Dissertation - The Proteus Effect

In my dissertation, I addressed the issue of transformed identity in virtual environments. Below is the abstract and link to a PDF of the full text.

Abstract

Digital media allows us to make both dramatic and subtle changes to our self-representations with an ease not available elsewhere. These changes can greatly affect how we interact with others in virtual environments. For example, facial and behavioral mimicry can make us more likeable and persuasive. In addition to gaining social advantages, our avatars (digital representations of ourselves) can also change how we behave. This occurs via conforming to expected behaviors of the avatar - a process referred to as the Proteus Effect.

I conducted a series of four pilot studies that explore the Proteus Effect. In the first study, I found that participants in attractive avatars walked closer to and disclosed more information to a stranger than participants in unattractive avatars. In the second study, I found that participants in taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in a bargaining task than participants in shorter avatars. In the third study, I demonstrated that the Proteus Effect occurs in an actual online community. And in the final study, I showed that the Proteus Effect persists outside of the virtual environment. Placing someone in a taller avatar changes how they consequently negotiate in a face-to-face setting.

The two dissertation studies extended these pilot studies by attempting to clarify the underlying process that leads to the Proteus Effect. In the first dissertation study, I isolated and teased out the unique contribution of the Proteus Effect from an alternative explanation - priming. Priming is a process whereby visual stimulus (such as words or photographs) leads someone to behave in a semantically-consistent manner. In the second dissertation study, I extrapolated from existing theories of stereotype formation to examine the consequences of placing users in implausible bodies that fall outside the range of normal human variation (such as a very short or very tall body).

The Labor of Fun

The following is an essay that has just appeared in the founding issue of the journal, Games and Culture. It is an essay on the blurring boundaries of work and play in online games. The final manuscript version is linked below:

The Labor of Fun

Citation:
Yee, N. (2006). The labor of fun: How video games blur the boundaries of work and play. Games and Culture, 1, 68-71.

A New Disorder is Born

I want to start off by saying that it is clear that sometimes gamers play too much and their game playing impacts their work and relationships in negative ways. There are many many anecdotes by friends and family of gamers as well as gamers themselves who describe how extreme game-playing can become. On the other hand, making this observation in no way necessitates creating a new psychological disorder with which to stigmatize games and gamers. It is this distinction and the gap between those two notions that I want to explore in this article.

A New Disorder is Born

The American Psychiatry Association does not officially recognize Internet Addiction Disorder (even though that term has appeared in academic papers quite often recently). There are several reasons why. The foundational work behind the concept of Internet Addiction Disorder derives from survey studies using a set of criteria developed by Kimberley Young (1996).

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet (think about previous on-line activity or anticipate next on-line session)?
2. Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?
3. Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use?
4. Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
5. Do you stay on-line longer than originally intended?
6. Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet?
7. Have you lied to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet?
8. Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)?

A person who answers “yes” to five or more of the above questions is considered to have Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Thus, in the original survey work, it was found that some people fell into this criteria and thus a new disorder was born. The primary objection to this methodology of creating psychological disorders is that for any given media form, hobby, or activity, it is probably true that some percentage of people will fall into this criteria of “addiction”. The only difference is that researchers choose only certain activities to investigate for addiction disorders. And thus, we have IAD and we are asked to believe that people never watch TV too much, never play golf too much, and never work too much. The Internet is dangerous whereas other activities are wholesome and good. But if any and every activity can have its very own addiction disorder, it’s not clear that such a notion is meaningful. On the other hand, picking and choosing which activities we deem “addictive” seems more and more arbitrary.

Another problem is that it conflates all kinds of things that people do online. In this model, shopping online, chatting online, looking for information online, and playing games online are all the same thing. It were as if any normal activity suddenly becomes potentially deviant and dangerous when it happens online. And by fudging the important differences among those activities in terms of motivations and social interactions, these survey studies typically manage to sidestep the most important question of all - what causes people to become addicted to the Internet to begin with? What is it about the Internet that is so dangerous?

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Call It What It Is

Young has proposed a model for IAD known as the ACE model - Accessibility, Control, and Excitement. She argues that these three aspects of Internet use encourage addictions. One problem is that most forms of media have ACE components. For example, TVs are accessible, remotes give us a great deal of control, and there’s plenty of sex, gore, and action on TV. The same is true of non-media activities such as rock climbing or golf. Now it is true that living close to a golf course increases accessibility and thus the likelihood of developing an intense interest in golf, but using that as an argument for creating an addiction disorder for golf seems strange. It is equally strange when it is done for the IAD.

More importantly, the ACE model leaves out one very important fact. Not everyone gets “addicted”. In fact, I know many first-person shooter gamers who find MMORPGs to be the most boring games in the world (and vice versa). If IAD were solely caused by aspects of the technology, then either everyone or no one would get addicted. In other words, whatever is causing IAD has to involve something more than just pointing fingers at the technology itself. It’s got to have something to do with the individual as well.

The emphasis on the media creates the illusion that the blame belongs to the media itself. It portrays the Internet as a predator that every person can fall prey to. But the more we look, the less this seems to be the case. Being addicted to one thing makes you more likely to be addicted to other things. People who are depressed are more likely to spend too much time online. People who are diagnosed as online gaming addicts typically have other problems - such as depression or low self-esteem. Recent studies show that one out of ten teenagers is depressed. The overall picture is quite clear, internet addiction may just be an expression of other well-understood problems such as depression. In other words, it may have more to do with the people than it does with the technology.

For a long time, we've known that people who are severely depressed may do harmful things to themselves, but whether we create a whole new set of "addictions" to explain it (and shift the blame from the person to the technology) or whether we call it as it is - depression, low self-esteem, etc. - is very much a social decision that is tied to the paranoia and mindset of the world we live in. If IAD were really about the person rather than the technology, then taking away the technology alone won’t solve the problem. And if the technology isn’t really the problem, then why create a disorder that stigmatizes a technology and its users?

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The 7 o’clock News

If someone dies while watching TV, that is not newsworthy. If someone dies on a golf course, you can bet that you won’t see it on the 7 o’clock news. But every time someone dies when they’re playing online games, it will be all over the news. We treat the Internet and online gaming as if no other media forms or leisure activities exist. On average, people watch 25-30 hours of TV a week, yet we seldom question whether people watch too much TV these days. But is that because TV has become a socially acceptable “addiction” that everyone is guilty of?

In a more recent paper, Young devotes several pages to the online affair as a common dangerous consequence of internet “addiction" (2004 - need academic access). It were as if affairs are somehow one of the defining reasons why the Internet is dangerous. But it is clear that affairs happen in the real world too. People have affairs at work, while playing golf, and while shopping at the mall. Young states that “at an alarming rate, once long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by a cyberaffair”. I would like to point out that long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by affairs, period. Just because they are more likely to occur now over the internet rather than over the phone or over written letters is simply a shift in communication modality. Besides, do we really know how many marriages are ruined by affairs carried out via traditional means (telephone, mail, water coolers at work, the gym, etc.)? Do we know whether people are simply having more affairs regardless of communication modality? To argue that the internet is to blame for cyberaffairs is akin to blaming kleptomania on shopping malls.

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Fun

Do spouses of golfers never feel estranged from their loved ones leaving them to go to a golf course every weekend? Do they never worry that a romantic affair may spark on the golf course? Do they never complain that their romantic partner plays too much golf? Or what about the investment banker who grinds 60-80 hour weeks and has no time to be with their family? Why do we stigmatize and pathologize certain activities when other similar activities are unquestioned?

Society is in the habit of legislating what we should and should not have fun doing, even when it comes to love and the bedroom. Not so long ago, homosexuality was diagnosed as a pathology. And sodomy laws were and are an attempt to criminalize sex among men. The variation in what constitutes wholesome enjoyment across cultures shows that certain kinds of fun can be deemed pathological, but that these decisions are inherently tied to the local culture and belief system. Labeling certain activities as addictive and potentially pathological is society’s way of marking what it deems to be unacceptable forms of fun.

We live in strange times. Watching TV for almost 30 hours a week in passive lethargy next to family members who barely talk to each other is considered to be socially acceptable. But if you play an interactive game instead of just watch a passive display for that same amount of time, and if you actually talk with people around the world instead of ignoring the people around you, then you may have the chance of developing a psychological disorder. It is ironic that apathy and laziness will never be questioned as psychological disorders, but a bit of passion can get you in deep trouble. Personally, I think apathy and laziness are far bigger problems.

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Ending Note

People can develop dependencies on many substances and activities. Creating new psychological disorders for every substance and activity seems like overkill if behavioral dependencies are more tied to the person rather than the specific activity that the dependency tethers to. And singling out only a few activities as potentially addictive seems disingenuous and arbitrary. Indeed, why do we not just have a general diagnosis called “behavioral dependency” rather than picking and choosing which behaviors are addictive? Language shapes how we think about technology use as well as our role as technology users. The notion that "video games are addictive" frames us as the helpless victims, whereas the notion of “developing a dependency” frames the excessive behavior as a function of the individual’s state of mind.

By calling it “online gaming addiction”, the media encourages us to think that we’re dealing with a very new problem. But if behavioral dependency is a general problem that tethers to many different kinds of activities, then “online gaming addiction” is actually a very well-understood problem because clinicians have treated depression and anxiety for a long time. If people can develop behavioral dependencies on any activity, then why are we surprised that some people develop dependencies on online games? Why is it news? I contend it is mostly because we’ve always used the word “addiction” to mark out deviant social activities in a way that treats them as unique predators, as emergent problems which we’ve never seen before. But once we shift our framework to one of general behavioral dependencies, then we have to abandon this view. What we’re seeing is actually a very old problem.

See Also (more recent articles listed first):

- The Trouble with "Addiction"
- A Q&A with a Therapist
- Problematic Usage
- The Seduction of Achievement
- Addiction
- Understanding MMORPG Addiction

Yi-Shan-Guan

Note: As I'm reading over the comments here and from referrer links, I'm noticing that a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that I'm mainly arguing that most gold farmers are not Chinese and that it's this aspect of the stereotype that I'm writing about. To decrease the amount of local comments based on this misreading, I want to make it clear that I do not make this argument in the article. I in fact point out, based on a variety of sources, that many gold farmers do appear to be based in China on page 11.

There’s been a lot of talk about gold farmers and RMT (real money transactions) lately. The part that both fascinates and frustrates me is not the gold farming itself, but the stories we’re telling about what’s going on. We tell stories to make sense of the world. And these stories use shared experiences to make sense of novel events, but they inevitably emphasize certain elements while sidelining other equally meaningful elements. In this article, I want to describe the story that we usually tell and hear about gold farmers as well as re-readings and alternatives to that story. My goal is not to justify what gold farmers do, but rather to complicate the typical story we tell about gold farming.

What’s the Problem?

Gold farmers are typically seen as problematic for several reasons. The following player articulates the key problems using his own experiences in the game.

Thus, gold farmers are perceived to create two main problems. First, they harass normal players. And secondly, they ruin the economy over time.

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If it ain’t English, it’s gotta be Chinese

While news articles that have dealt with gold farmers have implicated workers in Romania, Tijuana, and Indonesia, the belief that the majority of, if not all, gold farmers are Chinese is quite pervasive. The stereotype surfaces in many forum posts. On the official forums for World of Warcraft this past summer, one thread was titled “Chinese people make me mad”. Another thread countered with the title “Stop calling people Chinese farmers”. Posts such as the following reflected the general sentiment:

And even players who are hesitant at applying the racial stereotype are very aware of its existence.

Other players make the link more explicit with imagery. Of course, this stereotype holds not just for World of Warcraft but for other MMOs as well. For example, Constance Steinkuehler’s presentation of Lineage 2 showed these same sentiments among Lineage 2 players.

The extensive application of this stereotype becomes quite striking in certain cases. For example, the following French-Canadian player recounts an encounter in the game.

Other players explained their own perspectives in the following way.

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The Pestilence Trope

With the Chinese stereotype firmly in place, a familiar trope comes into play - the association between Asia and diseases. The Asian flu pandemic of 1957, and the more recent Asian bird flu crisis and SARS crisis all tie diseases to Asia repeatedly in a way that are seldom tied to Western countries and regions (except perhaps the British mad cow outbreaks). Margaret Cho highlights this trope with her parody of SARS:

But this trope plays out on forums and player narratives as well. In the “Stop calling people Chinese farmers” thread, one reply stated:

Extermination

The pestilence trope then brings into forefront notions of eradication and extermination. Depending on the game and the game mechanics, this is typically a combination of systematic harassment and slaughter:

In 2004, a fan video titled “Farm the Farmers Day” showed actual footage as players tracked down and massacred players they suspected to be adena farmers (see Constance’s paper for more on this).

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Yi-Shan-Guan

At this point, I want to briefly segue to a different story that paves the way for multiple re-readings of the story typically told about gold farmers.

This story sounds incredibly familiar, but the year is 1870 and I am, of course, talking about the genesis of the Chinese laundry shops (“yi-shan-guan”) during and after the California Gold Rush. During the Gold Rush, dirty laundry was routinely shipped to Hong Kong (among other Asian cities) partly because laundry was seen as demeaning domestic work that burly beardy miners should not perform. The turn-around time for this process was 4 months. Immigrant Chinese workers took advantage of this opportunity. The Chinese laundry business, as it bloomed, was suddenly seem as a threat by Americans. Laws were enacted in 1870 that tried to cripple Chinese laundry businesses (as well as preventing the Chinese from gaining US citizenship - which effectively barred them from voting). Documented mob lynching and pillaging of Chinatowns occurred in 1871 and 1877 (See “The Chinese in America” by Iris Chang, 2003, for more on this topic).

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Historical Vermin and Extermination

And the tropes of pestilence and eradication are particularly chilling because there are historical parallels of this exact rhetoric against the Chinese. During the late 1800s, as Chinese immigrants were blamed for many problems ranging from unemployment to the economic depression itself, they were portrayed as vermin that lived on rats and thus were a sub-human race that should be exterminated to protect the American way of life.

The images below are taken from Iris Chang's book, "The Chinese in America", and are depictions of the Chinese taken from periodicals published during the late 1800s.

And indeed, there are well-documented mob lynching and massacres of Chinese immigrants. These were particularly prevalent in the period known as the “Great Driving Out”.

Of course, the story of prejudice against the Chinese during the 1800s is far more complex and nuanced than stemming from just the laundry workers. And, of course, the parallel that I’m trying to draw isn’t perfect. But the juxtaposition of this historical narrative with the much more recent narrative we typically tell about “Chinese” gold farmers reveals its disturbing metaphors and framings. The contemporary narrative starts to feel too much like the historical one - Chinese immigrant workers being harassed and murdered by Westerners who feel they alone can arbitrate what constitutes acceptable labor.

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Double Standards

But let’s leave the historical parallel behind for now and focus more on gold farmers in MMOs. Because of the presumed nationality of gold farmers, some players use an interesting litmus test on probable farmers.

In other words, it is not the behavior per se that is the damning piece of evidence as to whether a player is a gold farmer, but rather, whether they are fluent in the English language. Other players are understandably troubled by this double standard.

One player elaborates and points out that blame is always easier to place on “other people”.

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Stay Out Of My Country

Having players from other cultures in the same virtual environment might have been seen as a positive thing. After all, this is presumably why we have study abroad programs and why we attempt to teach foreign languages. In the discussion about gold farmers and language fluencies in MMOs however, responses on the official WoW forums suggest otherwise.

Even in the most positive light, there is something xenophobic about these statements, but more importantly, it’s hard to not interpret them as the digital variation of “go back to your own country”. And beneath all that is the eerie undertone of “this land belongs to us and we prefer to keep it that way” - a digital country club where language fluency is the membership fee. In other words, even in a land of Orcs and Night Elves, some people simply don’t belong in Azeroth.

Rethinking Fluency

The language fluency issue is also strange because many forum posts are dedicated to illustrating that players who do speak perfect English can also be just as annoying and infuriating in the game. For example, in a thread titled “Whats the STUPIDEST whisper u ever got” on the WoW forums, we can find many examples of these:

And several players described requests such as the following, all done in perfect English:

Finally, I offer you this player’s experience which I think hits at the heart of the issue of language fluency:

But my point is that the language fluency issue is ironic given that players who do speak English can say far more offensive and annoying things.

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Rethinking The Economy

There is a common belief that gold farming ruins virtual economies over time. We saw this sentiment earlier in the article and it is a fairly widespread belief.

The problem is that the impact of these secondary markets on the in-game markets of MMOs is not well understood. Moreover, it is not clear that they would have the same impact across MMOs with different economic mechanics. Some players in fact argue that gold farming may have a positive effect on their game economies:

A recent discussion over at Terra Nova also highlights that classical definitions and measures of inflation and deflation may not make sense for talking about certain game economies. Thus, it is oftentimes hard to tease out the impact of gold farming from the naturally-occurring process of inflation due to the never-ending influx of normal gold. And there are reasons to believe that gold farming may in fact help stabilize some game economies.

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Who’s Out Of Sight?

But our retellings so far of the gold farming narrative have left out two crucial players from the picture. The first are the gold buyers.

Like the historical parallel, what we really have is a service industry of immigrant Chinese workers being driven by a market composed almost entirely of Westerners. The secondary market cannot function without demand. And as the above player correctly points out, it is Westerners who drive the demand in the market. As one poster on a Final Fantasy XI forum mentions:

Another group of Western players left out of the picture are the middlemen who buy gold from the gold farming operations and then resell it at a significant profit. Typically, it is on one of these portals where actual virtual currency is bought. As one forum poster put it bluntly:

The actual gold farmers are the losers in this market in several regards. These workers are harassed as they try to accumulate gold and then are fleeced by the middlemen. IGE makes publicly available their buy and sell rates. To give you a sense of where most of the profits go, on WoW’s Suramar server, they will buy 1000 gold for 25 USD. They sell that same 1000 gold for 66 USD. So for every dollar spent on buying virtual gold, only 37 cents of it goes to the actual gold farmers. The gold farming industry is not only driven by Western demand, but most of its profits in fact also go to Westerners.

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A Valuable Service?

Even as systematic harassment of gold farmers appears widespread, it is also clear that some players feel that gold farmers in fact are offering a valuable service.

In a recent survey, 20% of respondents indicated that they have bought virtual gold online. Thus, even though many players make use of this service, gold farmers remain a stigmatized group.

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The Reality of Gold Farming

Over the past 6 months, several reports of who these gold farmers are and what they do has emerged and the overall picture is quite consistent. Some of these reports rely on extensive conversations with actual gold farmers in the game. Others are based on documentation of actual gold farms in Asia and interviews with managers and workers.

New York Times - Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to China
Game Guides Online - Secrets of Massively Multiplayer Farming
The Observer - They play games for 10 hours - and earn £2.80 in a 'virtual sweatshop'
1UP - Wage Slaves
FFXI Forum - Confessions of a Gil-Seller

The overall picture seems to be that many gold farms are based in China (although there are a few in other countries). Most of these workers are students in their late teens or early 20s. They work for a boss who owns the machines and software and need to accumulate virtual currency on a daily quota system. Sometimes, multiple workers share the same account and cannibalistic behavior emerges where one worker will sell the character’s equipment to make the quota, thereby putting their “partner” at a disadvantage. While some use the term “sweatshop” to describe these gold farming operations, most of these establishments would probably be considered normal or well-furnished in local standards. Gold farming pays a livable wage. As the following manager implies, most other employment options for people who do gold farming involves hard labor.

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Harsh World

Players who have interacted with gold farmers in a non-confrontational manner typically have very different views of gold farmers. Understanding why gold farmers do what they do changes how they interact with them.

One player ties together many of the threads in this article and helps reframe the reality of gold farming.

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Harsh World (continued)

The theme of immigrant worker being harassed by Westerners who feel they own the land and can arbitrate what constitutes as acceptable labor is one that is hard to escape. Another player draws out why this is so frustrating for her.

Let me end this section with a narrative that hints at the many ambiguities in the interactions between these foreign workers and the “native” players.

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Equal Treatment

The most interesting narratives I received were ones where players had befriended these foreign players in spite of the language barrier. In many of these cases, Western and Eastern players had learned to work together to their mutual benefit. For example, in World of Warcraft, a few instance raids now accept known gold farmers given the right looting arrangement (master loot and then random roll) because some gold farmers are recognized as decent players of their class.

Others have found out that it is possible to work with instead of against the gold farmers.

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Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy Gold

It is unfortunate that gold farmers are the most visible tip of a much larger iceberg - consisting of buyers as well as middlemen. As we’ve seen, most of the profit from gold farming does not go to the actual gold farmers. However, they bear the brunt of daily harassment and slaughter. One player had a more progressive perspective on curbing gold farming.

Currently, MMOs do not allow players to police and govern themselves in a practical way regarding gold farming, but imagine if this were possible. If it is true that most players are against the practice, then by giving them a practical means to detect these transactions, self-regulation might emerge. For example, if a character’s financial transaction history is made public, then it becomes possible for that character’s friends or guildmates to detect gold buying behavior. Very few characters would have good reason to get a sudden 300 gold increase from the mail. The problem right now is that gold buying is invisible and thus these players have no accountability. But once that behavior is made public, then accountability emerges. Other players will question that sudden windfall in the mail. Guild members and friends will exert a social pressure where it was impossible to exert before.

If we are indeed serious about dampening the gold market, the best solution isn’t tormenting the suppliers, it is in curbing the demand itself. Currently, there are no social disincentives to avoid buying gold because that behavior is entirely hidden. Developers can reveal that behavior and create accountability by showing what is already tracked by the server. Why insist on tormenting foreign workers when Western players are equally culpable?

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Hearthglen - A Short Story

My goal here wasn’t to justify gold farming. It is true that some gold farmers employ a range of cutthroat and deplorable tactics to drive normal players from certain areas in MMOs. On the other hand, the typical racialized story that is told about pestilence and extermination is quite chilling and leaves out important aspects of what’s going on. The racialized story is a very comfortable one for us to tell because it frames us as the victims, as the arbitrators of justice, and as the unquestioned owners of the land. It is a story that sustains our privileged status. But gold farming isn’t simply about foreign workers who harass Western players and deserve to be killed. My goal here was to show that it’s a little more complicated than that.

Let me end with a story of my own. Recently in WoW, I ran into an Undead Mage in Hearthglen who frost-AE farmed the non-elites (literally 10-12 at a time). As a frost mage myself (on the Alliance side), I attempted the same trick. The first time I tried, the Undead Mage pulled elites into my Blizzard range in an attempt to kill me. I escaped. The second time I tried, a stealthed Undead Rogue turned his PvP flag on as he walked into my Blizzard, thus setting off my PvP flag. Another Undead Rogue then backstabbed me. Using a variety of ice blocks, blinks, and ice barriers, I somehow managed to survive that as well.

As I recovered and pondered how to exact revenge against these 3 gold farmers, I realized that in my mind I had instinctively cast them as Chinese gold farmers. And in return, they had probably instinctively cast me as the white leisure player. And in this mesh of historical and contemporary racial narratives where we all suddenly seemed to be playing out our expected racial roles, I found myself pondering what it really meant to be Chinese-American … because somehow, in this land of Elves and Orcs, I suddenly felt more Chinese than I usually do in the real world.

Discussion Links:

Here are some interesting external links I've found that bring up new points or discuss the points made here.

Are farmers necessary? An intelligent and surpringly flame-free post on the WoW forums.

EvE in China. A thread in the EvE China forums where Chinese players react to Chinese gold farmers. Unfortunately in simplified Chinese, but Babelfish comes in handy.

The Second Opium War: An interesting post on Scott Jennings' blog.

The English Test: An article in TG Daily on the use of English competency tests in instance raid groups.

Chinese Nannies: A slightly tangential but apropos and provocative piece in the BBC news about the demand for Chinese-speaking nannies in New York.

How a Gold Farm Works: A post on Terra Nova about american gold farmers which gives great detail of how farming works on this side of the Pacific.

Joystiq Blog: A brief entry on Joystiq about anti-chinese discrimination in WoW that drew a lot of comments. As a sidenote, I think they picked up this idea from WoW Insider which is based on this article (note the same cropped graphic - I link to the full image on page 2). Unfortunately, Joystiq did not mention the source of all this.

Types vs. Components

While there are taxonomical differences between Bartle’s Type and the Components mentioned in this presentation (i.e., Socializing and Role-Playing are not highly-correlated), I would argue that there are more important underlying theoretical differences in terms of how the two models conceptualize player motivations. I describe these differences in detail here.

People Don’t Fit in Boxes

It only makes sense to have a Type called an Achiever if your population shows a bi-modal distribution of high Achievers and low Achievers. The following graph shows a hypothetical bi-modal distribution.

The problem is that bi-modal distributions seldom occur in personality, attitude or ability assessments. Almost all psychometric assessments follow a normal distribution (the bell curve). For example, the graph below is the histogram of the scores on the Achievement Component in the current data set of 3200 respondents. In other words, most people fall along the mean and there are few individuals who fall along the ends of the spectrum. It only makes sense to classify people into Types when there are clear distinctions in the distribution of the population. This is not the case with player motivations.

Note that Bartle’s model doesn’t propose an Achievement axis, but the same argument applies to the two underlying axes in his model. The 4 quadrants in his model only makes sense if most people do not all fall near the origin. Bartle’s model is a classification model. A player fits in 1 of 4 boxes. The Components model is an assessment model. Every player has a score on each of the components.

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Motivations Do Not Suppress Each Other

Bartle argues that players have a primary motivation and typically fall clearly into one of the 4 Types. The 2 underlying axes of his model suggest that an Achiever cannot be a Socializer. More importantly, this assumes that motivations suppress each other. The more of an Achiever you are, the less of a Socializer (or Explorer or Killer) you can be.

If this were the case, then we would expect that the 3 main components (Achievement, Social and Immersion) to be highly negatively correlated. In other words, if you score high on Achievement, then you should score low on the Social component (and Immersion component). This is not the case. The 3 main components are largely uncorrelated (r’s ~ .10). The following scatterplot with the Achievement and Social components show that motivations are largely independent of each other rather than following an inverse pattern. Your score in Achievement has nothing to do with your score in the Social component.

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It’s Configural

Bartle’s Types puts people in one of 4 boxes and argues that the other 3 boxes say nothing about you. The Components model says the opposite. Your scores on all the components matter. A player who scores high on Achievement and low on Socializing (solo grinder) is a very different kind of player from a player who scores high on Achievement and high on Socializing (raid guild officer) and the more you know about their scores, the more you know about their preferences.

More importantly, the Components model shows that low scores are just as interesting as high scores. When you score low on Socializing, it’s not the case we simply discard the Socializing component and say it doesn’t matter to you. Your low score on Socializing means you don’t like games that force you to interact with other people (i.e., dependencies in EQ - bindings, teleports, rezzes). In other words, low scores are just as revealing as high scores.

The key point is that the components are configural. People do not fall into simplistic Types. There are many different kinds of people with high scores on Achievement, and knowing what their other scores are is meaningful. In Bartle’s model, all Achievers are the same. In fact, this shortcoming in the Types model is why it became necessary for Bartle to create 4 additional Types (8 Types altogether) in his recent book in an attempt to cover those nuances. The problem is that subdivision is not the answer. People are never just one thing. The answer is not subdivision but understanding that people don’t fit into boxes. Motivations are configural. If it’s ok for me to like both ice-cream and French onion soup in real life at the same time, why can’t I be both an Achiever and Socializer in an MMORPG at the same time? Players can never be understood if they are assumed to be defined by a single preference. Players are multi-faceted and most people like and dislike many things at the same time. The core problem with the Types mode is that it says that people can only like one thing at a time.

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Summary

Applying Psychology to MMORPGs: Automatic Mimicry

Research in social and organizational psychology has consistently shown for many years that when people or groups interact, many of their verbal and non-verbal cues become synchronized almost immediately. For example, the timing of gestures becomes synchronized (Kendon, 1970), and group members mirror each other’s posture and mannerisms (LaFrance, 1982; LaFrance & Broadbent, 1976). Individuals in a conversation will also mirror each other’s accents and speech patterns (Cappella & Panalp, 1981), and syntax (Levelt & Kelter, 1982). In fact, many human behaviors seem to be contagious, such as yawning (Provine, 1986), laughter (Provine, 1992), and even moods (Neumann & Strack, 2000). Researchers have suggested that this synchronization is an automatic human behavior that functions as a regulator of trust and rapport in social interactions (Kendon, 1970; LaFrance, 1982).

Recent research has demonstrated more precisely that when people interact, they in fact unconsciously mimic each other’s behavior. In one study (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), subjects interacted with a confederate (a research assistant who pretends to be another subject) in a collaborative task. The confederate performed a series of movements (foot shaking and touching their face) and it was found that subjects would unintentionally match those behaviors themselves. More importantly, in a different part of that study, confederates were asked to either mimic or not mimic the subject’s behaviors and it was found that subjects judged confederate mimickers as more likeable than confederate non-mimickers.

Instead of merely influencing attitudes, automatic mimicry has also been shown to influence observable behaviors as well. For example, waiters who verbally mimic their customers’ orders (by repeating the order) receive bigger tips than when they say something else instead (like ‘Coming right up’) (van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert, & van Knippenberg, 2003). In fact, when a person is mimicked, they become more generous not only towards the mimicker, but to everyone else in general (van Baaren, Holland, Kawakami, & van Knippenberg, 2004). Mimicry increases an individual’s prosocial behavior. This process also happens the other way. Affiliation goals increase the frequency of automatic mimicry in interactions (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003).

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This has led researchers to hypothesize that automatic mimicry is an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate and express social affiliation and that the process is bi-directional - mimicry facilitates affiliation and prosocial behavior and affiliation goals increase mimicry (Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand, 2003). This theory is also supported by studies that have shown that very young infants will mimic many facial expressions they perceive, such as sticking their tongue out, smiling and opening their mouths (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977).

Virtual environments in fact provide a perfect setting for embedding subtle mimicry behaviors in NPCs because details in the environment can be rendered differently for each user. The goal of embedding mimicry would be to increase prosocial behavior in general in the community. After all, loyalty and bonds with other players is what keeps players in a community.

Examples of this embedding range from the simple to the complex. Of course, the following are not meant to be employed with every single NPC interaction, but instead used intermittently to seed prosocial behavior.

- Align the NPCs appearance with the character’s appearance. Match their hair color, their clothing style, or the weapon they are carrying.

- Match the first letter of the NPCs first name with the first letter of the character’s first name.

- Store the user’s style of greeting other users by matching with a small database of known greeting words, such as ‘hi’, ‘hey’, ‘what’s up’, and so on, and have the NPC greet the user with the appropriate words.

- Store the verbosity of users’ exchanges with other users. Laconic users prefer laconic NPCs and verbose users prefer verbose NPCs - it functions as an approximation for personality differences.

The often-assumed freedom that comes with virtual worlds is a double-edged sword. In the real world, laws constrain behavior, but in virtual worlds, code dictates behavior. If shouting is not allowed in virtual worlds, then you cannot shout in public spaces. You can communicate with other users only through tools provided by the virtual world. In a strange way, relationships in virtual worlds are not created as much as engineered by the mechanics of the world. As these environments evolve, they might - for better or worse - become tools of social engineering that were never imagined even possible in the real world.

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References

Cappella, J., & Panalp, A. (1981). Talk and Silence Sequences in Informal Conversations. Interspeaker Influence. Human Communication Research, 7, 117-132.

Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910.

Kendon, A. (1970). Movement Coordination in social interactions. Acta Psychologica, 32(2), 101-125.

LaFrance, M. (1982). Posture Mirroring and Rapport. In M. Davis (Ed.), Interaction Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behavior (pp. 279-298).

LaFrance, M., & Broadbent, M. (1976). Group Rapport: Posture Sharing as a Nonverbal Indicator. Group and Organizational Studies, 1, 328-333.

Lakin, J. L., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). Using nonconscious behavioral mimicry to create affiliation and rapport. Psychological Science, 14(4), 334-339.

Lakin, J. L., Jefferis, V. E., Cheng, C. M., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27(3), 145-162.

Levelt, W., & Kelter, S. (1982). Surface form and memory in question answering. Cognitive Psychology, 14(78-106).

Meltzoff, A., & Moore, A. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198(75-78).

Neumann, R., & Strack, F. (2000). Mood Contagion: The automatic transfer of mood between persons. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 79, 211-223.

Provine, R. (1986). Yawning as a stereotyped action pattern and releasing stimulus. Ethology, 72, 109-122.

Provine, R. (1992). Contagious Laughter: Laughter is sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30(1-4).

van Baaren, R. B., Holland, R. W., Kawakami, K., & van Knippenberg, A. (2004). Mimicry and Prosocial Behavior. Psychological Science, 15(1), 71-74.

van Baaren, R. B., Holland, R. W., Steenaert, B., & van Knippenberg, A. (2003). Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(4), 393-398.

The Blurring of Work and Play

The boundaries between work and play have become increasingly blurred due to digital media technologies. Take web cookies for example. Companies such as DoubleClick.com use hidden cookies to build in-depth profiles of individual users as they surf the web:

Over a period of time DoubleClick compiles a list of which member sites the user has visited and revisited, using this information to create a profile of the user's tastes and interests. With this profile in hand the DoubleClick server can select advertising that is likely to be of interest to the user. (from http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/wwwsf2.html)

In other words, as individuals browse the web, they become both content producers and consumers. More importantly, users are performing this work under the guise of entertainment, producing information with economic value but which they derive no profit from. Users are in fact performing free labor.

The same occurs with TiVo. As Andrejevic (2002) has pointed out, as TV watchers use TiVo, they reveal their tastes to the system which in turn caters more and more to them - a “commercial paradigm of interactive media as a means of inducing viewers to view more efficiently”. This form of work benefits media companies at the expense of individuals. After all, in a strange way, consumers are paying TiVo while performing free labor.

The blurring of work and play in MMORPGs has three primary forces - economic profiteering from the sales of virtual goods, the growing resemblance of play to real work, and the embedding of real work into these environments.

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Sale of Virtual Goods

As Dibbell (2003) describes, virtual items and property in online environments such as Ultima Online have economic value, and users accumulate these items to sell for real money on Internet auction sites such as eBay. The transformation of gaming activity into economic activity is most striking in the presence of companies that pay teenagers in developing countries to “play” these games for 40 hours a week and derive a profit from selling these virtual goods for real money (The Walrus, 2004). This transformation of play into work is driven by entrepreneurial users who see the opportunity for bringing economic activity into the game, but what is more intriguing is how the increasing complexity of play in these worlds is coming to resemble real work.

The Growing Resemblance of Play to Real Work

Most MMORPGs base their core mechanics on operant conditioning, a system of rewards that increases frequency of a behavior. The rewards cycle is a random ratio schedule (exactly like casino slot machines) where a reward is given every x times an action is performed, where x increases exponentially as the user progresses. Simple actions are gradually replaced by complex, time-consuming actions and typical users are essentially trained to spend on average 22 hours per week in these environments. This is striking given that the average MMORPG user is 26 years old and about 50% of MMORPG users work full-time. As some users note,

But for every user who has burned out from the treadmill, there are thousands of users who are still “playing” industriously. One user articulates the seduction of achievement in these environments.

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In other words, these online environments are structured such that they reward and seduce you to perform complex, tedious tasks.

While early MMORPGs focused on combat-oriented advancement, recent MMORPGs have provided non-combat advancement options, so users can now choose to become chefs, hair-stylists, architects, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and yes, even politicians in certain MMORPGs. The example of pharmaceutical manufacturers (PMs) will be used to illustrate the seriousness of play in the MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies.

To become a PM, a user must locate raw chemicals and minerals on the planet using geological surveying tools. Different resources have different attributes which contribute to the final quality of the product as described on each product schematic. To produce high-quality products, users must therefore find the best combination of resources through a time-consuming planet-hopping process. Resource gathering is only meaningfully performed using industrial harvesters bought from architects (other users). Even then, resource gathering is slow and users must check their harvesters on a daily basis. Raw resources are combined into sub-components in factories (also bought from architects), and then combined into the final product. Because each factory run take a few hours of real time to complete and because most products require several sub-components, users have to plan out their production chain fairly well to ensure their machinery doesn’t idle and drain their capital. To complicate matters, resources are randomly replaced on a weekly basis, so users have to constantly survey for new resources as well. Finally, users must market and sell these goods on the open market, which means competing with other users who are selling similar products.

The time required to acquire the expertise and capital to become a PM in Star Wars Galaxies is in the order of 4-6 weeks of normal game play, and thereafter requires sustained daily time investment to maintain the business. The irony is that users are paying to perform what increasingly resembles serious, complex work in these environments.

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Embedding Real Work into MMORPGs

Given that MMORPGs are creating environments where complex work is becoming seductively fun, how difficult would it be for MMORPG developers to embed real work into these environments? In fact, this is already occurring in There.com – a virtual world in a contemporary setting. Fashion companies pay There.com to embed test products into the environment where they can track user purchases and how often they wear the garment. More importantly, because the social network of every user can be mapped, it is also easy to spot who the trendsetters are. The information of how likely trendsetters purchase and wear a test product provides highly valuable information to the fashion companies. Of course, the irony is that There.com users are paying to work for a third-party company, with both sources of profit going to There.com.

This can be taken one step further because we know that users are willing to perform complex, tedious tasks in these environments. In fact, they have been trained to have fun performing these tasks. Consider the fact that cancer screening is routinely out-sourced to India because it is relatively cheap to train a lay-person to identify suspicious patterns on a diagnostic scan, and it is cheaper for several dozen of these workers to look at a single scan than it is to have a doctor in the US look at the same scan. Moreover, the accuracy rates are actually better because the redundancy lowers the rate of misclassifications. MMORPG environments could easily tap into their free labor pool of dedicated users by embedding real world tasks into the “game”. What is clear is that there are many different ways in which real work can be embedded into MMORPGs – different ways in which game developers can seduce users to pay to perform free labor.

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Conclusion

Considering all the things that happen in these worlds - weddings, political elections, sales of virtual real estate for real money, genocides, and teenage mafia gangs and prostitution rings - it seems strange that some people, both gamers and non-gamers, still say that “it’s just a game”. Ironically, the most appropriate reply might be “No, it’s just work”.

References

Andrejevic, M (2002). The work of being watched: interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Dibbell, J. (2003). The Unreal Estate Boom. Wired 11.01, January, 2003. Available at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/gaming.html

The Walrus. (2004). Game Theories, from http://www.walrusmagazine.com/04/05/06/1929205.shtml

Games, Life, and The Pursuit of Happiness

Because video games were born out of communication mediums (TV’s, computers), they have been mainly examined as media artifacts rather than construed as extensions of games and past-times. The lens that has been focused on video games is mainly derived from the “media effects” tradition – an attempt to examine the consequences of exposure to different kinds of media. The carryover from that perspective is quite palpable – the incessant suggestion that video games can’t be good, and that the more of it you’re exposed to, the worse off you must be (essentially a parallel of critiques of watching TV). While this framework has mainly been used to vilify violent video games, its basic conclusions seem to have spilled into video games in general and helped ferment general paranoia about video gaming – that they are pointless at best and might actually be highly addictive and dangerous. After all, media has to have an “effect” on you, right?

But in reality, video gaming is much more like a hobby or past-time than passive exposure to media, and the critiques along the lines of addictiveness seem misplaced when we consider our cultural attitudes towards other past-times and hobbies. We seldom ask avid book readers how often they stay up late at night just to finish a chapter from their favorite author. We don’t ask avid mountain climbers how distracted they are while working because they are thinking of their next climb, or whether their spouses feel neglected when they go mountain climbing. We also don’t ask aspiring writers or actors how often their art consumes the rest of their lives. In fact, it’s perceived as noble to be consumed by artistic endeavors.

Furthermore, by categorizing MMORPGs as video games and video games as media artifacts, it allows researchers to talk about MMORPGs using an exposure model. The problem is that this implicitly denies the importance and effect the other thousands of people in the environment have on the experience. It likens MMORPGs as passive an activity as watching TV. But in fact, MMORPGs are social communities. What's frustrating when talking about MMORPGs to non-gamers or some researchers is that they are examing a social community as a media artifact - where fascinating issues of social identity and social interaction are reduced to issues of media exposure and usage.

Games have always been human constructs. The goal of any game has always been a seemingly meaningful task in a scaffolding of arbitrary rules. To a Martian, it may be incredibly difficult to understand the point of football (or golf) or why so many people are emotionally invested in how a ball is tossed on a field, or why any sentient beings would reward tossing balls on fields. When we take a step back, it seems odd that the very people who find so much value in one game deny any value to other kind of games considering that all games at an abstract level are goals defined in the context of arbitrary rules.

Non-gamers scoff at the joy derived from looting a rare item or when a dragon raid succeeds. They wonder how so much happiness can be derived from something that is not real. The answer is that it’s an exact parallel of any other game. After all, achievement is entirely defined by the rules scaffolding. Getting a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal is as much a game as defeating Vox in EverQuest. It’s about a set of rules that were defined by us, not some universal guideline for achievement. The universe could not care any less about what we do.

A colleague once critiqued MMORPGs this way – “Why don’t I just give you a black box with a crank? Every once in a while, you get a piece of candy. That’s what an MMORPG is, right?” Of course, this focuses on the grind and doesn’t take into account the social interactions of the environment, but even if we conceded that point, there’s a problem with that analogy. The problem is that that’s a good description of almost anything in life. When you take away the specifics, even something like trying to get a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal is like that black box.

Many of the frustrations associated with talking about MMORPGs to non-gamers stem from two incorrect categorizations. Either they lump MMORPGs with media artifacts, or they see MMORPGs as games but forget that much of life is a game as well. For some reason, popular culture would like us to think about video games as a very different beast from what it is. Many people talk about video games without noting its striking parallels to other activities we deem worthy and wholesome. Many would have us think that video games can never be taken seriously. The reality is that when you take a step back, most of life is a game.

A New Game Model: Bots, Nurturance and Solving the Grind

It’s kind of ironic that EverQuest has just celebrated its 5th birthday, still going strong, and one might have imagined 5 years ago that we would have much better MMORPGs by now, but we don’t. Almost every game that has come out since EQ has been an EQ-clone. Actually, what’s more ironic is that EQ2’s biggest competitor will be EQ itself. Notable exceptions (A Tale in the Desert, Sims Online) have struggled to gain a sizeable player base. In a way, everyone is waiting for something innovative to come along, but it’s not clear whether anyone knows what that is.

Not that I think I know what the next big thing is, but the following is an idea that came to me after several weeks of playing Ragnarok Online. I’d like to briefly describe several interesting features of RO before moving on to describing my idea (impatient readers can skip ahead).

Notes on Ragnarok Online

RO caught my attention because it uses 2D anime-styled characters instead of 3D pseudo-realistic characters. It overlays the character sprites on top of the 3D environment pretty convincingly. One benefit of this is that you don’t walk into the city and lag at 1 fps (like in SWG). There are several unique game mechanic features in RO:

There are two interesting sociological features of the game which I’m not sure are good or bad:

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Botting

Now here’s the feature of the game I found most fascinating. RO has incredibly poor network security, which makes it very easy for players to download and use bots (AI scripts that pretend to be the game client and literally do the work for the player). Botting is actually a well-known problem in the game, with several maps known to be infested with bots. Bot scripts are fairly sophisticated. Users can control:

Botting is perceived as a bad thing by Gravity (who owns the game) and by most players (because bad bots will kill-steal you), but in a weird way, bots fulfill a critical function in RO’s twisted rare-item economy. Many highly-demanded items (ores, cards, slotted items) have very low drop rates to the point where if bots were not around to harvest them, many of these items would be several times more costly and difficult to buy.

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The Big Picture

Here’s the aspect of botting that intrigues me. Sophisticated botters could script a tank bot (knight/assassin) for leveling a new mage, or script a buff bot (priest) for leveling a new melee character. One could imagine the AI becoming smart enough such that you could script both and let both run at the same time. Or what if you could script your own dungeon-crawling group? A collaborative botting model introduces several new themes:

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The Details

But let’s take one step back and imagine what the game would actually look like.

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Potential problems and answers

So the question is: What’s your gut-feeling about this game? Would you want to play it? Would you add or change anything about it?

The Seduction of Achievement in MMORPGs

The fairy tales we grow up with and our schooling system hold a particular vision of how people are rewarded and how goals are achieved in life. Goals and rewards are well-defined – the prince has to slay the dragon to marry the princess, or you need to write the alphabets three times before you get a sticker. Moreover, you will reach the goal if you put in enough effort – princes always defeat the dragon, and you can always get that sticker if you finish your work.

After 6 years of fairy tales and then 16 years of school, we are then exposed to the real world. In the real world, goals are seldom well-defined, More importantly, the amount of effort you put into something isn’t guaranteed to get you any closer to your goal. Sometimes, you put in very little effort and hit the jackpot. Other times, you work week after week to get an incredibly small payoff. One of the disillusions of being an adult is that the framework of goals and rewards we learned the first 22 years of our lives suddenly stops working.

Unlike single-player and limited multi-players games, MMORPGs offer social rewards and achievements. High-leveled characters have social prestige, are perceived as powerful, and are valuable members in their guilds. More importantly, these rewards follow the framework that we learned as children. Levels are clearly defined goals. When you are given a quest, they tell you exactly what you need to do. And when you’ve done what they want, you get the sticker … I mean level.

Achievement in MMORPGs is seductive because the goals are well-defined, the journey is well-defined, and the rewards are social and persistent. Games in non-persistent worlds destroy the illusion of achievement when you quit the game – your “achievement” has suddenly vanished, gone unrecognized, and become inconsequential. In an MMORPG, you accumulate what you have achieved in a character that is a part of a community that recognizes your power and competence. Your efforts and achievements in MMORPGs gain a consequential realism that other games do not provide because they are persistent.

Unlike the real world where effort does not translate into achievement, MMORPGs offer an environment where you know exactly what your effort is going towards and a good sense of how far you are from your goals. Unlike the real world where connections, chance and family background are what mostly determine your success, anyone can become rich, powerful, and admired in an MMORPG if they put enough effort into it. In a strange way, The American Dream – the belief that anyone can become successful if they work hard enough – does exist, but it exists in worlds like Norrath and Camelot.

The Seduction of Achievement in MMORPGs

The fairy tales we grow up with and our schooling system hold a particular vision of how people are rewarded and how goals are achieved in life. Goals and rewards are well-defined – the prince has to slay the dragon to marry the princess, or you need to write the alphabets three times before you get a sticker. Moreover, you will reach the goal if you put in enough effort – princes always defeat the dragon, and you can always get that sticker if you finish your work.

After 6 years of fairy tales and then 16 years of school, we are then exposed to the real world. In the real world, goals are seldom well-defined, More importantly, the amount of effort you put into something isn’t guaranteed to get you any closer to your goal. Sometimes, you put in very little effort and hit the jackpot. Other times, you work week after week to get an incredibly small payoff. One of the disillusions of being an adult is that the framework of goals and rewards we learned the first 22 years of our lives suddenly stops working.

Unlike single-player and limited multi-players games, MMORPGs offer social rewards and achievements. High-leveled characters have social prestige, are perceived as powerful, and are valuable members in their guilds. More importantly, these rewards follow the framework that we learned as children. Levels are clearly defined goals. When you are given a quest, they tell you exactly what you need to do. And when you’ve done what they want, you get the sticker … I mean level.

Achievement in MMORPGs is seductive because the goals are well-defined, the journey is well-defined, and the rewards are social and persistent. Games in non-persistent worlds destroy the illusion of achievement when you quit the game – your “achievement” has suddenly vanished, gone unrecognized, and become inconsequential. In an MMORPG, you accumulate what you have achieved in a character that is a part of a community that recognizes your power and competence. Your efforts and achievements in MMORPGs gain a consequential realism that other games do not provide because they are persistent.

Unlike the real world where effort does not translate into achievement, MMORPGs offer an environment where you know exactly what your effort is going towards and a good sense of how far you are from your goals. Unlike the real world where connections, chance and family background are what mostly determine your success, anyone can become rich, powerful, and admired in an MMORPG if they put enough effort into it. In a strange way, The American Dream – the belief that anyone can become successful if they work hard enough – does exist, but it exists in worlds like Norrath and Camelot.

Imagining Future Worlds

Are MMO platforms only suited for games? As these virtual worlds become more complex, more realistic, and more pervasive, what might they become? This article explores non-game uses of MMO environments that are plausible and make sense.

Education

MMORPGs are designed with game mechanics that purposely encourage time investment as well as some level of emotional and social investment. Some MMORPG players are comfortable claiming that MMORPGs are inherently addictive. Currently, the reward cycles in the games shape the players to pursue arbitrary goals of camping and killing mobs, but what if we created goals with educational value? Can we not harness the game mechanics of MMORPGs to create pedagogical tools?

When I was attending Haverford College, a Quaker School (middle school) in the neighborhood used what is called a “Story Path Curriculum”. The curriculum of a typical semester is embedded in an ongoing story-line set in a historically interesting period. For example, the students in the class are each assigned a character-role in a hypothetical late 19th-century iron-forging village in England. From baker to tax collector, from blacksmith to local pastor, they have a good variety of roles covered. For English class, they may be asked to write a creative piece of “a day in the life of …”. For History class, they may be asked to research the common social or seasonal problems an iron-forging village faced. For Math class, they may be asked to determine the optimal proportion of crops to plant or to calculate the most profitable trade routes. For Art class, they may be asked to create a small-scale model of the village. For Social Studies, the students may have to decide how to deal with a local epidemic of scarlet fever.

Thus, instead of having disparate subjects that students may not find relevant in their lives, the point of a Story Path Curriculum is to create a fun and interesting hook to draw the students in and then embedding the traditional subjects in a relevant and memorable way. And of course, the Story Path Curriculum makes sense in a grander scale in an MMO environment where students from different schools and states or countries have their own village in a larger virtual country – each having influence on their microcosm while being part of an interconnected macrocosm. Elements of discovery and collaboration can be built into the environment to encourage different forms of collaboration. For example, perhaps a new technology or crop variety can be found but requires multiple villages to pool their resources together. Students from different schools may have to coordinate and share their research in order to achieve these goals.

Learning should be fun and engaging, and an MMO paradigm can make sense. It provides an environment where different teachers can follow their own schedules and pedagogical goals. It also puts a twist on addiction. What do we say when our kids are addicted to learning?

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Personality Assessment

The most currently-used personality assessment tools of our age are questionnaire-based inventory statements usually with 5 or 7 answer options. The statements are typically of the similar to the following:

There are many problems that these kinds of assessments have to deal with. First of all, the point and social acceptability of the statements are usually very obvious, and it’s easy for individuals to “cheat” on these assessments, especially when they are given in a job screening assessment where questions like the following are typically used:

The other problem is that different people view the 5 or 7 point scale differently. The scales are usually labeled with “Strongly Agree” or “Strongly Disagree” as the extremes. Some people will never use the most extreme choices, while others use them liberally. In a large aggregated data set (on the order of 100 samples or more), these differences do not affect the outcome analyses much, but when comparing individual to individual, it’s impossible to tell how much the response bias factored into the results. It’s also not possible to just mathematically scale the responses because some people do indeed feel more ambivalent about the statements.

In an MMO space, we can think about personality assessment in an entirely different way. We project our own personalities into anything we are emotionally and personally invested in. The reason we know that players project and express their personalities in the game is because we know how much most players care about their avatars, and the successes and failures they encounter in the game. And when we are personally invested in an activity, every decision we make in that space becomes personally revealing.

The MMO world also provides us with a way to directly access and store any relevant personality information. We are no longer in the realm of needing to ask people to rank how they feel about something. We can just measure it unobtrusively. And because we are the ones doing the measuring, we don’t have the response bias to worry about. Consider the following kinds of data we could collect from current MMORPG players:

Of course one assumption we are making is that people behave and act as they really do behave and not some extended masquerade. But the thing is that we all wear masks in real life so we can fit in to our social context. In a sense, even though people may act differently in the virtual world than the real world, we have good reason to believe that how they act in the anonymous and safe space of virtual worlds is truer to who they are. In fact, people are more likely to masquerade in the real world where they are constantly judged by their family and peers.

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Leadership Training

Anyone who has tried to lead a mid-level group in any MMORPG knows that this is not a trivial task. There are many problems that the group leader has to face. Among these are outlining a clear vision and goal, getting the members to commit to this goal, understanding member capabilities and delegating appropriate roles, dealing with discouraging and inappropriate behaviors, resolving tension, motivating a group with low morale, and reacting to sudden crises among others. Performing these tasks well means both an expertise in the domain knowledge of these games (what different spells do, what the strength and weakness of each class is) and in the general knowledge of leadership and small-group management. While the domain knowledge is non-transferable to the real world, it is clear that leadership skills can transfer both ways. After all, leadership is dealing with people, with all their individual idiosyncrasies, motivations and needs, in both the real and virtual world.

For a newcomer to an existing group, the rules and strategies to slowly gain the trust of the group’s members and become the tacit leader are the same for both an EQ hunting group as they are for a real world group. Experienced leaders know that the person who has the highest official title is not always the one who ends up having the most say in a decision-making process. In fact, all the lessons of Machiavelli or Sun Tzu can be applied, learned, or perfected in an MMORPG, especially when we talk about guild leaders or raid leaders.

What is clear is that it does take real leadership skill to lead any kind of group in an MMORPG because you are dealing with real people. The diversity of an MMORPG group is probably higher than that of a real world group if only because of the age range. And all the human emotions and motivations are always there: greed, pride, altruism, shame, guilt, cowardice or brashness.

Now imagine how we could harness all this for leadership training. We could imagine asking individuals to perform these kinds of tasks:

These tasks would clearly need to be embedded into a reading or lecture course on leadership techniques and strategies to be effective. But the MMORPG tasks allow individuals to apply, learn and reinforce a variety of leadership skills. Leadership is one of those skills that is more about experience than about theory, and the MMORPG space is well-suited to this kind of training.

Virtual "Achievements"?

Our cultural distinction between “work” and “play” traps us in what may be false dichotomies. We are so caught up in thinking that games are for fun that even when some of us toil away for hours in an MMORPG, even when we become extremely frustrated or angry with something in the game, we sometimes forget that “play” can become “work”. As the following quotes taken from the “Why We Quit” collection of player narratives show, playing an MMORPG can become like having a second job.

Rethinking MMORPGs as something not-quit-game yet not-quite-work frees us to ask a whole host of provoking questions. Could and should the virtual achievements that occur within an MMORPG world be taken seriously? Do these virtual achievements deserve recognition? And how do we compare virtual achievements with real-life achievements? This set of questions is all the more crucial to answer as new MMORPGs bring in more realistic political and economic elements.

Clearly not all virtual achievements are meaningful. Getting a character to level 40 or 50 is really only a matter of time investment and patience, as is the same for camping a rare drop in EverQuest. When an achievement revolves around pure time spent and involves no complex skill, it is hard to justify as a real achievement. But MMORPGs introduce a set of achievements that are based on the social nature of the world. Narratives in “The Rise and Fall of Guilds” highlight the complex management and leadership skills needed to sustain a large guild. From dealing with clique formation, preventing polarization in a guild argument, keeping the guild motivated or deflecting strong personalities, a good leader must understand and deal with these issues as they occur. As the narratives show, these are no trivial tasks.

We might also consider raid leaders who coordinate and then pull off a large scale raid successfully. Managing multiple groups with different tasks composed of disparate personalities while under unpredictable and stressful circumstances is a gargantuan challenge, especially when the only means of communication is a thin typed-chat channel. There are also the leadership challenges of sustaining group morale, having and holding firm to a vision, and dealing with discouraging players. And all this occurs in real-time, not some turn-based tactical game. The question is whether there are certain virtual achievements that we should take seriously. Could we imagine a time when putting “guild leader of a 120-member guild” on your college resume is taken seriously?

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Some may argue that the problem is that not only are these virtual skills non-transferable to the real-world, but that they have no financial opportunities because they are part of a “game”. But neither of these arguments holds any water.

We live in a culture that celebrates skilled performers in other “games” – activities that are based on arbitrary rules and typically used as entertainment. Take chess or tennis for example. Certainly an MMORPG has all the elements of chess or tennis – an arbitrary rule set, the need for strategic understanding at multiple depth levels, and a combination of training time as well as inherent talent. We recognize great chess-players and tennis-players, but for some the idea of recognizing a great guild or raid leader outside of an MMORPG feels awkward. But why should it? If it’s only about the financial opportunities, is it so far-fetched to imagine future MMORPGs where players pay or compensate a good guild or raid leader to be part of a successful group – a virtual membership that parallels what real-world memberships do? But in fact, the financial opportunities are an effect of recognizing the achievement itself. If being a great guild leader involves the same types of symbolic challenges that a great chess or tennis player would face, then is that not something that deserves recognition?

We also have good evidence that the management and leadership skills we have mentioned can be learned in the virtual world and then be used in the real world. Data to support this can be found in the “Learning Leadership Skills” article. Afterall, leadership is about leading other people, and the context or medium isn’t the primary issue. An individual who understands how to motivate, lead and manage individuals in a stressful, real-time context can probably do this in different scenarios.

We are now in a situation where we might be forced to compare virtual achievements with real-life achievements. If leading a large guild deserves recognition of some sort, then how does that compare with being an Eagle Scout in the real world or being elected school president? In a sense, the question may not be whether virtual achievements should be recognized now as much as whether this will be an inevitable phenomenon as virtual worlds become more complex and more people are involved with them. As people take virtual worlds and their own virtual identities more seriously, is it inevitable that our virtual achievements will be recognized? Could we imagine a future where we can accept both virtual and real-world achievements (or in fact realize that virtual achievements are real-world achievements)?

If we believe that virtual achievements are legitimate achievements, then we are left with a particularly disturbing question. If life is about finding happiness on an individual level and we accept that different people derive pleasure and satisfaction from different things - then what is our role with regards to individuals who are obsessed with these games but who are clearly making real achievements in the game? In fact, there is an X percentage of the population who can achieve more in the virtual world than in the real world because of their social, physical or psychological circumstances. If existential happiness and satisfaction is based on achievements, then this is to say there is some part of the population who can derive more happiness from the virtual world than from the real world. What then is our role in moderating obsessive game-play? Is it in our right to take away this source of happiness from an individual? Many of us believe that real-world achievements are more meaningful and gratifying than virtual achievements, but is this always true?

As these games become more realistic and more engaging, and it becomes more obvious that virtual achievements are on par and can be compared with real-world achievements, we are forced to answer tough questions that we never thought a “game” would force us to answer.

Inside Out

Note: This essay was originally written for the MMOG magazine which has since gone out of business. This essay is a more fleshed-out rewrite of the "Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves" presentation.

We are on the cusp of a new generation where parents telling their children about the circumstances of how they met will not revolve around college parties, chance encounters at a coffee shop or business conferences. Instead, they will tell their children how they met each other while battling gnolls in subterranean caverns or slaying the undead in forgotten crypts while pretending to be warriors or clerics. Of course, this could have happened in the MUD days, but it is the success of MMORPGs that have suddenly increased the number of romantic relationships that began this way. Survey data collected from players of EverQuest (EQ), Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), and Ultima Online (UO) show that romantic relationships that began in MMORPGs are not particularly rare.

This is especially true given that 2 out of 3 MMORPG players are already romantically involved (dating, engaged or married). In other words, only 33% of players are available for a romantic relationship to begin with.

But the prevalence of very close friendships, as opposed to romantic relationships, that develop online is also very striking. Most MMORPG players have become good friends with someone they met in the game.

And many of these players feel that they would consider their online friends to be comparable or better than their real life friends.

About 3-4 years back, the prevailing talk-show wisdom was that people who fell in love online were socially maladjusted and had deep-seated psychological issues. This view still lingers, but the prevalence of both platonic and romantic relationships that occur online force us to ask whether it is not something about these environments and the mechanics of the communication, rather than something about the people, that change the way that relationships form. Could it be that people become friends and fall in love in a different way in an MMORPG?

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Sharing Secrets

Part of what we mean when we say so-and-so is a good friend is that we know a lot about them, and not just that we have a good sense of their personality and how they might react in a certain situation, but that we know revealing personal details about them that very few other people know. The process of mutual self-disclosure in a normal real-life relationship is like a dance, with a lot of expected reciprocations and rules. If you tell someone about your childhood traumas on the first date, they may not return your phone calls for a second date. If someone shares an intimate secret, and you don’t reciprocate, they might feel slighted. But ultimately, it is this dance of give-and-take that builds the foundation for a close relationship – whether platonic or romantic.

While it may come to a surprise to some people, there is a good deal of evidence that people are more revealing about themselves and more forth-coming with intimate details when communicating over a textual, computer-mediated channel. This was first observed by clinical psychologists who began using computers where new patients would type in their answers to some screening questions. What these clinical psychologists found was that patients using the computers were much more forthcoming than new patients who were asked those same questions face-to-face. In other words, even though the patients knew that the clinician would read or hear their answers, they would be more revealing when answering in a typed channel as opposed to in a face-to-face situation.

One reason why this occurs is that when you’re typing to a computer, you don’t worry about how you look, what you’re wearing, or whether you’re smiling at the right time. A lot of this self-consciousness is irrelevant when typing on a computer, and all this energy is instead channeled to the message itself, which typically becomes more detailed. In the case of an MMORPG, the ability to be in the safety and comfort of your own home while typing relieves some of the tension of saying something intimate. Also, oftentimes in a face-to-face conversation, we censor ourselves because of what we perceive to be a subtle frown or a slightly raised eyebrow on the other person’s face. We don’t want to elaborate on something if the other person isn’t interested. Many of these gestures and cues are absent online, and this allows us to finish our original thought more often – the unchanged, uncensored version of what we wanted to say. And we also have anecdotal and survey data that supports that a high level of personal self-disclosure occurs in MMORPGs.

Being able to talk to someone about a problem that is bothering you can often bring some relief. The problem is that this is not always possible in the real world. The anonymity of online environments makes it easier for a lot of people to share their personal issues, because oftentimes the very people they might turn to in real life are part of the issue itself. Another reason why the anonymity helps is because it removes any fear of repercussions. A teenager who is unsure of his sexuality is highly unlikely to share this information with his friends and family. A husband who is experiencing difficulty with his spouse might be able to talk about the problem with an online friend without fear of aggravating the problem in real life.

This dance of sharing secrets and intimate details occurs very slowly in real life because usually we only feel comfortable saying these things behind closed doors or when we are alone with the other person, and only after knowing them for a long time. In the MMORPG world, this dance happens much sooner because there are far fewer consequences and the environment facilitates this kind of intimate disclosure. In other words, this foundation of a good relationship is far easier to reach in an MMORPG than in real life because of the textual communication and the anonymity.

Of course, this is not to say that everyone who plays an MMOPRG will share their personal lives with their fellow players, but in general, people are more likely to disclose personal information online than in real life for the reasons mentioned. But apart from being more likely to share intimate issues and problems with other players, there are other reasons why relationships in MMORPGs begin and develop differently.

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Crises, Trust and Bonding

Every MMORPG player can recall a high-adrenaline battle or surviving a fight with a handful of HP left. If an MMORPG can guarantee anything, it can guarantee that you’ll be faced with many sudden high-stress situations where the group or your hunting partner needs to make very decisive actions. Maybe the cleric is low on mana when the room suddenly respawns, or you fall off a bridge in a dungeon and end up in the corner of a room full of purple-cons. These kinds of situations force the group to work together or perish. They force players to depend on each other, to trust each other and to work together as a team. These experiences are often very salient trust-building exercises for all the players involved.

Because most MMORPG players spend a significant portion of their free time playing the game, they become very emotionally invested to their characters and what happens to them. Most players are very serious as to what happens to their character, and this heightens the intensity of these high-stress situations. This pairing of emotional investment and frequency of trust-building situations in MMORPGs facilitate the “jump-starting” of solid bonds between players.

Moreover, stressful situations in MMORPGs seem to bring out the best and worst of individuals. Most MMORPG players can recall experiences where another player displayed a remarkable degree of honor, altruism, self-sacrifice, betrayal or cowardice. This is not to say that players who act honorably in MMORPGs are honorable in real life, but because most players assume that other players are as emotionally invested as they are, they tend to feel that these honorable or cowardly actions give a glimpse into how this other person might be in the real world. In a sense, all of us would like to put our friends into simulated crises to see whether they would stand by us in a time of need. We would all like to know which of our friends we can count on. Unfortunately, we usually don’t find out the answer until that time of need arrives. Friendships in MMORPGs go through this process almost in reverse. Instead of making friends and then slowly finding out whether they can really be trusted, MMORPG players are making friends with people who have demonstrated that they can be trusted because of their actions under spontaneous crises that required difficult decisions.

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Compatibility

One reason why many people are uncomfortable with meeting people online is because, at first glance, it feels like finding a needle in a farmhouse of haystacks. The chances of finding someone you could get along with just feel very remote. They then project this attitude and conclude that the likelihood of other people finding compatible romantic partners is also very low. But the opposite might be true in MMORPGs. MMORPG players who are employed tend to work in the IT industry (36% of employed EQ players, N=1099), and most MMORPG players have previous experience with table-top RPGs (68% of EQ, DAOC, UO, AC, and AO combined, N=3415). IT workers are usually very analytical and rational people; RPG players are usually imaginative and idiosyncratic. Both tend to be non-conformist.

In other words, people who play MMORPGs are probably similar in more ways than not. When you think about, an MMORPG is a highly specific kind of entertainment. People who like first-person shooters are probably not the kind of people who like MMORPGs. By the same token, people who play MMORPGs and enjoy the slow level advancement, character development, and simulated battles while immersed within a fantastical medieval world probably share other attitudes and interests. The MMORPG effectively attracts people with similar interests and attitudes while at the same time filtering out the people who do not share these interests. What you end up with in an MMORPG is a pre-filtered group of people. This is why compatibility is more likely to occur.

Meeting someone compatible in an MMORPG would only be a shot in the dark if you believed that MMORPG players are a representative sample of the general population, which is definitely not the case. Thus, another reason why good relationships are so common in MMORPGs is because players tend to be meeting people who are more compatible with them than a random person they meet in real life. It’s like meeting someone on a message board about the French culinary arts during the late Renaissance. The interest is so focused and specific that other shared attitudes are highly likely.

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Idealization

Even though an MMORPG already offers a higher chance of compatibility among players, there’s something else that artificially boosts this sense of compatibility. The “Law of Attraction” in psychology states that people tend to like those with shared attitudes, values or beliefs. This is true as long as there aren’t a lot of things they disagree on. The internet is very good at hiding differences because a lot of physical cues we use to judge others are missing – clothing, hair style, speech inflection, accent, age, appearance, expressions and gestures among others. A lot of times, we don’t even consider approaching someone because of their hair style or the clothes they are wearing. But we don’t see those things when we chat with someone online. And because those differences are hidden away, we focus on all the things we do agree on and the sense of compatibility is enhanced even though this would not have been the case if this meeting occurred in the real world. In other words, many relationships that would never have even begun in the real world have a far better chance of developing online. To some people, this is a good thing.

This heightened sense of compatibility is especially important in the development of romantic relationships. Romance usually begins with an idealization of the other person where they gain god-like features and abilities, where they become flawless and perfect in every way. The textual communication in MMORPGs almost encourages people to fill in the blanks. It lets people idealize as much as possible while hiding the flaws as much as possible. These idealizations are reinforced by the game metaphors themselves – knights in shining armor, clerics with glowing aura. Thus, these metaphors also encourage projecting a superhuman idealization upon another player apart from the underlying inflated sense of compatibility. As one player puts it:

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A Relationship in Reverse

One way to think about MMORPG relationships is that they happen almost in reverse of how a RL relationship would occur. All the things that typically take a long time to know about someone in a RL relationship usually happen very early and very quickly. For example, it takes a long time before two people in real life, whether they are dating or just friends, to share secrets with each other. We know that the opposite is true online. We know that many MMORPG players have shared secrets with their online friends that they haven’t told their real life friends.

The MMORPGs also allow people to see how someone would react under a sudden high-stress situation, and how they treat you in a situation where you need their help or support. These situations are far rarer in real life. The environment also allows you to see how they interact with other people in a multitude of scenarios. A lot of times when we meet someone in real life or when we date them, we don’t really get to see their other sides – especially how they treat other people.

In real life, we judge a person first by their physical appearance and then we get to know their character and values. In an MMORPG, the reverse is true. You get a sense of their values and character from the situations in the game. You hang out with them because you share a lot of common values or you like their personality. And then finally, you may meet them in real life where you judge their physical appearance. As this player describes, her relationship happened “inside-out”:

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Conclusion

Part of the concern over online relationships is that they are superficial because the premise of the game is to pretend to be someone else. How could you possibly know someone well in such an environment? The thing to remember is that people “pretend” all the time in real life. People wear “masks” in real life and “putting on a front” is something happens in the real world as well.

In fact, a significant portion of MMORPG players feel that they can be more of who they really are in the virtual world.

Other players feel that online relationships can be substantial because people are actually less superficial online. The removal of physical cues such as age, appearance, race and social class forces players to interact with each other with far fewer prejudices and stereotypes than they would in real life.

And as one player notes, the irony is that online relationships can turn out to be less superficial than real life relationships.

Finally, while many people are frightened by the prospect of encountering individuals with bad intentions in an online environment, those same individuals oftentimes underestimate the number of those same people they are encountering in real life. After all, the “bad” people you meet in virtual worlds live in the real world. Prudence and cautiousness are things that people need to keep in mind in both the virtual and the real world. And considering the restricted range of things that other people can do to each other online when compared with the real world, it seems surprising how worried some people get over online relationships.

Some people are hesitant to use the words “romantic relationship” or “good friendship” to describe these online relationships, and by and large, they are correct in that these relationships begin and develop in an entirely different way than face-to-face relationships. But just because they happen differently, sometimes in reverse, doesn’t mean they aren’t just as real and valuable as face-to-face relationships. If what we mean by friendship or love is really getting to know someone well, then perhaps environments like an MMORPG do have something very important to offer.

Engineering Relationships

Introduction

The effects of game mechanics can be explored on many different levels. On the lower tiers, we can look at how the rewards system enhances or diminishes the appeal of the game. On the higher tiers, we can look at how game mechanics influence community-wide behaviors or phenomena. For example, it is probably fairly obvious that the game mechanics of an MMORPG affect the economy that develops within the game. If there are limited ways for the currency to leave the player market (through NPC vendors, death penalty, etc.), then inflation will eventually overtake the economy and be difficult to control. But it may be less obvious how the game mechanics of an MMORPG affect how relationships form and develop within the game. By comparing the game mechanics of EverQuest (EQ) and Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), this essay explores how these game mechanics can shape the relationships that form in MMORPGs. While more theoretical than empirical, the ideas presented are all testable hypotheses. An understanding of the effect of game mechanics on social phenomena has an impact on the design of future virtual environments, as well as helping us understand how social context affects us in the real world.

Encouraging meaningful relationships is much more than just enhancing the communication interface. While clearly a necessary part of building relationships, having a communication channel doesn’t do any good if players aren’t encouraged to interact with each other. It also doesn’t do any good if players only interact for superficial reasons. To foster strong relationships, a game needs to provide players a large potential to interact and increase the likelihood that each interaction creates a relationship between the players involved.

Downtime During Fights

Forcing players to group to fight a tough mob is a typical way to get players to interact, and most MMORPGs make it very difficult to solo as the player’s level increases. But perhaps the amount of downtime between fights is also a crucial element in player interaction. DAOC streamlines combat and minimizes downtime during grouped combat. Mythic does this by making most buffs consume no mana, and by having fast HP and mana regen among other design elements. Typical grouped combats in EQ, on the other hand, are separated by pronounced intervals of downtime. Among other design elements, HP and mana regen are slow, and buffing a group consumes most of a cleric’s or druid’s mana, after which the group has to wait until the cleric or druid has regained that mana. Also, typical battles with a mob are shorter in DAOC when compared with EQ, and the rate of mob encounters is higher in DAOC than in EQ. In effect, what typically happens in EQ is that a group fights for 5-10 minutes and then has to rest for 3-5 minutes, while in DAOC, a group can fight continuously for long periods with relatively short rest periods. Even though players are together in a group and might be inclined to talk to each other, they can’t really develop meaningful relationships easily if there’s not enough time to talk. By streamlining the group combat experience, Mythic may be shortchanging themselves in terms of potential relationship formation in DAOC.

Interdependencies

Apart from situations where players are already grouped, game design elements can encourage players to interact with each other on a one-on-one basis to differing degrees. EQ, when compared with DAOC, has a system where players are more dependent on each other. For example, a lot of crucial or useful abilities in EverQuest are utility spells that only certain classes can cast on others. Among these are Bind (safespot creation), Resurrection, Clarity (mana regen), Spirit of Wolf (movement enhancement), Teleports, or Invisibility. In DAOC however, Bind is an ability all classes can perform by themselves, cheap public horses take the place of Teleports, Resurrection is a low-level spell that several classes have, and most utility spells can only be cast on the character or on group members.

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Facilitating Altruism

There are several reasons why player dependency encourages relationship formation. On a superficial level, it increases the possible interactions two players could have. But it’s much more interesting than that. First of all, it increases the number of ways that players can help each other. Very frequently in EQ, you meet someone new by asking for a Bind or a Clarity. The asker is humbled, the giver is empowered, but both players usually come away from the encounter with a sense of mutual benevolence. Asking help from a stranger or being asked a favor from a stranger are far rarer occurrences in DAOC because of the relative independence the game mechanics give each player. These encounters, which are frequent in EQ and rare in DAOC, help create debts of goodwill on an individual level that foster future encounters between these two players. The following account highlights these kinds of relationships:

Random Acts of Kindness

A variation of this theme is the random acts of kindness that many players experience. By increasing the number of ways that players can help each other, it increases the chances that altruistic individuals help lower-level players. Individual altruistic events promote trust at the community level which is crucial for trust at the individual level when two strangers encounter each other and could potentially form a relationship.

Some EQ players were vocal about the annoyances of the player dependencies in EQ, and DAOC was consciously designed to make players more independent of each other than in EQ. However, these minor annoyances may actually help encourage and sustain strong social relationships in the long-run.

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The Mechanics of Death

Beyond specific game mechanics, the world of EQ is also more dangerous than the world of DAOC. In EQ, when you die, your items stay on your corpse and you must travel to your corpse to retrieve your items. There is the chance you may not find your corpse, and also a chance that you may lose all your items if your corpse decays, apart from the frustration of having to retrieve your corpse instead of gaining XP. Both teleports and resurrection can only be cast by one or two classes, so dying is a very “expensive” event in EQ. DAOC is much safer in comparison. Your items stay with you instead of the corpse when you die; everything is a horse-ride away; you can’t de-level because of experience loss; and resurrection is a low-level spell that several classes have. Trust is forged through dangerous and high-risk situations. You don’t ever need to trust anyone except when the situation is dangerous, and EQ does this much better than DAOC. The game design decision to make death easy in DAOC also makes players more nonchalant about dying. Dying is a trivial event in DAOC. But because trusting friendships are forged from dangerous encounters, the mechanics of death actually have a huge influence on how relationships develop.

Conclusion

Of course in listing all these differences between EQ and DAOC, one has to keep in mind that game design is about compromising among multiple objectives, and Mythic purposely chose to streamline certain game features while Verant streamlined others. One might get the sense from the above contrasts that Mythic made poor decisions. This is not meant to be the case at all, and it must be pointed out again that game balancing oftentimes leads to compromises such as the ones mentioned.

In single player and limited multiplayer games, system rules and game mechanics mainly have an impact on how fun and engaging the game is. In MMORPGs, game mechanics have more far-reaching effects. Differences in game mechanics influence how an economy develops as well as how social relationships form. As upcoming MMORPGs provide integrated real-estate and player-elected governments, one could imagine using these worlds as social or political simulations in an attempt to understand large-scale human behavior without the fear of inflicting real world consequences. Or perhaps, we might come to realize that the rules of social interaction in online environments are so different from those in the real world that we need new theories to understand these phenomena.

Questions for Readers: Are there other game mechanics that influence the formation and development of social relationships or social networks? What other interesting large-scale behaviors or phenomena do game mechanics affect? (comment below)