The Proteus Paradox Read Online Free Page B

follow a linear genealogy somuch as it repeatedly and spontaneously coalesced in a shared cultural consciousness in which Tolkien, role-playing games, and networked computing were popular. Raph Koster, the lead designer of
Ultima Online,
has said that “MMOs were created simultaneously and independently by a dozen groups at once. The folks doing Meridian 59 did not know about the folks doing Kingdom of the Winds, and so on. Not to mention older antecedents like Habitat. MUDs, in fact, were also invented independently at least four times.” Of course, this is not to say that online games emerged the same way every time. In discussing the history of role-playing games and MUDs, Bartle has said, “Dungeons and Dragons was a seed, which, when it planted, grew in a particular way. And if it had been planted in, say, another country or at another time, it would have grown differently.” Online games may have been inevitable, but the online games available are influenced by historical factors. The large budgets needed to develop online games increase risk adversity and encourage copying the formulas of successful games, and certain archetypes become deeply entrenched within the industry. As Koster has noted, “MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added, when you look at the games in aggregate.” 12
    Online games like
World of Warcraft
are the primary implementations of virtual worlds we have right now; there are no other three-dimensional, persistent virtual worlds that rival their use—whether in terms of active users or amount of time spent in them. Because of how similar these online games have become, we’ve largely stopped asking how they can be any different. On game forums, players tend to ask for improvements of existing features—larger-scale group conflicts or deeper character specialization. But online games as we know them are a very idiosyncratic implementation of virtual worlds; there is nothing preordained about this historical accident. One ofthese idiosyncrasies is the focus on small group combat. It’s true that the metaphor of war is pervasive across video games, but it’s telling that the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game was launched in 1996, yet
SimCity,
the popular city-building game franchise, introduced large-scale multiplayer features only in 2013. 13
    These idiosyncratic vestiges in online games affect how they influence us. The emphasis on combat in these games stems from their wargaming roots. In chapter 4 , I describe how this ancestry comes full circle in high-level guilds that focus on raiding; many of these guilds adopt militaristic hierarchies and require strict obedience and discipline from their members. The reliance on deeply numerical gameplay also stems from wargaming conventions. Fantasy and math aren’t natural bedfellows, but the complex rulesets and tables of wargaming brought this unlikely pair together. In chapter 3 , I explain how the complex mathematical outcomes in online games play into our brain’s eagerness to make sense of the world, leading to the emergence of superstitions. It is also this numerical system that makes it so easy to collect, quantify, and analyze data from online games—free-form storytelling would be much harder to process and analyze. In chapter 9 , we’ll see how these accessible data sets can be used to infer a player’s gender or even personality. And finally, Gygax’s shift to individual combat in
Chainmail
is why we play online games with an avatar. But this, too, is a historical accident. In
SimCity,
you play a disembodied mayor who controls a growing city; you never see yourself. In chapter 11 , I describe how our reliance on avatars constrains and changes how we interact with virtual worlds. The story of how online games came to be helps us understand not only what these games are but why they influence us as they do.

CHAPTER 2 WHO PLAYS AND