Epidemics in MMORPG

Almost every game nowadays posts a message before the game starts stating that game play experience may change when playing this game online. Which rather makes us think that internet can be such a scary place to be in or it maybe the next best thing that happened to you. But more than scary people lurking the internet it’s the people who disrupt gameplay and spoil the whole experience of playing an MMORPG.

The idea of going to a PvE Server is mainly to avoid having to handle with stupid fights when you want to learn the game and try new things. That’s the mistake I did, I got into a PvP server and needless to say my level one paladin stood no chance against the bunch of rogues I ran into. Every time I went back to my body (after they killed me) they used to lurk around, waiting for me. And me being a grade A World of Warcraft noob, did not realize it for the first 8 times they killed me! I don’t know how level 52 rogues can stoop to such low levels by assaulting a level one paladin time and again. I so wanted to say “I did not wish to lower myself by engaging your kind, but you leave me little choice!” and decapitate them all.

That said, I quit that server and hopped onto a PvE server. I get to create my player character once again. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I do not need to take the same character that was mauled up in the previous PvP server. I would say out of all the MMORPGs out there; World of Warcraft employs the most number of character customization. It will let you change the head gear, skin color, hair style, facial hair, etc you name it. It’s probably the case with most gamers out there, but I always tend to use a male character for an FPS game, but a female character for third person game. I guess, it’s because I don’t want to keep looking at a dude running (and dancing) for multiple hours in-game. Anyways the strategy of moving to a PvE server proved the most effective, as there were much “friendly” NPCs in this world. I had already decided that I will show no mercy. In a skirmish I cornered a “ferocious” pig and showed it who is boss!

Lastly if you are going to die, die with honor, or at least style. Fellow players talk about your “bravery” at great lengths for a long time after you die; like one to two minutes! You don’t want “diseases” killing you in game. I over heard about this disease called corrupted blood that killed a lot of people back in the early World of Warcraft days. I was so curious, I had to look it up in Wikipedia and unsurprisingly I did find some interesting tidbits.

Virtual epidemics are worse than virtual thefts. Corrupted Blood was a virtual plague that infected characters in the computer game World of Warcraft, spreading rapidly from character to character. Its resemblance to real-life disease epidemics drew international attention in the news. The epidemic began on September 13, 2005 when Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, introduced a new instance called Zul'Gurub into the game as part of patch 1.7. Inside this instance was a boss named Hakkar the Soulflayer, alluded to as the "blood god". Players who fought Hakkar were affected by his debuff (a spell which has a negative effect over a fixed period of time). The debuff, in this case, was Corrupted Blood, a spell that caused 250–300 points of damage (compared to the average health of 2500-5000 for a character of the highest level, and with those at the mid-levels having about 1500) every few seconds to the afflicted character. The affliction was passed on to any characters standing too close to an infected character. While the curse would kill most lower-level characters in a matter of seconds, higher-level characters could keep themselves alive (via healing spells, having high stamina, or other means) long enough to spread the disease around the immense landscape inside the game. After a few days, Corrupted Blood had become World of Warcraft's version of the Black Death, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and causing players to avoid large clusters of other players, and in many cases, causing players to avoid major cities altogether.

Every so often, Hakkar will cast this debuff on a random player, effectively forcing players to be spread apart, or in the case of melee classes, to move away from Hakkar before spreading it to the other melee classes. Blizzard Entertainment tried several times to fix the problem, including imposing quarantine on certain places. This "plague" was eventually "cured" by changing the mechanics of the Hakkar encounter to eliminate the spreading of the effect from character to character. Hakkar still has an ability called Corrupted Blood, but it now takes the form of a red bolt launched at a random player fighting the boss. The player and those nearby take damage, and receive a heavy damage over time, but the effect no longer spreads further.

In March 2007, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, published an article in the Journal Epidemiology describing the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr Balicer suggested role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. In a follow-up article in the Journal Science, the game Second Life was suggested as another possible platform for these studies.

Courtesy: Corrupted Blood from Wikipedia

A Brief Aside for Logistics

Tomorrow from 11:30 to 12:30, as a class we will be attending Dr. Jonathan Frome's lecture in ATEC 1.606, entitled "Levels of Engagement: Why Different Media Generate Different Emotions." Dr. Frome is a candidate for the film studies position; his dissertation is entitled "Why Films make Us Cry but Videogames Don't: Emotions in Traditional and Interactive Media." Come prepared with hard questions.

We'll discuss the current round of papers after his lecture. See you then!

Character is Only the Domain of Man/Woman/Imaginary Being

The topics surrounding character gender in games with user created avatars have existed since before the beginning of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game genre, floating around in the realm of the Pen and Paper RPGs. Of all the topics in this area the most widely discussed is that of cross-gender character creation. That is to say, male players playing female characters and female players playing male characters.

I personally have played a lot of MMOs and, as a male, have played a large number of female characters. At least seventy percent of the characters that I actually put time into are female. However, my quick acceptance and seeming preference for playing female characters puts me among a small group of people. In my experience most male players might have the occasional female character, but the large majority of their characters are still male. In addition to my large amount of experience with MMOs, I have also played various Pen and Paper RPGs for many years. Having for a long time always been the Game Master in almost all the Pen and Paper gaming groups I have been in, I have acted for an innumerable number of female NPCs. This might partially explain my comfort with playing characters of the opposite gender, but more interestingly is the number of different kinds of players I have encountered in these groups.

I will be concentrating on just the relationship of male players playing female characters for now because I have more experience in that area and the reverse relationship will come later. I have met people with several different personal views on this subject, determined through my observation of their play. First comes people who prefer to play female characters for whatever personal reason and play them almost exclusively. There are people who, like me, are comfortable with playing characters of the opposite gender and will play whatever they feel fits best with the concept they’ve come up with. Then there are the players who have played female characters a few times, but only as experimentation or a change of pace, they largely play male characters. The next kind of player plays male characters almost to exclusivity and the reason can range from that’s just what they feel comfortable with to coincidence to that’s their natural choice and they don’t ever think about why. Then the last type that I have met on occasion feels very uncomfortable with the idea of playing a character of the opposite gender. They don’t necessarily view it in the same way as they might view cross-dressing, but they still treat it with a sort of light awkward laughter.

Although it is to a lesser degree because of the anonymity of playing a character in an MMO versus playing a character at a table of people and then having to speak that character’s actions and words, these types of views can still be seen in the world of MMOs. It is likely that any uncomfortable feelings or stigma attached to this process is due to views in culture as a whole. Men who wear women’s clothing are odd at best and men who act in any sort of feminine way are assumed to be homosexual. So how might someone who wishes to place themselves into the role of a female character be viewed?

This brings us to female players playing male characters. It seems to be a more common and more widely accepted practice. From what I’ve heard of people discussing the topic and from what I’ve observed of people’s reactions, female players who play male characters are not seen as different and female players who don’t want to play male characters are not viewed as “silly”. It’s likely that this also stems from cultural views. A woman doing “men” things is more readily accepted than vice-versa, even the term ‘tomboy’ is used less nowadays. A man wearing women’s clothing is weird, whereas a woman wearing what is seen or used to be seen as “men’s” clothing is an everyday occurence. This isn’t a reprimand on the unfairness of society or anything, just an observation on how the culture is.

This reflection of real life into the virtual world may offer an explanation for at least one reason why the male to female and the female to male player to character relationships are viewed in so many different ways. There is also the fact that there are people who just want to play their gender merely because it is what they are used to and those who want to play the opposite gender because when imagining themselves as someone else they might as well be as far from themselves as possible. There are any number of reasons for both kinds of character choices and this just scratches the surface of the topic.

My MMO character history (Only those characters who were played past the first few levels adjusted according the leveling system of the game. I have made too many characters in CoH and CoV.):

Guild Wars: Name Forgotten – Female Assassin

Final Fantasy XI: Name Forgotten – Female Elvaan Red Mage

Star Wars Galaxies: Skizzix – Male Trandoshan Smuggler

EVE: Lenai – Female Gallente (Smuggler/Drone User)

City of Heroes: Lenai – Female Defender (main)

Remade and forgot new name – Female Scrapper (other main)

RocknRollMartian – Male Ass Kicking Band Leader

Tiddlywinks – Robot Scrapper

City of Villains: Lenai – Female Stalker

World of Warcraft: Searniz – Male Troll Rogue (main)

Roury – Female Night Elf Rogue

Lenai – Female Blood Elf Rogue (other main)

Male:Female:Genderless Robot ratio - 3:8:1

Paper 2

 
The ultimate goal in EVE is power.
- Official EVE Online Website

EVE Online is almost completely differentiated from the myriad of other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) available in the market today. The game assumes a “harsh reality” and is unforgiving even in the early stages of “NOOB” play. The galaxies of EVE are reminiscent of the lawless, money-driven, “Wild-West” galaxies of the Ferengi from Star Trek or the Hutt-run galaxies of Star Wars. EVE presents an interesting universe, one in which the story is but a novelty, and the narrative becomes almost entirely player-driven. Despite the lack of a traditional graphic avatar, EVE provides a large amount of flexibility in the amount of role-playing one wishes to do. However, the entire universe of EVE revolves around and is completely dependent upon the extremely complex, realistic, and volatile virtual economy. “The ultimate goal in EVE is power,” and in EVE economic power reigns supreme. EVE supports a multitude of play-styles, however, the matter which style one prefers, economics will play a vital role in their survival. With this in mind, EVE offers a truly unique avenue for digital identity in that your reputation and identity is not measured by your appearance or speech, but instead by your economic standing and business cunning.

EVE Online employs a heretofore unseen level of economic complexity. Every sale, every purchase, and every ISK (Interstellar Kredit: the base monetary unit of EVE) must be analyzed and weighed against other options. For example, the opportunity cost of mining ore for 2 hours could far outweigh the cost of buying it for 3.01 ISK per unit. In fact, EVE’s economic forces are so powerful that CCP (the developer) publishes a quarterly economic newsletter giving growth rates, inflation/ deflation rates, consumer price index, and gross user product, to name a few. In their newsletter, CCP states, “our knowledge of the economic forces in EVE is increasing, guiding us closer towards the ability to make short-term economic forecasts for macroeconomic variables in EVE.” Although intimidating at first glance, the universe of EVE allows for easy access to the economic statistics for your particular region. This enables the player to approach an economic transaction in several ways:

1. Find the average region price and sell at the same price or cut into your profit and undercut the lowest seller.

2. Charge a premium, or “convenience fee,” for being the exclusive seller of an item in a farther system.

3. Keeping an item in hopes that someday you will be able to afford the skill, train it, and finally try to use the item only to find out your ship doesn’t have the capacity.

In addition to the obvious market transactions of buying and selling, EVE also allows the player own corporate stock, create contracts, manufacture items from blueprints, research new items, and earn ISK through bounty hunting NPCs or player initiated bounties. It is during these activities where the players’ reputations truly become paramount. The most notorious players have the highest bounties on their heads, and the best mercenaries receive the high-paying contracts. Due to the economic nature of the game, I believe EVE gives the player more freedom to be themselves throughout the virtual experience.

The corporate structure of EVE creates a rewarding experience for the socially-tuned player. Corporations offer protection, coordinated mining endeavors, price fixing, and a source of pride. On the other hand, unlike some MMORPGs, EVE can be a very rewarding solo experience. Solo adventuring can build confidence and wallets. Many corporations identify with a single task at which they claim to be experts. These include mining corps, fleets for hire, manufacturing corps, etc. The corporation to which a player owes his/ her allegiance is another source for in-game reputation. These corporations can become so large and exert enough influence to control the ebb and flow of the economic tides. There have been stories of weeklong blockades, corporations fizzling out due to economic miscalculations, and the infamous “Heist.” The corporation actually plays a bigger part in the role-playing aspect of the game than the character’s race or sex. Striving to be bigger, better, and richer is what makes players stay in the game.

EVE Online employs an interesting dynamic not shared by many MMORPGs: the universe can make you feel insignificant due to its overwhelming size (EVE comprises of over 5,000 systems totaling countless KM2 of virtual space) but CCP goes out of their way to include the players in decision making processes. I believe that this adds greatly to the enjoyment of EVE and does much to fuse the player with his/ her digital identity. CCP was quoted as saying, “Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption,” after being accused of favoritism. This is a powerful statement showing the true feelings the developers and many players share about EVE. CCP also uses technology to uniquely add to the engrossing nature of this game. All 200,000 players are housed on one super-server, thus allowing a large, permanent virtual-community to establish itself in the Eve universe.

CCP has created an opportunist’s paradise, one in which economics and market forces rule all. Eve is a vast, cold expanse filled with dreams of economic superiority; a place where one man’s unfair monopoly is another man’s cash cow. CCP has created a universe in which the players make the decisions, drive the market, and make trades across billions of miles. Business cunning, political savvy, and guts are the tools of the EVE role-player as they try to carve out a piece of this place to call their own.

If you want to see the economic report go to http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q4-2007.pdf.

Topic 2

I played World of Warcraft to look into the aspects of anonymity and behavior online and also the creation of avatars and if they had any significance to the identity of the player. Do people act differently? Did their avatars say things about them, either known or unknown to the player?
The more I played the game, the more I realized that with the time I had to play the game there would be no way to find the knowledge I was looking for. World of Warcraft (WOW) is a game that to fully experience a player must invest large amounts of time. The online community is a very tight knit group and to gain respect from the other players your rank must show you are devoted. With my skill, I could not gain the experience I needed; therefore I could not gain access to the social elements I was interested in. I chose instead to look into the book Computer Mediated Communication which shows research into the internet as a whole. My purpose was to see which elements that were present in dealing with digital identity online translated over to the gaming world.
While the book discusses mostly text-based online interaction, the points made are valid and strongly applicable to WOW, as well as many other online communities. “Scholars talk about our having multiple identities – people take on different identities throughout their lives and find new ways to represent themselves to the world (Thurlow 97).” Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games allow people to create another character that lives in an online world. This character can be a branching of their current identity or they can try to create an entirely different identity with them. This topic relates to how we are in real world; we are constantly reinventing ourselves, our identity is always evolving. In my opinion, nothing is really wrong with this. If someone is more comfortable and can express themselves more openly online, then they should do so.
Online communities allow people who wish to express themselves more in the real world communities a chance to do just that. “Anonymity [of the internet] paved the way for disembodiment – an identity which was no longer dependent on, or constrained by, your physical appearance…It would give an opportunity for those whose voices had not been heard before to speak and be heard (Thurlow 99).” The book referred to the internet as being color blind. Personal characteristics such as race, gender and religion are only known if you let them be. Also the aspect of being anonymous can give some people the courage to voice their opinion. It also may encourage others to express themselves in a negative way. For instance, we discussed in class the WOW funeral scene where a group of people came charging in and ruined a funeral, obviously this would never happen in real life. The aspect of anonymity however allows, and possibly encourages, people to act out more. I know many people who will make crude remarks online without thinking twice when in a real life social setting would never imagine it.
The authors of Computer Mediated Communication also quoted the famous internet scholar Sherry Turkle referring to chat rooms, “You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want…You are the character and you are not the character, both at the same time. You are who you pretend to be (99).” Creating an avatar is creating another identity. I believe there is rarely a direct correlation between a user and an avatar. Many times people just pick one to try something different they cannot do in the real world or enjoy the aesthetics of a certain character. Some of my colleagues have mentioned they will almost always play a character of the opposite gender, just because it is something different from their real life. Like the research given to us in class, occasionally it really could be someone trying to live out a different identity in the best way they know how; however I believe if they spend enough time with the same group of people they may eventually give themselves away. Based on our class discussions the majority of one’s selection seems to be personal preference without a deeper meaning in most cases.
“It’s therefore important to put online identities into context: first, in the context of the fluid, multiple nature of offline identity, and second, in the context of what people are really up to in cyberspace (Thurlow 102).” My final thoughts are that each individual would need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis; but overall there is no direct correlation. Anonymity online will allow, and encourage, people to act more confidently for positive or negative impact on the online world.

Thurlow, Crispin; Lengel, Laura and Tomic, Alice. Computer Mediated Communication. Sage Publications, 2004.

Character Customization in Guild Wars

Character creation can be a fun, painstaking part of the MMO experience. Players expect options for their character’s appearance if they plan to spend an extended period in a virtual world. Guild Wars’ creation process allows players to select their character’s appearance from premade faces and hairstyles. While selecting from a pool of skins formed by the developers’ imagination may keep characters within the aesthetic confines of the game world, the limits may come into conflict with the visual individuality of a character, the personal preferences of the player, and the depiction of the sexes.

One may run through the vast MMO world with a hundred different players on the screen at one time. One may also find their character’s twin, or even triplet, in that crowd. Guild Wars does not offer a great range of initial character customization. Players can only play as the human race, despite other races existing within the Guild Wars world. A player’s decision to select certain avatar options may be swayed by the options available or not available in avatar customization. Developers gave female characters a larger pool of faces and hairstyles compared to male characters. However, female characters do not have a choice to be old or horribly disfigured, but male characters have old, haggard, and scarred options. Thus, male characters have less choices to be attractive—and less choices in general—while female characters have many choices in meshes but no choice to be unattractive. Because many people would rather play a unique, attractive character, the higher possibilities for attractive features and more options in faces and hairstyles may support the inclination to play a female character.

Character customization, of course, does not end at the initial creation of the character. The character’s profession determines what kind of armor or clothing that character can wear. Professions follow a theme in their equipment. For example, while there are several variations to armor sets, warriors can only wear heavy armor, mesmers can only wear fancy outfits, and dervishes can only wear long robes. Armor sets, however, can be mixed within each profession, allowing players to find creative armor combinations. In an effort to further customization, Guild Wars implemented a system in the third chapter where players could buy armor of any appearance with the highest armor rating and customize the armor’s statistics.

The system, conversely, has little use if the armor sets are not particularly to one’s taste. By setting each profession in a rigid image, some armor sets fall short in creativeness. Nearly all female characters’ armor sets are close-fitting or show skin in unpractical places while their male counterparts are covered from head to toe in bulky gear. Female characters’ armor, on the other hand, has finer, more intricate details, and higher quality than male armor. Again, these are reasons why some people may choose a female character over a male character.

Creativity waned in the coming of the last chapter. Old armor meshes were retextured and marketed as new armor. While armor had been retextured and noted as different armor sets before, the community became enraged at the lower texture quality produced in the final chapter of the series where they expected entirely new armor sets. Players, too, had been asking for variation in armor within their profession. Female elementalists wanted options for more modest dress. Assassins did not want spikes jutting out of their shoulders and limbs and pleaded not to have anymore spikes. Many times, players only received half of their requests, even as early as the beta.

In the beta, female warriors were as thin as spell casters with necks just as long. Players complained about giraffe necks and that they preferred the warrior to at least appear capable of wielding a two-handed hammer without her arms snapping off, and the developers partially responded. Female warriors were given faintly more muscle in their arms. In contrast, the male warriors have always been thick, muscular gladiators. Their necks and thighs appear as solid as the tree trunks in the environment. Many people reported on forum polls that they had chosen female warriors because they found the male warriors too thickset, not the least bit attractive, and even loutish. This posed a problem for players who wanted to play male warriors as intelligent, elegant, righteous leaders, since many other players would only see them as twelve-year-old brutes. The developers did not see the need to change the male warrior’s appearance nor the female characters’ necks.

The developers hold a set vision for the professions, as well as what defines male or female. A player is given appearances to choose from by the developers, and what those aesthetic decisions are affect, to some degree, the character a player will select. If a player finds a duplicate of his or her character, the twins may be amused, take screenshots, and forget about the encounter. They may not wonder why they look alike, or they may subconsciously guess why they look alike—there were no better faces, or it was the best looking armor. In games where character customization is limited to selecting from premade appearances, many players may not find designs to their liking and will have to settle.

A Spade is a Spade: You Can't Force Socialization

There are many different types of MMORPG players and many different theories on how to categorize them. No matter how you choose to categorize them, there are two categories that always come up in some form or another; gamers and socializers. Gamers are players who play MMORPGs because they are a game. Socializers are players who play MMORPGs for community and socialization. While not mutually exclusive, these are two important distinctions to make in terms of design. Nowadays, developers seem to be intent on trying to capture more socializers in their demographic. This seems to be rooted in the idea that a strong social community can make up for weak design choices, lags in updates of new content, and keep an MMO thriving after its pinnacle of activity. The most interesting case of this is in a fairly new MMORPG titled Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO).

DOMO focuses its design almost entirely on the social aspect of its game. Every part of the gameplay is made for players to work together. Every player is allowed to level every class in the game on any of his characters. Upon leveling multiple classes, the player can choose to use skills from other classes to augment his main class's power. Four of these classes (the doctor, the musician, the dancer, and the merchant) seem to be built entirely with teamwork in mind. While possible to level these classes in solo play, it is significantly easier to level with the aid of other party members. Even the classes that can level by themselves easily have at least one skill that seems to benefit another class more than their own class. On top of this, quests are designed to be incredibly difficult at the levels they are given without a group backing the player up. DOMO even uses the Chinese Zodiac to match people up with your character that would be compatible as friends, rivals, or lovers in real life so you can have an excuse to party with someone. Finally, DOMO uses a relationship system that allows players to designate players as friends, teachers, students, or lovers. These relationships actually give major combat bonuses to the player while playing near the person they have this relationship with. All of this is built in to give social players a gameplay advantage while encouraging more gameplay oriented gamers to team up more often and make friends.

However, this system, while fascinating, doesn't seem to be entirely successful. After having played for three weeks, I have noticed some interesting facts about the players in the game. Despite being very heavily balanced towards multiple players, a large number of players still choose to work on missions as a solo effort. This is clearly harder to accomplish, but it doesn't stop solo players from playing solo. Furthermore, despite it being a major mechanical benefit, only one of my real life friends that chose to test the game with me decided to form a friendship. General player reaction on forums and in the game also seem to show a general avoidance of these relationships. Even the lover relationship, which gives what some consider game-breaking level benefits, seems to be avoided. As a matter of fact, the idea of having an “online lover” seems to freak people out so much that it is avoided even more. The only reason I can seem to find for avoiding these relationships is the fact that once you have a relationship with someone, it seems like you almost have an obligation to party with that person. Does giving someone mechanical benefits really give someone a social responsibility to follow? Is this a job? On the other hand, the extremely social gamers with no interest in power seem to have no problem with forming relationships in game. Boards with these kinds of players are filled with topics asking for new friends, lovers, and teachers. It's odd that the people that would desire a mechanical benefit the most would shy away from it the most because of an implied social hierarchy.

In the end, I don't think DOMO's party friendly engine is necessarily a failure, but I think their attempt to turn their more game-driven gamers to a more social attitude is mostly a failure. It seems to be conclusive evidence that you can't change a player's inherent style of play. With everything focused so heavily on the socialization aspect its a wonder whether DOMO will be able to keep their game-driven audience overtime. Either way, DOMO is always going to be a great place for social gamers.