Player Interest and the Elder Game

I mentioned in Chapter 3, while deriving a third dimension for the player interest graph, that MUD2’ s wizzes are griefers, politicians, networkers, or friends: They are not the world-oriented types of planners, opportunists, hackers, and scientists. Why is this? Shouldn’t they be hacker-type explorers or friends-type socializers?

MUD2 has rules about what wizzes can and cannot do. To prevent abuses of their (considerable) powers, they are not allowed to use them to play “normally” as a non-wiz (that is, a mortal). In other words, if a wiz wants to play in the mortal world as a mortal, they can’t use their special wiz abilities; they have to use a different, non-wiz character. In the discussion from which the original player types graph was derived, wizzes therefore considered what they did as a wiz to be separate from what they did as a mortal. Some of them spent most of their time as a wiz; some spent most of it as a mortal. The rules forbade them from doing achiever or explorer things as wizzes, which is why they didn’t show up in the analysis of what wizzes did. In fact, these players did all these activities, just not using their wiz personae ¹.

The reason that wizzes weren’t exclusively hackers or friends was because many of them had crossed the threshold and were no longer in apotheosis; they were playing merely because they enjoyed playing. Some things they could do using wiz powers; others they couldn’t, so they did them as mortals. This is why Figure 3.3 doesn’t include any world-oriented player types—it only lists what wiz-level players were allowed to do using their wiz-level characters.

MUD2’s wizzes were automatically co-opted to the live team, a duty they could dispatch to whatever degree they cared. They could only use their wiz characters, because wiz-owned mortals had to remain incognito so as not to compromise them ². Thus, there were only four ways to behave as wizzes. Here they are:

• Griefers. Griefers with power will either use it responsibly ³ or abuse it and be banned. In a well-designed virtual world, griefers who are unable to move on will rarely reach the elder game anyway; those griefers-at-heart that do will understand that they can act explicitly on other players in a benevolent fashion, even if the delights of malevolence ultimately prove too tempting. In MUD2, for example, griefer wizzes would try to make the lives of mortals more interesting by tinkering with the virtual world itself in subtle, undetectable ways. Done well, it was like being guided through trials by your own, personal angel; done badly, it was like being tormented in perpetuity by your own, personal devil.

• Politicians. These people see themselves as good guys, organizing fun activities like leaders at a children’s holiday camp. These activities can be invaluable as bonding exercises, but they also can be immersion-busting and incredibly irritating to those who don’t want to take part. Politicians tend not to get on with other politicians, whose events (and even presence) clash with their own endeavors.

• Networkers. These are oracle-like players, who are happy to help others by sharing what they have learned, yet rarely in a boastful kind of way. Unlike explorer types, for whom the acquisition of knowledge is itself intrinsically fun, these people give it away for free. Although their help and advice is limited to low-level activities that help people get involved with a virtual world, it’s generally fine. If they spout less well-known information, this will annoy achiever types (who see people getting an easy ride) and some explorers (who see the dissemination of information as taking away the potential fun of other explorers).

• Friends. They snoop on mortals, they chat, they laugh, they complain about how things aren’t the same as they were when they were a mortal. They like each other’s company, and don’t like it when other wizzes fall out.

To this list, we should add hackers and scientists. Hackers use their knowledge to create things, but aren’t all that bothered in exploiting it. Whereas politicians will build a whole new area and dump players in it to have fun, hackers do it because the creativity itself is the interesting part—they don’t care if players actually use it, except maybe so they can test its functionality.

Scientists are like friends-type socializers, in that they snoop a lot. However, this is because they can find out more about the virtual world, rather than finding out about the players. Scientists use snooping like it was a documentary; friends use it like it was a soap opera.

So the wizzes did, in fact, spend their time doing more than four things. If players have mastery of both worlds, they can live how they see fit. That means they have passed beyond the confines of player development tracks (which stop after apotheosis), and can be themselves. They can be any of the eight player types—it’s just that these didn’t show up in the analysis. When playing as achievers, they looked just like any other achiever; when playing as hackers, they were mistaken for politicians; when playing as scientists they were mixed in with socializer-type friends. So the analysis that led to the inclusion of a third player types dimension was, while not exactly flawed, a little incomplete.

Well, it’s complete (for) now.