be the game

I came across a story today about a 15-year old Canadian boy found dead after he ran away following his parents' confiscation of his Xbox. The father's quote is tragic to me because it seems to portray him as both understanding and ignorant. "This (the Xbox game, Call of Duty 4) had become his (the runaway son's) identity, and I didn't realize how in-depth this was until I took his Xbox away.... I just took away his identity, so I can understand why he got so mad and took off." Whether or not the family home life was exemplary or the boy otherwise troubled is way beyond me, but the quote seems to indicate that the Xbox restriction might have happened differently if the father had understood the relationship between identity and gaming.

The father's initial failure to appreciate how significant the game was for his son is far from uncommon. This lack of understanding is widespread, perhaps dangerously so. Most people frame their understanding of the unknown within terms of the known. What this means for gaming is that too many people think of MMOs (I should note that Call of Duty is not, by my definition, an MMO) as some more complex form Tetris or Super Mario or the ever-ubiquitous Solitaire pre-installed on technology ranging from earliest personal computers to the latest mobile phones. People think to themselves, "Yeah, I used to be really into such-and-such a game. I get it." But those simple games are as similar to MMOs as doing a round of pushups alone in your bedroom is to playing a team sport. If a parent were to suddenly forbid their child from playing on the school basketball team, they would do so knowing that they were taking away a routine (the time commitment of practice), an identity (both on-team as, say, a point guard, and in a larger sense as "basketball player") and a total social environment replete with friendships, rivalries, gossip, hierarchies and shared history.

A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on identity formation indicates that while there are far too many theories for me to sort through immediately the components of identity formation fall primarily into two fairly intuitive categories: self-concept and interpersonal identity. The mechanics of playing an MMO revolve around developing a character in ways which directly mimic the process of identity formation. To play an MMO is to quite literally engage in identity development within a restricted, simplistic world whose rules are often more transparent than the rules of the so-called real world.

You begin playing WoW by making specific character choices, establishing a provisional concept of self if you will, by choosing a faction, race, class and certain visual attributes. As you play over time you are presented with seemingly endless opportunities to further hone this self-identity by building up specific areas of expertise. While establishing the various quantifiable individual character attributes allowed by the game, you concurrently create an identity within the larger social by meeting other players, belonging to a guild, and participating in group events.

That the development of social identity occurs over time within the context of a multiplayer game should be obvious. To trivialize an MMO identity because it is something which occurs only within "a game" is to overlook the importance of things which persist over time. We all have persistent developing identities within any context we inhabit over time: family, school, work, etc. All of these sub-identities, roles and social histories are part and parcel of individual identity. When the amount of time spent within a game context is greater than time spent within other contexts, the importance of a game identity shouldn't come a shocking surprise to anyone.

What I believe is less obvious to non-players is the extent to which a character's self-identity, opposed to its social identity, can be individualized within WoW. There may be ten million subscribers world wide, but it's statistically improbable that any two are literally identical from a quantifiable perspective. Think back to the game of Monopoly for a minute. Players begin by choosing a tiny figurine to represent themselves during the game. You role the dice, accrue money, buy property, suffer penalties and progress to the end of the game all the while moving about a specific, fixed figurine. There is a decidedly limited number of figurines available to differentiate player identities in Monopoly. Furthermore, throughout game play these representations never alter; you start out as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow and finish the game as the Hat or the Thimble or the Wheelbarrow.

Where Monopoly traditionally has a grand total of twelve representative figures to choose from, WoW has fifty-two (or sixty-two if you include the Death Knight class which something of a special case). A player chooses a faction (a binary decision to play "Horde" or "Alliance"), within which there are five faction-specific races (i.e., the Troll race is specific to the Horde faction) and a total of ten classes (i.e., Warrior, Druid, Mage) which are subject to racial restrictions (i.e., if you want to play a Druid you can only choose the Night Elf or Tauren race or, conversely, if you want to play a Gnome, you can only be a Rogue, Warrior, Mage or Warlock). Each of these fifty-two starting options is subject to dozens of user-driven visual customizations such as hair style and skin color, none of which even begins to touch on the avenue for individualization presented by the class-specific talent tree mechanism which bumps possible character permutations from the comprehensible hundreds into the mind-boggling millions.

Someone with a tad more math mojo and a lot more patience than I could calculate the exact number of so-called "talent specs" possible at maximum character level, but a rough description of how it works should serve to indicate the enormous number of possibilities. Each of the ten possible classes has three distinct "talent trees" whereby a maximum total of seventy-one "talent points" can be spent across the trees. Players gain one talent point for every level attained above level ten and typically choose to spend these points within one tree in order to unlock certain tree-specific skills. For instance, the three talent trees available to the Mage class are Frost, Fire and Arcane. A mage with points invested in Frost will have specific frost spells and powers not available to a mage with points invested in the Fire tree.

Not only are there are more ways to spend points within a tree than the total available points (a typical talent tree has approximately 85 available talents while a player only has a maximum of 71 points to spend), but it is often undesirable to spend all of one's points within a single tree. This leads players to develop an endless parade of hybrid specs or "talent builds" (i.e., 40/0/31 with 40 points in Arcane, 0 in Fire and 31 in Frost). From a mathematical perspective it should be clear that distributing seventy-one points across three possible trees available to each of the ten classes results in a truly enormous number of potential talent builds.

Although the numeric possibilities literally number in the millions, certain talent builds are more desirable from a game-playing perspective and it's not uncommon to run into another player with a similar build. When two players with similar builds encounter each other, they typically launch into a long, tedious, highly involved discussion about their respective talent distribution choices. These conversations are painfully excruciating to outsiders but highly satisfying to players. Talent builds are fundamentally about identity; they are the final expression of extremely individual decisions based on personal play style, preferred in-game activities (such as raiding vs pvp) and character history (particularly history as it's evinced by the acquisition of specific gear which can either augment or undermine specific builds).

The main point here is that in Monopoly you play a Hat but in WoW you play a snowflake. You play a character with millions of possible variations whose individuality is based on self-determination and experience garnered through social interaction. You play an identity. Pulling the plug on an MMO is not like pulling the plug on too much television watching, it's pulling the plug on an identity. And like any abrupt change in identity (graduating from school, getting married, being fired from a job), the consequences are uncomfortable. After all, I pulled the plug on myself and it made me crazy enough to start a blog again -- I can only imagine what might happen to other people. For an adolescent who likely found more satisfaction from the simplistic simulacrum of MMO identity formation than the messy confusion of real world identity development, for anyone who doesn't have a strong, well-formed and multifaceted identity to fall back on, the sudden amputation of what is, effectively, a psychological limb, is understandably traumatizing.