The Proteus Paradox (7 page)

In addition to the belief that certain people are lucky, there are pervasive superstitions around items that confer luck. The specific items differ from game to game, but these superstitions take the same general form.

In World of Warcraft there are 2 items that are said to bring luck to the owner. These are the “Rabbit's foot” and the “Lucky charm.” These items drop off common mobs around the world. There is a group of players that strongly believes that carrying around one or more of these items increases your luck in loot drops. People often use specific events
and strokes of luck to prove that they “work.” I myself don't believe it has any effect at all but still have a “Rabbit's foot” in my inventory because you never know. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 41]

[Some believe] that carrying or owning items whose names implied good luck (Fortune Egg, Millionaire's desk, 4 Leaf Mandragora Bud) would increase drop rates despite no evidence to prove this. I'll admit to doing it myself! [
Final Fantasy XI,
female, 25]

In Anarchy Online, some people believed that wearing certain gear was the way to gain certain drops and would spend hours farming gear so that they could farm other gear. [
Anarchy Online,
male, 33]

What's particularly intriguing in this set of narratives is that some players explicitly state that they do not believe in the superstition but follow it anyway.

Another type of high-risk action occurs in games in which players are allowed to
over-enchant
equipment. In many games, players can enchant an item to give it a bonus, whether to combat skills or the character's traits. In some of these games, the player can enchant the same item multiple times. Once the player has reached a certain threshold, there is a chance that the item may be destroyed in the process. Over-enchanting refers to the process of enchanting an item beyond its safety threshold. The risk of item destruction is proportionate to the number of existing enchantments over the threshold. Given the daunting risk of destroying a valuable piece of equipment, over-enchanting is a high-risk gamble ripe for superstitions.

In Lineage II . . . enchanting to +3 is risk-free. However, at +4 and above the item has a chance of breaking, causing you to lose a lot of
money. Many people have gone so far as to quit the game or reroll after blowing up their ultra-expensive gear. A very prevalent superstition is for people to take the item into a church when attempting to overenchant it. Many people, if they were successful over-enchanting an item at a certain spot, will return to that spot every time they need to over-enchant. [
Lineage 2,
female, 24]

In addition to location-based superstitions, ritual behaviors conducted before over-enchanting have also developed in other games.

In Ultima Online it has been stated many times by the Dev[eloper]s that “eating” does nothing to enhance the characters' abilities. Many players still choose to eat before they try to do some specific crafting where the risk of destroying an item for example is high. [
Ultima Online,
female, 45]

Some go to only a particular NPC—some will not only upgrade at only a certain NPC, but also upgrade
ONLY
within a certain time period—some do it
ONLY
while standing on a “lucky” spot, yet others believe that the secret is to wait there patiently till someone comes in . . . then wait for him to fail . . . they believe that their attempt will be 100 percent successful if it follows on the heels of someone succeeding. I personally am guilty of a fairly weird ritual myself—I tend to strip off all equipment I am carrying and log off in between
EVERY
attempt to refine my gear.:) [
Ragnarok Online,
male, 29]

Here's a final example of a crafting superstition from
Final Fantasy XI
that also hints at why it is so difficult for superstitions to go away once they begin.

One of the most persistent superstitions (and for all I know, it might be true) was that facing in certain cardinal directions would affect how your crafting came out. It was the perfect superstition, because it took so little effort to follow that even if it wasn't true, you didn't lose anything by acting as if it was true. [
Final Fantasy XI,
female, 23]

Superstitions, pervasive across online games, develop wherever a high-risk or low-probability event leads to a highly desirable outcome. This scenario is common in online games, whether it is valuable loot from a boss, over-enchanting a weapon, or having a rare monster spawn. Many of these superstitions persist despite limited or anecdotal evidence or even direct refutation by game designers.

In
Dungeons and Dragons Online,
diplomacy is one of many skills that a character can learn. Game designers intended for players to use the skill on computer-controlled characters, allowing for alternative conversation paths as well as the distraction of enemies during combat. A programming error made it possible for players to use the diplomacy skill on treasure chests, although doing so had no impact on the game. Heather Sinclair, a member of the development team, has publicly discussed the aftermath of this programming error.

From beta all the way through months into launch players were
CONVINCED
that if you used the diplomacy skill on a chest it would improve the loot you got. . . . This was
SO
widespread that you literally could not get in a pickup group without them querying about the diplomacy skills of the party and someone forcing everyone to wait while the highest diplomacy skill player cringed before the chest sufficiently.

This superstition became so pervasive that the game developers decided to debunk it publicly. The public statements, however, had the opposite effect:

No matter how many times we posted on the forums that this was a myth and it doesn't do anything, they kept doing it. It got so bad our community relations manager even put it in his [forum signature]. Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then
players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we “nerfed” the skill!

Not only are superstitions prevalent in online games, but some are also incredibly resilient to debunking.
⁴

In several of the player narratives, people who claim they don't believe in the superstition nevertheless carry out the superstitious behavior, just in case. Social factors also help sustain these superstitions. The most significant is the relative low cost of the ritual compared to the relative high value of the potential reward, especially in situations in which the team members have nothing else to do to fill the time. After all, if you get to run a difficult dungeon only once a week, what's the harm in trying something that takes just thirty seconds?

Generally the experimentation is harmless enough that it is at least permitted by skeptics of the theory. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 24]

There is also the relative cost of trying to debunk a superstition. In a typed chat setting, it takes much more time and effort to argue and attempt to debunk a superstition than to simply follow along, even if you don't believe in the behavior.

If the potential outcome is negative rather than positive, risk aversion comes into play. For example, there are superstitions that make a boss easier to kill and thus decrease the odds of a
raid wipe
—the obliteration of the entire team by a tough encounter.

“Hey kids, don't use curse of weakness on Gandling, because he starts teleporting people a ton faster . . . .” But nobody wanted to try it out; I remember actually offering to pay people a gold each to let me try . . . and they refused; . . . people are very pious when it comes to respecting these technological taboos. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 23]

In Skinner's pigeon study, superstitious behaviors persisted even though they did not produce food 80 percent of the time. Even a low contingency rate was sufficient to sustain a superstition. The same is true in online games. After all, a ritual that produces highly beneficial outcomes 20 percent of the time is still worth performing. Indeed, probabilistic superstitions are hard to debunk without a large experimental data set, which few players would have the time or tenacity to collect.

If it worked some of the time, it was enough for the group in question to continue to think that the process they were following was crucial to the success of whatever it was they were doing. [
EverQuest II,
male, 36]

With a group of five people, the likelihood that the superstition has recently been true (that is, reinforced) for any one team member is very high. This secondhand reinforcement also creates the illusion of a much higher success rate.

Superstition in online games reveals something very important and fundamental about how people interact with new technology. To help us unravel this, let me describe a study that changed how we think about human-computer interaction.

Are people polite to computers? Given that computers are inanimate objects without feelings, this question may seem ridiculous. But a study conducted at Stanford University in 1996 showed that people interact with computers as if they had feelings. Communication scholars Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves had college students take a tutoring session from a standard desktop computer. The session was about different facts of American culture, such as the
percentage of American teenagers who kiss on the first date, and included a quiz on a set of questions the computer had not tutored students on, followed by a scoring session in which the computer went through the students' responses and let them know how they performed. The students were then asked to complete an evaluation of the tutoring session either on the same computer or on a different computer.

When a family member asks you what you think of his or her cooking at a family gathering, you tend to be polite and avoid offending that person. If someone else pulled you aside and asked you the same question, you'd probably be more honest. It turns out that people obey this politeness rule even when interacting with computers. The researchers found that students gave more favorable evaluations if they filled the form out on the same computer that tutored them. Students who filled out evaluations on a different computer gave less positive responses. Given that these college students were all familiar with computers, they did not consciously believe that computers had feelings. Instead, as Reeves and Nass argue, users rely on existing social norms when interacting with new technology. And we do this because our brains lack the cognitive resources to create and follow entirely new social protocols for every novel class of technology we encounter. When a computer asks us to evaluate its cooking (so to speak), we subconsciously treat it as if it were a person asking us, and the politeness rule is triggered. Without even being aware of it, we treat computers as if they had feelings and could be hurt emotionally by our remarks.
⁵

As another example of how we fall back on existing social norms even in new technological spaces, consider the notion of personal space in virtual worlds. In the physical world, the amount of personal
space we give another person depends a lot on whom we're talking to and what we're talking about. Intimacy, for example, can be expressed either with eye contact or by moving closer to another person. When one of these cues is accidentally triggered, such as when we are crammed next to strangers in an elevator, we modulate the other cue to maintain the appropriate level of intimacy. Thus, in an elevator, we turn away from and avoid eye contact with the people next to us to defuse the cues of uncomfortable intimacy. In a study my colleagues and I conducted in
Second Life,
a virtual world in which users can create their own content, we wondered whether people moving around with the mouse and keyboard in digital avatars would nevertheless conform to these physical norms. And it turned out that this modulation of eye contact and personal space indeed occurs in
Second Life;
people standing close to each other in
Second Life
are less likely to be looking directly at the other person. Instead of developing new social norms, we fall back on the ones we've learned from the physical world.
⁶

The same is true for superstitions. False contingencies trigger superstitious behaviors around highly desirable rewards, whether we're talking about pigeons in Skinner boxes or people in online games. For pigeons, this is food pellets. For online gamers, the rewards are magical items, rare monster spawns, or over-enchanting equipment. When a superstitious idea emerges, it can be inadvertently reinforced, and then social dynamics such as low relative cost help it spread across a community. And once a superstitious ritual spreads, it takes on a life of its own, and not even the direct refutation by game developers can quash the superstition.

Our digital bodies are fluid, mutable with the click of the mouse. Our fantasy worlds, with their elven druids and galactic starships,
seem far removed from the physical world and infinitely malleable. But the reality is quite strange and sobering. Even if virtual worlds were tabula rasa, we are encumbered with a great deal of cognitive baggage. Our brains are hardwired with many mental shortcuts to help us make sense of the world. We simply do not have the time to carefully process every piece of information that comes our way. To cope with this inundation of information, our brains have developed automated heuristics that filter and preprocess this information for us. Thus, when we encounter new media and technological devices, we fall back on the existing rules and norms we know. We react to computers as if they were human and had feelings. And when we enter virtual worlds, this mental baggage hitches a ride with us. We react to digital bodies the way we react to physical bodies. And the same psychological triggers that lead to superstitions in Skinner's pigeons lead us to develop superstitions in online games. This is an example of the Proteus Paradox: how our brains work doesn't change when we slip into a digital body. In a fully digital technological construct meticulously built from rational, precise program code, the irony is that superstitions persist and flourish.
⁷