The Proteus Paradox (31 page)

2
. See John P. Robinson, Phillip R. Shaver, and Lawrence S. Wrightsman,
Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes,
vol. 1:
Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes
(New York: Academic Press, 1991); and Oliver P. John and Sanjay Srivastava, “The Big Five Trait Taxonomy: History, Measurement, and Theoretical Perspectives,”
Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research,
ed. Lawrence A. Pervin and Oliver P. John (New York: Guilford, 1999), 102–138. See also Lewis R. Goldberg, “A Historical Survey of Personality Scales and Inventories,” in
Advances in Psychological Assessment,
vol. 1, ed. Paul McReynolds (Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1975), 293–336.

3
. See John and Srivastava, “Big Five Trait Taxonomy,” for a wonderful historical and conceptual overview of Big Five development. For all that the Big Five model has done to unify the field and advance personality research, it's still important to acknowledge its weaknesses. See, e.g., Jack Block, “The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations,”
Psychological Inquiry
21 (2010): 2–25. In particular, certain traits that are well captured in the English language are not in the Big Five, including honesty, masculinity-femininity, humor or wit, and sensuality.

4
. For earlier studies involving personality assessment among strangers, see David C. Funder and Carl D. Sneed, “Behavioral Manifestations of Personality: An Ecological Approach to Judgmental Accuracy,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
64 (1993): 479–490; and David A. Kenny, Caryl Horner, Deborah A. Kashy, and Ling-chuan Chu, “Consensus at Zero Acquaintance: Replication, Behavioral Cues, and Stability,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
62 (1992): 88–97. The study on personality expression in bedrooms and offices is reported in Samuel D. Gosling, Sei Jin Ko, Thomas Mannarelli, and Margaret E. Morris, “A Room with a Cue: Judgments of Personality Based on Offices and Bedrooms,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
82 (2002): 379–398.

5
. For personal websites, see Simine Vazire and Samuel D. Gosling, “e-Perceptions: Personality Impressions Based on Personal Websites,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
87 (2004): 123–132. For Facebook profiles, see Mitja D. Back et al., “Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, not Self-Idealization,”
Psychological Science
21 (2010): 372–374. For email content, see Alastair J. Gill, Jon Oberlander, and Elizabeth Austin, “Rating E-Mail Personality at Zero Acquaintance,”
Personality and Individual Differences
40 (2006): 497–507. For email addresses, see Mitja D. Back, Stefan C. Schmukle, and Boris Egloff, “How Extraverted Is honey.bunny77@ hotmail.de? Inferring Personality from E-Mail Addresses,”
Journal of Research in Personality
42 (2008): 1116–1122.

6
. Dmitry Nozhnin, “Predicting Churn: Data-Mining Your Game,”
Gama Sutra,
May 17, 2012,
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/170472/predicting_churn_datamining_your_.php
.

7
. Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Les Nelson, and Peter Likarish, “Introverted Elves and Conscientious Gnomes: The Expression of Personality in World of War-craft,”
Proceedings of CHI 2011
(2011): 753–762.

8
. Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,”
New York Times,
February 16, 2012.

9
. Machine learning analysis of this data set was reported in Peter Likarish et al., “Demographic Profiling from MMOG Gameplay” (Paper presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, 2011). The specific rules we list here in the book chapter were not reported in that paper. These rules were derived using an association rule mining algorithm in the Weka toolkit called HotSpot. Peter Steiner's well-known cartoon was published in the
New Yorker
on July 5, 1993. The indoor gardening story is reported in Heather Hollingsworth, “Kansas Couple: Indoor Gardening Prompted Pot Raid,”
Associated Press,
March 29, 2013.

10
. For more on the “digital enclosure,” see Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,”
Communication Review
10 (2007): 295–317. Screenshots of the Naked Gnome Protest, along with the account suspension message, can be found at:
http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/491
.

Epigraph: Lawrence Lessig,
Code
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 58–59.

1
. The wallet-dropping experiments are reported in Mark D. West, “Losers: Recovering Lost Property in Japan and the United States,” Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper No. 02-005 (2002), available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=316119
. Tsunamic recovery statistics reported in Tom Miyagawa Coulton and John M. Glionna, “Japanese Return Cash Recovered after Tsunami,”
Los Angeles Times,
September 22, 2011.

2
. Walter Mischel,
Personality and Assessment
(New York: Wiley, 1968). For an interactionist approach, see Allan R. Buss, “The Trait-Situation Controversy and the Concept of Interaction,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
3 (1977): 196–201.

3
. Nick Yee, “Time Spent in the Meta-Game,”
The Daedalus Project
(2006).

4
. Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “‘Alone Together?' Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Games,”
Proceedings of CHI
1 (2006): 407–416.

5
. Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2011), 19.

1
. See Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson,
Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives
(New York: HarperCollins, 2011), for the historical background of and current research in virtual reality.

2
. Barlow's documentation of his virtual reality experience can be found in John Perry Barlow,
Being in Nothingness: Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace
(n.d.), available from:
http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/JohnePerryeBarlow/HTML/beingeinenothingness.html
. The counterculture's fascination with technology is documented in Tom Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). For a fascinating account of how the counterculture gave rise to personal computing, see Fred Turner,
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

3
. William Swartout et al., “Simulation Meets Hollywood: Integrating Graphics, Sound, Story and Character for Immersive Simulation,”
Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation Series: Text, Speech and Language Technology
27 (2005): 297–303.

4
. Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read,
Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
(Boston: Harvard Business School, 2009).

5
. Philip Rosedale, “Second Life: What Do We Learn If We Digitize Everything?” (Paper presented at the Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, November 30, 2006, video of the talk available at:
http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/
). For the schizophrenia simulation in
Second Life,
see Jane Elliott, “What's It Like to Have Schizophrenia?”
BBC News,
March 19, 2007, available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6453241.stm
.

6
. Pavel Curtis and David A. Nichols, “MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World,”
Xerox PARC,
January 19, 1993, available at:
http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/muds_grow_up.paper
.

7
. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace,”
Village Voice,
December 23, 1993.

8
. Jaron Lanier,
You Are Not a Gadget
(New York: Vintage, 2011), 10.

9
. Raph Koster,
MUD Influence,
June 27, 2008, at:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/06/27/mud-influence/
.

10
. Jaron Lanier, “Homuncular Flexibility,”
Edge,
January 1, 2006, available at:
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#lanier
.

1
. See Eric T. Lofgren and Nina H. Fefferman, “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,”
Lancet Infectious Diseases
7 (2007): 625–629; and Edward Castronova, “Virtual Worlds: Petri Dishes, Rat Mazes, and Supercolliders,”
Games and Culture
4 (2009): 396–407.

2
. Jon A. Krosnick, Joanne M. Miller, and Michael P. Tichy, “An Unrecognized Need for Ballot Reform: Effects of Candidate Name Order,” in
Rethinking the Vote: The Politics and Prospects of American Election Reform,
ed. Ann N. Crigler, Marion R. Just, and Edward J. McCaffery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51–74.

3
. Lisa Nakamura,
Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet
(New York: Routledge, 2002).

4
. For more on the connections between the military and the entertainment industry, see Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex,” in
Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne—Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert,
ed. Jan Lazardig, Helmar Schramm, and Ludger Scharte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003).

This glossary covers online game terminology that appears in this book. For a more comprehensive glossary, please refer to:
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001313.php
.

Add
. Noun. Short for
additional.
Refers to an additional mob that unexpectedly appears (and thus must be dealt with) during a fight.

Aggro.
Verb/Noun. Short for
aggression
. As a noun,
aggro
refers to the amount of hostility the player has generated on a mob by damaging it. In turn, mobs attack the character that is highest on its
aggro
list. As a verb,
aggro
refers to drawing a mob's attention, either intentionally or accidentally.

Alt.
See
Alternate
.

Alternate.
Adjective/Noun. Refers to an
alternate
character a player has apart from his or her main character. Commonly abbreviated to
alt
. This is a fluid and personal categorization that varies from player to player. Sometimes players get tired of their main and spend more time on their
alt
.

Bind.
Verb/Noun. In certain online games, characters are teleported back to a designated safe spot when they die. The act of designating a spot is called
binding.
In some games, characters can
bind
themselves. In other games, they must interact with a specific NPC or ask characters of a specific class to
bind
them.

Boss.
Noun. Usually short for a
boss monster,
a challenging mob at strategic points in a dungeon or raid.

Bot.
Noun/Verb. Short for
robot
. Refers to automated scripts that play the game for a character using simulated mouse and keyboard commands. This practice
is often explicitly banned in games and can lead to termination of the account if uncovered by the game developers.

Buff.
Noun/Verb. A spell that temporarily boosts a character's abilities or attributes. In verb form,
buff
refers to the act of casting this spell.

Camp.
Verb. To wait in an area to hunt one or more specific mobs. Can be used negatively to imply the selfish hoarding of a mob or an area.

Class.
Noun. Refers to combat professions in online games and role-playing games. Examples include warrior, cleric, druid, and necromancer.

Corpse.
Noun. In some online games, a
corpse
appears where the player has died. Sometimes all the player's items and money are left on the
corpse
and the player is teleported back to his or her bind spot.
Corpses
typically decay after a certain time proportional to the character's level.

Corpse Run.
Noun. The act of retrieving your corpse after you have died. This is typically a perilous task because people tend to die in dangerous places rather than safe places.

Crafting.
Adjective/Noun. A general category of skills that allow players to create usable objects and equipment from raw resources. Examples include tailoring, blacksmithing, and cooking.

Crit.
See
Critical.

Critical.
Adjective/Verb/Noun. When dealing damage with spells or weapons, characters have a low probability of landing a particularly heavy blow, referred to as a
critical hit, critical
for short, and often abbreviated as
crit
. A
crit
often deals 50 percent or more damage than usual.

DPS.
Noun. Short for
Damage Per Second.
In the context of combat statistics,
DPS
refers to the mathematical calculation of damage dealt by a character per second. Thus, a character with higher
DPS
can inflict more damage over time than a character with low
DPS
. In the context of combat classes,
DPS
refers to classes that deal high
DPS
and is one of the three combat archetypes in online games. See also
Healer
and
Tank
.