Addiction

Virtual world designers are creating something that they know is addictive. Addiction is a bad thing, because of its personal and social costs. At a moral level, are designers of virtual worlds little better than drug pushers?

The first person to question me on the ethics of making an intensely addictive experience available to unsuspecting members of the public was computer journalist Guy Kewney in the mid-1980s. His point was that even if I didn’t know MUD1 would be addictive when I started on it, I knew now and should therefore give some thought as to whether I should continue running it. This I did, and I concluded that although players might at times exhibit behaviors that could be considered symptomatic of addiction, it wasn’t that simple. Virtual worlds are places: You can’t be addicted to a virtual world any more

than you can be addicted to Las Vegas. You can be addicted to the things you do in a virtual world, as you can be addicted to the things you do in Las Vegas. Unlike Las Vegas, however, in MUD1 it wasn’t me who made the experience addictive, it was the players themselves through their imaginations and interactions.

No, it didn’t convince me then, either.

I certainly didn’t set out to make MUD1 addictive. I wanted it to be a place where people could be and become themselves. It just happened that for many people this turned out to be a very intense experience that they wanted to repeat again and again. The question I should have been asking was not whether playing in virtual worlds was addictive (if “addictive” is the right word, which in this context it almost certainly isn’t), but whether this addictiveness was a bad thing given the potential rewards. In this respect, I see it morally defensible on three counts:

• People come out of the experience as better individuals than they were when they went in.

• Most players would not develop as much if they did something else instead of playing in the virtual world.

• The process has a definite end. When your hero’s journey finishes, all signs of addiction/dependency/habit are gone.

Players of virtual worlds don’t all have periods of what could be called addiction to the experience, but even those who do will on the whole come out the better for it ¹. Virtual worlds are a force for good.

The problem is, not all virtual worlds satisfy the preceding criteria. Some, for example, use gambling-psychology feedback systems to drive their addictiveness, rather than the sheer freedom to be. The player is addicted but isn’t developing; they play to feed their addiction, not to end it. It’s all the worse when the virtual world is especially designed this way; accidental incompetence is a lesser crime than deliberate incompetence. As I mentioned in Chapters 5 and 6, most game-oriented virtual worlds have a certain inherent amount of addiction-promoting activity as a part of their gameplay; it helps their players have fun. Plenty of regular computer games also have it, however these don’t attract anywhere near the degree of dedication that virtual worlds are able to rely on. It’s the player’s development that is the critical “addiction;” that being the case, virtual worlds that deliberately implement in tandem with this a variable feedback system of rewards have something of an ethical case to answer.

The other common violation is in closure. If players are on some version of a hero’s journey and the virtual world designer, knowing this, interferes with their progress, they will have to play for longer to reach the end (if indeed they ever reach it at all). The virtual world itself may never “end,” but individual journeys must; the never-ending journey is an eternity of frustration. Give people an out and they’ll come back; force them to stay and they’ll go. Virtual worlds that move the winning post as players approach it are dealing out an unnecessary cruelty.