Anonymity

Good simulations allow people to do whatever they want to do; good virtual worlds allow people to be whatever they want to be ¹.

Anonymity is itself a neutral concept: You can use it for good or for evil. In practice, someone has to know who you really are, so you can be called to account should you cause pandemonium. In virtual worlds, this will be the administrators; other players don’t get proof of who you are unless (through your behavior) you give it to them.

Reduced consequences for actions makes for the disinhibition that so characterizes virtual worlds. Anonymity is central to this, because only through anonymity do people have the freedom to change. If you make a mistake in the virtual world, you can restart; it’s okay to experiment, to take risks. However, if a real-world friend finds out about some virtual-world mistake, restarting will not erase it. Contact with reality collapses virtual identity like observation does a quantum wave.

Life with a Backspace

Starting a new character is like backspacing over your identity mistakes and retyping them a different way. It’s only possible in virtual worlds ¹.

Anonymity separates the real you from the virtual you. This has three effects:

• People in the virtual world won’t prejudge you on superficialities.

• Your real-world friends won’t judge you by your virtual-world actions.

• Your virtual-world friends won’t judge you by your real-world actions.

Without anonymity, your virtual actions have real-world effects and vice versa. If no one knows you’re the U.S. president, you can be yourself; if they do, you’re back to being the U.S. president.

It doesn’t usually take long for newbies to realize that anonymity means they can restart if they screw up. It’s pretty obvious. However, in practice it’s not actually as important as people often think. The longer you play a character, the more attached to it you become, and the more people come to know that character. You soon reach the stage where you’ve invested so much in that character that if you do screw up you would be very reluctant to throw it all away. Instead, you ride out the storm (and are perhaps a better person because of it).

This can lead to an extra level of anonymity. If you decided to create a second character, you might not want it to be associated with either your real self or your first virtual self. Anonymity lets you branch. Thus, we should think of anonymity ² as acting as a buffer between all your separate identities, not just the real and the virtual. When you start a new identity, your primary concern is to keep the old identities intact and separate. Therefore, the main advantage of anonymity is not that your new friends won’t find out about your other selves; rather it’s that your other friends won’t find out about your new self. It can be the other way round (for newbies and U.S. presidents), but mostly it isn’t. The virtual girl who doesn’t want her friends to know she’s a real-life guy has less to lose than the real-life guy who doesn’t want his friends to know he’s a virtual girl ³.

It turns out that maintaining separate identities in the same virtual world can be quite difficult. Experienced Wild West telegraph operators were able to tell which of the other operators on their line they were communicating with from nuances in the way they tapped out the Morse code ⁴; it’s unsurprising, therefore, that players in virtual worlds can often detect other players by subtleties in the way they act and speak. If you always misspell a particular word, for example, people will notice. This means that anonymity across characters can’t always be relied on. There are ways to succeed, which I’ll discuss a little later; on the whole, though, people who feel they need anonymity should switch to either a different virtual world or a different incarnation of the same one.

An interesting side issue here is that although players will often mature quicker if they regularly start up new characters, most of them are reluctant to do so because of the time they have invested in their old ones. They therefore find themselves facing the same challenges as before, responding in the same ways, and generally not getting much out of the experience. Were they occasionally forced to change character (for example, by its erasing following virtual death), would this not perhaps lead to greater enjoyment for them in the long term? Probably, yes; however, if they knew that characters could die dead-dead after months of playing time, players perhaps wouldn’t sign up for a virtual world in the first place. This is the great tragedy of persona death in virtual worlds, which causes more problems than any other for designers. It is discussed in considerable depth later in this book.

Returning to the topic of anonymity, then: What are the implications of all this on virtual world design?

Well firstly, a certain degree of anonymity must be guaranteed. Clearly, the live team needs access to the real-world details associated with a character, but this information should be considered private. If there is any way that a regular player can uniquely identify another regular player without the latter’s permission, it’s not good. You might think that associating email addresses with every character is beneficial for community development, but that’s not how the majority of players will see it.

Secondly, it shouldn’t go too far. People want to have separate identities, not no identity. If every character looked the same, that would lead to anonymity. If you can’t tell people apart, everyone could be anyone. Identities should be constructible to as great (or shallow) a level of detail that a player wants. Anonymity is relative, between characters; it isn’t absolute for individual characters.

Finally, players should be able to start up new characters with relative ease. Players won’t grow if they can’t occasionally experiment, and they’ll eventually lose faith in the virtual world unless they can start afresh occasionally. This does not mean that they should be offered new accounts at a cheaper rate; rather, there should be several slots on their existing account so they can maintain several characters simultaneously (in practice, the absolute minimum is three, but five is normally enough for most people).

Well, that’s the traditional point of view.

There is another argument that says players should only have one account with only one character on it. In game worlds at least, most people use secondary characters either as mules (which screws up game balance) or as griefers (so they can act like jerks without fear of reprisal). In both instances, the virtual world would be better off without them. Furthermore, in a commercial setting you can check names, addresses, credit card numbers, and computer registry settings to ensure that people don’t simply buy a second account to use for their mule or griefer activities ⁵.

This is the approach adopted by Star Wars Galaxies (although their hands were somewhat tied by the fact that the huge amount of data they store for each character is such that it would exceed their database’s capabilities to allow more than one character per account—well, that’s the official line anyway).

As it happens, none of these are particularly thorny issues for designers (although the number of characters per account may yet become so). The immediate problem with anonymity is practical rather than theoretical: It must be possible for characters to be referenced. This means they need a name. In a virtual world with half a million players, that’s a lot of names.

The Name Problem

In a virtual world, you are represented by, represent, or are an individual. The world fiction may pretend otherwise, for example, by allowing hive minds (for example, ant nests) or shared-mind couples (for example, Tweedledum and Tweedledee), but these are mere conceits. You are associated with a single, sentient game object: your character ¹. So that people can refer to your character in conversation and commands, that character must have a label; in other words, a name.

MUD1 allowed players to have the same names, as long as they weren’t logged on at the same time. This rapidly led to problems of mistaken identity (and, to a lesser extent, impersonation). Permitting only one person with a particular name to be in the virtual world at any one time was no help: Players could find themselves locked out that way. The solution adopted was to allow only one instance of any name in the entire virtual world. There were still occasional problems when a character was killed and someone stole its name before the original player had recovered enough to return, but these were only isolated incidents that could be handled by administrators on a case-by-case basis.

On the whole, this is how virtual worlds are still designed today. There are implementational reasons why two characters ² with the same name should not be allowed into a virtual world at the same time (it makes parsing and communication so much easier), and disallowing name clashes ³ for offline characters, too, is essentially a customer relations requirement (although there are other benefits to do with helping engender a sense of identity).

Virtual worlds with large numbers of players rapidly run out of decent names. It’s not a problem that dogs only virtual worlds, of course—it’s far worse for URLs, AOL account names, and Hotmail email addresses—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue. The designers of Ultima Online anticipated that names would be in short supply, so they took the decision to allow them to be non-unique. To stop lock-outs, people with the same name could both play at the same time. Impersonation and communication evils ensued. Both were fixable while retaining non-unique names, but only with immersion-breaking solutions. The graphical virtual worlds that immediately followed did not make the same mistake, and used unique names from the beginning.

This still meant that there was a shortage of supply, of course: If you have 400,000 players, they need to have 400,000 names (and more if they have multiple characters). An obvious compromise is to limit uniqueness to server cluster (that is, to an individual incarnation/shard). With 40 servers, players’ imaginations need only stump up 10,000 different names, which is far more tractable. Sure, some other guy might be using your name on a different server, but your friends are all on this one.

How to choose a name? Players identify more with their characters if they get to choose the names themselves; name selection is the first and arguably most important decision concerning their virtual identity that a player can make. Giving them a free hand, though, can be tiresomely fiction-breaking (Robinhood the elf is here). It’s a problem: Randomly select any virtual world with a policy of free naming and the chances are there will be someone called “Gandalf”—irrespective of the genre.

One solution, hinted at previously, is to use a restrictive naming policy. Administrators vet prospective names. This is practical and very effective in virtual worlds with strong role-playing elements, because in explaining why their character has the name it does, a player must necessarily flesh out that character. It’s a barrier to entry, though: If someone tries to play your virtual world and finds there’s a 10-minute delay while you okay the character name, they’ll go somewhere else that doesn’t have a 10-minute delay. It’s also way too expensive to implement for virtual worlds that have thousands of newbies arriving every day.

A way to preserve an element of choice, while limiting the freedom to choose something unfortunate as a name, is to use name lists. The idea is to present players with a list of, say, 10 or 20 available names, and let them pick which one they want. If none of them really suit, another list can perhaps be presented, until all the options are exhausted. Players could still be given the option to enter a freeform name and wait for it to be vetted, but they wouldn’t have to do so.

There are a number of ways that name lists can be generated. The most obvious one is to do it randomly. This has to be good to work: EverQuest tried it, but it wasn’t and it didn’t.

Another way is to use the context of the virtual world to present possibilities. This is used sometimes in pencil-and-paper role-playing games. The idea is that the character’s name is built up from syllables that have a meaning in some ancient language supposedly spoken by the character’s people. A typical arrangement is to have an opening syllable, one or more middle syllables, and a closing syllable. An elf might thus choose “Ard-la-shi-sa” meaning “tree-of-silent-spirit,” whereas a dwarf (using a different set of syllables and ostensible meanings) might pick “Khad-rak-uz” meaning “Stone-strongbeard.” These are fun for designers to design and for players to play with, but you have to be careful—I once managed to get Fu-qu-az-ole out of one of these.

Using such pseudo-cultural definitions for names, it’s possible to re-introduce a modicum of non-unique naming. If players are given a surname based on their character’s race/class/gender/ whatever, then they might be able to choose the same first name as someone else with a different surname. If Urk Wolfhead and Urk Sharpspear play at the same time, either can be referred to as Urk by other members of their tribe or by people in the same general location as they. Only when someone from a different tribe wants to reference one rather than the other does the surname also have to be used (adjectivally). This is a neat solution that allows for some degree of choice while preserving the decorum of the virtual world.

Names are referents, but they are not the only ones. Hey, you know that charismatic, short, French general who conquered half of Europe in the early 1800s? Well yes, of course you do—it was Napoleon Bonaparte. I didn’t have to give you his name before you knew who he was, though, did I ⁴? There is an argument that virtual worlds should allow this kind of relative description for characters, and that it should be preferred until you’ve actually been introduced to someone (or told who they are by someone who already “knows”). The rationale for this is that in the real world people don’t walk about with their names tattooed to their foreheads, and therefore neither should characters in virtual worlds. The counter argument is that having to refer to someone as “The Tall Stranger” the whole time gets in the way of interactions—even if it eventually encourages people to interact by asking each other their names. As with many real-versus-virtual arguments, both sides have a point, and it’s ultimately up to designers to decide how they want to handle the situation in their own virtual world. Most of them go with the see-the-names approach, because it’s easier on newbies. If people complain, they can always produce some fiction to explain it away (“All player characters are by definition heroic, therefore they’re also famous, therefore everyone knows who everyone else is already”).

Relative names illustrate a point that game designers often forget: Names are owned by an individual, but used by everyone else. If “The Tall Stranger” won’t tell me his name, I may just decide to call him Lanky: I can invent names for other people. In MUD1, killers would give themselves hard-to-type names like Mmnmnnmn so that people would have a hard time casting spells on them, stealing goodies from them, and so on. I got round this by using pronouns, although this was not itself without problems. In particular, you might type something like “sleep him” then just as you were hitting return a friend would appear and change the binding for “him.” MUD2 added the ability to create synonyms for players and objects, so that once you (or anyone else) had typed “syn Mmnmnnmn as “Mm,” you could thereafter refer to Mmnmnnmn as Mm.

Why stop there, though? Why not allow players to annotate one another? Most people see, “Jay says, ‘hello’”; you see, “Jay the boring creep says, ‘hello’.”

This raises the issue of how players annotate themselves.

Image

Traditionally, virtual worlds make a distinction between stats (short for “statistics”) and knowledge. Stats are what characters have (strength, dexterity, magic points, and so on); knowledge is what players have (how to bring down a dragon, the route to the citadel, that player B is an idiot, and so on). The virtual world knows everything about stats and nothing about knowledge; for this reason, the terms tangibles and intangibles are used when referring to attributes of characters ¹ as opposed to attributes of players. A player’s knowledge of tangibles is itself intangible, of course.

Only tangibles are meaningful to the virtual world, but both tangibles and intangibles are meaningful to players. Virtual worlds generally have no way even to know that player A thinks player B is an idiot, let alone to model the fact. Players, however, do like to know this stuff, and are excellent at assimilating it. Many virtual worlds therefore provide what are essentially bookkeeping facilities for players, wound into their own context to maintain a degree of immersion. However, they don’t actually use any of it to introduce goals for the players—they have no access to the content of the information, just to its form. There is therefore no gameplay reason why a player should be able to make a private annotation to another player’s character; it just adds to their enjoyment.

The most important intangible is a character’s name. Unless the name is constructed from components that the virtual world knows about, it has absolutely no handle on what a name might “mean.” Players will hazard a guess that Cupcake and Hardcore might have different personalities, but the virtual world doesn’t know. Names that are names in real-life are especially potent: Anyone picking such a name has some reason for doing so (typically to do with role-playing or real-life self-image). There are plenty of other intangibles, however. It costs a virtual world practically nothing to allow characters to have different color clothes, hair, weapons, and so on, but it allows people to individualize themselves and make personal statements. This is made easier by the fact that these are recognizably intangible: At character-creation time, players aren’t going to worry about the gameplay effect of having blue eyes, whereas they might for having a particular weapon or skill. They can concentrate on their image. Purists often sneer at such distractions from what a virtual world is “about.” Why would anyone in their right mind want to wear a suit of crimson armor if there are cheaper regulation gray ones that offer a better defense? Shouldn’t designers be investing their time in extending gameplay rather than adding yet more eye candy? Some designers do go overboard in this regard, it’s true, but then some non-gameplay features can be absolutely critical. Strictly speaking, for example, communication between players is rarely necessary for gameplay reasons, yet take it away and you don’t have a virtual world.

That said, the purists do have a point in that although there’s no reason why a suit of crimson armor should have any gameplay differences from a regular suit of armor, there’s no reason for it not to, either. If someone has gone to the trouble of collecting all the various crimson parts (breastplate, helmet, gauntlets, epaulettes, grieves, and so on), it doesn’t hurt to make the parts or the suit as a whole give more protection against, say, fire than a standard-issue suit; what’s more, it makes it a little more interesting for achiever types. Even someone who is wearing it only because it makes them look good might feel more satisfied if they can convince themselves there is a “legitimate” gameplay reason for sporting it ². Note that this does not apply for customizations that players pay for. There is money to be made in selling players one-off character modifications or pieces of customized kit, but only if it doesn’t affect gameplay. It’s okay to replace a shield with a functionally equivalent one that looks different, but it’s not okay to replace it with one that acts different; otherwise, players who can’t afford to pay for such a change will complain bitterly that they are disadvantaged ³. Changes to intangibles are acceptable, but changes to tangibles aren’t.

Tangibles mainly interest achievers. It therefore comes as little surprise to learn that intangibles are particularly important to socializers. Therefore, designers who want to make their virtual worlds attractive to socializers usually incorporate a number of intangible-friendly tools in their worlds. As the celebration of identity lies at the very core of virtual worlds, chief among these will be the means made available to players for determining their appearances in the virtual world.

The mechanisms for creating a basic character differ between textual and graphical worlds, and the various options are discussed fully in Chapter 5, “Life in the Virtual World.” For now, though, we’ll assume that a new character has been created: This new character is the player’s opening statement. Customizations subsequent to it are modifications to that statement and can say important things about the way individuals view themselves. It is therefore in the best interests of designers to make customization easy, so that people can go where they want to go. The simplest method is to allow players to make freeform notes about themselves that other players can read as an adjunct to their name, but this is just one of three general approaches available:

• Tangibles real for the virtual world. A character can remove a suit of armor and give it to some other character who will benefit from its protective attributes.

• Intangibles real for the virtual world. Your character can dye their hair yellow and their hair will thenceforth be reported as being yellow—even if hair color is transparent to the mechanisms of the virtual world.

• Intangibles virtual for the virtual world. You can annotate yourself with a publicly readable note that says dogs adore you, but the virtual world would take no account of it were you to encounter one.

Players can therefore use a combination of methods to make statements about—that is, to express—themselves. They can write their description such that when someone looks at them they’re told they see “a mighty knight;” they can wear some impressive-looking armor that makes them appear like they’re mighty knights; they can wear some top-of-the-range plate mail that makes them be a mighty knight.

Freeform descriptions aren’t as important in graphical worlds as they are in textual ones, because people go by looks in the former and by “look” commands in the latter. Most MUDs have freeform descriptions, and they’re considered the main way (other than by name) to flesh out a character. There are two problems, however, neither of which is immediately apparent.

The first is practical. On the face of it, it might be thought that there could be trouble with hugely unsuitable descriptions ⁴ if people are allowed to depict their characters however they see fit, but this is only the case for griefers (who are trouble anyway).

Other players may inflate their status, but it’s easy to spot and only makes the perpetrator look foolish (well, not quite “only”—it spoils immersion for others, too). No, the main problem with the content of personal descriptions is that they are often either touchingly illiterate or irredeemably clichéd. There may be a thousand ways to say that a character is tall, dark, and mysterious, but if every male character you meet is basically tall, dark, and mysterious then they all kind of merge into one. They even have eyes that seem to pierce your very soul the same way ⁵. Female characters are green-eyed, flame-haired, pale-skinned beauties who move with the catlike grace of a dancer while wielding matching swords. Oh, and they have heaving breasts, too. There must be a factory somewhere manufacturing them.

The second problem is less easy to fix by taking someone aside and having a quiet word. The thing is, it’s an act of will to change a description. The player may change, but unless they notice it their character’s description won’t. Even if it does, there are limits; “tall, dark, and mysterious” may mean a player feels out of place and misunderstood yet possessing of hidden depths, but if they later feel at home, at ease, and gregarious, how do they change their description to reflect that? Their character shrank a few inches and went blond overnight? Worse, will they even effect a change if every time they meet someone new they’re treated like they were tall, dark, and mysterious? Freeform descriptions can anchor players too much; in graphical worlds, the same applies to their character’s visual appearance. I didn’t implement character descriptions in MUD1 precisely for this reason: Players can explore their identities more freely if they aren’t tied to some image ⁶.

There are two basic mechanisms for getting around this.

The first one is to have characters die occasionally, so players have to create new ones. This gives players the opportunity for some redefinition. Persona death has other implications, however, so this is not necessarily an option for most designers.

The other approach is profiling. The idea here is that characters have computer-generated descriptions based on their actions. It’s not as expressive as freeform text you’ve written yourself, but at least it gets updated. Its most basic form is to tag a character’s name by some epithet based on some combination of that character’s level of experience, class, race, and gender: “Felice the heroine” rather than just plain “Felice.” Special titles and epithets, for example “Felice the giant-killing heroine,” can be added for particularly exemplary deeds, either automatically or by admiring administrators.

Longer biographies can be built up separately, for anyone to access if they want to know more about a character’s actual deeds. This allows people to form an opinion about a character, which is particularly useful in virtual worlds where characters never really “die.” The half-life of these descriptions should depend on their importance. “Felice vanquished the maiden and saved the dragon” might be a big deal for a relative newbie, but not worth a mention after a couple of weeks. “Felice beat seven kinds of hell out of Tommy and took his shoes” would probably hang around to stain Felice’s reputation for somewhat longer.

Profiling also can be used as a more general tool to provide information for other parts of the system. For example, if a group of players finally destroy the demon lord after two months of trying, the server could automatically generate a newsflash (for a login message, for a web site, for a mobile phone message, for email) to inform everyone what’s happened. Done right, it may even be possible to create faux articles for the virtual world’s virtual newspapers.

It’s therefore not only individual players who can benefit from a virtual world’s acceptance of intangibles: the whole community can.