Sociology in fantasia: death, love, and dancing in online realms.

• Author: Alexander, Bryan
• Position: The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us - and How They Don't - Book review

The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us--and How They Don't, by Nick Tee, Tale University Press, 2014, $28

Millions of men and women spend industrial-scale hours and dollars in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).They stalk ores, battle superheroes and supervillains, build up interstellar alliances, and market pharmaceutical enterprises. Why do they throw themselves so deeply into online gaming, and how do they live in these virtual worlds?

Nick Yee, a researcher at the international gaming company Ubisoft, has spent years finding out. As part of an investigation dubbed the Daedalus Project, Yee interviewed MMO players from around the world about their pastime, posting the results in an online archive and resource hub. The Proteus Paradox is a book-length summary of this research, organized with an eye to the larger question of how human beings behave online. It is the most important, challenging, and accessible study yet conducted on the rich, sprawling culture the players have built. It is also a fine way for nonplayers to learn what gamers actually do.

Learning who those players actually are contradicts several stereotypes right off the bat. In some games, Yee notes, "a player group may span a sixty-year age difference....There are college students, early adult professionals, and homemakers in their thirties, as well as war veterans and retirees." Most have jobs. Unlike the rest of the gaming world, a majority (80 percent) of MMO players are male. People play for various reasons, boiled down to "achievement, social interaction, and immersion," plus the pleasure of storytelling.

Once in that world, players sometimes create superstitions to better understand it, especially as game designers' intentions are often (perhaps necessarily) opaque. Some gamers will insist on bringing or modifying certain items on missions for good luck, negotiating with inanimate objects, or performing online tasks according to lucky lunar phases. Especially delightful are the fortune-summoning ritual dances some players perform in EverQuest and World of War craft, whereby avatars jump, make figure eights, display certain items, or crouch dramatically.

None of these maneuvers actually work with their games' rules or underlying code, yet players find them meaningful and even efficacious. Yee explains this in terms of Skinnerian psychology, as players interpret events as behavior-linked stimuli. He also sees a benefit for the game...