The Proteus Paradox (10 page)

The hardest part is definitely to get people to listen to instructions from the raid leader. I'll take the most recent dragon raid I was at as an example. While running there after assembling the needed amount of players, the raid leader explained the rules of engagement on the way. And other participants commented on in other channels that he knew what he was talking about. One of the rules was to stay very, very close to the dragon, as it would otherwise be able to “single you out” if you ran a certain distance away from it, and would breathe fire on you, killing you and the people within a small radius of you. We get to the dragon and people seemed to forget quickly about that rule, especially “support classes” who apparently preferred to heal from a distance, thus getting killed first. [
Dark Age of Camelot,
male, 31]

In much the same way as football or basketball, explaining the strategy to a team is easy, but executing that strategy in the face of unexpected interferences is often challenging.

Of the things you expect to experience in a fantasy world, taking orders is probably not one of them. But in the same way that corporate structures emerged to take advantage of a free market in
EVE Online,
militaristic structures emerged in games like
World of Warcraft
to manage real-time, team-based combat.

The most successful large raids tend to consist of experienced raiders who are completely focused on the task at hand, know exactly where to find the key information, and follow instructions without question during the active raid times. [
EverQuest,
female, 40]

In 2005, I interviewed Talon, who had been the leader of a high-end guild for three or four years. The guild began in
EverQuest
and was consistently the first guild on the server to kill many of the bosses. When the guild migrated to
World of Warcraft,
it was the first to kill Ragnaros (the last boss in the original game). In our interview, Talon isolated obedience and discipline as the most important factors in the success of a high-end guild.

If I said something, people needed to do it instantly and they did. You never argued, especially on raids. Like I said, the organization was military style. To be successful you have to be organized. . . . If shit hits the fan, yes, they
WILL
follow the commands of the captain, but mostly because they know that if they don't act in a cohesive fashion, they will lose. In other words, the power is given democratically, but wielded in a dictatorial way.
⁵

As you can imagine, these militarized guilds are not everyone's cup of tea, but succeeding in the high-end dungeons requires increasing amounts of centralized command, discipline, and obedience. The growing tensions from different guild factions wrangling over the goals and nature of the guild often cause guilds to split up.

These challenges of running a guild make it clear that being a guild leader is a lot of work. And more often than not, it is emotionally draining and cognitively demanding work. It is not something you would do to relax.

The toughest thing for me, about leading a guild was just showing up. I never wanted the job, but I felt obligated to maintain the guild I loved. I spent an average of 4 hours a day replying to ICQs and e-mails while attending alliance meetings in IRC [Internet Relay Chat] and writing up announcements for the website. This before I even logged in . . . which when I did, being a RP [role-playing] guild I was forced to attend every event and function I was invited to, to keep up community relations. Not to mention weekly guild and alliance meetings or any impromptu meetings that came up. Whatever time I had left was used up dealing with the inevitable daily guild issues. . . . So I got maybe one to two hours a week for myself. [
Ultima Online,
male, 35]

Given the player narratives we've seen so far on the challenges of managing a guild, it makes sense that some guild leaders would describe their gameplay explicitly as a second job.

After becoming a guild leader I found that I had taken on a second full time job. Creating a nice website was a pain and was time consuming. Then came trying to plan raids that the people in our guild could all attend (too much variation in levels), trying to keep people interested, recruiting new people. It was way too much work. [
EverQuest II,
male, 31]

The single toughest thing about running a guild is managing people. It can quickly turn into a serious job. You have to referee disputes, come up with events, loot rules, and organizational structure, recruiting. In short, running a guild is a lot of work, just like managing people in a real-life position. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 37]

Our society stereotypes games as places where no work gets done. And certainly, many gamers start playing just to relax after a long day's work. They want to kill monsters. They want adventure. But for many guild leaders, their digital escape becomes the very thing they are seeking to escape. The difference, of course, is that they aren't getting paychecks.

Being a guild leader is a bit more responsibility than I enjoy in a game. If I wanted responsibility I wouldn't be hiding from the real world;). It may also be that I work as a PR professional and being a guild leader feels a little bit too much like I'm at work. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 25]

The toughest thing about being a guild leader is finding the middle ground between all the members, and being able to keep the group entertained at the same time. Being a guild leader is like being a manager at work, only without the paycheck. It's frustrating but rewarding to lead a group and see it function and grow, but it's a pain in the rear more often than not to get it to that point. [
EverQuest II,
male, 33]

Player motivations to achieve and socialize (as we saw in
chapter 2
) can inadvertently lead to tedious management roles. The deeper irony is that these guild leaders are paying around fifteen dollars a month for the “pleasure” of working a second job.

I've focused on guild leaders so far, but for a guild to function well and succeed in raids, everyone has to pitch in. In any given raid in
World of Warcraft,
ten or twenty-five people have all scheduled their lives to work on this one task for two to six hours every week. Since only a few pieces of usable loot drop, most of these players walk away from the raid with nothing but repair bills for their damaged armor. Given this net negative return and the social pressures of participating in raids once a player has joined a guild, many players in these situations also directly compare the game to work. The following
pair of player narratives shows that this comparison holds true for players of all ages.

But by the time I was level 50, the game was too focused on the “grind” to 60—the game required 20–40 players in raids—and the elitism, and classism of the players, just made it no fun. You could not achieve anything without massive support of some player group, and if you were in such a group (guild, etc.), they expected the game to be a full-time job. It was a burnout. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 53]
⁶

When we became the max level, we participated in raids and joined a high-end guild. The game became a job. It lost that feeling we originally played for the raw fun, questing and exploring new areas, advancing characters. We noticed the game wasn't about that any more. It was only fueled by greedy intentions guild members possessed. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 18]

We made computers to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them. Whether it is manufacturing pharmaceuticals in
Star Wars Galaxies,
running a corporation in
EVE Online,
or managing a guild in
World of Warcraft,
game play can become a second job. In the player narratives in this chapter, gamers have described their play with words including “grind,” “pain,” “stressful,” “burnout,” “obedience,” and “discipline.” These are hardly the words we would expect from consumers paying to be entertained in an immersive fantasy world. This is a prime demonstration of the Proteus Paradox; the offline burdens we thought we could leave behind follow us into virtual worlds.

In their book
Got Game,
John Beck and Mitchell Wade report survey data on the provocative differences between how gamers and
nongamers think. They argue that gamers are more willing to take risks than nongamers because failure and repeated attempts are acceptable and expected in games. Beck and Wade argue that corporations will have to adapt to gamers, but perhaps not as much as they think. After all, the complexity and corporate metaphors turn modern online games into corporate-mentality training grounds. In online games, players manage, discipline, and overwork each other. It bears repeating that the average player spends twenty hours a week in an online game. And especially for younger gamers, these games may give them their first taste of being a cog in a large, structured organization that slowly burns them out.
⁷

It's depressing to see grueling work in video games, but I wonder if we should be outright alarmed that we're now finding games in corporate work. The kind of adaptation that Beck and Wade foresaw is already happening. Jane McGonigal's
Reality Is Broken
and Byron Reeves and Leighton Read's
Total Engagement
are two recent books that champion the idea that games can improve engagement and empower workers, leading to increased autonomy and productivity. Both books also use online games as their pivot: If players can be motivated to accomplish complex tasks in
World of Warcraft
for free, can the same principles be applied to enhance corporate work or to improve our everyday lives?
⁸

I have no doubt that games can be powerfully motivating, but the intentions of corporations are not always aligned with the well-being of their employees or the general public. If corporations provide a game that enhances worker loyalty and engagement, I wonder if these corporations will come to see their employees as being over-compensated. And more often than not, company policies do not benefit owners and employees equally. Health benefits are often sites of struggle. Health plans that employees prefer can cost the company
more to provide, and I can imagine that companies would be interested in using games to help employees choose the “correct” health plans. Yes, games are fun, but games are also created by certain people to achieve specific goals. And in corporate settings, it is not the employees who are creating the games. For the time being, we don't have to be worried. Just as the technology research firm Gartner has predicted that the majority of corporations will use a gamified application by 2014, it has also predicted that 80 percent of gamified applications will fail because of poor design. But eventually, some companies will get it right.
⁹

A fascinating aspect of many contemporary online communities is that they are able to incentivize people to perform work for free. Wikipedia—the collaborative online encyclopedia—is an obvious example. But also consider how Facebook generates revenue primarily by aggregating the information you freely share and allowing advertisers to target you more accurately for their products. Sociologist Tiziana Terranova has called this phenomenon “free labor.” Games are uniquely powerful in converting paid work into free labor. Taken to its extreme, the premise of gamification is that any task, no matter how tedious, can be made engaging and motivating. And there is evidence that this premise is true. When unpaid laypeople solved the complex folding pattern of an HIV enzyme using an online game in 2011, it was heralded as a breakthrough in gamification. But this also means that game mechanisms can be used for less noble goals. Consider the possibility of a casual multiplayer word association game released by a marketing company in which the underlying goal is to generate high-impact keywords for marketing new products. Engagement and exploitation may be two sides of the same coin. When we receive these invitations to play, we must remember that fun can end up being a lot of work.
¹⁰

The video begins with haunting electronica chords played against a black backdrop. As the lead vocals begin, the gameplay footage starts. The camera arcs around a gathered group of characters in a forest clearing, centered on a character named final Elf—the character recording this footage. The lead singer chants the word
karma
repeatedly as the video cuts to the gathered group rushing down the stairs of a stone fortress. They reach a large, open area of the fortress. finalElf approaches a female Elf from behind, pauses a second to adjust the camera angle for a better view, and then plunges a sword through her body. The female Elf slumps down on the stone floor. The lead singer shouts: “I said hallelujah.” The camera zooms in on the scene as others from the group crowd around the corpse. The group heads into another area of the fortress, slaughtering characters along the way. The lead singer continues: “Come on and tell me what you need now. Tell me what is making you bleed.” finalElf chases an elven archer through the halls. The archer suddenly stops and stands still, appearing to give up. finalElf shoots three arrows into the archer's back before he drops to the floor.

This massacre continues for another four minutes. The video,
titled “Farm the Farmers Day,” is the first in a series of five videos in which finalElf documents his group's systematic slaughter of Lineage II players suspected of being Chinese gold farmers.
¹

In
chapter 3
, we explored superstitions in online games. I touched on the tedium of
grinding,
having to kill hundreds of monsters to gain another level. Although quests in the game provide experience points, they often bring players only partway to the next level. Players need to grind to accrue the remaining required experience points. The tedium of grinding is also exacerbated, as mentioned previously, because leveling-up time increases with each level. At the same time, quests get you less of the way to each next level. The result? More and more grinding is required to reach each successive level. In many cases, the quests themselves are just grinding in disguise. For example, a gang forces a local baker to pay a protection fee and would like you to kill ten gang members, computer-controlled enemies, in addition to the gang leader.