Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
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- CHAPTER 3: EMERGENCE IN CULTURES AND GAMES Emergent Cultures
- Emergent Cultures in Games
Virtual Worlds/Real CommunitiesThe word “virtual” is problematic, contested, and continuously in flux, as illustrated by this random sampling of recent dictionary definitions: ‘Virtual’ adj. 1. Being something in effect even if not in reality or not conforming to the generally accepted definition of the term; 2. Used to describe a particle whose existence is suggested to explain observed phenomena but is not proven or directly observable; 3. Simulated by a computer for reasons of economics, convenience, or performance; 4. Used to describe a technique of moving data between storage areas or media to create the impression that a computer has a storage capacity greater than it actually has. Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation, by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. (USA) adj.
3. Computer Science. Created, simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or computer network: virtual conversations in a chatroom. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company (USA). adj. 1. (before noun) Almost a particular thing or quality: Ten years of incompetent government had brought about the virtual collapse of the country's economy. War in the region now looks like a virtual certainty. 2. Describes something that can be done or seen using a computer and therefore without going anywhere or talking to anyone: virtual shopping/banking Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, © Cambridge University Press 2003 (UK). The last definition highlights the challenges in working with terms whose official usage is still highly contested, if not entirely incorrect. None of these definitions, furthermore, reflects the term in its original usage. “Virtual Reality” was originally coined to describe high-end, immersive, real-time 3D graphical environments, generally accessed via sensory immersion techniques such as head-mounted displays or panoramic screens. More recently, ther term “virtual community” has gained popularity as a way to describe communities whose members interact with each other primarily via a network (Rheingold 1993). However well-meaning, this term suggests that mediated communities are in some way “not”—or “less than”—“real,” which I would argue is an inaccurate characterization. It would be easy to get side-tracked at this point with a philosophical debate about the broader definitions and distinctions between reality and virtuality, and much has already been written on this topic. (REFS: Heim, Baudrillard, Klastrup, Ryan, Benedikt, Stone) Such a debate is beyond the scope of this book, which concerns itself with the lived practice of inhabitants of virtual worlds, and their own interpretations of the meanings of that practice. Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has coined the term “virtually human,” pointing out that inhabiting a virtual world, far from being “post-human” and alienating, actually highlights our humanness in interesting and unique ways. He also adds “…virtual worlds show us that, under our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been virtual all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human ‘nature’ to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being.” (REF Boellstorff p.5) CHAPTER 3: EMERGENCE IN CULTURES AND GAMES Emergent Cultures The emergent properties of real-world cultures have long been a topic of interest to historians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists and urban planners. Urban historian Lewis Mumford described and mapped out patterns of growth in European cities, radiating from a central core, usually a cathedral. (Mumford 1961) Urbanist Jane Jacobs, in her famous critique of 1950s urban planning policies, spoke about the ways in which urban, mixed-use densities promote and hinder emergent behavior, both positive and negative. (Jacobs 1961) Thomas Schelling described this in economic terms as “systems that lead to aggregate results that the individual neither intends nor needs to be aware of.” (Schelling 1971) (p.145) To demonstrate how such a system might work, he created a simplistic model of racial segregation using a rule-based, checkerboard simulation. Individual agents of two binary types were said to be more happy when neighboring agents were of their own group. Consequently, the outcome over time of a series of proximity moves would result in increased segregation, regardless of whether the agents were deliberately segregationist. He used this model to show how segregation in ghettos can self-organize in an emergent, bottom-up fashion rather than through deliberate or institutionalized exclusion. Contemporary approaches to human cultural and historical development have taken a similar complex system approach, and have also reconfigured how we think about the notion of “progress.” The now-outmoded idea of “cultural evolutionism,” which suggests that some societies and “civilizations” are somehow more “evolved” and hence “better” than others, is being challenged in various ways by interpretations that frame society and history in terms of the dynamics of complex systems. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond has argues a new reading of the historical domination of some cultures over others as an emergent process arising from the intersection of available resources and technologies, geographical conditions, and biological processes (such as disease), rather than an essentialist predisposition for superiority. Diamond illustrates the role of feedback loops, such as European exposure to and consequent immunity to disease, which served as a powerful, if inadvertent, biological weapon against the indigenous cultures of the Americas. (REF: Diamond) While his approach is quite different from Diamond’s, Manuel De Landa also argues for a complex systems approach to what he calls “nonlinear history” and rejects the deterministic model of history. Like Diamond, he critiques the notion of the dominance of Western culture as progressive, and looks instead at history as a possibility space that does not necessarily produce inevitable outcomes. He describes emergence as the “unplanned results of human agency.” (REF: p.17) And while some decisions made by individuals are constrained by the goals of organizations, in other cases, “…what matters is not the planned results of decision making, but the unintended consequences of human decisions.” (De Landa 1997, p. 17) De Landa argues that emergent properties, which can be characterized as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, cannot be studied using reductive methods: These emergent (or “synergistic”) properties belong to the interactions between parts, so it follows that a top-down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects it into its constituent parts (an ecosystem into a species, a society into institutions), is bound to miss precisely those properties. In other words, analyzing a whole into parts and then attempting to model it by adding up the components will fail to capture any property that emerged from complex interactions, since the effect of the latter may be multiplicative (e.g., mutual enhancement) and not just additive. (De Landa 1997, pp.17-18) Historically, emergent cultures can take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. Yet as Diamond points out, the advent of new technology can rapidly accelerate these processes. Guns, for instance, allowed for much more rapid colonial expansion and accelerated the rate of genocide throughout the new world. (Diamond 1997) Technologies of transport, as McLuhan has pointed out, accelerated the expansion of goods and people westward across the industrializing United States {McLuhan, 1964 #28}. The Internet is just such an accellerating technology, and emergent social processes that might take years to play out in real life, such as the example of inter-game immigration chronicled in this book, can happen in a matter of months, weeks, or even days. The speed of communication enabled by the Internet allows for a kind of snowball effect in terms of the feedback dynamics. People tend to follow trends among their peers, not, as some might cynically suppose because people behave like sheep, but because, as Schelling’s model suggests, they wish to maintain a connection to a community. Thus, as with his segregation example, we find numerous instances of humans gathering, moving and assembling based on a desire to join or to remain proximal to a community with which they identify. Emergent Cultures in Games Emergent cultures have existed in networked play spaces since their inception. Weddings in MUDs and MOOs and MMOWs such as Active Worlds were commonplace. In the late 1990s the phenomenon of “eBaying” began to emerge, in which players of Ultima Online and other massively multiplayer games began to sell game accounts (in other words, their avatars), virtual objects and real estate. Supported by an extra-virtual network with a highly developed feedback system, the eBay auction site, they were able to emergently spawn an entire real-world economy around the trade of virtual characters, commodities and currency. This emergent phenomenon inspired economist Edward Castronova’s now-famous economic analysis of EverQuest, in which he determined its imaginary universe, Norrath, to have the real world’s seventy-seventh largest economy. (REF: Castronova 2001) By analyzing exchange rates and trade volumes on the online black market for virtual goods and currency, he was able to calculate a “gross domestic product” of Norrath that placed it on an economic scale with real-world nations. Castronova’s research is itself emergent, the outcome of emergent behavior on a large scale, precipitating emergent behavior on a smaller scale. Castronova’s groundbreaking work has inspired a growing interest in the economies of virtual worlds. This interest has reached as far as the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is investigating both the tax and regulatory ramifications of virtual economies, and the ways in which they can be used as research contexts for the study of real economic patterns in society. (REF) While “eBaying,” as the practice is called, is banned by most game companies, the black market for virtual items and currency not only flourishes, but has spawned an entire global industry. In 2007, journalist Julian Dibbell, known for his early studies of the text-based world LambdaMOO, visited a “gold farming” factory in China. Here low-wage workers, usually young men, live and work in barracks-style housing, spending their days playing World of Warcraft and gathering virtual currency, which their employers in turn then trade on the black market for real-world profit. Dibbell noted that when these young men finish work, they go to the facility’s cybercafé, where they enjoy their time off by playing World of Warcraft. This practice has also precipitated new emergent social behaviors within the game. Players believed to be Chinese gold farmers are shunned with a form of racism that conflates real (Chinese) and virtual (the most common characters played by gold farmers) ethnicities. (REF: Dibbell) Second Life has brilliantly leveraged these emergent economic trends as the only virtual world that sanctions the free buying and trading its virtual currency for real money. As a result, its attracted more publicity of its competitors as players have begun to make their real-world living through its virtual economy (REFS). This policy precipitated the emergence of an in-world banking industry, and the eventual collapse of one of Second Life’s leading virtual banks. As in real life cultures, the outcome was a run on banks, to the tune of $750,000 in real-world financial losses (REF). All of these examples can be viewed as emergent: they were the result of individual agency, bottom-up actions that aggregated into large-scale patterns of social behavior. While some forms of emergence in games happen as a result of an aggregate of individual actions, others are more deliberate, and resemble real-world grassroots organizing. One example is a game-wide protest that was staged in World of Warcraft in 2005. (REF: Castronova 2005, Taylor 2005.) Warriors of all races, dissatisfied with what it felt were unfair statistics associated with their class, gathered at urban centers and even blocked a bridge to demand a change to the very software they inhabited. In the process, they managed to down a server, which did not have the capacity to process such a high volume of players in a single virtual location. Game operator Blizzard, in the typically top-down approach of corporations, squelched any further uprisings by banning players found to be involved in or planning in-world protests. In other words, the company took the stance of a totalitarian regime by making civil disobedience punishable by virtual death. Because Blizzard is a company and not a nation, its players/customers/citizens, however you wish to frame them, had no rights whatsoever in this situation. The totalitarian stance taken by Blizzard is common to MMOG companies. When players first initiate an account, they are required to sign an end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, that for all intents and purposes relinquishes any rights they might enjoy in the real world as a pre-condition for becoming a citizen of a virtual one. Most EULAs state that the company has full ownership of all intellectual property generated by players. Game companies often exercise their own IP rights by prohibiting extra-virtual practices, such as some forms of fan fiction or the buying and selling of virtual game artifacts. Second Life is again the exception: although they implemented a radical policy that allows players to retain all rights to their intellectual property, the company still owns the virtual property that represents those ideas; in other words, they may not own the ideas, but they own the bits. As a result of some of these draconian practices, ethicists and lawyers have begun to ask: “What sorts of rights, exactly, do avatars have? And how might these be reinforced? Do we need some kind of bill of avatar rights?” (REF) One thing seems to be clear: again and again, people inhabiting avatars inevitably arrive at the conclusion that they have rights, often based on the rights they are accustomed to enjoying in their real-world cultures. American players, for instance, expect the right to free speech as well as self-determination. These desires and expectations often come into conflict with virtual world owners, who are more preoccupied with business concerns, such as maintaining a high profit level, and protecting themselves legally. (REF: Taylor) Corporations that control virtual worlds will tolerate a certain measure of emergent behavior as long as it does not threaten their bottom line. Consequently, griefing, which harms the enjoyability of games and the rights of players to go unmolested, is generally tolerated, while mass protests and virtual currency exchange are not. Download 0.83 Mb. 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