Fun Inc. (12 page)

In Richard Bartle’s terms, Adam had reached the end of his heroic journey, at least within
WoW
. One thing that was especially striking about this process, however, was just how elaborate a procedure it was for him to exit the guild and the game. Couldn’t he, in Scruton’s terms, simply decide one day to hit the off button and never show his virtual face in
WoW
again? ‘Oh God, no. You don’t just leave over thirty-five people in the lurch like that, especially not from a position of authority. I pretty much made the decision four months ago. Then I gave warning to the officer corps that my interest in the game was waning. I selected the new leadership, and made sure the guild would keep going without me; then I gradually weaned myself off it, raiding less frequently, leading less from the front.’ It all sounds rather better planned than many corporate exit strategies, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise given the formality of the processes involved in joining and putting together a guild like Adam’s in the first place: written applications, in-depth interviews, probationary periods.

Still, there were inevitably mixed feelings as he mulled over his time in the game. ‘It was fulfilling to commit to something and actually to reach and perhaps surpass my own expectations. At the same time, you realise it’s not something that you can really take with you. Friendships were lost as well as made. I was very guilty of taking it far too seriously.’ Yet, as Adam himself added, one thing he could take away was the friendships and, in all its odd complexities, the human experience of the game. In fact, he added, what he was hoping for in leaving was to escape from an excessively sociable experience: ‘Dealing with different personality types, getting them to do things, handling the constant turnover. It had its benefits, like being able to indulge an aspect of myself that wouldn’t be acceptable in a normal work environment. But after a while it can all get too much.’

When considering just how ‘real’ anything that can be taken away from a video game is, it’s also worth taking into account the degree to which most real-life activities, from work to shopping to dating, demand a degree of self-concealment precisely because they carry the possibility of real-life consequences. Video games, in this sense, are not so much more (or less) real behavioural environments than they are different ones, with their own particular kind of authenticity on offer.

One thing that almost all academics can agree about is that the strange mix of freedom and constraint found within games has a magnifying effect on personalities. Those with altruistic and team-building inclinations express them more strongly, as do those with anarchistic and abusive tendencies. People are freer to act within a virtual environment in several senses: there is a freedom from major consequences of their actions, but also a freedom to put their time and resources at others’ disposal. The banter can be brutal, but conversations can also cut through to the essentials almost at once. Perhaps most significantly of all, a virtual world is also a tremendous leveller in terms of wealth, age, appearance and race. It’s a place where ‘you’ are entirely composed of your words and actions, and for anyone who isn’t in the optimum social category of, say, being attractive and aged between twenty and thirty-five, the benefits of being able simply to circumvent any kind of prejudice are potentially huge.

This notion of equality is something that’s of central interest to Ville and Liz Lehtonen, a husband and wife who have between them devoted a large proportion of the last decade to various kinds of video game. When Ville first met Liz (or, if you prefer, first ‘met’ Liz: this was a strictly virtual encounter), he was living in Finland and she was living in the western United States. Their game of choice was
EverQuest
, a sword-and-sorcery style MMO run by Sony since 1999; and Ville was the co-leader of a guild Liz had joined. He had been away for three months and, as she puts it, ‘when he came back he was so bossy and annoying and irrational that I wrote him an email saying all this. He wrote back having a go at me. We talked, and he thought I was cute, and it went from there. We met up in Paris about 3 or 4 months later; and I ended up moving to Finland.’

It’s a whirlwind romance, on paper, and yet, by their reckoning, Liz and Ville must have spent several hundred hours in conversation before their first face-to-face meeting. And it’s this that was the key to the success of their relationship. As Liz explained, ‘I find that I have a tendency to be more open with people that I meet online. It’s easier to be much more negative too, but I think you’re quite a bit closer to the people who you do really like.’ It’s a view that Ville seconds. ‘For me, real relationships had often tended to be more superficial. In real life it takes a lot more for people to express their true feelings. Whereas, if people like you online, that to me is much more certain than with people in real life, who might just like the way you look or find you convenient because you are useful to them rather than genuinely wanting your company.’

In one sense, it’s possible to think about online games as a kind of highly sophisticated dating site. By his own estimate, Ville spoke to between 50 and 200 people a day as the leader of a major
EverQuest
guild and the game was crucial in making these interactions more than casual. In providing context, focus and circumstances, people soon revealed some fairly significant information about just how well they could work in a team, take constructive criticism, express their intentions verbally, and generally manage to relate to a diverse bunch of people.

Perhaps more surprisingly, though, Ville also discovered a community profoundly interested in certain fundamental political and philosophical principles: notions of fairness, of cooperation, of justice and of competition. One example, he explains, is the great
EverQuest
debate about ‘Communism versus Capitalism’, that is, an argument between players as to how the limited resources available within the game should be divided between those paying to play it. The problem itself seems simple. Each game server in
EverQuest
can have around 5,000 people playing on it at one time, all of whom will be paying an identical amount of money – $10, give or take – to Sony each month for the privilege. In order to make the game worth playing there are naturally strictly limited numbers of the most dangerous enemies in the game, enemies who, if players can manage to kill them, are likely to yield up some of the most powerful items it’s possible to own. So, for example, there may be only fifty rare blue dragons available for potential slaughter during the course of any given month.

Unlike
World of Warcraft, EverQuest
has no closed dungeons within which a group of players can ‘raid’ undisturbed: everything is out in the open and up for grabs. So, while a ‘fair’ division of these fifty blue dragons between the 5,000 people on a server would mean that 100 or so people would be allowed to have a go at teaming up and killing each dragon, in practice the same elite guild ends up killing almost every single dragon due to its superior skills, dedication, contacts and resources. Sony and
EverQuest
allow this: it’s not against the rules, or even against the spirit, of the game. The result, however, is a quite stupendous level of debate in both the game itself and the huge number of player-run forums, websites and discussion boards surrounding it: who is entitled to what; can a consensual system be arrived at to ensure the fair division of virtual goods between all players; what obligations do players have to each other, or the game’s designers to their players?

This arena of often fantastically detailed discourse is known as the ‘meta-game’, and its influence extends well beyond private squabbles, grudges and flames. Visit any website devoted to hosting player discussions of games like
World of Warcraft
, for instance, and you’ll find not hundreds but tens of thousands of comments flying between players who debate every aspect of the game, from weapon-hit percentages to detailed mathematical analyses of the most efficient sequence in which to use a character’s abilities. It will range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and will invariably be riddled with private codes, slang, trolls, flames, and everything else the internet so excels at delivering. What you’ll find above all, though, is a love of discussion almost for its own sake; and an immensely broad and well-informed range of critical analyses. It’s not uncommon for doctors or professors of economics or maths to wade into the fray – and find themselves bested by other still more meticulous chains of gamer reasoning. Doctoral theses can and have been spun out of MMO forums. It’s a richness that flows in both directions between the game worlds themselves and the sprawling social arenas that surround them.

Perhaps the most sophisticated MMO of them all, the epic science fiction universe
EVE Online
, has even seen its player community persuade the company running the game to hold democratic elections for a ‘council’ via which players can voice their concerns directly to developers. Places on this Council of Stellar Management, as it’s known, were first competed for in a full election during March 2008, with sixty-six candidates putting themselves forward for nine positions. Every player of the game was eligible to vote, and the results were announced in May 2008: 24,651 votes were cast out of a pool of 222,422 eligible voters, revealing a turnout of 11.08 per cent – not bad at all, considering the level of engagement with the game required to follow the campaigning and select between the candidates – with victories for some of the most well-known and vocal members of the player community. These days, alongside the Council, there is also a separate Internal Affairs division, designed to root out misconduct on the part of both players and developers after some nasty allegations of ‘insider dealing’ with valuable engineering schematics. It’s a grand experiment in community government and participation that is only just beginning, but has staggering potential, given the sheer number and diversity of players involved in online games like EVE.

All of this is also extremely significant in terms what ‘anti-social’ actually means. Video games, it often seems, can be companionable to play, but tend to go hand-in-hand with a larger social disengagement, substituting a diffuse non-local network of contacts for immediate relationships with a local community or even country. It’s certainly true that internet sub-culture has always had a somewhat libertarian bent to it, with avid gamers tending to be less religious, less dogmatic and less locally minded than national populations as a whole.

As a tool for broadening people’s perspectives, this is often a very good thing. Even casual gamers like my wife and myself have developed dozens of good in-game friendships with people from, for example, small towns in the southern and central US that we would never have visited or learned anything about in a hundred years of non-virtual travel. Yet these are now places we have visited on several occasions, just as these friends have visited us, broadening both sets of horizons in the process. It’s easy to see, however, how the very ease of establishing such transnational relations might undermine one’s loyalty and commitment to a genuinely local community, not to mention to the necessary trappings of government and civil society – voting, taxation, looking out for one’s neighbours, using and investing in local facilities, even something as simple as keeping a house and garden tidy.

Many gamers will simply sniff at such observations. For national governments and societies, however, there is potentially a large problem here. How can a nation command loyalty – and rely on the participation of its citizens in everything from voting to paying taxes to keeping their front gardens tidy – in a world where people are increasingly free to chose their own loyalties irrespective of where they happen to be living?

Video games are an especially interesting medium in this respect, because both the problem and the solution may be two sides of the same coin. If you really want people to participate in twenty-first-century democracy, the kind of behaviours and institutions that have developed within online games are pretty hard to beat as motivating, co-operative social tools. Unlike any other form of online activity, or indeed any other medium or recreation, games have already got it all: elections, formal debates and fundamental discussions, self-organising task-forces, mass communications and mass motivations, human groupings which largely transcend age, gender, sex, physique and wealth.

On top of this, one of the most unexpected results of the 2008 Pew Internet
&
American Life Project was the degree to which gaming communities already seemed to be unusually aware of current social and political issues, and more likely than the population as a whole to take political action. More than half the gamers surveyed reported that games ‘made them think about moral and ethical issues’, while 43 per cent reported that games involved making ‘decisions about how a community, city or nation should be run’, and 40 per cent reported that playing games had taught them about a particular social issue.

The degree to which online communities can feed directly into politics was powerfully illustrated in 2009 via an unorthodox Swedish political movement called the Pirate Party. Effectively the political wing of the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party campaigned for radical changes in copyright and patent laws as well as a greater right to privacy for individuals. So far, so dull: the Party had been born at the start of 2006, and done relatively little beyond publish manifestos during the first few years of its life. Things changed, however, in April 2009, when the founders of the Pirate Bay website were found guilty of copyright infringement. Within hours of the verdict, membership of the Pirate Party began to soar. Within a week, it had more members than all but three of the parties in the Swedish government. Then, still more surprisingly, in the 2009 European parliamentary elections it managed to win no less than 7.13 per cent of the national vote, entitling it to a seat in the European Parliament.