by Nick Yee
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 of these 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 WHY
When arcade games appeared in bars and nightclubs in the 1970s, gaming was largely an adult pastime. In an analysis of three decades—1970 to 2000—of news articles on video games, Dmitri Williams, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, has documented how media portrayal of gaming shifted dramatically in the 1980s. News and magazine articles began to associate gaming with male teenagers and to warn of the addictive and corrupting nature of video games: gaming was not only a gateway to deviance; gaming was deviant behavior.1
The reaction to gaming is not unique. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of every communication medium has caused a moral panic centered on teens—movies in the 1920s, radio in the 1930s, comic books and rock and roll in the 1940s and 1950s, and so on. Following the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, the media widely reported his unsubstantiated claim that reading comic books turned innocent boys into delinquents and criminals. After all, alarmist headlines sell papers. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie has argued that moral panics encourage people to “turn away from the complexity and the visible social problems of everyday life . . . or to adopt a gung-ho ‘something must be done about it’ attitude.” I would add that these panics are appealing because they reduce complex social problems into a simplistic model with one marginalized culprit. It’s easier to put warning labels on video games than to address all the very real social, cultural, and psychological factors that lead to gun violence.2
Much as with comic books and rock and roll when they first appeared, the unrelenting media association between video games and teenagers led to the stereotype that only teenagers play video games. According to the news media, moreover, gaming wasn’t just for teenagers: it was specifically for teenage boys. In addition, media reports repeatedly suggested that boys were biologically hardwired for violent video games. Williams quotes from a Newsweek article from 1989: “Nintendo speaks to something primal and powerful in their bloody-minded little psyches, the warrior instinct that in another culture would have sent them out on the hunt or the warpath.” This alignment of gender, age, and deviance produces a simple yet powerful sound bite: video games turn boys into violent criminals. And it concisely reinforces multiple stereotypes: only teenage boys play video games, and they play these games because they enjoy violence. Online games actually combine two separate moral panics—worry about video games and fear of the Internet. And perhaps the emergence of online games is what allowed the moral panic of video games to continue into its third decade.
Even after thirty years, these stereotypes still strongly influence how we perceive gamers. In 2008, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel played these stereotypes to great comedic effect when he cajoled actress Mila Kunis into divulging her World of Warcraft gaming habit: “I find it hard to believe . . . like, how fanatical are you about video games?” When Kunis asked Kimmel whether he had played World of Warcraft, his reply was, “I’ve not, but I’ve watched my son play it.” Kimmel reinforced multiple stereotypes: only teenage boys, not women or grown men, should be playing video games.3
Before we can understand what people actually do in online games, we first need to acknowledge and debunk the pervasive stereotypes around who plays video games and why. Teenagers are actually the minority in online games. More important, online games are highly social, and gamers are not a monolithic category.
Debunking the Stereotypes
Despite common media portrayals, studies of thousands of online gamers—primarily English-speaking gamers in North America and western Europe—by different researchers across varied games and over the past decade have consistently found that players’ average age is around thirty, with some players as young as eleven and some as old as sixty-eight. Only about 20 percent of these online gamers are teenage boys. Online games appeal to a broad age range. The majority of online gamers are adults in their twenties and thirties. Other findings show that many online gamers are leading normal adult lives outside of games. Fifty percent of online gamers work full-time, 36 percent are married, and 22 percent have children.4
Some player profiles gathered from my online study of more than fifty thousand players in the Daedalus Project illustrate the diversity of online gamers. Al is a sixty-year-old project manager working on a commercial airlines project in Houston. He started gaming in the 1980s with Dungeons and Dragons. Emre is twenty-seven, a graduate student in Germany. In Star Wars Galaxies, he plays a female Imperial pilot. In World of Warcraft, he’s a “holier-than-thou Human Paladin.” Jane is forty-six, a criminal defense lawyer from Ohio. She plays EverQuest with four people in her family. And Claire is a thirty-five-year-old computer technician and digital photo restoration artist from Idaho who has suffered from lupus for fifteen years and is unable to work. “Online games,” she reports, “gave me a chance of socializing when I was unable to get out.”
While there is a broad age range among online gamers, the gender stereotype is currently true. Only 20 percent of players in this game genre are women. We’ll dive deeper into the possible causes of this significant gender difference in chapter 6, but this statistic makes clear that online games are currently more appealing to men. Despite this bias, the overall demographic composition of online games is diverse. In addition to high school students, there are college students, early adult professionals, and homemakers in their thirties, as well as war veterans and retirees. In some online games, a player group may span a sixty-year age difference. Teenagers who may feel a lack of control and agency in their everyday lives are suddenly able to work with adults as equals or even their superio
rs—something that almost never happens in the physical world. The stereotypical association of video games and teenagers is not only false but hinders our ability to understand how online games can be positive social spaces for younger players.5
Relatively few studies of online gamers outside the West have been conducted. These studies are also complicated by the fact that different online games tend to be popular in different regions—it’s often not clear whether differences are due to culture or that particular game. World of Warcraft’s global appeal was unique in this sense and provided a way to compare demographics using the same game. Between 2010 and 2012, my colleagues and I gathered survey data from more than three thousand World of Warcraft gamers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States, and many countries in the European Union. We found that online gamers in the European Union closely tracked the demographics of gamers in the United States but that gamers from the Chinese countries had a very different profile. Their average age, twenty-two, was about ten years younger than online gamers in the West, with the majority of the Chinese players between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There were also slightly fewer female players than in the West; 15 percent of the Chinese players were women. More research will be needed to understand what factors are responsible for these demographic differences, but these findings suggest that we need to be careful when extrapolating findings from Western gamers to gamers in other regions.6
Given the largely adult profile of online gamers in the West, studies on their typical play patterns reveal just how appealing these virtual environments can be. The average online gamer spends more than twenty hours a week playing online games. That’s the equivalent of half a workweek spent in a virtual world. In one study, 9 percent of online gamers reported that they averaged forty hours or more each week. And 60 percent of players in that same study had at least on one occasion spent ten hours continuously in an online game. These statistics are also not skewed by the playing patterns of younger players. In two large studies of online gamers, one found no correlation between age and hours played each week; the other found that it was actually older players who spent more time in these virtual worlds. In short, older players in online games—in their thirties or older—do not spend any less time in these games than younger players. Although these statistics often appear alarming to nongamers, it’s important to put them into perspective. According to a Nielsen report in 2012, the average American watches thirty-three hours of television each week. And most of us would probably admit that there was at least one time in our lives where we spent the entire day lounging in front of the TV.7
The rise of online games has accentuated the earlier stereotypes of antisocial deviance. After all, online games seem like the perfect escape; reclusive gamers can shut out the real world by logging into a digital fantasy world and cutting off all social connections. Again, studies of online gamers contradict these assumptions. One fourth of online gamers regularly play these games with a romantic partner or spouse; 19 percent of gamers do so with at least one family member (excluding spouses); and 70 percent of gamers do so with a friend they know in the physical world. Tallying across the categories, 80 percent of online gamers are regularly playing with someone they know outside the game. Instead of using virtual worlds to shut out the real world, gamers are using online games to socialize, keep in touch, and hang out with their friends and family. Here’s how two gamers characterize their gaming experience:
I’ve been getting together in a MMORPG with a very close friend of mine who moved recently. It gives us an opportunity to still “see” each other and be able to do things together, unlike just chatting (either on the phone or online) where we can’t interact on the same level. Being able to “see” one another and then go hunting or hang around town feels much closer to getting together in real life than talking on the phone or e-mailing one another does. [Realm Online, male, 23]
I regularly play online games with my husband. Knowing my husband’s play style and him knowing mine, makes all the difference in our game enjoyment. We know what to expect from each other and rely on those things. Being able to play together keeps our relationship strong and playful, both in game and in real life. We always have something to talk about . . . the day to day RL grind and that ugly monster we had to deal with in game. =D [A Tale in the Desert, female, 44]
It is also worth noting that a family sitting together silently in front of the television is deemed socially acceptable, but if they chat and collaborate in a virtual world, this is stereotyped as being antisocial.8
In addition to their time investment, the emotional investment of players is important to consider. In one of the Daedalus Project surveys, 27 percent of online gamers indicated that the most rewarding or satisfying experience they had in the past week occurred in the game world. But there’s a love-hate relationship here. In that same study, 33 percent of online gamers indicated that the most annoying or infuriating experience they had in the past week occurred in the game world. We see another indicator of this emotional investment in the relationships that emerge from these online games. Forty-one percent of online gamers felt that their in-game friendships—with people they first met in online games—were comparable to or better than those with their real-life friends. It may be tempting to frame these findings through a pathological escapist lens, but another interpretation is that these virtual worlds do a good job of creating engaging, social experiences that are highly memorable and forge relationships. In chapter 7, we’ll hear from players who have fallen in love in online games.9
Why People Play
One of my favorite questions to ask online gamers is why they play these games. Understanding the diverse reasons why online gamers play these games is another way of moving beyond stereotypes. Players’ answers vary tremendously. One player in EverQuest writes, “Overall, I enjoy taking on the role of a happy/silly little gnome who eats bugs,” while another player in Star Wars Galaxies explains that he is “trying to establish a working corporation within the economic boundaries of the virtual world. Primarily, to learn more about how real world social theories play out in a virtual economy.”
Richard Bartle’s analysis of player types is a well-known taxonomy of why people enjoy online games. He categorizes players as achievers, socializers, killers (players who enjoy inflicting misery on others), and explorers (whether it’s the geography or the game rules). My research in gameplay motivations built and expanded on Bartle’s types. Statistical analysis of survey data from online gamers has consistently identified three clusters of gameplay motivations; these relate to achievement, social interaction, and immersion. The motivations within each cluster are highly correlated with one another and largely independent from motivations in the other two clusters. The achievement cluster focuses on different ways of gaining power within the context of the game. The social interaction cluster is about different ways of relating to other people in the game. And the immersion cluster is about different ways of becoming a part of the story.10
These aren’t separate categories that players fall into but rather the building blocks that allow us to understand individual players. Thus, most players have high scores on one or two clusters while having average or low scores on the remaining clusters. The holistic configuration of these three building blocks traces out the unique profile of each gamer. These motivation clusters also do not imply that achievement activities are always nonsocial (as an example). After all, a player may have high scores on both the achievement and social motivations at the same time (that is, a player interested in guilds and end-game raiding), but the building blocks indicate that this is only one of many possible configurations. Only by specifying the underlying individual building blocks can the full matrix of possibilities be mapped out.
In terms of the achievement motivations, power can be satisfying in different ways. For some players, the satisfaction comes from a sense of progress in the construct of the game—leveling up and gradually becoming more p
owerful.
I feel achievement is my greatest motivation for playing. I can’t wait to level again and get that new ability or skill or awesome weapon, but I never want to hit max level. [World of Warcraft, male, 28]
It gives me the illusion of progress, I know that. I hate the level of frustrated progress in the real world so I play the game and lvl up instead. [World of Warcraft, male, 34]
In contrast, other players do not care about the sense of progress. What they care about is being as powerful as possible. For them, it’s not about the journey but about the destination. Social recognition is also often important for these players.
I basically play these games to become the most powerful force the game can allow. I want the best of the best items and people to truly respect my play style. I want to become a legend among players within the virtual mmorpg world! [Dark Age of Camelot, male, 25]