Social Engineering

Are virtual worlds a force for good or for evil?

As I have already said, I strongly believe in the former. However, mere faith in my own (clearly biased) judgment is hardly justification. Computer games (along with television, film, and music) are routinely implicated when some disturbed teenager gets hold of a weapon and goes on a killing spree; virtual worlds are also starting to suffer from their perceived negative effects ¹. Do virtual worlds incite, reinforce, or train?

I won’t make the case for virtual worlds here, because I hope to have done that already in this book. However, I will examine some of the case against. Without any formal studies to call on, all I can do is provide anecdotal evidence; nevertheless, it’s evidence based on years of observation, and therefore not quite as speculative as it may seem.

My argument that virtual worlds are a force for good is based largely on the fact that players can learn to be better people as a result of playing them. That means I intrinsically accept that virtual worlds can bring about change. Given this, why must that change necessarily be for the good?

Well, it isn’t always, of course; in a well-designed virtual world it will be most of the time, but some people will indeed replay old issues repeatedly, consolidating points of view that would be better disbanded. The reverse is also true: Some individuals in real life become better people after committing horrific acts that leave others traumatized, but on the whole anyone taking up this kind of activity is on the road to personal destruction.

So, why is it that individuals take “good” things from virtual worlds, rather than “bad” things? I believe that it is due to the similarities between virtual worlds and the real one. The

majority of people who learn anything at all from virtual worlds will pick up things such as:

• Information specific to the virtual world (stats, goals, geography)

• Skills specific to the interface (dodging, aiming, feature recognition)

• Skills specific to the virtual world (tactics, strategy)

• More general skills (social, behavioral, educational)

• Wider cultural values (as exhibited by the other players)

• The difference between the real and the virtual

These are all either innocuous or of benefit to the individual player (the further down the list, the more likely it is to be of use ²).

People who play virtual worlds will not pick up things such as these:

• Desensitization (to evil, to other people’s emotions)

• The belief that people are just like NPCs, and rules that apply to NPCs apply to people

• The idea that everything virtual transfers to the real

If any of these were true, that would indeed be worrying. In general, though, I don’t think they are. Let’s take a closer look….

The desensitization argument is that people come across something in the virtual world so often that they become used

to it, so when the same issue arises in the real world they do not respond appropriately. This is a valid point about virtual worlds (as it is about things like TV news, too); where it becomes invalid, however, is in the suggestion that impressionable players will be unable to distinguish between virtual-world concepts and the real-world concepts that they’re based on.

Take “evil,” for example. The notion that most players of the big commercial virtual worlds have about evil actually translates as “cool.” In practice, the people on the “evil” side exhibit the same kind of behavior that they would were they on the “good” side, except they think they’re cooler because they have all the nasty-sounding spells and skills.

What evil really means is rule by fear. You do what your boss tells you to do because if you didn’t you would be tortured, maimed, and (if you were lucky) killed as an example to others who might think of stepping out of line. An evil person is as likely to kill someone on their own side as they are the “enemy.” In real life, people fight for evil because:

• They’re evil.

• They think they’re evil.

• They’re afraid of what will happen to them or to people they care for if they don’t fight.

• They have no way of escaping.

• They don’t realize they’re fighting for evil.

• They’re threatened by what they perceive as an even greater evil.

Now translate this into a Fantasy world. Let’s give evil commanding officers the power to take 10% of a player’s levels off them for “torture.” Who would fight on their side?

Well evil people would, because they get the same powers over their subordinates and they agree with the overall aims of the

evil empire. Non-evil people would scream like crazy at customer service the moment such a sanction was imposed on them. Those who felt particularly annoyed would quit and join the good side. If a greater evil was on the way, they’d quit and play another game.

In short, “evil” as a concept doesn’t work as a major force in virtual worlds. What we have instead is some kind of sanitized version that gives people a cloak to hide behind if they want to do something they think is a little naughty. It’s no more evil than the “good” side is good (when self-sacrifice is cheap, even evil people will do it).

“Evil” in virtual worlds is just an artificial construct that misapplies labels to promote a meaningless conflict. Is it without consequences, though? If players come to see “evil” as just a label, does that indeed desensitize them to the very concept of it? Will they be more likely to side with something labeled as evil in the real world?

At a very superficial level—that of the label—perhaps. If they are told that some dictator is “evil,” some individuals may not fully appreciate what this means; this could be true irrespective of whether they have played virtual worlds or not, though. Whatever, contact with the reality of evil will swiftly disabuse them of this naivety.

Nevertheless, the wicked will always prey on the gullible; if desensitizing people to the label means that those to whom it applies can draw innocents closer to them, it can’t be a good thing. Whether it’s unacceptably bad or merely one poor chord in the great song of popular culture is another matter ³.

Besides, the traffic is not one-way: Real-world ideas can affect virtual world concepts. In the great scheme of things, permanent death for characters is not actually as bad as people make out. However, because death in the real world is bad, this has caused people to redefine what “death” means in virtual worlds. They say their character “died” even when all that happened was it was teleported out of a battle. Are they becoming less sensitized to the notion of death in the real world because of this? Or does their use of “death” in this way arise precisely because they aren’t insensitive to it?

The remaining two primary concerns about the way that virtual worlds can be a negative influence are related to each other. They say that people who spend long periods in virtual worlds will transfer inappropriate emotional and intellectual understandings to the real world because they cannot subconsciously separate the real from the virtual. If you spend all day beating the guts out of NPCs, and NPCs look just like people, then in the real world you’ll start to objectify people too. Similarly, if you find that being lying and deceitful in the virtual world works, you’ll change in the real world so that you adopt this strategy too.

The objectification argument is a non-starter. People are acutely aware of whether opponents are computer-controlled or player-controlled. It makes a big difference to them ⁴. If anything, they are more likely to subjectify NPCs than to objectify players.

Virtual-to-real transfer does occur. The core of the attack against it is that it happens without critical reflection; in other words, it becomes part of your behavior through rote, rather than because you thought about it. Although I agree that it is possible to learn information and simple skills this way, I do not believe that behavioral changes can also be acquired except under very artificial circumstances. If you find that being lying and deceitful works, you’ll notice it consciously; you won’t just fall into it with zombie-like mindlessness. This is why, when other players start shunning you because of your behavior change, you may explicitly consider what it is you are doing wrong (that is, lying) and resolve your ways.

The way I see this is like the difference between episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is your memory of events (“yesterday I watched a movie”); semantic memory is your memory of procedures and processes (“when you watch a movie, you have to buy a ticket”). People who suffer from amnesia will forget their name, let alone what movies they have seen, but they’ll still remember that they have to buy a ticket. Semantic memory is an abstraction of episodic memory ⁵; from individual events, you build up a general picture that describes them, such that you can forget the individual events but retain what you have learned. I don’t remember how I found out I needed to buy a ticket to see a movie, but then I don’t need to; I only need to remember that I do need to buy a ticket.

With virtual worlds, the actions that you undertake lead to individual episodes. Although you remember the episodes immediately when they’re over, with time they will fade. Yes, some will be particularly memorable and will remain with you always, but most won’t. What does remain are the lessons you learned from the episodes, and these are quite different from the mere facts of the episodes themselves.

As a designer, I therefore don’t care whether people get a rush from finding a secret passage, from being a leader, from designing their own house, or from laying waste to a nest of vampires. What I care about is whether, in doing so, they develop as people. So, when someone says that virtual worlds encourage sex or violence, no, they don’t. Even if a designer went all out to try to encourage it, they wouldn’t. It may be that they encourage play of a sexual or violent nature, but play is play, and it’s virtual. The lessons that people learn are the lessons that they can take with them into the real world. They find out about people; they find out about themselves.

I believe that designing virtual worlds is a morally defensible occupation. I believe that they are on the side of the virtuous.

Mind you, I also believe that one day we’ll see more people getting married because of virtual worlds than we’ll see getting divorced because of them. Don’t let my idealism do your thinking for you. Consider the issues; reflect on them yourself; draw your own conclusions.