Masquerading

Role-playing a character is one thing; role-playing a player is something else.

Suppose you’re male in real life, playing a female character. Some other player asks you whether you’re female in real life. You have three options:

• Tell the truth. Everyone knows you’re a real-life guy, but who cares? Most people will happily play along with the fiction.

• Don’t answer the question. Everyone still knows you’re a real-life guy, but they respect the fact that you’re role-playing and want to keep in character.

• Lie. Now you’re not role-playing a character, you’re role-playing a player (an alter ego) who is playing a character.

Why do people lie about player/character mappings?

It may be because they have a real-world reason for it: They are an administrator for the virtual world trying to get a sense of the “the word on the street”; they are famous and want to take a break ¹; they are parents checking out that a game is suitable for their children. In this sort of situation, they are said to be playing incognito. Usually, they’ll be happy for the administrators of the virtual world to know the score, just so long as other players don’t find out.

For the majority, though, there usually isn’t any premeditated reason to lie. They do it because they can, or because it gives them a frisson of excitement, or because they like the way people treat them, or simply to see what happens. Almost always, they don’t think it’s all that big a deal to start with; they will nevertheless try to keep their activities a secret from administrators just as much as from other players. Role-playing a person who is playing a character is called masquerading.

The problem with masquerading is that deep relationships are formed between people, not between characters. Characters can have virtual relationships (a player can cause Tommy to act like he loves Tammy), but players have real ones (the player playing Tommy really does love the player playing Tammy). The longer and more convincingly a lie is sustained, the more meaningful the relationships formed become; when the lie is finally exposed, the emotional effect can be absolutely devastating. Finding out that the 20-year-old, wheelchair-bound ex-athlete you’ve been getting to know over the course of two years is actually a 40-year-old company lawyer from Chicago could represent for you a betrayal of trust at a profound level. All that time you were building up an emotional attachment, someone was playing you for a fool. Everything was a lie, from beginning to end.

I’ve seen it happen several times, and it really is very, very upsetting for all concerned. So, how do you spot it?

Most of the time, it’s easy. People will often realize what’s happening in time and stop before things get out of hand. Of those that don’t, many are found out early because of flaws in their role-playing (“How come you type so fast if you have two-inch long fingernails?”). For the remainder, it’s harder. Nevertheless, because most people don’t plan on masquerading (they just fall into it), there are a number of common themes.

Players will:

• Claim their alter ego is physically attractive or of high status.

• Give their alter ego’s character the same valid real-world name as their alter ego (especially when crossing gender).

• Invent some reason why their alter ego can’t go to real-life meets (disability, phobia, lives in Saskatchewan).

• Never give out their phone number (or, if they do, will always insist on talking in the virtual world whenever you call).

• Avoid players who really are what the player is only pretending to be (men playing women will avoid real women).

• Bring in “friends” their alter ego knows “in real life.” These friends never become regular players.

• Have their alter ego take on high-profile roles, usually for the good of the community.

• Have their alter ego succumb to injuries or ailments that lead to absences or promised absences.

Of these, the saddest sign is perhaps the last one. The player feels guilt over their deceit and has genuine fondness for their virtual world friends. The player knows how distressing it would be were the truth to come out, so they try to provide an exit. They stop playing for no reason, but have to come back because there’s no closure, which means they must explain why they went missing. They set themselves a deadline for when they will quit and invent a fiction for it so everyone knows they’ll be going at that point, but the fiction makes their bonds even stronger and they still can’t leave.

Ultimately ², something has to give. If a player becomes a persona but that persona can’t become the player, there is a tension that can never be resolved. Either the player feels they have to tell someone, or they make a series of errors so glaring that they are certain to be found out, or they contrive for their alter ego to leave in such a manner that return is impossible.

The single greatest cause of sudden death among beautiful, young, female players is that the guy who was role-playing them wanted an irreversible out.

So could you ever masquerade and get away with it?

Well yes, you could, but you really ought to think about why you’d want to. It’s more appropriate to ask whether you can play incognito and get away with it. The answer here is that it’s relatively easy in the short term if you obey a few simple rules:

• Don’t get attached to your alter ego. It isn’t going to last.

• Don’t get into relationships with other players beyond politeness.

• Keep your head down. High-profile characters attract attention.

• Abandon the exercise the moment anyone smells a rat.

• When you abort, don’t immediately restart.

For this level of playing incognito, you generally don’t care if you’re caught. This is probably just as well, because if you’re a long-term player of the virtual world, then people will notice your idiosyncrasies sooner or later anyway. After all, if telegraph operators can be identified from tapping out Morse code, what hope do you have?

Well, you can take precautions. You can run a spell-checker over a log of your communications and find out what words you consistently misspell, then resolve not to use them. You can think up a few catchphrases like “I guess” or “you know” that you don’t normally use and sprinkle those into your speech. You can use meticulous capitalization or sloppy abbreviations—anything to disguise your underlying speech patterns. I once played a character incognito whom I decided wouldn’t use nouns that began with vowels; nobody noticed, but it meant I post-edited every line he said and was thus better able to keep in character.

This kind of thing leads to a more serious level of playing incognito. In essence, what you’re doing is designing a player in the same way that a normal player would design a character. You’d give your alter ego a number of superficial differences in playing style to your own, some knowledge (and misconceptions) of the virtual world, enough to throw anyone suspicious off the scent. “That can’t be Mike, he spends all his time killing undead with a sickle;” “Jo never plays this early in the evening;” “It’s spelled LOSE, not LOOSE!”

Using this approach you can play for several weeks or months without detection, although I’d recommend getting an accomplice to help you every once in a while so both your regular characters and your alter ego’s characters can be seen hanging around doing sensible things at the same time.

If you plan on playing incognito in the same virtual world for a year or more, it starts to look less like playing and more like espionage. It’s hard, but not impossible, to escape detection, as long as you’re well prepared in advance and have reasonable acting skills. Here’s what to do:

• Be sure you have a very good reason for embarking on this task. “To have fun” is not a very good reason.

• Ensure you can spare the time. This will really gobble it up.

• Design your alter ego from the ground up. What makes it tick? What are its goals, background, fears? How intelligent, articulate, extrovert is it? Do some personality tests in-character, make sure it’s all consistent.

• Give your alter ego a history. What has it done in life? Who are its friends and relatives? Why are they playing this virtual world? Be sure to come up with some reason why no one can phone you (paranoia only works as an excuse for four months or so before it starts getting harder to justify).

• Give your alter ego an online history. Six months before you need your alter ego, create a web site. Illustrate it with photos of a friend who is not stunningly good looking. Hand-code the HTML so it looks different from your own web site. Later, create web sites for friends and put links between them. Make some Usenet posts. Tell nobody about these—it’ll look suspicious. Let people find you through search engines.

• Don’t give your alter ego skills or knowledge you don’t have. If their favorite music is classical, be ready to answer questions as to whether Mahler’s use of strings is sublime or over the top. If your alter ego speaks German, you’d better speak it too.

• Dry-run your alter ego on other virtual worlds and in chat rooms. Make sure it works coherently and you can keep it up.

• Either use an accomplice or never go on vacation. Your accomplice plays you when you’re away, not your alter ego.

• Use a separate PC for your alter ego. Firewall it. There’s just too much risk of detection from cookies, misdirected emails, and slips in concentration otherwise.

• Locate your alter ego somewhere remote, so meeting anyone in real life is impractical. Important: You should have been to this place in real life; keeping a guide book or a web site at hand isn’t enough.

• Have an out from the beginning. Absolutely the best is the main reason most people leave—to play some other virtual world instead. However, if you do this, then you may be tempted to return. You might therefore prefer to choose some life-changing event in advance that will enable you to leave your friends behind without causing them any worry—your alter ego is going to college, or is getting married, or is doing voluntary service overseas.

• Leave false clues that you are someone else, preferably someone in a position of power in the virtual world. If anyone suspects your alter ego of being someone playing incognito, they won’t think it’s you.

• If you plan on doing this several times, build more than one false identity and overlap playing times. If alter ego X is due to leave in a few weeks, introduce alter ego Y now.

• Do not form deep relationships. Playing incognito is deceitful, and no matter how good your reasons for doing it, you have no right to trample over people’s emotions. Have a barrier in place from the very beginning—inventing a steady real-world boy/girlfriend is perfectly acceptable.

• The instant you are suspected, stop playing. If you don’t, things will only get worse than they are already.

I’ve listed this sneak’s charter for two main reasons.

The first is to continue the discussion on role-playing. If people can go to these lengths and play incognito for two or more years at a time, shouldn’t this have weird side effects on their sense of identity?

It’s quite possible it could have, yes. This really is something nobody should attempt unless they know what they are doing! That said, some people can play this way successfully for long periods—years—without ill effects. This is because it enables the separation of immersion from identity. You don’t feel that you are in the game, you feel that the player you’ve created is. Identity drift can still occur between character and invented player (or even you), but rarely between invented player and you except by explicit reflection. This is because immersion in a real-world invented alter ego is overwhelmingly more difficult than it is in a virtual character, if indeed it makes sense to talk about the concept at all.

The lesson we can learn from this is that although immersion and identity are strongly interdependent, they’re not inseparable. One of my hobbies is taking 3D photographs, which consist of two 2D images taken from slightly different angles, viewed side-by-side. If I cross my eyes, I can make it appear as if there is only one image, but it’s out of focus. I have to bring it into focus while keeping my eyes crossed; this means decoupling the eye’s focusing mechanism from its directional mechanism. After years of experience, I can now do this easily, but it took a while to learn the technique. So it is with immersion and identity: Although normally they work together so closely that it’s as if they’re a single system, actually we can now see they’re not. Immersion may help bring dimension to identity, but it’s only the default way to do it. You can be immersed through the medium of a constructed player without its greatly impinging on your sense of self. From this, we can deduce that it isn’t immersion that drives the celebration of identity, but something else of which immersion is an aspect. We’ll return to this topic later in this chapter.

My second reason for describing how someone might go about dishonestly deceiving players as to their real-world identity in this underhanded fashion is that unfortunately it’s really useful for designers on the live team to be able to do this. Data-mining can only go so far ³. By actually playing a virtual world as a real player from beginning to (nominal) end, designers can get an unparalleled understanding of what it “feels” like. They don’t have to rely on the outpourings of players on rant sites to tell them what’s wrong, they can see it with their own eyes—and they can also see if a problem is nonexistent or is being exaggerated out of all proportion. It really does give them an understanding they simply couldn’t get any other way.

Whether they have any moral defense for these actions is another matter, of course. It’s not unprecedented in the real world: Henry V of England dressed as a common soldier and wandered among his men on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt; the Russian emperor Peter the Great traveled Europe incognito as Sgt. Pyotr Mikhaylov, spending four months as a carpenter in the shipyard of the Dutch East India Company at Saardam before working in the Royal Navy yards at Deptford.

For a game designer, well, it’s up to you. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, it would probably be more useful for a large-population virtual world than for a smaller one. I’ve done it several times for both MUD1 and MUD2, and feel that on the whole it’s worthwhile as long as you really are finding it useful. If you’re not, stop. If it becomes an obsession, stop. If your alter ego falls out with your friends, stop. Especially if other people start investing in emotional relationships with you, stop.

Players may take issue with this. The live team stomps on people’s feelings? And because it’s for the long-term “benefit” of the virtual world, that somehow makes it okay? Don’t players have rights?!

That’s actually quite an interesting question.

Player Rights

Players do have rights. Players are real people, real people have rights ¹, therefore players have rights.

Characters, on the other hand, have no rights whatsoever.

For example, it makes sense to say that players have a right to exist, but no sense to say that characters share that right. Characters can—and do—get killed regularly in game-style virtual worlds. Characters don’t even have to have a human being controlling them.

When players become so immersed that they merge with their characters, they still have rights. Their characters (personae) now have rights too, but only in the sense that players do. Killing a persona does not kill a player; it might cause a player severe emotional distress, but any system embodying “the right not to be made very upset” would be wholly impractical (“You mean I can’t dump my girlfriend?”). Systematically persecuting a player through the vehicle of their persona, on the other hand, does border on oppression (if not exactly torture). It’s still the player that suffers, though, not the character. Just because someone puts your character on a rack, you can’t claim it’s “just like” you were put on the rack yourself. It isn’t.

There is, however, an often-supposed notion that players nevertheless have rights in a virtual world beyond those granted by the real world. There are two arguments as to why this should be the case.

The first argument is that the players of a virtual world make up a population, and populations determine for themselves what rights they have. Who gave the citizens of the United States their rights? “We, the people.” Unfortunately, for virtual worlds the populace does not have sovereignty. The people who write the code and run the hardware have sovereignty. The counter-argument is that with this power comes responsibility. That’s true, it does, but responsibility doesn’t mean rights.

The second argument is more pragmatic. Rights are granted by those who have power. Administrators have power because they can turn off a virtual world. However, players also have power because they, too, can turn off a virtual world—they can stop playing. By constructing a virtual world and inviting people into it, administrators are conceding that they have a need for players. Players are therefore in a position to insist on guarantees from the administrators, enshrined as a constitution, otherwise they’ll go play elsewhere. Players have rights because in the end it is they who wield the most power, not the administrators.

As a thought experiment, Raph Koster constructed a Declaration of the Rights of Avatars ², based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American Bill of Rights. On the face of it, the result is way too unpalatable for most developers to swallow, however it loses a lot of its bitterness when rewritten in plain English as “advice to virtual world administrators” rather than “rights of avatars.” What it then amounts to can be summed up pretty well as:

• Ultimately, someone has their finger on the power button.

• What this someone says, goes.

• If this someone doesn’t provide a code of conduct for their virtual world, then anyone playing in it deserves all they get.

• If this someone wants to change the code of conduct, they should consult their players, but they can ignore whatever they are told.

• Codes of conduct should be fair and should be applied fairly.

Codes of conduct are basically sets of laws. Although the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars assumes a U.S. perspective (anything not prohibited by law is permitted), this isn’t to say that alternative forms aren’t valid (in much of continental Europe, what is not permitted by law is prohibited). It’s just one example of what a constitution might look like.

There are two areas of confusion, however: Between players and characters and between real and virtual worlds. The following argument illustrates both.

Let’s accept that people have rights to liberty, property, security, and freedom from oppression. This does not mean that their characters have any such rights. If my character locks your character in a room and steals your stuff, that affronts no inalienable rights. Its rightness or wrongness is determined entirely by the context of the virtual world. Some virtual worlds may be constructed so that this is intrinsic to them. If I were playing in an “escape from Colditz ³” virtual world, I would be disappointed if my character could walk out of the front door simply because some right to virtual liberty was being infringed. I would expect the guards to destroy my character’s digging tools if they found them—it would spoil the game if my character’s property rights made this unconstitutional.

Even if you were to buy a virtual object with real-world money from its real-world owners ⁴, that still would not mean your character had any “right” to it. My character would not be prevented from stealing it from your character if that’s how the virtual world worked. You’d still real-world own the object, but that would not mean you could demand that it be changed in the virtual world unless you’d also bought some sort of explicit servicing agreement. You could conceivably argue that changes due to bugs in the code be reversed, and you may have a case if your object were destroyed. However, if in the real world you own a piece of a virtual world, you can’t extend this to say your character owns it in the virtual world.

The implementation of the virtual world alone determines the meaning of ownership—and everything else—within that virtual world. If you know this when you buy your virtual object, you can’t complain. It would be like taking a bicycle back to the shop because it didn’t turn to gold when you sat on it. The laws of physics don’t work that way in the real world. In a virtual world, everything tangible is subject to the laws of that virtual world’s physics. That includes concepts that are nonphysical in the real world, such as that of ownership.

Virtual worlds don’t work the same way that the real world works. It is a mistake to assume that they do.

So what can we say about players’ rights?

• Players have rights in the real world, of which the virtual world is a part.

• When considering rights, virtual worlds should only be thought of in terms of being a part of the real world.

• Administrators can take their ball home if they like.

• Players don’t have to play ball if they don’t want to.

For designers, the only impact of this is that they should always remember there are real people attached to virtual characters. These people can be affected in the real world by events in the virtual world. If the way these people are affected breaches their rights (or the laws that express these rights), then the designer is errant. Fortunately, the context of the virtual world normally provides enough cover that even when designers do slip up the damage is not normally too great. In the same way that someone who deliberately visits a museum of slavery can’t complain if the accoutrements of enslavement exhibited within give them nightmares, so a player who signs up to an “escape from Colditz” game can’t legitimately complain if there are images of Nazi regalia everywhere. They could, however, complain if their character escaped from Colditz and encountered a starkly realistic depiction of a concentration camp. They didn’t sign up for that, and suddenly the game is not a game any more.

Most problems of this nature will come from misjudgments rather than from deliberate flouting of the law. It’s quite difficult, in fact, to conceive how a designer could contravene a player’s fundamental rights in the real world by means of constructs in the virtual one.

That said, this is not actually hard-and-fast ⁵. I’m not a lawyer, none of what I have said here has yet been tested in a court of law; it might turn out to be complete hogwash. So young is the debate that its parameters are still being set. The first legal battleground to determine the place of virtual worlds in the real world is likely to be in intellectual property law; whether this will turn out to be robust enough to settle all outstanding issues depends on how the lawyers and judges slug it out, but it seems doubtful. In all probability, it will be some time before a working legal and constitutional understanding of the place of virtual worlds is reached.

It would be easy to conclude this analysis of players’ rights by stating that designers have very little to worry about on the subject, so all is well. It has, however, exposed an issue that really should be of some concern to them. In the concentration camp example mentioned previously, it was clear that occurrences in a virtual world can have such deep real-world implications to a player that it can break that player out from the deepest levels of immersion and make them think, “whoa!” This is something that can’t but concern designers. Unless you’re trying to make some kind of provocative artistic statement ⁶, it’s not supposed to happen. Players want to be immersed and designers covenant with them to deliver this immersion; if something within the virtual world shakes them out of their immersion, it’s cause for concern.

If a player loses immersion like this, it’s because they have a problem with something in the virtual world. The virtual world falls short of the standards the player expected of it. Those standards could have to do with the world’s physics, appearance, or performance, but in the concentration camp case it’s far worse: It’s an ethical issue. Bugs just show incompetence, and can quickly be fixed; poor ethics show poor principles, and they aren’t so easily forgotten.

Ethics are so important that they get a whole chapter of this book to themselves, Chapter 8, “Coda: Ethical Considerations.” Don’t expect answers—ethical issues are all questions.

I’ll wrap up this discussion about the intrusion of reality into virtual worlds with a celebrated and oft-republished story from LegendMUD.

A Story About a Tree

A Story About a Tree ¹ is an eloquent rebuttal by Raph Koster of the suggestion that a virtual world is “just a game.” It concerns a player called Karyn.

In real life, Karyn was from Norway, but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site about LegendMUD, on which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway).

She became more and more integrated into the virtual community, until eventually she started a guild, “the Norse Traders.” With much effort, she built up this into one of the most popular and well-known guilds in the whole game. The ties between its members were strong, and so were the friendships that developed.

One day, some of her friends realized they hadn’t seen her around for a while. They checked her web site, and found to their dismay a message from her parents. Karyn had died two months earlier in a head-on collision while test-driving a new car. There was a copy on the site of a news item (in Norwegian) describing the accident.

There was an immediate outpouring of grief in LegendMUD. Emails were dispatched, players who hadn’t been around for months logged in to share their sorrow. A memorial service was held, and a garden or remembrance created. In that garden was planted a tree, bearing a plaque: “In memory of Karyn.”

Two things disconcerted the players.

Firstly, how could they feel a genuine sense of loss at the death of someone they had never actually met? Many of them found it hard to articulate their reasons, but eventually it was recognized that Karyn hadn’t been just someone they “gamed with,” she’d been a vibrant part of their community.

Secondly, the grief came at the wrong time. “The Norse Traders” had fallen apart two months earlier, and no one had thought why. It was obvious now, of course—its heart had been torn away. The community had felt Karyn’s loss when she stopped logging in, but only now understood it.

Karyn’s tree stands in LegendMUD to this day. It stands there as a memorial to a much-loved human being, but that it was erected at all is a testament to the realization among the players—as individuals—that they weren’t merely “playing a game.” The grief they felt was real; virtual relationships are real; virtual communities are real.

Virtual worlds are not “just games.”

A Story About a Tree is not unique. In MUD2 there is a Dally Lane, named after the man responsible for bringing it out of academia and into the real world, Simon Dally. Simon was popular not only as an administrator and a player, but also as a human being. When he suffered from a bout of manic depression and committed suicide, the grief felt among the players of both MUD1 and MUD2 was as intense as that for Karyn in LegendMUD.

So why did I present A Story About a Tree here when I could have written A Story About a Road and not have my abridged prose suffer in comparison to Raph’s powerful original?

Let’s look at that opening paragraph again and compare it against the classic indicators for masquerading that I listed earlier:

In real life, Karyn (BONG!) was from Norway (BONG!), but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (BONG!) (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site (BONG!) about LegendMUD, upon which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway (BONG!)).

That’s a lot of BONG!s. Add the guild and the violent death, and Karyn starts to look more than a little suspect.

Before any angry players of LegendMUD email me ² to say that they met Karyn in real life and know for sure she was a real person, I should mention that it’s only the abstract principle I’m concerned with here. The events of A Story About a Tree happened in 1998, so people have had plenty of time to check the facts ³. The point is that even though Karyn almost certainly was whom she said she was, it’s easy to see how, in some other virtual world, someone with her story might not have been real. There could be some unKaryn in some un LegendMUD who was truly a fictional construct.

I wouldn’t doubt that the grief felt by these un LegendMUD players was real. I wouldn’t doubt that many of the people who experienced that grief would be deeply offended by the mere suggestion that unKaryn might have been bogus. It doesn’t undermine the basic point, though.

I’ve seen players fall in love with other players who turned out to be inventions. I’ve seen a player get close to another player who was the creation of two people playing together because they could only afford one account (fortunately they aborted when they realized what was happening). There are complex factors at work here.

A Story About a Tree shows that players can have real relationships with people whom they have never met. The masquerade corollary shows that it’s also possible for players to have real relationships with people who are imaginary.

In virtual worlds ⁴, people are constructs in the minds of other people; relationships between people exist only in the minds of individuals.

In the end, creating constructs in the minds of players is what a designer’s job is all about.