The Proteus Paradox (2 page)

The first part of the book provides an introduction to online games and dispels some myths about who plays. In the second part, I focus on different aspects of online games that challenge their promises of freedom and escape. We'll look at superstitions, stereotypes, the
work of dragon-slaying, and falling in love. And in the final part, I move from an explanation of how virtual worlds don't change us to describing the unexpected ways that they do. In this section, I describe how virtual worlds come with a unique set of psychological tools—whether it's our avatars or the rules of death—that can modify our attitudes and behaviors. I end the book with my thoughts on the possible trajectories of virtual worlds and what it might take to change our current course.

Many of this book's findings come from web survey data from more than fifty thousand online gamers. The questions I asked ranged from basic demographics to gameplay motivations, from how players fell in love to how they picked the names for their characters. I ran new surveys every few months, and thousands of players would respond over a weekend. Findings would fuel new questions and directions. I often started exploring a topic with open-ended questions—“Tell me how you fell in love in the game”—and once I got a handle on the range of responses, I would use more focused, multiple-choice questions to gather quantitative data. The Internet also gave me a way to share my research findings and engage with gamers. I created a research blog, the Daedalus Project (I have a penchant for names from Greek mythology), that cataloged the survey results and publicized new surveys. The project was active from 2003 to 2009. In this book, I share many player stories from the Daedalus Project, allowing players' own voices to explain why these online games are so engaging and unforgettable. To improve the readability of these narratives, I have expanded all acronyms of game titles and corrected minor typos. At the end of each player quotation, I include the game that player was actively playing when they took the survey. Thus, players with multiple online gaming careers may mention a game title in their response other than the one explicitly noted. In the
latter part of the book, I also present my findings from lab studies and large-scale data analysis of in-game data. I describe these projects in detail separately when they are introduced.
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I wrote this book with a diverse audience in mind, presuming expertise in neither online gaming nor the social sciences but with an eye toward highlighting the many intersections between these two areas. We'll see how one psychologist's experiments with pigeons help us understand superstitions in online games and ask why we need virtual chairs if our virtual bodies never get tired. Rather than focusing on abstract theory or gamer jargon, this book leverages provocative findings from a wide range of data sources: player narratives and statistics from online surveys, results from psychology experiments, and analysis of in-game data logs. Whether it's gnomes in love or the consequences of virtual death, each chapter delves into a different aspect of online gaming to help readers understand what these virtual worlds are about and why they matter. For readers who are unfamiliar with online games, a glossary of online gaming terms is provided at the end of the book.

Gamers already familiar with online games will learn about the many psychological mechanisms that influence their behavior in games: why superstitions are so pervasive or how your avatar can change the way you interact with other people. They will also learn the many statistics of gameplay behavior documented, such as the percentage of men and women who gender-bend—inhabiting an avatar of the opposite gender. Nongaming parents and spouses of gamers will find a guided cultural tour of online games addressing who plays these games, whether gaming addiction is real, and what collaboration and love mean in these virtual worlds. And game designers and analysts will understand why gamers don't always play by the rules—for example, creating their own in the case of superstitions,
and how to process and make sense of the wealth of data available in their game logs.

This book is about more than games. It questions what it means to be human in a digital world and how technology changes who we are, how we live, and how we form relationships.

A good way to understand online games is to trace how they emerged from the intersection of several historical trajectories: miniature wargaming, epic fantasy literature, role-playing games, and multiplayer video games. In 1812, the Prussian army developed
Kriegsspiel,
a complex tabletop board game, to train officers in military tactics and strategy. It was certainly not the first board game about war—chess also fits the description—but where chess is a metaphorical abstraction, the Prussians developed
Kriegsspiel
to be a realistic war simulation. Miniature figures represented infantry and cavalry armies; square terrain tiles, laid out on the table, created a grid-based map; and dice determined individual combat outcomes. Rules governed how far each unit could move each turn, how much damage each unit could inflict, and how terrain modified movement and combat. A neutral umpire would assess and resolve the players' actions. In the 1880s, the United States imported
Kriegspiel,
again for military training purposes. Miniature wargames first became commercially available in 1913, when the writer H. G. Wells simplified the rules, added a mechanical cannon, and sold the toy soldier package as
Little Wars
.
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In addition to simulating contemporary warfare, miniature wargaming branched into other time periods, such as the medieval era. In 1968, Gary Gygax developed a medieval wargaming ruleset for his local gaming group. He extended an existing ruleset and added such features as jousting and one-on-one duels. As he later said in an interview,

Not long after that, as the members began to get tired of medieval games, and I wasn't, I decided to add fantasy elements to the mix, such as a dragon that had a fire-breath weapon, a “hero” that was worth four normal warriors, a wizard who could cast fireballs (the range and hit diameter of a large catapult) and lightning bolts (the range and hit area of a cannon), and so forth. I converted a plastic stegosaurus into a pretty fair dragon, as there were no models of them around in those days.

This new game, published and sold in 1972 as
Chainmail,
was novel for two reasons. First, it shifted the focus from army squadrons to individuals. Players no longer controlled an army; they controlled one character, a heroic figure. And second, the game retained combat realism but moved away from modeling physical reality and historical warfare. Dragons were now fair game.
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Of course, these fantasy elements were popular with Gygax's wargaming group in the late 1960s largely because of J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, published in Britain between 1954 and 1955 and in the United States in 1966. Fantasy creatures had existed in literature long before Tolkien, but
The Lord of the Rings
wasn't simply a story with fantasy creatures; it was an epic fantasy with unique races, centuries of fascinating history, and a varied set of political factions vying for power. Tolkien didn't merely write about characters; he created a parallel world. In a sense, Gygax's
Chainmail
was an initial answer to the hypothetical question: What if you wanted to be a
heroic character in Middle Earth rather than just reading about Legolas, Gimli, or Aragorn in a book?

Shortly after
Chainmail,
Gygax began working with game designer Dave Arneson to develop a more elaborate and self-contained ruleset because
Chainmail,
though popular among wargaming enthusiasts, assumed extensive prior knowledge of wargaming conventions. This new ruleset shifted the focus of battle location from outdoor terrain to monster-infested dungeons. The resulting stand-alone game, published in 1974, was
Dungeons and Dragons
. It created a new gaming genre: role-playing games. The popularity of Tolkien's epic fantasy left a clear mark on this new game genre. As Gygax put it, “Just about all the players were huge JRRT [Tolkien] fans, and so they insisted that I put as much Tolkien-influence material into the game as possible. Anyone reading this that recalls the original D&D game will know that there were Balrogs, Ents, and Hobbits in it.” At the same time, he has stated that Tolkien was only one of many sources of inspiration. Thus,
Dungeons and Dragons
clearly borrowed Hobbits and Ents from Tolkien, but the game also welcomed Medusa and vampires from Greek mythology and medieval lore.
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In role-playing games, players first create their characters based on predefined templates of different races and abilities in the rule-book. Elves may be more proficient in archery, and Dwarves may be able to endure more combat damage before dying. Players can choose from different combat specializations, such as warriors trained for combat or mages trained for casting spells. Combat is initiated and won using conventions from miniature wargames. A two-handed sword may inflict “2d6” damage—“2d6” refers to rolling two six-sided dice and taking the total, thus inflicting between 2 and 12 damage points. Characters and monsters have health points,
and when the combat damage exceeds their health points, they die. As characters defeat monsters, they accumulate experience points and ascend to higher levels. This allows them to improve on skills or learn new ones over time. Typical role-playing campaigns are weekly social gatherings that may run weeks, months, or even years.

One frustrating feature of role-playing games is the constant need to reference tables in the rulesets. There are tables that list the damage of every weapon, tables for each monster's health points, tables for how skills improve as characters level up, and tables for suitable treasure for different character levels. Almost every rule in the game has an accompanying reference table. As role-playing games became more complex, the computerized automation of dice-rolling and referencing tables was a natural progression.

Online games emerged in the media and the public consciousness around the turn of the millennium, but networked computer games existed as early as 1969. The University of Illinois, funded by the National Science Foundation, created an experimental computer-based teaching system. Named
PLATO
, for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations, the system consisted of a set of computer terminals connected to a central mainframe computer. The terminals were “dumb” in the sense that as simple input and output devices they merely relayed information to and from the mainframe, which carried out all the computation. A programming language allowed users to create programs, and thus games, of their own. In 1969, Rick Blomme used
PLATO
to program
Spacewar,
a game in which two players controlled their own spaceships and attacked each other. The graphics consisted of a monochrome, top-down view of the star field.
PLATO
's terminals were located all over the campus, and this meant that two users could play against each other remotely, making
Spacewar
a networked game. The first three-dimensional, networked,
multiplayer computer game,
Maze War,
appeared in 1974. In this game, eyeball avatars represented players who would chase and shoot each other in a maze. The monochrome line-based graphics provided a first-person perspective of the maze.
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Maze War
paved the way for action shooter games like
Quake
and
Doom
. The predecessor for computer-based role-playing games came a few years later. In 1976, Will Crowther created
ADVENT
, a single-player text-based adventure game that led to games such as
Zork
.
ADVENT
plays like a fantasy-infused dungeon explorer, inspired by Crowther's experience with
Dungeons and Dragons
and his interest in cave exploration. The game begins with the following text: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.” Players moved around and performed actions by typing in keywords. For example, if a player typed “go in,” he or she would see the following text:

You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There are some keys on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.

There were also fantasy elements in
ADVENT
, such as a bridge guarded by a troll who demanded payment for crossing.
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It wasn't long before someone figured out how to create a multiuser adventure game. In 1978, Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, began developing a multiuser version of
DUNGEN
, a text-based adventure game inspired by
ADVENT
. The very first version of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), still text-based, was released in the fall of 1978. Richard Bartle, a fellow student, soon joined Trubshaw in developing MUD: “The game was originally little more than a series
of inter-connected locations where you could move and chat. . . . Roy was mainly interested in the programming side of things, rather than the design of rooms, puzzles and so on. When he left Essex, I took over full control. At that point, there was no objective for the players, and only primitive communication.” Drawing from his interest in board games, Bartle added many game elements to MUD, such as a combat system, an experience system that permitted characters to level up, and puzzles. In 1980, Essex University's computer network was connected to ARPANet, the network that became the Internet, and this meant that MUD became a full-fledged Internet-based game.
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The separate historical threads we've been following so far—miniature wargaming, epic fantasy literature, role-playing games, and multiplayer video games—finally intersected with the creation of MUD. As with
ADVENT
, other developers began creating variants of the original MUD, changing the game design and adapting the code to different computer systems. These variants in turn started their own lineages of MUD code bases; among them were TinyMUDs, AberMUDs, and DikuMUDs. In the 1980s, MUDs began to appear on commercial online services such as America Online (AOL) and CompuServe. One notable MUD was
Island of Kesmai,
the first online role-playing game to display rudimentary graphics using ASCII symbols—mazes and rooms, for example, were created using dash, pipe, and asterisk characters on the screen. MUDs were cash cows for these early Internet service providers because users paid for each hour spent online.
Island of Kesmai
cost six dollars per hour on 300-baud modems and twelve dollars per hour on 1200-baud modems. This meant that early online games could be very profitable even with relatively small player bases, as long as there were enough dedicated players. The first multiplayer online role-playing game to display true graphics—that is, using colored pixels to represent characters
and the virtual world—was
NeverWinter Nights,
launched on AOL in 1991. The game used graphics to render the world and the characters in a top-down 2D representation. The game server's initial capacity of two hundred concurrent players was eventually upgraded to five hundred concurrent players.
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