That’s probably something you’d hear out of an alcoholics anonymous meeting, but my addiction was more benign. I am a recovering World of Warcraft addict. I started playing my junior year of high school after some friends got me into it and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t stop until I woke up sophomore year of college surrounded by empty Red Bull cans, with an essay due the next day that I hadn’t even started, and the other 39 people in my 40 man raid screaming at me through my computer speakers to wake up. It was 3 AM on a Tuesday.
Maybe it’s a part of my personality that I’m so easily addicted to those types of distractions? That’s partly true, there have been friends of mine which I’ve tried to introduce to WoW (I now tell them to avoid it like the plague) and they have hated it entirely, and never really got into it. I think most of it has to do with the way the game is designed. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG for short) aren’t new, in fact WoW isn’t the first of its kind, but rather just the culmination of years of research on the open market.
It’s probably best to start off with a brief history first.
Early online multiplayer games started out as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon), in which multiple users could play at one time in one map and setting, thus enabling them to interact with each other. I’ve had some experience with these games, but since most of the gameplay requires memorizing an ever growing dictionary of actions and spells that you have to type in, it didn’t really appeal to me.
Neverwinter Nights (the first multi user RPG that utilized graphics) is like the holy grail of RPG nerds everywhere. The reason for NWN’s intense popularity (other than its graphical interface) was the integration of guilds. This simple method of player organization is important to attracting and keeping players. We’ll see more of this later on.
As time progresses, more titles are released by developers and publishing houses jumping on the MMORPG bandwagon. Titles such as Everquest, Guild Wars, and Lineage are all examples of the progression of this genre. These titles helped to popularize the idea of classes, which are chosen to the player at the beginning of his or her adventure. A class may determine a different storyline, abilities, or how a player solves certain obstacles in the game. This system is so successful that it has been spread across different genres and is not limited to only RPGs.
Since the advent and popularity of WoW, there have been many spinoffs and contenders seeking to reap some of the profits that WoW has shown. Games such as Conan Online, Eve Online, City of Heroes, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. These all follow a similar system in that they have classes, quests, player run organizations, and a distinct in-game economy (though the specifics are different).
So getting past all that boring history stuff, we ask the important question: why are MMORPGs so addicting? For a number of reasons, mostly psychological and sociological. Cracked.com recently did an article a while ago synthesizing these reasons and I’ll be paraphrasing and relating some of them to this blog entry.
The first, and probably most innate psychological reason, has to do with the work of BF Skinner. He was the inventor of the “Skinner Box”. This is important since, due to the advent of MMORPGs, the gaming industry has changed. Instead of selling a customer a $30 game cartridge and hoping that they’ll buy the sequel when it comes out, more companies are moving towards subscription systems, where you have to pay to KEEP playing. No one, however, can keep the same game interesting enough that players will continue to play when it becomes boring. That’s why they have to change how the game works in order to keep players playing during the boring, repetitive parts as well as the exciting parts.
Going back to BF Skinner, the “Skinner Box” is basically a box with a rat inside it that contains a lever. This lever will dispense food when pressed, HOWEVER, it won’t always dispense food. In fact, Skinner found out that if the lever is set to release food all the time, the rat quickly becomes bored, since he knows that the food is always there and he doesn’t have to work for it. Interestingly enough, when the lever is set to release food only SOME of the time, the rat presses the lever constantly, nonstop because he doesn’t know when he’s going to get food. This concept is called “variable ratio rewards”. Why is this important to MMORPGs? Well because a player progresses through the game through one of two ways, either by leveling up, or gaining better items. However, there is a level cap, so when you reach a certain level, the only way to progress is to gain newer and better items, and the BEST items are the RAREST items which have a very low chance of dropping from defeated enemies. This means that players have to kill the same monsters, and raid the same dungeons over and over again to get that one magical item. Sound familiar? BF Skinner’s findings have been applied to games like WoW to keep players are mundane tasks by taking advantage of the natural instincts of human beings to hoard precious resources.
This works in a similar way to slot machines. You can’t stop putting in quarters and pulling that lever, because everytime you do, you could win. Or maybe the next time, or the next, or the next!
But c’mon, I mean, if an item is THAT rare, only the most obsessed people will sit there and kill monsters all day (we in the MMORPG world like to term it “farming”) right? What about the other 99% of players? Well, BF Skinner also discovered the idea of “shaping”, meaning that it is possible to keep someone on the same behavioral track by offering little prizes along the way. For example, your ultimate goal is to get the best sword in the game, however you have to get 10,000 rabbit legs to feed the magical fire that you will use to smythe this sword (don’t ask, maybe it’s a magical bunny hating forge). However, no all rabbits drop rabbit legs, maybe there’s like a 50% chance. So you start killing little rabbits, going on a stabbing rampage with your sword. 5 hours later you’re covered in the fur and blood of countless cute, cuddly pets and you’ve only got about 75 rabbit legs, but that’s OK, you’re almost a quarter of the way there! C’mon, keep going, it’ll only take you maybe another two of three days of continuous farming to get that sword! Keep pressing that lever, little mouse, because you never know when you’re gonna get something!
In the end though, who really cares about those things? That sword you’re working so hard for is just an abstract concept, it’s not a REAL item that you can use. Well neither are diamonds, or gold, or that expensive four wheel drive SUV that you’re never really going to take off-road but just want because it makes you feel better about yourself. They don’t actually do anything, but you pay for the idea that they resemble, so to your brain, they ARE real. Better items in a video game represent your status in that world, and even better than gold, you can use them to kill other players! It’s as if you could walk on the street and watch your bigger diamond suddenly shoot out lasers and destroy someone else’s smaller diamond. You’re paying for the idea of superiority and status. This has progressed to the point where online businesses exist solely for the purpose of exchanging in-game gold and items for actual fiat currency. In fact, the term “Chinese Gold Farmer” has become a popular, omnipresent term inside the World of Warcraft.
Moving on to the sociological points of MMORPGs, we mentioned guilds and clans before – player run organizations which team up together to complete tasks normally undoable by single players. Hey, wait a minute, this sounds like social interaction, why is this a bad thing? Well because now instead of playing the game for yourself, you’re also playing the game for other people too. Guilds in WoW are normally formed for the purposes of raids, dungeon events which take anywhere from 20 to 40 people to complete. To help your guild complete these raids, you have to possess certain potions and a good amount of gold. Where do you find the time to get this if raids take (on average) 2 to 6 hours of playtime? Well, during the time you’re NOT raiding, DUH!
Now the game has become your job. You don’t want to let your guild members down, because they’re doing their part. You have to spend extra time farming for ingredients to make potions or other things so that you can go on the raids, so that you can get better items, so that you can then go on harder raids, so that you can get better items, etc. etc. ad nauseam. It’s like trying to beat a heroin addiction except every Sunday at your book club everyone keeps offering you a hypodermic syringe full of the stuff.
This brings us back to the Skinner Box example. In his experiments, Skinner soon realized that in addition to rewarding the mouse for pressing the lever, he could also punish the mouse for failing to press the lever. He hooked up the mouse so that it would receive an electric shock for every 30 seconds it failed to press the lever. This kept the mouse going like an automaton. This brings us back to guilds, because for every raid group of 20 people who get to go to the dungeon raid and get goodies, there are probably 60 people waiting at the door because they weren’t good enough to get picked for the raid. Raids are filled based on what classes are needed, your skill level, and your equipment status. How do you get better equipment? Well by going on raids of course! Thus it stands to reason that if you decide to take a break for a while and stop going on raids, someone else will take your spot, and then you’ll be out-geared and you won’t get invited to those raids when you decide to crawl your way back to the game. Why do people keep playing a game after they’ve gotten the high score? Well they’ve got to make sure that no one takes that spot away from them! When you stop going to raids you become outdated, your guild mates become disappointed in you, because if you don’t go then that means they have to fill your spot with someone who is less experienced and has worse equipment, thus decreasing the raid’s overall chance of success. Your “friends” will keep shocking you until you just say “fuck it” and keep hitting that lever.
So overall why do so many people turn to MMORPGs if they’re so terrible? If these findings are out there for anyone to see? Let’s face it, most people hate their job, it’s boring, your hate your coworkers, and your boss is probably a prick. Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that for someone to be satisfied with any task, you should have three things: autonomy, complexity, and a sense of accomplishment. In other words, autonomy is your ability to choose what you’re going to do that day. Is your boss going to let you choose which TPS report you need to fill out? Of course not, but in the game you make all those decisions yourself. Complexity is necessary to make it seem like the task isn’t mind-numbingly repetitive, how far are you on killing those rabbits and collecting their legs? And a sense of accomplishment is needed for you to connect your effort to your eventual reward. In a job your reward is a paycheck, but rarely do you get the sense of accomplishment from a job well done as you do from slaying a 40 foot lava monster with 19 of your guildmates.
So now what? Well now you know that MMORPGs are a pretty damn scary example of efficiency. They are good at hooking your interest and getting your money, but there’s gotta be something else to this whole thing right? I mean, you can’t just put THAT many people together and expect them no to do something interesting. Well of course MMORPGs like WoW have a culture of their own, like in these two videos, both examples of raids gone wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04 these two videos are two of the most popular in WoW. In fact the term “pulling a Leeroy” is in common usage.
The sheer number of players on some games is also useful in full-scale sociology studies without any risk to actual subjects. For example, Eve Online is a game that is centered around space travel and exploration in that you are one pilot among many in the galaxy who is making a living doing whatever. The economy in that game is largely centered around trade between players (unlike in other games where you have the option of buying things from the computer who has an infinite supply), meaning that you can only buy things other players are selling.
This is a parallel to the actual stock market in that many players actually make in-game money not by producing items but rather by buying items off the open market from other players and holding them for a while or shipping them to other areas where other players are willing to pay more for said items. Many players have tried and failed to create banks in Eve, largely due to the Machiavellian philosophy of CCP (the development house that makes the game) in which the game admins will intervene in the case of players abusing game mechanics and code to turn a profit, but see anything else (including scams, pirating, and holding characters hostage for ransom) as fair play. In other words, players can make a living in the game simply by outfitting a fast ship with as many guns as it can carry and hoping to catch another player’s slow flying freighter shipping goods from one part of the galaxy to another. This actually cuts down on the work that CCP does in that it allows players to play both the good and the bad guy, acting out their own personal storylines where CCP simply has to provide the environment.
Market history in Eve Online
Additionally, in the case of WoW, some scientists are using it to study the reaction of large crowds during an outbreak of an epidemic disease (such as plague). This is due to the “Corrupted Blood” incident. On September 13th, 2005, the corrupted blood glitch was exploited to spread a disease across the WoW servers which resulted in numerous player deaths until Blizzard was able to fix the glitch. Corrupted blood is a curse which is placed on players during a raid in a dungeon called “Zul’Gurub”, the raid is meant for level 60 (highest possible level at the time) players and so was lethal to lower players. Players in the raids somehow managed to transport the curse (which is spreadable to other players via proximity) out of the dungeon and into major cities. This killed lower level players instantly on contact and caused most players to avoid major cities with high populations. This in effect turned major cities in the game into ghost towns literally overnight and injected paranoia into the population. Scientists are studying this event and its parallels to recent SARS and Avian Flu outbreaks, using it as a model for epidemic research.
So the conclusion about MMORPGs? Well, they consume time, money, and your social life. They are addicting to some while a mild distraction to others. In intense cases they work psychologically and sociologically to keep you playing, but they have a culture of their own and sometimes bear surprising fruit to scientists simply because of their large consumer base.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
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