I was looking for an updated game player categorisation. Everyone still talks about the Bartle player types (achievers, socializers, killers explorers), but they don’t cover what I think needs to be covered. Through a rabbithole I stumbled across Nick Yee’s site, and because that seemed a bit out of date I went to his company site, and THERE I found what I was looking for: Gamer Motivation Model (Quandry) His three clusters of gameplay motivations relate to achievement, social interaction, and immersion.
After that I had to read his book too: The Proteus Paradox. It was published in 2017, and a lot has happened since then, but it really inspired me. Some notes here. It’s a lot, so I will make another post with the more relevant stuff.
page 15: Even in a virtual world, imperfection proved more believable – to me this links to the curiosity and fake islands thing.
page 19: Without a more careful look how these [virtual] spaces do and do not change us, the promises of virtual worlds and online games are being subverted.
page 19: business corporations are increasingly exploring how the psychological principles from gaming can be harnessed for corporate work – I included this quote only to say that this is almost exactly opposite what I want to do with bringing in the physical world into games. I wish to research game culture to avoid misapplying game design principles.
page 19: Games are becoming an integral part of our lives—they are where we play, where we work, and where we fall in love.
As millions of people spend increasing amounts of time in online games and virtual worlds, we need to be vigilant about whether these new environments are fulfilling their promises of freedom and reinvention, and if they’re not, we need to find a way to change them.
page 21: This book 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.
page 23: Yee states that online games emerged from the intersection of several historical trajectories: miniature wargaming, epic fantasy literature, role-playing games, and multiplayer video games. page 31: Contemporary online games draw heavily from the conventions of miniature wargaming and tabletop role-playing games.
Is this true? Is this it? Why this? Why not something else? Why war games? Who is not in the room? Where is space for me and others like me, who would like to play, but not like this. Is war everything? Towards the end of the book Yee implores us to find different ways to play. Reading the goodreads reviews, one comment is that other games should also be considered: Call of Duty games, Minecraft, or The Sims. I know the killing monsters thing puts me off immediately.
This then got me thinking, what would my intersections be? What would the equivalent to war games be, age of exploration? What literature genre would tell the story? I think emergent games can disrupt this stale situation.
page 32 describes the player classes, damage vs healing, for example. I wonder if this can be replaced by different balance of decision-making. I called command-and-control leadership “pinnacle” – only one can get to the top, and the more conversational, or, feminine leadership a spiderweb, where everyone’s daily decisions get woven into the trajectory. There’s also creative and analytic balance …
page 32 also describes guilds. This reminded me of my three-letter-community idea, TLCs. With my idea, players are encourages to join as many TLCs as they want. Each TLC is built from three keywords, for example, knitting, magic and family values. Or, sword-play, fire and cooking. Whatever. To solve challenges, different guilds would be better for different things. Each guild has their own dynamic , members, opinions and networks to other guilds, so fundamentally it becomes a networked approach. People are encouraged to join more than one TLC, but there is work required in a TLC, just like in a guild, so there’s an optimum. It should give most benefit to be in three TLCs. Having one topic in common with two TLCs is best, to provide a link. The ulterior motive here is to cross political or ideological boundaries. How your bowling club and church may have different views which challenge your beliefs, but you feel belonging with both. You may tolerate views and behaviour in one that you won’t in the other. Something about plurality.
page 33: Most online games provide different game servers with slightly different rules that cater to different players. For example, there are usually servers on which players are able to kill each other. This activity is usually referred to as player-versus-player, or PvP. Servers on which this is not allowed are marked player-versus-environment, or PvE.
page 35: In chapter 3, I explain how the complex mathematical outcomes in online games play into our brain’s eagerness to make sense of the world – so surely using the physical world in games would be a no-brainer?!
page 37: Online games actually combine two separate moral panics—worry about video games and fear of the Internet. – just adding this here to consider it noted. I wonder if it’s even still a thing.
page 38: Teenagers are actually the minority in online games. More important, online games are highly social, and gamers are not a monolithic category. …While there is a broad age range among online gamers, the gender stereotype is currently true. Only 20 percent of players in this game genre are women.
page 39: Teenagers who may feel a lack of control and agency in their everyday lives are suddenly able to work with adults as equals or even their superiors—something that almost never happens in the physical world. – I think this is crucially important to rediscover mentorship and some sort of apprenticeship model, building literacy both ways. This also links to my project focus of enabling new knowledge alliances, the transformation of expertise.
page 41: Instead of using virtual worlds to shut out the real world, gamers are using online games to socialize, keep in touch, and hang out with their friends and family.
page 42: virtual worlds do a good job of creating engaging, social experiences that are highly memorable and forge relationships.
page 43: Richard Bartle’s analysis of player types is a well-known taxonomy of why people enjoy online games. He categorizes players as achievers, socializers, killers (players who enjoy inflicting misery on others), and explorers (whether it’s the geography or the game rules). My research in gameplay motivations built and expanded on Bartle’s types. Statistical analysis of survey data from online gamers has consistently identified three clusters of gameplay motivations; these relate to achievement, social interaction, and immersion.
The motivations within each cluster are highly correlated with one another and largely independent from motivations in the other two clusters. The achievement cluster focuses on different ways of gaining power within the context of the game. The social interaction cluster is about different ways of relating to other people in the game. And the immersion cluster is about different ways of becoming a part of the story. (See Nick Yee, “Motivations for Play in Online Games,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 9 (2006): 772–775; and the validation of the scale in Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Les Nelson, “Online Gaming Motivations Scale: Development and Validation,” Proceedings of CHI 2012 (2012): 2803–2806.)
page 47: The label “role-playing” was devised to mark the shift from army squadrons to individual characters in miniature wargaming, not the importance of storytelling. “Role-playing” thus has two very different meanings in online games.
page 48: Online games appeal to a broad demographic because they tap into a wide set of gameplay motivations. … These virtual worlds allow players to engage in very different kinds of gameplay side by side. – I want this, for science. … Online games are like school in many ways. Both provide predefined rewards for a set of highly constrained and objectively measured activities. … Online games can provide a cheap, convenient way of feeling progress.
page 50: gaming can augment existing social networks, and well-adjusted gamers are largely not at risk of problematic gaming. (there’s a couple of pages about the similarity of video games to sports or other activities, the mental impact and countering stereotypes)
page 52: the promise of escape and freedom in virtual worlds is illusory. Our psychological baggage and social stereotypes follow us into these fantasy worlds. – I think my approach is saying, yes, and let’s embrace this. Can we use games to deal with our psychological, economic, political and environmental baggage then?
Chapter 3 is about superstitions. A term to note for future reference, is the tutorial part of a game, or the easy challenges that are actually teaching you how to do something is called “operant conditioning”.
page 58: Dungeons in World of Warcraft are known as instances because player teams each enter their own version of the dungeon. – I think this instance isolation thing is something to explore, especially with the potential for community-hosted servers.
page 67: Instead of developing new social norms, we fall back on the ones we’ve learned from the physical world. – he mentions this several times in the book, and I wonder if we can use games to change social norms. There’s probably work on this already, the answer is probably yes but it’s complicated.
page 71: Although superstitious rituals would be a bad thing in the jury room or the classroom,I would argue that they are indicators of engagement in online game.
Chapter 4 is about “The Labor of Fun”. It blows my mind that people will sit through unpaid drudgery for a game. But then I wonder, can we use this?
page 78: Online games are portrayed as fantasy worlds to escape work, but corporate work is now a form of digital play.
page 80: Think about the last time you had to work in a team of people (excluding family members) who were as young as ten and as old as seventy. … In online games, this social homogeneity is removed. – THIS is why I want to learn from game culture and game design to improve interdisciplinary collaboration.
page 81: . Being a guild leader has taught me about personality types and how to manage people more than any job I’ve ever worked on.
page 82: Guilds, with their mixed-bag personalities and competition for loot, are drama factories.
page 84: Defeating a raid boss is like stacking a human pyramid. Everyone has a role, and everyone must understand the bigger picture. If someone stumbles, they often take out multiple people with them.
page 87: But for many guild leaders, their digital escape becomes the very thing they are seeking to escape. The difference, of course, is that they aren’t getting paychecks. – There’s probably work on volunteer leaders who burn-out (say Aye), and maybe there’s work on guild leaders burning out. What are the similarities? What can we learn and what can we improve? How can a virtual environment help community leaders?
page 90: Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken and Byron Reeves and Leighton Read’s Total Engagement are two recent books that champion the idea that games can improve engagement and empower workers, leading to increased autonomy and productivity. … I have no doubt that games can be powerfully motivating, but the intentions of corporations are not always aligned with the well-being of their employees or the general public. … Yes, games are fun, but games are also created by certain people to achieve specific goals. And in corporate settings, it is not the employees who are creating the games.
– I want to do the opposite. Can games push the resistance?
page 91: A fascinating aspect of many contemporary online communities is that they are able to incentivize people to perform work for free. Wikipedia—the collaborative online encyclopedia—is an obvious example. But also consider how Facebook generates revenue primarily by aggregating the information you freely share and allowing advertisers to target you more accurately for their products. Sociologist Tiziana Terranova has called this phenomenon “free labor.” Games are uniquely powerful in converting paid work into free labor. – In my research I would have to qualify the free labour in terms of … autonomy?
page 91: Engagement and exploitation may be two sides of the same coin. When we receive these invitations to play, we must remember that fun can end up being a lot of work. – Doing civic work is already work, and less fun. If there are parallels to the guilds and volunteering, what other constructive parallels can we create?
page 105: With both the Chinese laundry workers in the 1800s and today’s Chinese gold farmers, workers identify and exploit an economic opportunity, providing a service to Westerners that improves their quality of living. However, complex economic problems are blamed on these immigrant workers, leading ultimately to genocide. …
At its heart, economic stress caused by inevitable resource competition is blamed on a vulnerable minority. … In this sense, Western players are blaming Chinese workers for problems they themselves are creating – I guess a game can make this visible, perhaps with the environment … maybe showing that we are all Chinese gold farmers eventually. I dunno. Doesn’t sound fun.
page 107: We should also consider the role that game developers play in this story. After all, what we have is a form of entertainment that is so tedious and so repetitive that many people are willing to pay to not play the game. This is an artifact of game paradigms that reward time played rather than player skill—again a direct consequence of the deeply numerical leveling-up mechanics – this is ripe for disruption, surely (in game and IRL, lol)
page 110: If virtual worlds are indeed utopias, why are so few women playing these online games? THIS chapter is what I missed in Christopher Tozzi’s book. And yes, I think these are VERY well aligned to the lack of women in coding in general and FOSS in particular.
page 112: Certainly player motivation is an important variable, but trying to understand gaming by referencing brain evolution in the Pleistocene savannah ignores the reality of how people actually play games. Playing a game isn’t simply about what players would like to do in the game; it’s also about how they gain access to a game, their past experiences with games, who they play the game with, and how other players treat them once they are in the game.
page 114: The gendering of computing technology is a recent social phenomenon, and we shouldn’t mistake the current disproportionate male presence in computer-related fields as reflecting an unchanging, innate, biological basis.
page 117: Many women in these games are also highly aware that male companionship is one of the few legitimate access points into online games. Can confirm.
page 117: Even as gamers admit that some women play online games, these women tend to be labeled “casual gamers.” This euphemistic label designates someone as having a passing fancy with online games, and even though they are in an online game, they aren’t a “real” gamer. Again, this label acknowledges women are present in games while simultaneously designating them as second-class citizens. (statistics says otherwise, women (the few who play) do play as much or more than men)
page 117: For many women, from the moment they step into a gaming store to when they log on to the game, they are bombarded with signals that they don’t belong. They are presumed to have no inherent interest in games. They are presumed to be incompetent at games. And they are assigned labels, such as “casual gamers,” that are disconnected from reality.
Because these fantasy online games are designed by male game developers to be consumed by male audiences, they are technologically constructed male fantasies in a very literal sense. – And this is true in FOSS as well. Women in FOSS are not casual coders, we are the carers, the organisers, the secretaries, the sandwich makers, the wives, the +1s.
page 119: The female players in these narratives make clear that female avatars are disturbing to them not only because of the sexual exaggeration but also because the avatars are a constant reminder that they have stumbled into some sort of digital peep show. As game designer Sheri Graner Ray puts it, female avatars are designed “as male players would like them to be—young, fertile, and always ready for sex.”
Male avatars have unrealistically big muscles, yes, but we don’t see male avatars with prominent bulges in their pants or tight stripper shorts that reveal the top quarter of their behinds, and most of their pants selections do not consist of briefs and thongs. In fact, as one female player noted, there is a very definite bulge problem in male avatars.
page 121: Perhaps the greatest irony of this male fantasy is that women are simultaneously highly desired and shunned. Idealized female body parts are put on display and ogled, but the moment a real woman steps into an online game, her presence is deemed suspect and her body parts are questioned. Women are worshipped and idolized as long as they are not real; it is in this sense that online games reveal their function as a male fantasy. And perhaps another reason why games deny women access is because the male fantasy can be sustained only by presuming a male audience.
page 122: One caveat in this male territory discussion is that studies have consistently identified statistical differences between male and female gamers. In particular, many studies have found that women are less interested in the achievement and competitive aspects of games than men are. – I find this so interesting, because I absolutely am another data point to support this. However, the differences are small:
page 122: Even though the difference in terms of how strongly men and women were motivated by achievement in online games was significant, the overlap was 70 percent. … the majority of male and female players in online games actually like the same kinds of play.… When we look at gender similarities instead of gender differences, we find that claims of dramatic differences between men and women are often inflated. Attempting to identify gaming motivations that appeal to the “female brain” might be attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. … In fact, the relation between age and the achievement motivation dwarfs the gender difference. What this then tells me is that there is a large portion of people, for whom existing games don’t cater for. WoW had 12 million people at its peak, but there may be millions more who would play if the setup was different, and catered more for the other gameplay motivations.
page 124: There isn’t really a concept of a “game for boys”: men I know play everything from Japanese RPGs to tactical simulations to FPSs, yet women are expected to ALL play The Sims, as if there aren’t just as wide a variety of tastes amongst women as there are amongst men. [Dungeons and Dragons Online, female, 26]
page 128: Political theorist Langdon Winner argues that human artifacts embody politics—the things we build can implicitly regulate who does and does not belong.
page 129: From body lotion to chocolates, from yogurt to spa treatments, products are often marketed to women as guilt-free indulgences—that just this once, they can indulge in something special without feeling guilty about it. Advertisements for men almost never employ guilt. But this trope reveals an important social message: women are normally expected to feel guilty about leisure and pleasure. The stereotype of gaming as a waste of time likely exacerbates this expected guilt and further lowers women’s desire to game. Maybe this contributes to wanting to build a game that is still borderline productive. I want to play games but the guilt consumes me. So if I play something that still contributes, something, or I learn, then I can do it. But it can’t feel like work, it can’t be obvious. It has to be fun.
Chapter 7 talks about how playing can lead to romance.
page 135: The romantic tensions in these casual relationships then slowly build up in an incubation period. As these players work with each other in groups and chat during downtime, they begin to wonder if there’s something there. … page 140: Players don’t simply jump from avatar to meeting face-to-face. … First of all, none of the players in the survey mentioned that they were looking for love in an online game. In fact, they often mentioned the exact opposite.
Because there were no expectations of love, players getting to know each other were not burdened with the pressures and awkwardness of first dates. More often than not, players had grouped together and chatted with each other a great deal before love became part of the equation. To suggest that online relationships are inherently superficial is to ignore the far more obvious lie that people are exactly themselves on first dates.
Falling in love in an online game is more similar to an office romance than finding someone in an online dating site. The love grows out of working with and getting to know another person. It is these opportunities of working together with someone that online games excel at. Later the book explains that this downtime is important, and that it has been reduced in games.
page 141: . In short, they spent time getting to know each other without the intent of trying to date or get in bed with each other. The typical geographical separation further inhibits romantic intentions because these players often assume that they’re talking to someone they will never meet face-to-face.
The fact that love is sidelined in online games seems one reason why relationships can work so well. People can get to know each other first without love getting in the way.
Although anonymity can make it easier to lie online, in gaming the lack of romantic pressures and the belief that you’re talking to someone you’ll never meet can have the opposite effect. I believe this translates to curiosity too, engaging with people with different opinions and beliefs to you. Rephrased, they spent time getting to know each other without the intent of trying to convince each other.
page 143: computermediated communication expert Joe Walther has called “hyperpersonal interactions”—interactions that feel much more intimate than typical face-to-face exchanges. Thus, trust and intimacy can evolve more quickly online than face-to-face. This can mean that with good game design, people can experiment with polarising opinions that they otherwise wouldn’t share, and perhaps explore letting go of their beliefs. Of course this happens the bad way through echo chambers, but the opposite way, leading to widening of exposure, is something a game can be structured for to facilitate.
page 150: By splitting realities, we ignore the fact that honesty and deception are very much a part of both the physical and virtual worlds.
page 151: Players developed relationships after going through adventures together and sharing in both disappointments and accomplishments. Relationships are created when two people are willing to work through life’s ups and downs together, whether online or offline and regardless of what their checklists look like. Lasting relationships are forged, not found. And the truth is that relationships are a lot of work. This is why online dating websites are so seductive. They are selling the myth that compatible relationships can be deduced with a magical database and require no real work on your part. For both good and bad, online games turn out to be a lot of work. And lasting relationships happen in online games because the gameplay often forces people to build trust and work together. These games jumpstart that forging process.
Chapter 8 considers how the virtual world can be used for persuasion and control. It uses examples of showing people themselves as a 70 year old avatar to encourage savings, but also talks about the (many) examples of the bad kind of manipulation, from getting you to buy stuff to manipulate political outcomes. I wonder if we can embrace this from the ground up. If the everyday people can use the virtual world to also persuade and control the powers that be. Think GameStop, perhaps.
page 152: virtual worlds provide unparalleled tools for controlling us.
page 156: What if you could break reality?
Chapter 9 talks about the big data available to analyze what happens in games.
page 173: public access to server-side game variables.
page 174: In 2005, three research scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center—Nicolas Ducheneaut, Bob Moore, and Eric Nickell—had created a research group studying social interaction and communities in online games called PlayOn. – sadly this seems no longer active?
page 176: Using data spanning thirty days allowed us to create network graphs of guilds—the frequency of interactions between members of that guild. These graphs allowed us to identify the best-connected characters in each guild—the information brokers who bridged different cliques—as well as to quantify how cohesive or fragmented a guild was. In one of our papers, we explored whether we could predict a guild’s survival in six months based on its current guild metrics. We found that several of the top predictors were related to diversity. Certainly, a large guild is more likely to survive than a small guild, but what also mattered is having cohesive cliques spread across the range of levels. Because players are constantly getting tired of the game and quitting, the key to a guild’s success is in being able to fill those vacant positions rapidly. – This is an incredibly important finding to me, and I would like my game to explicitly design this in. This is absolutely about creating those knowledge alliances. And then combined with the lasting friendships formed, as discussed in chapter 7, take those connections into the physical world. And therefore it is important that this is designed for women, so we are not left out, again. And designed for all player types, to not limit that diversity from the start.
page 180: Five personality factors form the acronym OCEAN. Openness to Experience measures a person’s intellectual curiosity, appreciation for art, creativity, and preference for novelty. People with high scores on Openness are more likely to enjoy going to museums and joining in philosophical discussions and to have unconventional ideas and beliefs. People with low scores on Openness are more practical and down-to-earth and more likely to be conventional and traditional. Conscientiousness measures self-discipline, organization, planning, and a sense of duty. People who score high on this factor are usually prepared, plan things in advance, and pay attention to details. People who score low on this factor tend to be spontaneous, don’t mind a bit of chaos in their lives, and may be perceived by others as disorganized. Extraversion measures activity level and the desire to seek out stimulation in social settings. People who score high on this factor enjoy large crowds and being the center of attention, and they have no trouble starting a conversation with strangers. People who score low on this factor avoid social situations, are quiet and reserved, and in general keep in the background. Agreeableness measures compassion and cooperation. People who score high on this factor sympathize with others’ feelings, take time to help others, and are interested in other people’s problems. People who score low on this factor tend to be more self-interested, competitive, even antagonistic, and in general suspicious and untrusting of others. Neuroticism measures emotional stability and the tendency to experience negative emotions. People who score high on this factor are vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and depression. They are easily upset. People who score low on this factor tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and relaxed.
page 183: In 2007, the balance between data access and third parties changed yet again. Blizzard released the Armory for World of Warcraft, a website that allows you to look up any active character playing the game. For each character, the Armory catalogs thousands of statistics and achievements. And this list has kept growing with the updates over the years. Currently, the Armory provides over 3,500 variables for each active character, updated daily.
page 183: Certainly, there is commercial value in the server-side data, but the earlier experiment with add-on scripting created a thriving community of modders—gamers developing in-game tools, usually for free. Hundreds of add-ons were developed, many of which were updated diligently with each game patch. The modding community enhanced engagement by allowing gamers to tweak the game interface to their specific play styles. – this is then basically FOSS, like Linux.
page 184: it also allowed Blizzard to understand the player community’s needs. More than once Blizzard added game functionality that was previously available only with an add-on. If anything was lost with sharing the game data, it was more than made up for with the free programming labor and marketing research generated by the player community. The Armory seemed to expand on this philosophy. The website enhances player engagement by making it easy for new players to understand how elite players are optimizing their equipment and abilities, quickly check a guild candidate’s résumé, or figure out what upgrades are available for a character’s current equipment. Different websites use the Armory data to create detailed census reports, prevalence of specific classes or specializations in player-versus-player rankings, and the progress of elite guilds in the high-end content. The data sharing created a thriving player community around the game as well as increased the engagement with the game itself. This illustrates the benefit of open culture to commercial entities. Rephrased for what I want to do: The website enhances engagement with expertise by making it easy for new players to understand how experts are optimizing their knowledge, tools and findings. The data sharing created a thriving civic community around the game as well as increased the engagement with the physical world itself.
page 186: We began to develop strategies to create meaningful variables from this morass of data. One was to create conceptually meaningful aggregates. It is impossible to interpret what stepping into any one particular zone means, but the percentage of all zones visited maps to a psychologically meaningful concept of exploration. In short, we tried as much as possible to create variables that came with explanations built in.
page 189: Nevertheless, the predominant pattern of correspondence between real-world personality and in-game behavior is striking. Neither the overt fantasy nor the constant invitations to reinvent ourselves drown out our personalities. Even when we take on virtual bodies, our personalities are expressed in online games.
page 189: Our behaviors online, in virtual worlds, and when using smart mobile devices allow others to make accurate inferences about who we are and what we like. On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog.
page 190: We are living in a world in which a digital escapist fantasy and a surveillance state refer to the same thing. Media scholar Mark Andre-jevic uses the phrase “digital enclosure” to refer to this rapidly growing phenomenon of users freely submitting to enhanced surveillance in order to gain access to a digital network or community. We need to get better as a community at understanding and managing this. This does not mean, to me, just increasing privacy. I think some things need to be more private, and some things more public, and we need to have better literacy and control over what goes where. Ideally this game or platform will help with that literacy.
page 190: Existence comes and goes at the click of a button. This links to internet censorship and so along with the digital literacy, we also need to get better at local storage – both caching global data and storing our own data. ( see e.g. the SolidBox concept)
Chapter 10 is titled “Changing the Rules” and I love this guy.
page 191: Cyberspace does not guarantee its own freedom but instead carries an extraordinary potential for control. . . . Architecture is a kind of law: it determines what people can and cannot do. – Lawrence Lessig, Code
page 192: Rules can powerfully influence social behavior. What is most striking about the difference between the New York and Tokyo return rates is that plain altruism and honesty perform only about one third as well as a good set of rules. – this is about a lost wallet returning experiment. I think it’s also about the enforcement of those rules, trusting the probability of the expected consequences to actually occur.
page 195: It is this shared understanding of the pervasive specter of death that contributed to a higher level of willingness of players to help each other. Norrath was fundamentally a world in which you could not survive alone. Players helped each other because they knew that one day they would be the ones asking for help; building a social support network was key to one’s survival in EverQuest. These pages talk about the penalties for dying in game which used to be much more severe, and I am faced with a challenge. I get way too anxious if there is a risk of losing everything, to the point that i don’t try. And I don’t want to collaborate with people. I am the definition of the casual gamer. But I also want to build community, have this social support network. My game would have to balance this. So uncomfortable. Although, I have been thinking that the “home bubbles” are protected, and in them you can play casually, and do whatever you want, either sandbox or PvE, I guess. Or maybe sandbox only, and PvE is a level-based game running parallel to the emergent game. Outside of those bubbles it’s the wild wild west, PvP and you better find friends. You get to choose who you invite into your bubble. And then, ideally, your bubble is stored on your own instance, on your own (or your community) server. And all three these things, the bubble sandbox, the casual game and the MMO, use the same platform.
page 197: Death was certainly painful in EverQuest, but oddly, it was precisely death that brought people together. The shared crises and aftermath created salient memories for everyone involved. Death was the bright red thread that wove itself through the social fabric of EverQuest.
Saying you will help someone and actually doing it are two different things. EverQuest allowed players to prove themselves trustworthy through their actions. The willingness to spend an hour to help a friend to retrieve a corpse isn’t something that can be faked.
The next section discusses how games have changed, and I can’t help think this is again games mimicking life, getting enshittified in late capitalism.
page 197: Weaving the Social Fabric:
In older online games like EverQuest, combat occurred at a glacial pace; monsters took minutes to kill and players had time to chat during combat. Contemporary online game designers have streamlined pacing to minimize any downtime. The action is brisk and constant. But downtime performed a valuable social function in the older games. It gave players a chance to talk to each other. In streamlined games, chatting is instead viewed as slowing down the combat (and thus experience gain).
page 198: Another game mechanism that has changed a great deal over time is character independence. – the ability to solo the whole game.
page 199: the more people you have the opportunity to interact with, the more likely your social network will grow. You can’t make friends if you never talk to anyone.
In the old days of EverQuest, people helped people because they had no other way to get help. This created a cultural norm of asking for and providing help to strangers.
The opposite is true in most contemporary online games. The shift to high levels of character independence—to attract and retain more casual players—means that it is possible to solo the game to the maximum level.
p200: In a world where you never have to ask other players for help and can do everything alone, the social fabric suffers. Asking for help becomes a sign of weakness and incompetence. Personal reputations no longer matter. I wonder though, this can’t be the only factor. What’s the other side of the coin? It’s not really that I hate people and so prefer not to interact with them. Sure, one thing is I am a people pleaser who’s terrible at boundaries, but it’s also about feeling vulnerable to harassment, or actual harm. What am I afraid of in this context? I think it’s about consequences. The game, like the Tokyo lost wallet experiment that showed their two carrots one stick approach, has to enforce something. Have consequences for bad behaviour.
Nick Yee then says exactly this:
page 202: We’re used to thinking of altruism as a personality trait, but altruism can also be a system trait. A community can be designed with rules and mechanisms that engineer altruistic behavior,
page 202: The rules in a virtual world create an invisible scaffold that favors the creation of certain social norms, tacitly dictating how and when players interact. These invisible scaffolds are the social architectures of virtual worlds; they are the ground rules that govern the DNA of the community that emerges.
A section on information access and how it helps and hinders gameplay discusses Thottbot (now merged with WoWhead) and Cosmos.
page 203: There were two parts to Thottbot. The first was a minimalist website where players could go to search for World of Warcraft information. The second was an add-on called Cosmos that came with several useful in-game features. But along with Cosmos was a background data logger. Any monster you killed, any item you found, and any quest you were working on were meticulously tracked by the add-on. Players who had installed Cosmos could then periodically upload their data logs to Thottbot.
page 203: The things that Cosmos tracked may not seem particularly useful at first glance, but the accumulated data contained a kind of crowd-sourced wisdom. On the Thottbot website, players could type in the name of a quest and see a map showing where the requisite items were located. If the quest involved killing a monster, a map showed the wandering range of the monster and the percentage likelihood that the monster would drop the needed item. Alternatively, players could search for an item and view a sorted list of all the monsters that dropped it or the quests that provided the item as a reward. And each item, quest, and monster had a comments page, allowing players to discuss tricky strategies or confusing parts of a quest. Players have aggregated information on almost every in-game aspect of World of Warcraft that they can search and sort in a unified and easy-to-use website. Why do we not have this for the physical world? What would this look like? How does OpenStreetMap compare? What are our “quests”?
The flipside of this is, of course: page 204: Personally I think the older games did a better job of forming communities. There wasn’t places on line you could go to get all the answers, you had to ask other players. There was a lot more give and take.
page 206: information sources also gradually removed the sense of adventure in more recent online games. … Adventuring, finding things out for yourself, discovering things, etc. is a huge part of what makes games fun and interesting.
This is the enshittification: page 207: Instead of a fantasy world where players experience adventures, the game becomes a task list—a graphical, action-packed task list, but one requiring fewer problem-solving skills and less creativity. The game is no longer about unraveling mysteries, exploring, or meeting fellow adventurers but about completing assignments efficiently. As described in chapter 4, the game becomes a work platform. And in this quest to complete tasks as efficiently as possible, other people become irrelevant distractions.
MIT’s Sherry Turkle has seen this same pattern play out in our fast-paced, gadget-embracing lives. In her book Alone Together, she writes, “We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone; in intimacy, new solitudes.” The machines and systems that offer to help us often take something away when we’re not looking.
page 209: The mechanisms that make the game easier to get into probably also make the game easier to leave. Independence cuts both ways.
page 210: … as fond as my memories are of the dangerous worlds of earlier online games, I doubt I would be able to stomach them now; the accepted tedium of the past would feel like torture after the casual independence of more recent online games. And I think that once gamers become habituated to the rubber-padding, it becomes difficult to wean them off of it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. In this sense, the games we have played limit the games that can be made. But this race to casualness has resulted in online games sharing a certain amount of interchangeable blandness. In online games, when death is meaningless, so too is life. I’m not suggesting that we want virtual worlds to be filled with harsh tedium, but I’m not sure lonely antagonism is where we want to be either. The question is whether gamers are too habituated to casual online games for us to reach a middle ground.
I think we can. I think the physical world has so much richness that we can have it all. We can have causal exploration, casual task based levelling up, and there is so much data that it’s OK, probably necessary to have the Thottbot equivalent and even AI companions to help. Then there is also so much local dependence, that you would need real people for that too.
Chapter 11 looks at avatars and again puts into words the frustration I have with avatars. Man I love this guy.
page 212: To Barlow, what was unique and revelatory about cyberspace was that you didn’t need to have a body. Neither virtual worlds nor virtual reality has taken this path. (the first damn thing you do is make a damn avatar)
page 214: Once you have bodies, social norms from the physical world come into play.
page 215: in a world where people can become and create anything they want, the overwhelming desire is to create a virtual Malibu on steroids. And this obsession with material decadence in a virtual world is probably the farthest you can be from Barlow’s “being in nothingness.”
extending the replicating the physical world, and talking about virtual offices with virtual chairs, page 215: This social training is what makes it psychologically awkward to have a formal meeting with everyone standing even if our virtual bodies don’t get tired. Yes, but we can then also use virtual environments to untrain ourselves or train different ideals. Which he then goes on to say. Great minds 🙂 page 218: When we insist on replicating physical bodies and furniture, are we missing out on novel forms of work, collaboration, and play?
page 216: the first fundamental truth of virtual worlds is this: boring people are still boring when they are in 3D.
page 216: Games are actually designed to be inefficient. In golf, there is a reason why you’re not allowed to pick up the ball and walk over to the hole. There would be no game of golf if rules did not explicitly constrain your ability to move the ball. Whether it’s golf, Pac-Man, or chess, the obstruction creates the game. … The inefficiency is the game. In a virtual world designed for business interactions, this is the exact opposite of what users desire. You don’t want workers to waste time walking to virtual places or putting virtual folders in virtual filing cabinets. Virtual worlds have rules that influence how we live and work in them. And when we do not explicitly question these rules, unintended consequences enslave us.
page 219: the emergence of art, literacy, and science all hinged on finding alternative modes of representation.
page 219: The virtual metaphor should change depending on the context and task.
A virtual world might also offer the possibility of serial embodiment. In this scenario, users have no default embodiment in the world but are free to take over or essentially possess other objects in the world, which grant them unique abilities. A person who likes to people-watch may possess a tree, blending into the environment but gaining heightened vision and hearing distances. Between embodiments, the user would be in ghost form. There is also no reason why we have to maintain a one-to-one relationship when it comes to virtual embodiment. Two or more users could possess the same object at the same time, with additional mechanics coming into play depending on whether they are able to collaborate with each other. – this can also work for scenario planning, especially considering other-than-human perspectives. From a goodreads comment, this two or more objects collaborating, there was a game doing this, something something Bands of Brothers.
page 221: I can imagine a virtual world in which players are different kinds of cells in a human body—the monsters are invading bacteria or viruses. Perhaps the virtual world is a rainforest ecosystem and players take on the role of different flora and fauna, trying to keep everything in balance. Or imagine a Benjamin Button world in which users start off in old avatars and get younger over time. What would it mean to raise a family and keep society running in such a world? I feel that virtual worlds offer us a chance to imagine the impossible, and we’re all just a little too comfortable being in human bodies. This would be cool but we should also be able to be the monsters, or kill the ecosystem. Cater to all the player types….
page 222: when we’re given the chance to do and become anything we want, I feel we owe it to ourselves to try.
page 224: There are three mutually nonexclusive trajectories that virtual worlds can take: they can replicate reality, influence reality, or reimagine reality.
Replicating reality: . Virtual worlds create an appealing but illusory utopia, fooling us into thinking that ethnicity and global inequities no longer matter. They promise to transform us while preserving the status quo. Oddly, the preservation of social norms has a silver lining. Social norms allow virtual worlds to be used to simulate and understand human behavior.
Influencing reality: page 225: Whether it’s the avatar you’re given, a doppelgänger of you, or the rules of the game, virtual worlds give us unparalleled tools for changing how we think and behave. Instead of providing an escape, virtual worlds can be used to influence how people behave offline. In this ironic trajectory, virtual worlds come to control reality. How we are influenced depends on the intentions of the manipulators. WE can also be the manipulators.
Reimagining reality: page 227: Instead of replicating reality, virtual worlds could allow us to imagine new ones. Would leaving our bodies behind or creating novel forms of embodiment allow us to imagine new forms of work, play, and interaction?
And, yes, we need to keep in mind: page 227: Sadly, it’s not clear that we would embrace this freedom even if it were handed to us. We gravitate toward the familiar; bodies in virtual worlds may function as McDonald’s does when we’re looking for food in foreign countries. They are a necessary psychological anchor in a sea of uncertainty. And perhaps we replicate the darker parts of our offline lives in virtual worlds—work, stereotypes, and conflict—because they are nevertheless comforting and help moor us to the only reality we know. But perhaps seeing this as the start of the journey and not the whole one, is less depressing. First meal McD’s, then start experimenting. Meet people where they are and then be curious, play. Don’t just bash McDs, that isn’t going to move the needle on anything.
Then there’s the issue of funding. page 228: World of Warcraft took over $60 million to create, and that doesn’t take into account the continuous operating costs. Yes, there are financial needs, but also, compare Linux to Windows. We can do this in different ways. Realistically I don’t think completely free, but we can hack it.
fun find Institute of Creative Technologies. https://ict.usc.edu/
page 228: Replicating reality is a key goal of the military’s interest in virtual worlds because the training context needs to match the actual context, and this has a trickle-down effect in terms of the technologies and graphical assets that are then available for commercial use.
page 229: It’s difficult for gamers or even techsavvy folks to put together a prototype. But we have seen the democratization of technology occur in other areas. Blogging software gave everyone the ability to create their own website without needing to learn a single HTML tag. (and, Linux, OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia)…. Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, began development of a software platform called Metaplace … we need something like Metaplace to move us along our experimentation with virtual worlds. – is Hubs that? page 229: it is only by lowering the entry cost of virtual world creation that we can understand the full potential of virtual worlds. .. we need to ask ourselves what new worlds we would create if we had the chance.
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