Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds and their economies. As matter of fact I am fascinated by real money trade in virtual worlds, and I understand economics well enough to see that real money trade is not only an inevitable facet of virtual worlds, but is in some ways a beneficial one. Having attended Indiana University, I have even had the pleasure of sitting down with Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and who was mentioned several times in Dibbell’s book. And I agree with both of those guys that the production and trade of virtual goods should be viewed more seriously as a legitimate economy. However, because of this I also think that people who hack and exploit code in order to make money should face harsher consequences that just having an account banned.

But when it comes to this book I am disappointed in Julian Dibbell. Sure, he spent a lot of time learning a lot of very interesting things about virtual economies and working to shine a light on the whole phenomenon. Now I am not trying to crucify Dibbell here, and if he ever reads this I don’t mean for this to sound offensive towards him. But during his self-experiment with learning to make money in Ultima Online, he made partnerships and deals with dishonest people, and engaged in activities that negatively affected a lot of people – glorifying them for reasons I can’t understand. The fact is, for all the heralding of this grand new virtual space where currencies and economies are more democratic and we inch closer to bridging the digital divide – the people who end up at the top of the food chain do so by breaking the rules and negatively affecting other people’s experience. When I say rules, I am not talking about “user agreements” – we all know that the logic and fairness of these are shaky at best. I am talking about real money traders who hack the code, exploit unintended game mechanics, and run bots to create their product.

Dibbell even mentions that virtual world economies don’t work on the same rules of supply and demand that “real world” economies do. However, the main reason for this isn’t because of some new branch of economics that the world has been blessed with now that technology has given us virtual worlds – it is because of people who break the integrity of the game world for their own monetary gain. What would we do in the “real world” if someone actually figured out a way to turn lead into gold? I bet we wouldn’t let them set up a website and hire young people in China to dig up lead for them.

And this is the main reason why I will never play MMORPGs again: Currently, real money trading ruins the integrity of the game space. I remember back when I played Final Fantasy XI, and my friend and I loved going around and farming for resources to sell on the in-game auction house. However, because the real money traders in the game had so successfully figured out how to generate income they inflated the economy to a point where it took us months to farm enough money to buy the items we needed to proceed. We couldn’t hunt a monster or farm for resources without running into gold-farming bots. I don’t mind if someone is making money off of the game, but when gold farming bots are preventing players from making any money in the game, that is wrong. When a gold-selling company holds 90% of a virtual economy’s currency, that is wrong. When players must compete with trained employees of gold-farming companies who don’t care about interfering with the game experience, that is wrong.

I know the gaming industry is concerned about this stuff, but I don’t think they are nearly concerned enough. The websites that sell gold, items, and accounts only make money by exploiting things in the game to the detriment of the game economy and the experience of people who actually want to play the game and interact with other players. The mafia-style business antics detailed in Dibbell’s book loom on the horizon, providing a very disenchanting vision of the future of our digital lives. It will be interesting to see if eventually the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and the game companies that provide these games will start treating the trade of virtual goods seriously – and criminalize resource production methods that disrupt the integrity of the game space.

Also, here is the poster for my final design:

WoW Capture: HCI/d Master's Capstone

In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain playstyles over others.  I feel that the design and “loudest” player groups have created a game culture that favors ambition, aggressiveness, and a focus on certain achievements over others.  (Warning: The following sentence might be highly subjective or half-baked).  High level or “epic/elite” activities, raiding, or player vs. player are seen as “better” than any-level activities like exploration, pet collection, or crafting.  While these any-level activities are not seen as unimportant, they don’t have near the prestige of the other activities, and are often treated as a means to an end.

After my first attempt at doing a semiotic reading of the FigurePrints service, I have a vague sense of a thesis.  This is something along the lines of: The FigurePrints interaction favors dominant, aggressive, and high-level players over players that are low-level or less concerned with aggressive or competitive play.

I begin with a statement about what the figure itself represents.  It is a text that represents the player’s time investment, their attachment to the character and the character’s place in the history of the game lore, the character’s (and player’s) growth over time, the character (and player’s) growth in a larger social context of friends and other players in the game, and on and on.  It is a text of rich and personal meaning, and the choices that FigurePrints provides limit players to only certain kinds of meaning.  I will illustrate this with a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the choices provided to players in the creation of the figure.

Syntagmatically-speaking, the creation of the FigurePrints statue consists of choosing from a Pose, a Base, and a set of Armor.

I think I need to explore the importance of limiting players to these 3 choices, but as of yet I haven’t analyzed it that much.  However, I currently can adequately speak about what each of these paradigms represent and what choices are given.

Pose as a representation of body language

Players can choose from 44 different poses, 33 of which involve the use of a weapon and depict the character in battle.  This leaves 11 poses that could reflect the character out of battle.  Of these 11 poses, 5 are gestures that depict behavior that is aggressive or negative in the culture of World of Warcraft.  There are the character poses of yell, chicken (taunt), rude (making an obscene gesture), train (a gesture that represents a despised activity in which a player or players, on purpose or on accident, lead a large group of monsters to another player resulting in chaos, game lag, and death), and beg (perhaps an even more despised behavior than a monster train).

The remaining 6 poses are stand, walk, wave, kiss, kneel, and sit.  Out of 44 possible representations of body language, this seems to be a very limited range of choices for creating a character figure that is NOT fighting or calling attention to the negative cultural aspects of the game.  Granted, the game is called World of WARcraft, not the World of Politeness and Compromise.  However, there is much more to a player’s character and gameplay than fighting.  Players engage in arguably more social/helpful scenarios than they do in fighting, and they collect plants, mine for metals, go fishing, craft items, and engage with storylines.  But there are no poses for any of these.

Base as a representation of [something]. < I don’t know what to put here yet.  It is a symbol of elevated status, of standing on top of something, of being built upon something.  I don’t know.  Anyway:

There are 4 choices of statue bases:

Marbled Floor: The “plainest” of all the bases, but represents a material of luxury and importance.

Horned Stand: Horns are aggressive, bestial, and associated with violence

Gold Mound: wealth, greed, achievement

Onyxia Base: This one is interesting in that it cost an extra $10, perhaps due to printing constraints.  However, more cost is usually associated with a “premium” or “superior” product, which in this case is the base that represents a large, epic battle against a dragon.  This particular battle is a well-known (relatively-speaking) raid in World of Warcraft, and is sort of a rite of passage for players that begin raiding.  Here the “premium” product is reserved for players concerned with raiding.

What is missing from this assortment of bases is the choice to have your character standing in a meadow, or at a crafting station, or near a fishing hole, all of which are places that exist in the game and can have very special meanings for players.

Armor as a representation of fashion and achievement

Choices of armor are limited to the armor you have actually collected in the game.  In the analysis I did, a level 80 character that has done many raids and player vs. player fights has 10 armor options as opposed to a level 20 character who has 3.  Additionally, 2 of these options are for Christmas outfits that every player has access to.  If you remove those options the armor choices are 8 to 1 in favor of the player that engages with game activities that reward players with special armor.

As I mentioned before, there are an incredible amount of activities that players can engage with.  Players can follow the storyline, harvest materials, craft items, play the stock-market on the auction house, explore the game world, collect pets, teach other players how to play, help out other players with difficult situations, make new friends, and on and on.  However, these activities in themselves are not rewarded with special sets of armor.  Special sets of armor are reserved for players that engage with high-level game content, and are successful in killing “epic” monsters, or defeating other players in tournaments.

Since FigurePrints only allows players to “dress” their character in the armor they have acquired in the game, this places a much higher value on high-level players concerned with raids and player vs. player activities.  This is most evident in the words used in the instructions:

These are the instructions shown to all players, regardless of if they have 8 sets of high-level armor to choose from or 1 low-level set of armor.

Any player without high-level armor could be described as either not interested in those aspects of the game that provide the armor, or as not “advanced” enough to have acquired it.  By not providing this player with as many options to “dress” the character, the player is limited in the ways he or she can create a meaningful representation of his or her character.

FigurePrints situated amongst other texts

And then I can also talk about FigurePrints as a creative activity concerned with creating an artifact that represents the player’s character.  In seeing FigurePrints as this, I can compare it to many other artifacts that are created to represent the character:  costumes, drawings, forum signatures, fan fiction, and the WoW Armory just to name a few.  In exploring these artifacts, I have seen an interesting occurrence: artifacts that are created from scratch by players have very different qualities than artifacts that are generated using information from the game.

Some future design implications?

Namely, game-generated artifacts seem to focus on achievements, statistics, armor, and items.  Player-generated artifacts seem to focus on personal stories and social elements.  Some of this is discussed by Silvia Lindtner, Bonnie Nardi, and Fernanda Viégas.  This will be more important in the future as representations based on digital data become a source for decision-making.  If social spaces like World of Warcraft use their digital data to reduce the rich experience down to statistics and equipment, what implications does that have for the ways in which we value others and ourselves?
EDIT: January 4, 2010.  Since first posting this, I have developed these thoughts more and have written several drafts of this paper.  It is currently a work in progress.

The transformative powers of repeated viewings were incredible. I had entirely different experiences when I viewed the game through different phenomenological perspectives. The first time I saw it as just a MMORPG player. When I first watched this video, I was distracted by the medium. All I saw was World of Warcraft characters, and attached to them every stereotype and bias that exists about World of Warcraft players, my understanding of the culture of MMORPGs, and the pop culture phenomenon that is the game.

However, after repeated viewings the “World of Warcraft-ness” started to fade away, and I realized that this video is very compelling. The second time I saw it as Chad with my particular history of knowing people who have died and the beginnings and endings of relationships in my life. I even noticed that when I was writing my notes from watching the video, I never referred to the character in the video as “he” or “him.” I kept writing the word “I” or “me.” That was quite a powerful realization.

Then I started reading the various comments and I saw someone who said it reminded him of when his mom was killed by a drunk driver. In my next viewing I pretended that my mom had been killed by a drunk driver, and I was surprised (and a little frightened) at how easily I was able to envision that scenario. Throughout all of these viewings I felt real, genuine pain. It grew even worse when I kept reading the comments about all the other types of loss that people associated with the video: breaking up, moving away, death of a loved one, losing touch with a childhood friend, someone cheating on someone else, or watching a sick relative slowly get sicker.

The sadness and tragedy of life were made even clearer by the insensitive and frankly assholish comments that are interspersed amongst the genuine comments. For every heartfelt comment there is another where someone is making fun of anyone who got something out of a “stupid video game.” There is much to be said here about internet culture, how machinima is viewed amongst other forms of expression, or how this particular video is grouped in with funny and ridiculous other WoW-inspired machinima. But that is the structuralist and semiotic stuff for later.

With all my new lenses for looking at things, I am slightly overwhelmed with things that I can say about this video, not least of which is that this video is definitely not what Blizzard had in mind when they created World of Warcraft.  But I have come to an interesting realization recently, and it is this: It isn’t our ability to say all these things that is valuable. It is the fact that we have noticed new things and in doing so are able to have richer experiences.

From a truly human-centered design perspective, that is, taking core human values into consideration when designing and implementing technology, MMORPGs have many great things to offer. I will give an example from my own experiences to elaborate on some of them.

My example is from back when I was playing Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I ended up in an awesome guild with some great players and great leadership. I had been in guilds in other games such as Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI, but it wasn’t until Vanguard that I got into one with exceptional organization and leadership. After about a month of playing with my guild, getting to know them using Ventrilo chat software and doing a bunch of quests, I found out one of the leaders of the guild was disabled and was confined to a wheelchair and could not work.

It became immediately apparent to me how valuable MMORPGs can be. It wasn’t just some silly computer game that I could play to entertain myself. It was a wonderful example of how technology can bridge gaps and imbue life with meaning for some people. This woman whose disability prevented her from working or going out was able to organize events and help out other players who couldn’t put in as much time in the game as she could. The game took on a new meaning for me when I learned about her disability. Whenever I couldn’t play I knew that she would be playing, organizing events for our guild, doing quests, crafting items for us, and doing many more things to make the game more enjoyable for our guild. And when I logged on I knew she would be there waiting to help out.

I hope the point of that story is an obvious one. It may not be “PC” to say this, but it is not a secret that so-called “nerds” or people that are disabled, crippled, or handicapped can have difficulties making friends and interacting in diverse social circles. I can honestly say that I probably would not have been friends with my guild leader in real life. It is sad, but it is the truth. And she might have been too nervous or self-conscious to try talking with me on the street. MMORPGs are not simply mindless fun, but can serve social and cultural needs as well. (Also economic if you count the people that sell MMORPG currency,) While sometimes it may seem that technology has dehumanized us and stripped away human-to-human interaction, some technologies are making great strides toward bridging communication gaps by evening the playing field and giving roles and opportunities to the underrepresented.

I will continue to write on this topic as I continue my studies.

It is my hope that the field of HCI can take some cues from video games to build more enjoyable and meaningful interactions. My story is just one example of why I think this is true.