The Proteus Paradox (3 page)

Early online games required much of both developers and consumers. Good graphical capabilities were not standard on personal computers in the early 1990s, and Internet connection fees via the early service providers were pricy. On the development side, the creation of online games required teams with incredibly broad skill sets; these teams needed to pioneer methods for rendering 3D graphics, create server technology that could handle thousands of concurrent users, and figure out how to manage online communities in which players could stalk, harass, and kill each other. It was 1996 when
Meridian 59,
the first 3D massively multiplayer online game, launched. Players could now see the game world rendered in three-dimensional graphics from a first-person perspective. Instead of having to play the game through AOL or CompuServe, anyone with an Internet connection could join.
Meridian 59
also has the distinction of being the first online game to employ a monthly subscription model. The game charged players ten dollars per month, regardless of how many hours they played.
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Although many recognize
Meridian 59
as the first 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing game, this unwieldy label actually wasn't coined until a year later, in 1997, by Richard Garriott, the producer of
Ultima Online
. Before this, many gamers referred to these games as graphical MUDs. What constitutes “massively” has never been standardized: Is it the number of total active players or the highest number of concurrent players or the greatest possible number of players a server can handle? Perhaps the best way to understand
“massively” is that it differentiated the genre from other multiplayer online games available in that era. For example, multiplayer shooter games like
Quake
could handle up to sixteen concurrent players on each server. This means that there is some wiggle room as to which game can claim to be the first in the genre. After all, in 1991
NeverWinter Nights
could handle five hundred concurrent users.

Ultima Online
's highly successful launch in 1997 changed the playing field, and the game eventually peaked with roughly 250,000 active subscribers.
Ultima Online
made it clear that the industry was no longer looking at a niche gaming subgenre that catered to a handful of hardcore players.
EverQuest
's launch in 1999 was an even larger commercial success, with an eventual peak of 450,000 players. With the shift to subscription-based revenues, the number of total active players mattered more than the number of hardcore players. It also meant that a retail game continued to generate revenue month after month after its purchase. Game companies were quick to realize the significant commercial potential of this model.
Ultima Online
and
EverQuest
are often recognized as popularizing this game genre and bringing online games into the public consciousness.
⁹

The success of
Ultima Online
and
EverQuest
led to a surge of online games in the following years. Games such as
Asheron's Call
and
Dark Age of Camelot
stayed within the medieval fantasy setting. Others, such as
EVE Online
and
Star Wars Galaxies,
took the gameplay mechanisms to futuristic settings. The success of the genre among older teenagers and adults led to the development of virtual worlds for preteens in games like
Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin,
and
Toontown Online
. Despite the large number of online games launched during this time, there was a general consensus in the game industry by 2004 that the online game player base had reached a plateau; new games would simply siphon players from older games. No online game in the American or European
markets had approached the million subscriber mark, and the overall number of players did not seem to be growing. Yet that year Blizzard launched
World of Warcraft
. Within months, the game had a million players. In early 2006, when the game broke the six million subscriber mark, Blizzard announced that it had more than a million subscribers in Europe—four times higher than the previously estimated size of the entire European market for online games. As of the writing of this book in 2013, no other online game in the US or European market has come close to matching
World of Warcraft
's peak player base of twelve million paying subscribers. This is remarkable, given that it has been eight years since the game launched.
¹⁰

Even though online games can have wildly different settings—ranging from medieval fantasy to intergalactic science fiction to contemporary cityscapes—their core gameplay is remarkably similar. Contemporary online games draw heavily from the conventions of miniature wargaming and tabletop role-playing games. Players begin all online games by creating their character, a weak novice who slowly gains experience and becomes more powerful. Players can select from a range of
races
(such as Elf, Troll, or Human) and
classes
(such as Warrior, Mage, or Cleric), each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the game, players can customize the appearance of their character by selecting different hairstyles, skin tones, and clothing.

The core gameplay revolves around leveling up the character. When players kill a monster, their character gains experience and an assortment of gold coins and equipment from the slain creature; this assortment is collectively called
loot
in gamer jargon. When a character
has gained sufficient experience, that character levels up and either learns new abilities or improves its existing abilities. In broad strokes, these games are about killing monsters and selling loot to buy bigger swords to kill even bigger monsters that drop more valuable loot. In online games, players refer to monsters as
mobs,
short for “mobiles,” a term coined by Bartle in the original MUD.
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These games encourage players to cooperate in a variety of ways. Although it is often possible to fight creatures and level up alone, this generally becomes more difficult beyond the beginner areas. Also, different character classes complement one another well when taking on more challenging monsters. There is a “holy trinity” in terms of combat class synergy that is important to understand. In a group encounter with hostile monsters, heavily armored
tank
classes shield the group from enemy attacks while lightly armored
DPS
(high Damage Per Second) classes inflict large amounts of damage from a distance.
Healer
classes restore health lost during combat to prevent their team members from dying. All gameplay tactics and strategies derive from these three class archetypes. Tanks need to make sure they vigilantly taunt and distract monsters, known as maintaining
aggro
—short for aggression. DPS need to maximize damage output without drawing aggro. And healers need to selectively heal their group while preserving their
mana
—a resource used to cast spells that regenerates slowly. Typical group encounters take place in dungeons, and challenging end-game encounters with boss monsters are usually termed
raids.

Because of the number of players needed to conduct a raid (up to twenty-five players in
World of Warcraft
), players form large, persistent social groups known as
guilds.
Guild founders create a unique name for their guild (for example, The Druid Circle), take on a leadership role, and delegate officer roles as the guild grows. In these games,
players communicate via typed chat. Newer games provide voice tools that allow players to chat directly using headsets with microphones. Online games typically also provide a set of virtual “emotes” that have visual animations. For example, typing “/dance” causes your character to loop through a dance animation. And in addition to combat skills, many online games allow players to learn and level up in noncombat abilities, such as tailoring, blacksmithing, and alchemy.

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. Even on PvE servers in many games, consenting players can kill each other in certain situations. In
World of Warcraft,
for example, players can choose to enter into battlegrounds or to initiate duels.

Hindsight streamlines history, often inaccurately. Many gamers think that MUD descended directly from
Dungeons and Dragons,
but according to Bartle, the “Dungeon” in MUD “has nothing to do with the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.” As I noted earlier, it derived instead from Trubshaw's interest in the adventure game
DUNGEN
. In fact, some later MUDs tried more explicitly to replicate the game mechanisms of
Dungeons and Dragons
. For example, developers in the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen created DikuMUD in 1990 specifically to capture more of the
Dungeons and Dragons
spirit—twelve years after the creation of the original MUD. The evolution of online games didn't follow a linear genealogy so
much as it repeatedly and spontaneously coalesced in a shared cultural consciousness in which Tolkien, role-playing games, and networked computing were popular. Raph Koster, the lead designer of
Ultima Online,
has said that “MMOs were created simultaneously and independently by a dozen groups at once. The folks doing Meridian 59 did not know about the folks doing Kingdom of the Winds, and so on. Not to mention older antecedents like Habitat. MUDs, in fact, were also invented independently at least four times.” Of course, this is not to say that online games emerged the same way every time. In discussing the history of role-playing games and MUDs, Bartle has said, “Dungeons and Dragons was a seed, which, when it planted, grew in a particular way. And if it had been planted in, say, another country or at another time, it would have grown differently.” Online games may have been inevitable, but the online games available are influenced by historical factors. The large budgets needed to develop online games increase risk adversity and encourage copying the formulas of successful games, and certain archetypes become deeply entrenched within the industry. As Koster has noted, “MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added, when you look at the games in aggregate.”
¹²

Online games like
World of Warcraft
are the primary implementations of virtual worlds we have right now; there are no other three-dimensional, persistent virtual worlds that rival their use—whether in terms of active users or amount of time spent in them. Because of how similar these online games have become, we've largely stopped asking how they can be any different. On game forums, players tend to ask for improvements of existing features—larger-scale group conflicts or deeper character specialization. But online games as we know them are a very idiosyncratic implementation of virtual worlds; there is nothing preordained about this historical accident. One of
these idiosyncrasies is the focus on small group combat. It's true that the metaphor of war is pervasive across video games, but it's telling that the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game was launched in 1996, yet
SimCity,
the popular city-building game franchise, introduced large-scale multiplayer features only in 2013.
¹³

These idiosyncratic vestiges in online games affect how they influence us. The emphasis on combat in these games stems from their wargaming roots. In
chapter 4
, I describe how this ancestry comes full circle in high-level guilds that focus on raiding; many of these guilds adopt militaristic hierarchies and require strict obedience and discipline from their members. The reliance on deeply numerical gameplay also stems from wargaming conventions. Fantasy and math aren't natural bedfellows, but the complex rulesets and tables of wargaming brought this unlikely pair together. 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, leading to the emergence of superstitions. It is also this numerical system that makes it so easy to collect, quantify, and analyze data from online games—free-form storytelling would be much harder to process and analyze. In
chapter 9
, we'll see how these accessible data sets can be used to infer a player's gender or even personality. And finally, Gygax's shift to individual combat in
Chainmail
is why we play online games with an avatar. But this, too, is a historical accident. In
SimCity,
you play a disembodied mayor who controls a growing city; you never see yourself. In
chapter 11
, I describe how our reliance on avatars constrains and changes how we interact with virtual worlds. The story of how online games came to be helps us understand not only what these games are but why they influence us as they do.

When arcade games appeared in bars and nightclubs in the 1970s, gaming was largely an adult pastime. In an analysis of three decades—1970 to 2000—of news articles on video games, Dmitri Williams, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, has documented how media portrayal of gaming shifted dramatically in the 1980s. News and magazine articles began to associate gaming with male teenagers and to warn of the addictive and corrupting nature of video games: gaming was not only a gateway to deviance; gaming was deviant behavior.
¹

The reaction to gaming is not unique. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of every communication medium has caused a moral panic centered on teens—movies in the 1920s, radio in the 1930s, comic books and rock and roll in the 1940s and 1950s, and so on. Following the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's
Seduction of the Innocent
in 1954, the media widely reported his unsubstantiated claim that reading comic books turned innocent boys into delinquents and criminals. After all, alarmist headlines sell papers. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie has argued that moral panics encourage people to “turn away from the complexity
and the visible social problems of everyday life . . . or to adopt a gung-ho ‘something must be done about it' attitude.” I would add that these panics are appealing because they reduce complex social problems into a simplistic model with one marginalized culprit. It's easier to put warning labels on video games than to address all the very real social, cultural, and psychological factors that lead to gun violence.
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