400 responses, and this includes players who said “no, didn’t learn anything”, about 44 specifically described how they had become better leaders or team managers from their MMO experiences. Many of these players also specifically mentioned how this has helped them tangibly in their work lives, in terms of promotions or better pay-scales.

The following responses are insightful because several players articulate the specific skills that they have become better at from their MMO experiences. Another important thing to note is that these responses aren’t only coming from teenagers who have few leadership and management experiences from real life. Players from all over the age range noted this change. And finally, I want to point out that no examples were given in the original phrasing of the question. In other words, this isn’t a case of respondents flocking to examples in the question stem.

In addition to high-level leadership and management, a related skill that several players brought up was learning how to work with and understand other people in team scenarios.

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Gaining Confidence

Another theme that some players brought up was that their in-game interactions allowed them to work through some shyness issues they’ve had in face-to-face interactions. What is most striking in this first anecdote is that the MMO space removed barriers to self-growth present in this person’s day-to-day life at school.

Of course, shyness is an issue that many people struggle with, and isn’t a problem only teenagers have to work through.

One of the processes that drive these increases in confidence, and hinted at by some of the narratives above, is that trying out more confident and sociable identities in an MMO allows them to experience what they didn’t think they were capable of. This in turn encourages them to extend their new behavioral repertoire outside of the virtual setting. The following players make this point more explicitly.

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Personal Growth

Apart from these two broad classes of skills that people mentioned, some players described stumbling-blocks in their personalities that their game experiences allowed them to move past. These are probably more accurately described as personal growth. This first anecdote is a good example.

Another kind of growth that several players mentioned was learning how to stay calm and not be bothered by the small stuff in life.

These final two examples are interesting in that they show more clearly how an MMO can reveal an area for potential growth and facilitate that transition.

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Revealing Aspects of the Self

Of course, it isn’t the case that MMOs can solve everyone’s personal stumbling-blocks. Indeed, many players noted that their MMO experiences helped reveal negative parts of themselves that they didn’t really know about. Since awareness is necessary before change, I guess we could think of these as precursors to personal growth. For example, some players noted that they never realized how competitive they are.

Others noticed how much they cared about other people’s approval and their need for validation.

And finally, for others, the game revealed a dark side of themselves that worried them.

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Global Perspective

One final category of comments that players made involved how their MMO experience helped broaden their perspective of the world. For some, interactions with players from different countries provided a more sober perspective of the US.

But overall, players commented on how their experiences helped them see the world from a more global, connected perspective.

Ending Thoughts

I think these narratives are helpful in highlighting the porous boundary between virtual worlds and physical worlds. As many of these stories show, it just isn’t fair to talk about MMOs as fantasy worlds that are somehow cut off from reality, nor is it fair to claim that MMOs only produce negative consequences. What happens in MMOs can lead to self-growth as well as promotions at work. Of course, this isn’t to say that everyone who plays MMOs will derive positive consequences from it, but these narratives do hint at the fuller spectrum of what MMOs are and the interesting ways that virtual worlds cross over and tie into who we are and what we do in the physical world.

Superstitions

I made a short, speculative post on MMO superstitions on the Terra Nova blog a while back when I first began to think about the idea. This article is a more elaborate exploration drawing on a survey asking players to describe superstitions they have seen in an MMO. But I want to begin with the most interesting comment made on the Terra Nova blog post which was posted by Heather Sinclair, a member of the Dungeon and Dragons Online development team:

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

I want to make clear that I am using the word “superstition” in the context of MMOs without reference to spirits or religion in the way “superstitious” sometimes implies when used in everyday language. Specifically, I’m using the word “superstition” to refer to repeated behaviors driven by strong beliefs that doing X (or not doing X) will cause Y even though there is no good evidence that this is the case, or despite countering evidence. Superstition falls along a spectrum of related phenomena, such as urban legends and speculation. What differentiates superstition from these other two terms is that urban legends are typically stories which have no repeated behavioral component and speculation usually forms the basis for somewhat systematic testing. Of course, the distinctions among all these terms are not clear cut.

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In this particular survey, about 380 MMO players described one or more superstitions they had seen in an MMO. As I read through the player-submitted superstitions, I was struck by several things, and I will list some of these here to help frame the phenomena we’re looking at and the stories that follow:

1) Other people’s superstitions always seem crazier. When reading through the superstitions, I felt more sympathetic towards ones in games I’ve played and more likely to laugh at superstitions in games I haven’t played. But, of course, most of the superstitions are incredibly similar across games and I think reading superstitions from other games will help us think more seriously about the ones in the games we do play.

2) Some people argue that all MMO superstitions must be false because it’s just easier for developers to use a random number generator throughout, but it’s also true that it takes just several lines of code to increase the chances of all rare drops on Tuesdays. And while it is impossible to prove that gods or spirits exist in the real world, there actually is an omnipotent, omniscient god in MMOs (known as the game developer) who can and does mess with the rules. In other words, there is no logical reason why a four-leaf clover would bring you good luck in real life, but this is plausible and easy to implement in an MMO. So ironically, there is a better basis in believing in an MMO superstition than a real life superstition.

3) A corollary of #2 is that we may never know whether a particular superstition is actually true or false because: a) most of the scenarios occur with sufficiently low frequencies (i.e., rare mob drops) that they are hard to sample for testing, b) we will never have access to the actual code base in most cases, and c) even if we did, weird features do arise from complex code that developers never put in explicitly but nevertheless might exist (e.g., the case of the "wi flag" in Asheron's Call). However, while some of these superstitions may be true, it is likely that most of them are in fact false.

But enough of my thoughts. Let’s turn to the superstitions that players have seen in the games they play.

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Instance Seeding

Most superstitions players described involved low-chance or high-risk events. For example, a low-chance event may be a rare loot drop. In World of Warcraft, there is a pervasive superstition that the loot table in high-level instances is determined by the first member of the group who steps foot inside the instance.

While a superstition involving a common scenario may be easily disproved by testing, one reason why superstitions involving uncommon scenarios sustain themselves is because “it can’t hurt” to try it. And if you only get to run a high-level instance once each week, then why not try something out that only takes 30 seconds?

Some People Are Luckier

One interesting variation of the instance seeder superstition claims that certain characters are luckier or have better loot tables.

What fascinates me here is that certain characters come to be seen as being inherently lucky or unlucky (even divine or cursed), analogous to how certain people in life are sometimes perceived to have divine or miraculous powers.

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Lucky Charms

There is also a pervasive item-based superstition regarding drop rates across many MMOs and this is the belief that having certain objects in your inventory will improve the drop rate of rare items. The specific item changes from game to game, but takes the same general form.

And again, here we see the interesting behavior where players may not themselves “believe” in the superstition, but they do it anyways because the behavior requires little effort in comparison with the potential gains.

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Over-Enchanting

An interesting case study of a high-risk event is something known as over-enchanting, a crafting mechanic present in games such as Ragnarok Online, Ultima Online, and Lineage 2.

In addition to standing in specific places, players described a wide variety of other superstitions related to over-enchanting. Some of these involve eating before enchanting.

Others have developed a more elaborate set of rituals.

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Crafting in FFXI

The most interesting superstitions related to crafting actually come from Final Fantasy XI, and it’s because the developers have a history of messing with the players.

Deliberately strange rules like this have spawned an entire legion of crafting superstitions in FFXI.

As a side note, I’ve never felt so relieved to not be playing an MMO where moonphases are involved. Just imagine the beliefs that might spring up in WoW if that were the case.

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Spawning

Spawning as a game mechanic used to be a much bigger deal, such as in the original EverQuest. This is because some mobs would have spawn times of an hour or six hours in addition to having place-holder spawns. This helps to partly explain why there were many superstitions regarding spawning in EQ in a way that there aren’t in a game like WoW where spawning is faster and less painful. One prevalent superstition was the existence of an “anti-spawn” radius.

Other superstitions involved cleaning up after yourself.

And of course, some people developed ritual dances for spawning. As you’re reading these, please note the uncanny resemblance of this to Skinner’s pigeons.

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Loaded Dice

Given the prevalence of random rolling systems in many MMOs, it makes sense that players might develop superstitions on what is ostensibly a random number generator. Of course, badly-implemented random number generators (or overly imaginative players) often give the impression of having patterns. One of the most popular superstitions is that you can get rid of your “bad rolls”.

A variant of this is waiting till someone else makes a bad roll and then rolling yourself.

Others prefer an order-based method of rolling.

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Risks, Costs, and Persistence of Superstitions

It bears pointing out the conditions that encourage superstitions to develop and the irrational and social mechanisms that sustain them. As we’ve seen, superstitions are more likely to involve low-chance and high-risk events. In practice, they are partly sustained because the cost of a 30 second superstitious behavior is extremely low in comparison with a raid wipe (and the consequent regrouping time).

Another mechanism is that we tend to remember confirming cases more than disconfirming cases. But typically, one confirming case is enough to create a new group of converts.

Overall, I was most surprised by how widespread superstitions were across MMOs and how adamantly some players follow them. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, a few of these superstitions might in fact be true, but most are likely to be false. I’ll close this exploration of superstitions with an anecdote that is a little more light-hearted.

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Appendix

There were a bunch of interesting submitted superstitions that didn’t neatly fit into the narrative flow of the article, but I wanted to make sure that they were shared as well. Here they are.

Bovine Assault

A Special, Happy Place

Paint Brush of Souls

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