Fun Inc. (20 page)

Economics and hedonics, the study of human pleasure, are not the only two areas in which video games offer some pragmatic learning opportunities. One of the most famous case studies of mass behaviour within a game arose entirely by chance in
World of Warcraft
in September 2005, just a year after the game was launched. It began when a deadly disease generated by one especially tough monster (Hakkar, a blood god lodged at the heart of the Zul’Gurub dungeon) was accidentally transmitted by infected players to the world outside the confines of the dungeon. Within hours, the disease had become an epidemic. Known as the ‘corrupted blood plague’, tens of thousands of player characters succumbed. What was interesting, however, was not the pile of corpses itself, but the fact that the sequence of events during this entirely unscheduled incident bore more than a passing resemblance to a genuine pandemic outbreak within a human population.

It sounds a little absurd, especially as genuine death or injury are quite impossible within a video game, yet it attracted some very serious medical attention, including a paper in the American journal
Epidemiology
, by epidemiologist Ran D Balicer, which argued that ‘virtual environments could serve as a platform for studying the dissemination of infectious diseases’ and that they might prove ‘a testing ground for novel interventions to control emerging communicable diseases’.

How could a virtual plague mirror a real one? For a start, it began in a remote area – an unexpected and isolated freak event, much like an isolated mutation in a virus such as avian influenza – and then spread via both humans and animals into population centres (in-game cities) where high densities of players quickly became hothouses for an uncontrollably escalating infection. There was also the known phenomenon of idle curiosity unwittingly contributing to the spread of the disease; and the existence of non-player-controlled characters who acted as ‘carriers’, spreading infection while themselves remaining healthy. Then, of course, there was the gamut of player reactions: experienced healing-class players offering their services in population centres to cure the diseased, guild leaders and those in positions of authority attempting to organise players and disseminate information, guild structures acting as support and information networks, many players hiding out in remote areas, not to mention engaging in all manner of speculation on the thousands of blogs and forums relating to
Warcraft
.

Why, though, did any of this matter? It was a question addressed at the Games For Health conference in Baltimore in 2008, when another epidemiologist, Nina H Fefferman, argued that the involvement of thousands of real people in games offered a way of modelling the unpredictable behaviour of humans in epidemic situations that no existing technique could match. The degree to which a game environment is able to model a real disease outbreak is, of course, limited. Yet it’s the unreality of games that makes the modelling possible in the first place: there is simply no comparable ‘real’ method for studying the spread of a deadly disease in a population.

The ability to model virtual versions of extremely hazardous situations within games extends to areas other than health, of course. For instance, the deputy director of the US Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Charles Blair, has pointed to the kind of tactics used by players within
World of Warcraft
(again, the world’s most successful MMO is, perhaps inevitably, the one that attracts almost all the attention) who have dedicated themselves to causing maximum possible disruption to the game world by inflicting huge casualties on other innocent players. This kind of behaviour is a near-universal feature of popular multiplayer games: known as ‘griefing,’ it has evolved into a sophisticated sub-culture dedicated to the delights of ruining most people’s fun in the most spectacular way possible. In the case of
Warcraft
, this has involved exploiting special features of high-end dungeons like the corrupted blood plague, which mischievous players then unleash like bombs in high-population areas to inflict maximum casualties. ‘To put it academically,’ Blair told
Wired
magazine, ‘you have both dependent and independent variables’ – that is, real people are making unexpected decisions within a controlled setting, giving a good indication of what approaches human ingenuity can come up with to try and get around rules and safety procedures designed to protect player populations.

Much of the pleasure that games offer comes from their combination of a sense of genuine achievement that nevertheless risks little that is ‘real’, and certainly not lives, health or even income. This is the source equally of their power and their limitations as models. As Castronova pointed out, you get to see some fundamental aspects of human motivation at work precisely because you are able to suspend certain other constraints.

The suspension of certain constraints within video games becomes most interesting when it is a question not just of mass behaviour, but of interpersonal behaviour – and the tools people have developed within games to better deal with each other and, in particular, with such problems as fairness and reward-sharing in complex group situations.

Consider one of the most fundamental problems posed by any online game: the distribution of rewards among a team of people who have collaborated in order to work their way through a particularly vast – and rewarding – challenge. Nobody is being paid to be there. In point of fact, as I noted in chapter 4, all the players involved will be paying exactly the same amount of money for the privilege of playing the game in the first place. Given that most in-game challenges tend to produce only a small amount of very valuable loot in the form of armour or weapons that almost everyone would like to own, the problem created is one that can only be solved satisfactorily by a solution that is self-evidently fair and self-contained.

In 1999 a group of players in the game
EverQuest
devised the first version of exactly such a system. Dubbed Dragon Kill Points, or DKP (the key task that necessitated devising the system was killing two extremely tough dragons), essentially it entailed introducing a private and self-regulated currency between collaborating players. Under a DKP system, every time anyone participated in a group mission they got ‘paid’ a set DKP allocation. These points were tracked – usually on a website independent of the game, that all involved players have open access to – and accumulated over time until a player decided they wished to spend them on a rare or desirable item that had been found during an in-game mission. At this point, an open or closed auction system would allocate each item to the highest bidder.

Once the notion of DKP had been introduced (basically a binding, quantifiable social contract arranged between fellow players), an increasingly sophisticated series of methods of quantifying the challenges and rewards in the game soon began to develop among players. ‘Price lists’ were developed for in-game items, based on detailed statistical analyses of their properties. ‘Zero sum’ DKP systems were introduced, balancing out the number of points gained and spent during each raid in order to ensure the fairest possible distribution of loot over time. Then there were ‘suicide’ systems, with players ranked in a ladder of priority and those higher up having the right to get items ahead of those below them – at the price of committing ‘suicide’ and falling to the bottom; and so on. As one founder member of the
EverQuest
guilds that first developed the DKP system put it, ‘loot handling in online games would probably be a PhD thesis in itself. It was very, very difficult. We had a good time trying to figure out what price things should be, what was the best way to distribute. We had to make and refine the rules as we went along, to keep people taking loot, spending their points rather than just saving them all up, while making sure the system was fair. I had to chase a few people out of the guild who just didn’t get this.’

All this demonstrates the spontaneous emergence of cooperative human behaviour of the highest order in a setting where no obligation was placed upon players whatsoever to behave in this way. More importantly, though, there’s the fact that, in an increasingly digital age, the field of gaming is a remarkably fertile one for creating better ways of working within and with digital media of all kinds. Above all, a DKP system maintains social cohesion among disparate people whose interests happen to coincide. It is an entirely self-enforcing mechanism; and yet, without any formal external framework or interventions, its success amongst gamers who adopt it runs at close to 100 per cent. This is largely because it works; it’s transparent, meticulously fair, and has been laboriously calibrated over time in its various forms to prevent collusive bidding or other kinds of ‘cheating’.

In the world of video games, inventions like the DKP system are small, sophisticated miracles with big implications. If you’re looking to motivate a group of disparate people in a digital setting, this kind of internal value-setting is a hugely powerful mechanism; and it’s a fine microcosm of what games can tell us about the value, thought and significance people attach to their actions in the supposedly anarchic, anonymous realm of remote communications and unreal consequences.

Precisely because they are not quite like the world, the study of video games can extract some extraordinarily powerful and useful lessons about what people are (or can be) like, and how best to motivate them. Can video games really bring certainty to the social sciences? Whatever transpires, they are in some sense already part of both the question and the answer. They have become a unique laboratory enabling us to study ourselves, and at the same time subtly shifting our sense of what it means to be a single self. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that many of the truths we’re liable to discover through this kind of play are themselves likely to change us in the act of learning.

C
HAPTER
10

Beyond fun

Video gaming may be an extremely serious business, and have the most serious of implications for the present century, but as soon as one starts sniffing around the burgeoning and contentious genre of ‘serious games’ themselves, the tension between what constitutes fun and what comprises a serious topic rises to the surface. No matter how much money a game makes or how great an impact it has, isn’t there a troubling incompatibility here? Absolutely not, according to Suzanne Seggerman, the New York-based founder of the organisation Games for Change, a group founded in 2004 that promotes the use of video games as tools for raising political and social awareness.

As Seggerman sees it, ‘fun’ is an inadequate description of what video games do in the first place. ‘I don’t think the word is really right, I don’t think a game has to be “fun”. It has to be engaging, it has to be well-designed: what makes a game good is the balance of challenge and reward, and that is about learning.’ At every step of a well designed game, you are engaged – but not necessarily entertained. It’s a process she believes is fundamentally akin to some of the most serious issues in the world today. ‘More and more we are recognizing in the twenty-first-century that the kind of problems we face globally are genuinely complex. They involve many interrelated variables: things relating to climate change or international trade, for example. Games are systems, and they offer a good way to explore complex systems, a way that we simply didn’t have before.’ There is, in other words, no better way to understand a complex system than by experiencing it: by role-playing, shifting variables, and seeing how the outcomes are affected.

This applies just as much to complex systems of conflicting human interests as to environmental or physical variables, as Seggerman explains. ‘We gave out three prizes in 2006, not only to recognize what serious games are good, but also to help shape the field, which is still young. One of the three prizes was for raising awareness, and it went to a game called
Darfur is Dying
, which is available to play for free online. A lot of kids initially grabbed it because it had “dying” in the title, but it had a real impact.’ In terms of ‘impact’,
Darfur is Dying
offers some impressive statistics. The game has been played by over three million people globally. It has also generated over 50,000 ‘actions’, including letters to the US Congress. Those three million players come from a vastly broader – and younger – demographic than would usually be involved in such a complex political issue. This, of course, is another area where games come into their own: as a booming medium, they boast uniquely positive connotations and a long reach among a younger generation increasingly immune to the solicitations of print and television.

Playing
Darfur is Dying
couldn’t be easier, so long as you have a computer and an internet connection. Visiting the game’s website, you are instantly thrown into the fray: a window in the centre of your screen asks you to ‘choose a Darfurian to represent your camp’ from the eight members of a family presented in a hand-drawn line-up in front of you. This family of two parents and six children are your charges: displaced by conflict, the game asks you to perform such tasks as foraging for water, irrigating crops, and generally trying to survive the appalling rigours of life as one of the 2.5 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan (a context that’s clearly explained in a couple of sentences underneath the game window onscreen).

I choose my family member, clicking on the image of Rahman, aged thirty, the father. Now I must forage for water – except I can’t. A message has flashed up on the screen: ‘It’s very uncommon for an adult male to forage for water because he is likely to be killed by the Janjaweed militia. Choose another camp member to forage for water.’ Right. Slightly nervously, I select the eldest child – Elham, a girl aged fourteen – for the task. I’m told to use the arrow keys to control Elham’s movements, and then I’m off, dashing and dodging as the screen scrolls towards me. My mission is to dodge wandering militia by hiding behind rocks and scrub, and to reach the well, whose distance and direction in relation to me are indicated at the bottom of the screen.