The Proteus Paradox (27 page)

There is of course a middle ground. We could keep human bodies in virtual worlds of houses and furniture but tweak the rules of reality. Imagine a brainstorming room that facilitated turn-taking between participants. Perhaps the people who talk too much have progressively darker shadows, or they grow bigger and start to dwarf the others, or the people who are quiet start to fade away. To avoid agreement bias based on authority or gender, we might randomize the appearance of the other avatars for each participant. If we're stuck in virtual meeting rooms, we should at least take advantage of tools that would mitigate the inherent biases in group-based decision-making. I'm not suggesting that all these possibilities will be fruitful. But when we're given the chance to do and become anything we want, I feel we owe it to ourselves to try.

In this book, I've focused on how online games often subvert the promises of freedom and escape. This is not to say that players never achieve transformative experiences. From the Daedalus Project surveys, two categories of players discuss finding escape and freedom in positive ways. The first group consists of those with physical disabilities.

Several years ago, I was working as a nurse on the graveyard shift at a local hospital. While repositioning a patient, I seriously injured my back (L4–5 disk). I've been disabled and unable to work since then. MMORPGs have allowed me to interact with people and feel more whole/able. . . . With online gaming I can meet people and have something of a social life even while isolated and pretty debilitated in “real life.” [
Star Wars Galaxies,
female, 46]

The second group comprises those who are struggling with issues of sexuality. Given the fear and uncertainty of coming out to friends and family, some players find a safe environment to explore and discuss their sexuality online.

In my family guild there was a female character who was quite flirtatious, mostly with the guys but every once in a while with the
girls. . . . One day, after I mentioned having real-life ties to the gay community, this player confided in me that not only were they really male, but that they were a youngish gay male. He played a female to be able to flirt with the gender he preferred to flirt with. But, knowing the usual homophobia, he was careful to keep all relationships strictly online and banter. . . . I mentioned the GBLT guild on the other server to him and he cautiously made a female player there. Once he had a feel for the supportiveness of the GBLT guild, he promptly deleted the female character and played an openly gay male character on that server in the GBLT guild. I think he said it was the first time he had played a male character without being in fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. [
City of Heroes,
female, 40]

Responses like these, however, are uncommon in the Daedalus Project surveys as a whole. We have seen the social and psychological phenomena that have broad impact on virtual communities: how the operant conditioning that leads to superstitious behavior is something we're all psychologically wired for, the way gold farming in online games has had a significant impact on the gaming landscape, and so forth. No doubt some players have found beneficial and transformative freedoms in online games, but I would argue that they are the exception.

There are three mutually nonexclusive trajectories that virtual worlds can take: they can replicate reality, influence reality, or reimagine reality. Let me describe the possibilities of these different trajectories.

For all their dragons and magic, fantasy worlds actually aren't all that different from reality. One trajectory for virtual worlds is that they continue to perpetuate, reinforce, and produce social norms. Along
with TV shows, movies, and magazines, virtual worlds become just another place where boys and girls learn what men and women are supposed to be. 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. The unintentional spread of a virulent in-game plague in
World of Warcraft
has prompted medical researchers to wonder if virtual worlds can be used to model and study epidemics. And Edward Castronova has argued that virtual worlds are “the modern equivalent to supercolliders for social scientists. . . . Virtual worlds allow for societal level research with no harm to humans, large numbers of experiments and participants, and make long term and panel studies possible.” Indeed, the ability to collect longitudinal and detailed behavioral data from millions of people around the world has significant scientific potentials.
¹

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. Virtual worlds may become a great way for retailers to make money from us. Our behavioral profiles in consuming entertainment reveal our material desires, allowing advertisers to target us more precisely. And
for those who do not initially have such material desires, a doppelgänger might convince them that they need to buy something after all.

It is easy to underestimate the power of subtle manipulations because they are both so pervasive and so difficult to detect. But consider that the simple ordering of names on a presidential election ballot changes the vote outcome. In California's eighty assembly districts, the order of candidates on a ballot is randomly assigned. In 1994, Bill Clinton received 4 percent more votes in the districts in which he was listed first. In 2000, George W. Bush received 9 percent more votes when he was listed first. Even in high-profile elections in which voters presumably have thought about their preferences before arriving at the voting booth, the simple ordering of candidate names matters.
²

This influence can be wielded for both good and bad. As we've seen, avatars can help people plan for their retirement. Ian Bogost, a game designer and media philosopher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has used video games explicitly as social commentary. In one game that satirizes airport security procedures, players must quickly react to the capricious nature of the rules at the screening checkpoints. And game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal has created games that help people engage with pressing global issues, such as the reliance on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the reality of our time is that major content creators need to care more about attracting large audiences than about generating highbrow social commentary. The programming shift on the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and the Discovery Channel—including attempts to gain broader market share via sensationalist coverage of aliens, a family with nineteen kids, and child pageants—stems from this market dynamic. And
I have a hard time believing that advertisers will care more about social well-being than their bottom line.

Virtual worlds hold infinite possibilities, but so far we've explored only a sliver of those potentials. Yet we've seen that sliver replicated and superficially modified so often that it's easy to convince ourselves that we've covered a great deal of ground. Instead of replicating reality, virtual worlds could allow us to imagine new ones. Early textual virtual worlds allowed users to invent their own gender, but contemporary virtual worlds often provide just two options. Would leaving our bodies behind or creating novel forms of embodiment allow us to imagine new forms of work, play, and interaction? This issue is particularly relevant for business applications. Avatars don't inherently make work more efficient or more fun, but they certainly make people more distracted by their virtual hair and clothes. Certainly, some of the alternatives I've mentioned in the previous chapter may seem impractical, but I didn't think that the goal of virtual worlds was to be practical.

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. Research in early textual virtual worlds highlights this resistance to change. In these worlds, users were not constrained
by graphical representations; avatars were created via textual descriptions alone. And yet, users often created avatars that leveraged racial tropes and stereotypes. As digital media researcher Lisa Nakamura has documented, many Asian-appearing avatars in Lambda-MOO borrowed heavily from martial arts or samurai movies. Perhaps the hypermaterialism of
Second Life
isn't caused by the presence of avatars. Perhaps it's just human nature.
³

These three trajectories are all somewhat double-edged, but even if it were clear that we need to try harder to use virtual worlds to re-imagine reality, I'm not sure gamers or laypeople could do much to influence the shift. This is primarily due to the significant costs in creating and maintaining virtual worlds.
World of War
craft took over $60 million to create, and that doesn't take into account the continuous operating costs. Only large corporations and game developers have the capital to create virtual worlds. Not only does this limit the ability of laypeople and even academic researchers to create their own virtual worlds, but it restricts the kinds of online games created due to risk adversity (and understandably so, given the entry fee).

Of course, there is also funding for virtual worlds from federal agencies, but here, too, the tendency is to create virtual worlds that replicate reality with ever higher fidelity. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the cross-cultural military training simulation developed by the Institute of Creative Technologies. That effort was made possible by a $45 million grant from the US Army. The institute collaborates with film studios and video game designers with the understanding that any new techniques developed are free to be used in
video games and movies. There are also similar virtual simulations for training in other areas and to help soldiers overcome posttraumatic stress disorder. 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.
⁴

And there's the rub. Experimentation in virtual worlds is expensive and resource-intensive, requiring very specialized skills in 3D graphics, server optimization, game design, storytelling, community management, and so forth. 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 Picasa allowed everyone to manage, edit, and share their digital photos without needing to learn a complex photo-editing package or understand photography concepts such as white balance. Raph Koster, lead designer of
Ultima Online
and
Star Wars Galaxies,
began development of a software platform called Metaplace that would have allowed anyone to create his or her own virtual world with a low barrier of entry. If you wanted a kingdom of fluffy cloud animals, you could build that. If you wanted a storytelling game set at Downton Abbey, you could build that, too. Unfortunately, the Metaplace platform closed in 2010, but I strongly believe that we need something like Metaplace to move us along our experimentation with virtual worlds. Since the boom days of
World of War-craft
and
Second Life,
there has been a strange, stagnant lull in terms of virtual worlds. I think gamers and academics have kept wondering what would come next in either the online gaming or social virtual
worlds spaces, but nothing has transpired to shift the attention from these two existing worlds. Yet in the same way that blogging software has allowed everyone to become comfortable with digital publishing and sharing (which helped to pave the way for social networking sites), it is only by lowering the entry cost of virtual world creation that we can understand the full potential of virtual worlds. Instead of being content to visit virtual worlds, we need to ask ourselves what new worlds we would create if we had the chance.

1
. Homer
Odyssey
4.446–448, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 77.

2
. To avoid these unwieldy labels, I refer to games in this genre as simply “online games” in this book. “12 million” reported in Blizzard press release; see
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=2847881
. Estimates of active online gaming subscriptions and peak concurrent usage come from MMOData.net, v. 3.8, retrieved on January 10, 2012. For online games forecast in China, see John Gaudiosi, “Booming Chinese MMO Games Market Forecast to Generate $6.1 Billion in 2012,”
Forbes,
June 6, 2012. For statistics of Club Penguin, see Brooks Barnes, “Disney Acquires Web Site for Children,”
New York Times,
August 2, 2007. It is difficult to get an accurate estimate of worldwide MMO gamers because subscription numbers are often closely guarded by game companies, different metrics are used for free-to-play games than for subscription-based games, and marketing companies count different kinds of games as “online games”—for example, some reports will include nonpersistent games (such as
World of Tanks
or
League of Legends
) as an MMO. The boom of casual web and smart phone games that are played online confuses these estimates even more.