The Proteus Paradox (24 page)

I think the total lack of downtime where you rest and relax together before fighting the next challenge lowers your chances of having a good interaction with people. Without those connections, those hooks most people will never ask questions about each other or make commonality discoveries. [
EverQuest,
male, 35]

As the player in the first narrative notes, the glacial pace of combat in
EverQuest
also made it more likely that a random passerby could jump in and provide assistance. In games like
World of Warcraft,
there is much less time to react, to ask for help, and to provide help.

Another game mechanism that has changed a great deal over time is character independence. In the original
EverQuest,
many crucial or useful abilities were limited to one or two character classes.
Binding
is one of these abilities. When a character dies in
EverQuest,
it is teleported
back to its bind location. To change your bind location, you must ask a magic user to cast the binding spell on you. Given the hassles of corpse runs, players would rebind themselves frequently as they adventured. Thus, nonmagic users often shouted out for binding when they reached a new zone. The same is true of other spells that dramatically increased traveling time or mana recovery—the shaman's Spirit of Wolf spell and the enchanter's Clarity spell, respectively. And only the wizard class had access to group teleportation spells. In
EverQuest,
asking other players for these spells was the only way to get many things done in a timely manner.

Compare this with more recent online games, which tend to emphasize character independence. In
World of Warcraft,
players can bind themselves to any tavern without any help. And there are flight paths and mounts that anyone can use to decrease traveling time. There are also multiple ways of teleporting group members. Dependence on other players in
EverQuest
encouraged social interaction in two important ways. It provided many opportunities for approaching and talking to someone, often a stranger. And one subtle point bears emphasizing: 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. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 32]

This created a cultural norm of asking for and providing help to strangers. For example, because Spirit of Wolf was such a valuable traveling aid, shamans were used to being asked to cast it. And enchanters were used to being asked to cast Clarity.

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. While early online games made it mandatory to group up, this mandate has shifted over time to encouragement and, recently, simply to an option. Certainly, players must form dedicated guilds to complete the high-level raids in
World of Warcraft,
but a great deal of the game content can be completed alone or with ad hoc groups.

The big solo experience that today's MMOs focus at make it easier to log in just for a little while and achieve something, but in my experience it takes away a lot of immersion and bonding to other players/guild/game. [
EverQuest II,
female, 28]

In general, I think EverQuest required more dependence and community. And heck, you
HAD
to group to get much of anything done. There was virtually no level-appropriate solo content. Now, a person can actually level all the way to max level in both EverQuest II (although it was not always true of this game) and certainly in Lord of the Rings Online without ever grouping. [
Lord of the Rings Online,
female, 44]

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.

When I started playing World of Warcraft I was amazed with the total lack of respect that people have for each other. It didn't take me long to realize because the game is easy, you don't need to respect anybody or make friends. You can solo to maximum level. You can ninja-loot epics and then just switch servers or even change your name now. In EverQuest you lived by your reputation. I remember an incident where I somehow got under somebody's skin in a group and then I couldn't get a grinding group in Dreadlands for like 3 days. [
Vanguard,
male, 25]

I keep contacts with former EverQuest companions to this day as we went through thick and thin together. In the new games, notably
World of Warcraft or EverQuest 2, you can hardly agree with people on which server we will play—because who cares; there is no need for real cooperation. [
Vanguard,
male, 39]

In Adam Guettal's musical
The Light in the Piazza,
there is a wonderful moment in the beginning of the second act when the matriarch of a lively Italian family unexpectedly breaks the fourth wall. The orchestration stops abruptly; she turns to the audience and says, “I don't speak English, but I have to tell you what's going on.”

Aiutami means “help me” in Italian
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Risk is everything
Without risk, there is no drama
Without drama,there is no “aiutami”
Without asking for help
No love! No love!

The pervasive danger in the world of
EverQuest
made asking for help a necessity. Finding players you could trust was a fundamental strategy for survival. And from these unending trials and tribulations, lasting relationships were forged.

In
chapter 9
, when I describe the historical development of the study of personality traits, I briefly mentioned that research on traits was abandoned in the 1970s and early 1980s. Psychologist Walter Mischel sparked this paradigm shift. Using published research on trait psychology, he pointed out that traits could not predict how a person would behave in a specific situation. Instead, Mischel argued, situations largely shape human behavior and the notion of static personality traits is a myth. Thus, Bob is talkative and gregarious at a party but quiet in the library. And Rachel is nervous when interviewing for a job but calm when watching TV at home. Differences among individuals are thus largely overshadowed by differences across situations.
In the decades following Mischel's critique and since trait theory has come back into fashion, researchers like Allan Buss have called for a move toward an interactionist approach—blending trait theory with understanding contextual demands—but as a field, personality psychology has tended to focus on standardizing trait measures.
²

Mischel's perspective provides a fascinating way of interpreting the social fabric of
EverQuest
. 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, as seen with the relatively larger percentage of wallet returns in Japan and with the cultural norms that emerged in
EverQuest.
In the world of
EverQuest,
altruism was something you needed to exhibit in order to survive in the game. 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.

Game developers usually design and control social architectures, but not always. This is because a great deal of the game actually exists outside the virtual world itself. The complexity of rules and abundance of information in online games mean that players frequently encounter quests, items, and game mechanics that they are unfamiliar with. Online gamers spend on average 3.5 hours each week looking for game-related information, another 3.5 hours each week reading or posting on forums. And players who belong to guilds
spend another 2.7 hours each week on their guild's website forums or managing guild-related tasks (such as scheduling). Thus, the average online gamer spends about 22 hours in the game each week and an additional 10.8 hours in the meta-game.
³

In early online games, before the days of game wikis, a great deal of forum activity was devoted to information sharing, but searching for specific information was cumbersome. Different people used different terminology and phrasings, and a player, even after finding the correct thread, would have to scan and read all the posts to find the one with the definitive answer.

Now, the data-sharing initiatives in games like
World of Warcraft
make it possible for gamers to get their hands directly on the information that matters to them. The same data sources that allowed my PARC colleagues and me to study
World of Warcraft
also allowed intrepid developers to create valuable information databases. One of the best-known examples of these efforts was the database Thottbot. 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.

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.

Game developers have also provided in-game access to information, and this has tended to increase over the years. You can ask computer-controlled guards in
World of Warcraft
cities for directions. They then provide a red marker on your map. Many games provide the player with a map of a zone automatically once they step foot in that zone. And a mini-map is always present at the top right corner of the user interface showing a top-down view of the surroundings. This is in stark contrast to earlier games such as
EverQuest,
which did not provide any maps to players.

When I was playing EverQuest years ago, there were websites with game info out there, but they were always incomplete. Unlike with World of Warcraft today, I couldn't always find out what I needed to know. . . . But now, you'd be hard-pressed to find any aspect of World of Warcraft that isn't well-documented online somewhere, complete with video footage and everything. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 33]

Making information accessible might be expected to provide benefits to a community, but by providing a unified information source, databases like Thottbot removed the primary method of gathering information before—by interacting with other human players.

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. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 29]

I much preferred the early days of MMOs when all the information you ever needed wasn't available on a website. It meant players actually worked together, spoke and chatted lots in the general channels about things directly related to the game and helped each other with quests. [
Pirates of the Burning Sea,
female, 38]

In the earlier games, asking someone for help actually benefited both players. The following player narrative is particularly insightful in articulating how the responder also gained something out of the transaction.

Players were more inclined to help each other, I think, because most of the game knowledge resided in the heads of the gamers themselves rather than being documented somewhere. So it was somewhat a source of pride to be *able* to answer someone's obscure question. It proved you were a seasoned player and made you seem like a nice guy. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 33, describing experience in
EverQuest
]

With the availability of information, the calculus of asking for help changed. There was no longer a need to ask for information, and no need to provide information. Publicly asking for help with a quest or a location became anachronistic and a mark of ignorance.

I have seen many players getting told to look up simple quest directions on thottbot.com and at the same time being insulted for being a “noob.” [
World of Warcraft,
male, 29]

Standard responses to questions in the general channels online are “look it up” or “check thottbot.” [
World of Warcraft,
male, 33]

Of course, this also changes the social fabric of the community. The fewer people you talk to and interact with, the fewer relationships
that form. It bears repeating that you can easily play
World of Warcraft
and level up to the maximum level without ever talking to anyone. Indeed, my PARC colleagues and I have found that until players reach the maximum level, they spend most of their time playing alone.
⁴