Panic In The Virtual Streets: Plague and Media Ecologies in Online Games
Compare studies of the internet to the study of another complex system; the study of life on our planet. Increasingly, it is from the field of biology that cultural theorists today borrow many scientific and theoretical premises for modelling the complexity of contemporary culture: evolution, ecology, selection, reproduction, of ideas instead of creatures, of cultural products and signs instead of animals, plants, or micro-organisms. Using a small sample of such approaches, I will attempt to describe how they can be used to think about the operations of online culture. My primary area of study will be the popular MMOG[1] World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) in which I will be attempting to highlight examples of interactions between the producers/consumers of World of Warcraft, the developers and end-users/fans, both inside and outside of the game’s medial space, with a view to exploring how emergent systems of game play and player culture arise beyond or without the direction of the developer.
Launched in November of 2004 in the United States, World of Warcraft continues to be the most popular and lucrative game of its kind in the world, with over ten million subscribers worldwide as of 2008. This kind of market domination gives WoW a very large cultural footprint, and references to the game abound in other media formats. WoW related stories often make major network newscasts so that even people with only a passing knowledge of video games are familiar with its brand. More recently, advertising campaigns have attempted to harness its market share to cross-promote their products, and a new advertising campaign for the game itself has begun using geek cultural icons such as Mr. T and William Shatner to promote itself.
One of the reasons World of Warcraft, and other MMOGs before it, like EverQuest (1999) are so successful is because they foster a range of gameplay styles, as well as the ability to interact with other players, and the combination of a huge world of options, combined with human variables gives a huge scope of potential for game play and enjoyment. Nicholas Yee has written extensively on the psychological motivations for online play in MMOGs (2006 [1], [2] & [3], 2007), basing his research on statistical analysis of the responses given by MMORPG players to survey questions. Yee identifies three broad components, consisting of more specific sub-components, which explain why players find MMOGs so compelling. Achievement, consisting of a desire for advancement through the game, an understanding of the workings or rules of the game, and desire to compete and dominate other players, forms the first component. The second component, termed the Social, reflects player desires to interact with other players, form relationships and work together collaboratively to make group achievements possible. The third component, Immersion, is centred more on the narrative of in game events, discovering the game world, losing oneself in the virtual experience, or perhaps borne out of a desire to escape the real world (Yee, 2007: p773)). The multiplicity of usage patterns are not mutually exclusive however, as some players scored high on more than one component (Yee: 2007: p774).
So, games like World of Warcraft provide a huge amount of content and play possibilities, which results in players investing huge amounts of time into them, while at the same time drawing in a wide mix of gender and age groups. In a study of MMORPG demographics, in which online survey data was collected from 30,000 players, it was revealed that player ages ranged from 11 to 68 years old, with the average age being 26. The appeal of MMORPGs was also evident in the fact that players spent an average of 22 hours per week logged in to their game worlds (Yee, 2006 [1]: p309).
For MMOG developers, this is the desired state of their art. To cover the continued running costs and maintenance requirements to keep an MMOG up and running, most follow what is now the standard model of requiring players to pay an initial cost to purchase the software client, then also charging a recurring monthly fee for continued access to their games. Hence, these games are designed with the imperative of rewarding the player enough to keep them wanting to play, but never truly having an achievable ‘end’. In World of Warcraft, even getting a character to the maximum level cap is not the end of the play experience, but rather another beginning of what is ironically called the ‘endgame’ content; high-level monsters and loot, requiring groups of powerful players to proceed. The game is explicitly designed with a range of hooks to keep players playing, and therefore paying. This process can often lead to players feeling burned-out or exhausted by the game experience:
“The central irony of MMORPGs is that they are advertised as worlds to escape to after coming home from work, but they too make us work and burn us out. For some players, their game play might be more stressful and demanding than their actual jobs. And the most tragic irony is that MMORPG players pay game companies on a monthly basis to work and get burned out.” – Yee, 2006 (3), p70
In this sense, a player becomes more and more bound to the grinding gameplay experience, and there have been numerous accounts of gaming addiction as a result of MMOGs like World of Warcraft. At the same time however, the WoW machine is constitued by, and also dependent on, its player-base. An MMOG without players has no future, and the developer will likely close a game down if subscription numbers drop low enough. The interesting thing in the case of WoW, is that is has attained a kind of cultural critical-mass, its player base being so huge that not only is it dependent on them, and them upon it, but the growing storm of media and attention has infiltrated public discourse around video games as well. At this point it seems that the WoW juggernaut constitues its own complex system, or machinic assemblage, as Guattari says:
“Curiously, in acquiring more and more life, machines demand in return more and more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred throughout their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they subtract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference.” – (Guattari, 1995: p36)
The system, or phenomenon, that we could largely characterise as the ‘WoW Experience’ does not end when the user disconnects from the game, or even when they turn off their computer. The user is part of the machine, and everything they do, be it discussing the game with a friend, who may or may not be a player too, to following online news about the game and reading ancillary materials like message boards or wikis devoted to the game, all adds to the processual development and re-creation of the machine itself.
It is here that we should discuss some of the problematic uses of the term interactivity. If the interactive elements that games like World of Warcraft are lauded for are actually programmed in anticipation that they will form a drawcard for player subscriptions, this appears to be something more akin to Lev Manovich’s conception of pre-programmed interactivity:
“If a complete work is the sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path accesses only a part of this whole. In other words, the user is activating only a part of the total work that already exists. Just as with the example of Web pages that consist of nothing but links to other pages, here the user does not add new objects to a corpus, but only selects a subset.” 2001: p128
So, the bounty of limitless interactivity is instead a predetermined set of variables that the programmer controls through their manipulation of the game world. The player is interpellated into the game world, and in turn becomes part of the pay-to-play system that supports it. This approach is somewhat limited however in its characterisation of a single user alone within the text. When discussing MMOGs it is fundamental to realise that the game space is open to multiple players, and this changes the dynamic between producer-end user. Gamers are nothing if not adaptable, and the sight of how others play the game inspires greater possibilities in our own play style. All of this operates under the auspice of the game itself however, and the game space cannot exist without parameters, rules governing the size and shape of the playing field, and what the player may enact within that space. Therefore instead of considering MMOGs as interactive works of art or electronic playgrounds or other generalities, it is more useful to see them as constructs of rules and protocols.
This concept of games-as-protocol is a useful approach to consider the power relations of MMOGs. Both the networking protocols such as TCP/IP, which allow the Internet to function, and the game code itself, that forms the basis for all the interactions possible in the game world, can be conceptualised as rules that determine what functions are possible, or as Alexander Galloway puts it, “as a management style for distributed masses of autonomous agents.” (2004: p87). Protocol “installs control into a terrain” (Galloway, 2004: p147), ensuring that the means by which connection and communication are made possible are the same means by which control is enacted. In this way protocols are made irresistible, as “only the participants can connect, and therefore, by definition, there can be no resistance to protocol” (ibid). With all that said, while governing protocols create and enforce the parameters of an online space, there is always room for disturbance. Complex systems involving multiple protocols and user inputs can react in unforeseen ways, and there are many examples of this to be found in World of Warcraft.
The “corrupted blood” plague of 2005 is one example of a viral breakout of emergent game mechanics.
The “corrupted blood” incident highlights the emergence of unanticipated results within a complex system, even when that system is governed by seemingly incontrovertible protocols. The effect that the curse would have on lower level players would have been obvious to the developers, as the instance was specifically designed with end-game level players in mind, and its effects were never intended to leave the instance. However the ability for player pets to become infected, combined with the fact that they retained the infection when dismissed, allowed some enterprising players to bring the curse out with them, and unleash it upon the rest of the virtual world. This is a perfect example of a hack, or exploit, using the logic of protocol against itself. Whether or not the hack was intentional in the first place or not is somewhat academic, but what we can learn from this event is that protocol can be affected by user agency, and is not infallible. Indeed as Galloway and Thacker put it: “Connectivity is a threat. The network is a weapons system.” (2007: p16). The supposed ’safe area’ of a player capital city was invaded by the electronic equivalent of weapons of mass destruction.
Corrupted blood is a useful point of departure to start thinking about the status of virality in networked media, and how it plays upon network structures in order to propogate and survive. Parikka (2005) states that understanding digital phenomena using complexity theories relies on a recognition of the “co-evolution of the organism and its environment”. That is, not only does the network give rise to viruses and other fragments of digital life, but these in turn shape the further development of the network itself. Indeed, in the case just mentioned, the protocols of the game itself had to be modified. The corrupted blood debuff was recoded so that it could not exist outside of the raid encounter, and the problem of mass player death was removed. However, it would be a mistake to imagine yet another binary paradigm in which the opposing forces of “the network” and “the viral” are placed as antagonists. This kind of approach is often gratifying because it gives the illusion that we have arrived at a simple conclusion, but in truth no such dichotomy is possible, because the two concepts, and more, are interrelated and interdependent. A virus cannot exists without a network to traverse, and network is purposeless without information to transmit.
This reciprocal relation between systems is what characterises the media ecology as described by Fuller (2005). When complex systems, the media, internet, telephony, to name a few, operate parallel and also interconnected with one another: “medial dynamics in combination generate behaviours, qualities, and openings that are more than the sum of their constituent, codified parts” (2005: p24). Medial dynamics does not only mean the movement or activity of the systems themselves, however. It also includes the actions of users, people who change and are themselves changed by what they see and interact with. It is Deleuze who cuts to the root of the issue when discussing Spinoza’s philosophy of existence:
“The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and accelereation of particles.” (Deleuze: 1988: p123)
Through this rubric of understanding, it becomes apparent that World of Warcraft is more than just a cultural product. It is a machinic system with autopoietic properties (creation, distribution and re-production of meanings, ongoing and dependent on outside forces for stimulation), a closed system with permeable walls, a cell to take the biological term to its fullest. As a system, it is much more productive to think in terms of dynamism between any and all points at once, rather than a discursive struggle between ‘bottom-up’ user creativity and ‘top-down’ networks of control. It is not whether one or the other of the forces described above are in dominance, but that they act and react upon each other, and this is what creates their continued fluidity and hence, stability. Stability through turmoil, as a static system is either dead or in stasis. A computer, as a digital device, only recognises signals in terms of off or on, present or not, in the same way, perhaps a useful way of decoding digital culture is to think of them in such terms. A processual conception of culture, which sees activity as necessarily always in process, is vital to this approach, because if a process or computation is finished, then a machine is at rest. It has no further purpose than to sit idle, waiting for further input, it would be a game without players.
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[1]A quick note on genre specificity and terminology: While World of Warcraft, which I will interchangeably describe as WoW on occaision, can also be more accurately described as an MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, due to its heavy reliance on character development and RPG combat systems, I make use of the term Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) here to describe the broader genre of play styles that covers games like Planetside (Sony Online Entertainment: 2003), which can be described as a Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter. The genre distinctions aside, I would suggest that the arguments I make about World of Warcraft could apply to most MMOGs, hence my use of this term.
