Unpleasantness

Some things are found unpleasant by enough of the population that even though they accurately reflect reality it would cause dissent were they to be included. Slavery, for example, was a fact of human existence for millennia; even now, some countries allow bonded labor that is slavery in practice if not in law.

So, you’re designing a virtual world set in the swashbuckling Age of Piracy. Players take on the role of a buccaneer, sailing the Caribbean in search of treasure, glory, and infamy. Within a week of beginning your research, you (the designer) have come to the conclusion that slavery was such an important part of Caribbean trade and industry that were you to omit, it your economic model would be missing a third of its goods. Do you put it in, or leave it out?

If your virtual world was for educational purposes, you’d probably leave it in. If it was primarily for entertainment, though…? The game Europa 1400: The Guild ¹ lets women become Catholic archbishops, even though this somewhat undermines its historical accuracy ². Virtual world designers tend to do this kind of thing too.

Unpleasant history is one example where self-censorship comes in. Another is unpleasant present. In the 19 th century, it was the general consensus in the western world that men were stronger and more clever than women. Now, it’s the general consensus that men and women are of equal intelligence. What about their comparative physical strength? Studies have shown that past academic examinations and intelligence tests were invariably biased in favor of men. Er, strength? Women and men may emphasize different aspects of their intelligence, but neither one gender nor the other is fundamentally the more intelligent. So will you answer the question about strength? Women excel at linguistic tasks, whereas men are good at spatial, and so on.

Most virtual worlds give men and women equal physical strength, even though in reality women are palpably not as strong ³. Some women are beefy enough to haul a truck, sure, but not ones that look like the female avatars in EverQuest. Those virtual worlds that don’t give female characters the same strength as male characters will usually try to compensate by making female characters shine at something else instead. It’s all for show, though. Real-life, non-cosmetic differences in gender and race are so charged with potential for problems that

virtual world designers simply edit them out of their worlds rather than suffer the political problems that come with including them.

A third example of unpleasantness is that which is fine now but which may not be in the future. Movies in the 1950s were full of people smoking cigarettes, but today’s certainly aren’t. Virtual worlds can have very long lives; what should designers omit that might cause future offense?

It may seem foolish to speculate on these possibilities: how can you know that something in your virtual world that is currently acceptable will cease to be so in a few years’ time? In general, of course, you can’t, but in some areas you can, particularly terminology. For example, in this book I have referred to people having same-sex orientation as “gay” and “homosexual.” It is practically guaranteed that in 50 years’ time even the phrase “same-sex orientation” will not meet with approval. The situation is yet worse for describing different races: Whatever currently prescribed term I use to describe a race or ethnic grouping, the historical evidence is that in 50 years’ time I’m going to appear a racist ⁴. It’s very tempting therefore for virtual world designers to counter this by omitting anything that has a track record of being controversial. This, of course, has other consequences (that we shall come to later).

As a final remark on the subject of unpleasantness in virtual worlds, it should be noted that the definition of “unpleasantness” varies between real-world cultures. For example, computer games that concern the hunting of wild animals are big-sellers in the United States but aren’t even released in the United Kingdom—there’d be a public outcry if they were. Many examples of such “localization issues” exist;

designers must choose either to ignore them (and lose sales), to make their presence switchable (which is expensive), or not to put in any offending content in the first place (hey, there’s an idea).