The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [113]
As a result, the characteristics that attract players to MMORPGs are much broader. Whereas a tabletop role-playing gamer may have an interest in fantasy literature and a wargamer may have an interest in historical battles, a massive multiplayer’s qualifications are only a credit card. There are no “soft” factors guiding the player into or out of the game, factors that come into play through personality conflicts and differences in playing style in other forms of gaming. As Vesna explained (2004:259), communities on the Net are tightly tied to e-commerce, malls, and credit card systems. Coding authorities are interested only in profit, and this is reflected in the only type of player they seek to screen out—the non-paying kind.
Extending this role to its logical conclusion, it is in the coding authority’s interest to not adjudicate actual play but to keep players coming back. As such, there is a genuine concern that a game’s addictive qualities are largely unregulated, that the coding authority takes on a predatory cast with the intent of enveloping players, even if it is to their detriment. Castronova calls this “toxic immersion” (2005:238) and it is a very real problem.
I personally experienced toxic immersion when playing MUDs. All my friends did, to different degrees. Because I was always a good student, my grades actually improved when I was addicted to online games. My friends were not always so lucky; one of them played so often that he had to drop out of college with a .9 average. Fortunately, by the time massive multiplayers came around, we had all overcome our addictions.
Participant Roles
Nick Yee (2001) found that the average player in EverQuest was 25.7 years old. Castronova’s survey (2005:60) of the EverQuest population skewed slightly younger, with an average age of 24.3. In fact, Castronova (2005:61) discovered that the vast majority of EverQuest players played less than 30 hours weekly, less than the average weekly TV viewing hours of most adults.
According to Castronova, the global virtual world population will increase in size by 8.4 percent annually, reaching 40 million by 2020 and nearly 100 million by 2030 (2005:53). The majority of subscribers are in Asia, with China having the single largest number of users and Korea having the highest density. As access to high-speed Internet spreads, so too does virtual gaming participation—that number will only continue to increase. The Digital Software Association estimated that there were 73 million online gamers in 2003, 38 percent of whom were hardcore users, which amounts to approximately 27 million global hardcore gamers. For the United States, of 14 million people polled, 7 percent were estimated by the Digital Software Association as being involved in persistent-world game play (DFC Intelligence 2003).
Although MMORPGs feature graphics for characters, there is still a layer of anonymity between player and avatar. Peter North demonstrated the effects of anonymity with an experiment in World of Warcraft. He conducted an experiment to test an avatar’s reactions to peer pressure. Anonymous players compared a weapon in one room with three in a separate room. Ten confederates were placed in the second room and instructed to give the same wrong answer. North discovered that avatars were much more likely to give the right answer despite peer pressure, in contract to humans in a similar experiment. However, the more of an investment a player had in his avatar, the more normalized the response to real-life behavior.
In another experiment, North recreated