The Proteus Paradox - Reflections and the Future of Virtual Worlds

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Chapter Title: REFLECTIONS AND THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL WORLDS

Book Title: The Proteus Paradox Book Subtitle: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don't Book Author(s): NICK YEE Published by: . (2014) Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vksvj.16

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209

chapter 12 reflections and the futureof virtual worlds

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 sur-

veys, two categories of players discuss finding escape and freedom in

positive ways. The first group consists of those with physical dis-

abilities.

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 flir-

tatious, mostly with the guys but every once in a while with the



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reflections and the future of virtual worlds

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 on-

line 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 fe-

male 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 Proj-

ect 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 some-

thing 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 trans-

formative 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 re-

imagine reality. Let me describe the possibilities of these di√erent

trajectories.

Replicating Reality

For all their dragons and magic, fantasy worlds actually aren’t all that

di√erent from reality. One trajectory for virtual worlds is that they

continue to perpetuate, reinforce, and produce social norms. Along




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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 uto-

pia, 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 won-

der 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 num-

bers of experiments and participants, and make long term and panel

studies possible.’’ Indeed, the ability to collect longitudinal and de-

tailed behavioral data from millions of people around the world has

significant scientific potentials.∞

Influencing Reality

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 oΔine. 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 ma-

terial desires, allowing advertisers to target us more precisely. And



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for those who do not initially have such material desires, a dop-

pelgänger might convince them that they need to buy something

after all.

It is easy to underestimate the power of subtle manipulations be-

cause they are both so pervasive and so di≈cult to detect. But con-

sider that the simple ordering of names on a presidential election

ballot changes the vote outcome. In California’s eighty assembly dis-

tricts, 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 be-

fore arriving at the voting booth, the simple ordering of candidate

names matters.≤

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 Chan-

nel, and the Discovery Channel—including attempts to gain broader

market share via sensationalist coverage of aliens, a family with nine-

teen kids, and child pageants—stems from this market dynamic. And




213

I have a hard time believing that advertisers will care more about

social well-being than their bottom line.

Reimagining Reality

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 our-

selves that we’ve covered a great deal of ground. Instead of replicat-

ing 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 e≈cient or more fun, but they certainly

make people more distracted by their virtual hair and clothes. Cer-

tainly, some of the alternatives I’ve mentioned in the previous chap-

ter 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 oΔine 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 high-

lights this resistance to change. In these worlds, users were not con-



214


strained 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 Naka-

mura has documented, many Asian-appearing avatars in Lambda-

MOO borrowed heavily from martial arts or samurai movies. Per-

haps the hypermaterialism of Second Life isn’t caused by the presence

of avatars. Perhaps it’s just human nature.≥

How Do We Get There?

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 Warcraft took over

$60 million to create, and that doesn’t take into account the contin-

uous 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 e√ort was made pos-

sible by a $45 million grant from the US Army. The institute collab-

orates with film studios and video game designers with the under-

standing that any new techniques developed are free to be used in




215

video games and movies. There are also similar virtual simulations

for training in other areas and to help soldiers overcome post-

traumatic stress disorder. Replicating reality is a key goal of the mili-

tary’s interest in virtual worlds because the training context needs to

match the actual context, and this has a trickle-down e√ect in terms

of the technologies and graphical assets that are then available for

commercial use.∂

And there’s the rub. Experimentation in virtual worlds is expen-

sive and resource-intensive, requiring very specialized skills in 3D

graphics, server optimization, game design, storytelling, commu-

nity management, and so forth. It’s di≈cult for gamers or even tech-

savvy folks to put together a prototype. But we have seen the democ-

ratization 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 com-

plex 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

flu√y cloud animals, you could build that. If you wanted a story-

telling game set at Downton Abbey, you could build that, too. Unfor-

tunately, the Metaplace platform closed in 2010, but I strongly believe

that we need something like Metaplace to move us along our experi-

mentation 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



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worlds spaces, but nothing has transpired to shift the attention from

these two existing worlds. Yet in the same way that blogging soft-

ware has allowed everyone to become comfortable with digital pub-

lishing and sharing (which helped to pave the way for social net-

working 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 our-

selves what new worlds we would create if we had the chance.



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The Proteus Paradox - Reflections and the Future of Virtual Worlds