The Proteus Paradox (23 page)

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

If you were to lose your wallet in New York City, what's the chance that someone would return it with the cash intact? As a social experiment, Mark West, a law professor at the University of Michigan, dropped twenty wallets, each containing $20 and an identification card that listed a telephone number, in Midtown Manhattan. Of these twenty dropped wallets, six were returned with cash intact and another two without the cash. West conducted the same experiment in Shinjuku, a business and shopping district in Tokyo. Of the twenty dropped wallets, seventeen were returned, all with cash intact. West also dropped hundreds of cell phones in similar experiments, with comparable differences between the United States and Japan. After the devastating tsunami in 2011, Japanese citizens turned over a stunning $48 million in loose cash—found in purses or paper envelopes among the debris—to local authorities. Authorities also collected an additional $30 million from recovered safes.
¹

Without knowing anything else about Japan, it might be easy to assume that collectivist Asian cultures instill a greater sense of honesty and altruism in their citizens, whereas individualist cultures like the United States encourage a finders-keepers mentality. But when
West interviewed the participants in his experiment, he found the opposite. Of the New Yorkers who returned wallets and cell phones, 91 percent explained their actions by invoking altruism or honesty. One interviewee stressed that “I'm an honest person”; another said, “I couldn't live with myself if I kept your money.” In contrast, only 18 percent of the people in Japan who returned the wallets invoked altruism or honesty. Instead, 84 percent invoked the finders-keepers mentality, providing such answers as, “If the owner doesn't claim it, I have a right to it,” and “I want the reward money.”

Japan has a very effective and widely understood legal framework around returning lost objects. Any found object can be turned in at
kôban
s—small neighborhood police stations that are ubiquitous throughout Japan. Two carrots and one stick incentivize this behavior. The first carrot is that owners have to pay the finder a percentage of the object's value if they claim the object; this percentage ranges between 5 and 25 percent depending on the type of property and the circumstances. The second carrot is that if no one claims the object after six months, the finder gets to keep the object. There is also one stick; a finder who misappropriates the object has committed embezzlement and is subject to a $1,200 fine and imprisonment of up to one year.

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.

In the physical world, there are a large number of immutable laws of nature—gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism—that we have no control over. These natural laws touch every aspect of our daily lives: under what lighting conditions our eyes can see, how far our
voices travel when we whisper or shout, how many people can fit in a room, and what happens when we die.

In virtual worlds, a programmer has to define every law of nature. In the original
Dark Age of Camelot,
you could shout a message only when you were inside a city zone. In the original
EverQuest,
you couldn't walk through another player's avatar, but you can do so in
World of Warcraft.
In
Star Wars Galaxies,
you couldn't teleport yourself from one location to another—you had to always manually navigate there yourself, but teleportation is available via skills and magical objects in
World of Warcraft
. And these rules change how people interact with each other, often in unintended ways. In the original
EverQuest,
in which you couldn't walk through another avatar, pairs or groups of players could block the zone entrance and watch as a train of monsters massacred bystanders desperately trying to exit the zone. In
Star Wars Galaxies,
malicious shopkeepers could entrap unwary customers by placing a piece of furniture in front of the door.

Programmers design many of these game mechanics for the functional aspects of gameplay, but game mechanics are also rules that can unintentionally change how we relate and interact with each other. In this sense, virtual worlds are the grandest social experiments that have ever existed. Any variable in the world, in the rules, in the way players interact with each other, can be infinitely tweaked. For example, how might society organize differently if people always came back to life when they died?

In online games, your character dies when its health drops to zero as a result of such things as combat damage, slow-acting poisons, or
falling from great heights. The consequences of dying then depend on which game you are playing. In many games, the character's body (that is, the corpse) remains at the location of death and the player (in spirit form) has to travel back to the corpse to resurrect the character. In some games, like
World of Warcraft,
your weapons and armor are slightly damaged when you die and you need to spend game currency to repair that damage. Other games apply an experience penalty after each death. For example, in
EverQuest II
and
City of Heroes,
you accrue a percentage penalty to experience earned—for example, you earn only half the normal experience for the next one thousand experience points. In the original
EverQuest,
characters lost accrued experience when they died, and a character could even lose his or her level by dying. In the most extreme cases, death actually means death, and the game erases the character. This mechanic was present in very specific scenarios in
Star Wars Galaxies
and
EverQuest
.

On an abstract level, death penalties are all variants of time penalties (with the exception of the case of complete erasure, or
perma-death
); dying means spending extra time to catch up to where you were, but nothing is lost permanently. Of course, losing accrued experience is subjectively more painful than a temporarily slower experience gain. One of the most striking trends in online games over the past decade is the softening of the death penalty. For example, in early
EverQuest,
you had to run back to your corpse naked. All your equipment stayed with your corpse. And there was a corpse timer. If you couldn't retrieve your corpse in time, your equipment decayed and disappeared. Because players are more likely to die in dangerous places, retrieving a corpse while naked is doubly dangerous and can result in dying again. Death in the early online games was a costly mishap.

You could play for six hours and lose all the progress by dying twice. You could log in and log off with less than you came on with. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 25, describing experience in
EverQuest
]

In contrast, dying in most contemporary online games is almost a lighthearted affair.

I have spent significant time in Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest II, and Lord of The Rings Online since playing EverQuest classic. . . . In subsequent games, I have found it absolutely does not matter if I die. Really, who cares about some repair bills and some dread, or decreased experience gain for a short time? Running naked after your corpse in a dungeon? Potentially losing all your equipment if your corpse decayed or losing a level? That was a penalty. [
Lord of the Rings Online,
male, 31]

The severe death penalties in earlier online games created a pervasive sense of risk and danger in the world. The
EverQuest
world of Norrath was simply not a safe place to be running around in. Staying alive was a constant concern. In comparison, the contemporary
World of Warcraft
world of Azeroth is like a rubber-padded playground.

I remember working for two weeks in the original EverQuest to get to level 5. I finally got brave and wandered a few hundred yards away from the guards in Kelethin and promptly got lost in the fog. I was soon attacked by several level 8 mobs and died. I've never experienced that level of fear and concern as I searched frantically for my corpse. I currently play World of Warcraft and enjoy it for the most part. However, there is no need to ask for help as the game does 90% of the work for you. In some ways I like that, but at times I really wish someone could come up with a way to recapture the original spark that kept me playing EverQuest for close to five years. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 39, describing earlier experience in
EverQuest
]

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.

It was definitely more important to work together when there were death penalties. Finding someone who could rez [resurrect] or summon your corpse, or someone to help you retrieve it was key. People helped others because they knew they themselves would probably need similar help later. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 21, describing experience in
EverQuest
]

Guilds, even enemy guilds, would help each other recover from bad wipes because they knew that there were occasions when they would need help. This helped to mitigate annoying behavior since you knew you may need to work together at times. [
Vanguard,
male, 42, describing experience in
EverQuest
]

In an earlier survey of
EverQuest
players I ran in 2000, I asked players to describe their most memorable experience from the game. Many players' stories revolved around altruism. The following player narrative exemplifies these stories.

My primary character is a Cleric, so on one occasion my guild was on a raid in a dungeon area and I came across one player's corpse. This was unusual because of where we were and how deep we were in the dungeon. I sent this person a “tell” to see if she needed a res. She replied and was very excited that I was there to res her. After she gathered her equipment she tried to give me some Platinum pieces, which I refused since I didn't go out of my way to help her . . . I was just there. A month later, my guild was performing another raid and we were wiped out by some unexpected baddies. . . . The person I resurrected happened to be in a group near the beginning of the dungeon where we were wiped out, and before I knew it, most of her guild was there to help clear the dungeon and get our corpses back. I mean about 30
other players went out of their way to come and help my friends out just because I helped one of their friends a month before. I don't know many people who would do that in real life. . . . All I can say is . . . Thank you Ostara. [
EverQuest,
male, 32]

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.

As much as I hated corpse runs back in old EQ, having to run naked from Fironia Vie to Chardok with a coffin to have my corpse summoned after a raid wipe with my guild was a bonding experience. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 20, describing experience in
EverQuest
]

While I'm glad the severe death penalty has been removed from Ever-Quest, I think it helped my character bond with her friends. I'm still playing with the same folks I met 8 years ago, and we often talk about the dreaded CRs (corpse retrievals) we went through, especially one in Chardok that lasted hours. [
EverQuest,
female, 61]

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.

To succeed in EverQuest you need to form relationships with people you can trust. The game does a wonderful job of forcing people in this situation. RL [real life] rarely offers this opportunity as technological advances mean we have little reliance on others. [
EverQuest,
male, 29]

In these early online games, as much as everyone was trying to avoid dying, death was actually a bonding experience. Death created debts and then allowed those debts to be repaid over time. Death created deep bonds based on mutual trust.

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). In
EverQuest,
if you didn't chat during the downtime, there was nothing else to do.

Relationships always seemed more based on the speed of the game and the speed of progress than anything else—EverQuest was so slow and had so much downtime that you had plenty of time to chat, help people in fights, buff passersby and answer questions. In World of Warcraft no one stops to look [because] by the time they have stopped to see if someone needs helps it's probably too late. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 38]